"In Other Rooms, Other Wonders"
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, W.W. Norton & Company, 247 pages, $23.95.
Daniel Mueenuddin's In Other Wonders, Other Rooms is an engrossing and often elegiac look at modern Pakistan. The author's tone varies between ironic humor at the machinations of his frantically scrambling characters, to suppressed rage at the waste of human potential.
To describe Mueenuddin's Pakistan as "modern" is very nearly a contradiction in terms, for the society the writer depicts is breathtakingly feudal. In their ironclad class distinctions and depiction of a rapidly vanishing way of life, these eight linked stories are reminiscent of Chekhov.
The lives of nearly all the characters are entangled in some manner with that of the wealthy land-owner, K.K. Harouni. His status provides protection for his servants and his women (and yes, the two groups often are conflated). For both, he is their reason for existing.
Indeed, the title character of the final story, A Spoiled Man, reminded me of Firs, the ancient footman in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, who is accidentally abandoned by his well-intentioned but callow owners in the play's final scene. Neither Firs nor A Spoiled Man's Rezak, an elderly servant who lives in a portable tin and wooden hut of which he is heartbreakingly proud, ever question their fate or criticize, even in their own minds, the rich families who alternately patronize and neglect them.
Mueenuddin's stories depict characters at every strata, from a sybaritic party girl to a kitchen helper who is half a step up from a prostitute. But his deepest sympathies seem to lie with those lowest on the food chain, and these are the stories that leap off the page. Saleema and Nawabdin Electrician are two of the most accomplished.
Though Mueenuddin has a quiet authorial voice that doesn't call attention to itself, his prose contains images of great loveliness. Here's a line from Our Lady of Paris: "The loose bedsprings made long, rusty sounds, like a knife leisurely sharpened on a whetstone."
In About a Burning Girl, a man describes his wife thusly: "You need only see her disjoint a roast chicken to know the depths or heights of her carnality."
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders also made me think about how we define corruption. Nearly everyone in every story is trying to play an angle, has a scheme or trick up their sleeves. The first line of Nawabdin Electrician is:
"He flourished on a signature capability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters so cunningly done that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired savings."
Perhaps in that society, a different rule set applies. Is it cheating if everyone knows you're doing it, and if it's necessary to scratch out a meager survival?
If corruption carries a connotation of evil, of obliviousness to the sufferings of others, the only truly corrupt character in this book is the judge who narrates About a Burning Girl. He turns a blind eye to murder, because to do otherwise would inconvenience his politically powerful wife.
