In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Pakistan’s turn to be read

“…nothing works here!”  - Exasperated words of an American woman who marries a Pakistani guy and tries to sow some meaning into her life in Islamabad. Those words encapsulates the short stories that make up In Other Rooms, Other wonders – an interesting collection of stories announcing the arrival of a Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin.

I heard about In Other Rooms, Other Wonders almost a year ago from a friend in Vietnam who announced excitedly that the set of stories by Mueenuddin was the most intriguing read he had experience this year. I went on a search for this book in bookshops in Kathmandu for months and finally finding it much later. Having grown up reading Indian novels from Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Jhumpa Lahiri, reading an author from Pakistan was an exciting idea.

Born to a Pakistani father and an American mother, Daniyal Mueenuddin spent his early years in Pakistan and then moved to United States. He was a lawyer in New York for a while before he decided to return to his father’s farm in Pakistan and write stories.

In In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Mueenuddin weaves stories around wealthy and ageing KK Harouni’s household, bringing to life eight stories about people in his family and people who serve them. “Provide, Provide” tells the story of Harouni’s manager Chaudhary Jaglani,  who manages to not just manage Harouni’ property but also become a wealthy man on Harouni’s blind trust while “Saleema” tells a story of a servant girl who makes chappatis so light that it floats in the air, falls in love with an elderly servant and dies a drug addict.  The story “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” which also doubles as the book’s title, is about a young woman Husna, who becomes a wealthy man’s mistress in order to fulfil her dreams of a good life.

Mueenuddin’s stories are about simple people and written in a simple language about people trying to change their lives, in little ways but “you take chances and then nothing really changes”. His characters seem to be able to scramble their way out of their fate for a while but unable to trick destiny at the end, they either succumb to death, age, disease or depression. He builds up the story, tells you about the character’s past, his present and sometimes he seems to be in a hurry to wind a story down making us think that the author suddenly realized that his genre is short stories and he nearly wrote a novel.  For instance in the title story, he builds up the story about how Harouni and Husna met, and how he asked her to come stay with him and how Husna planted herself in his life and his household and quickly tells us about how Husna’s reign ends in last few pages.

Almost all the characters in his story are either foolish people with money or cunning people with no money. They either squander their fortune or try to fleece their masters for it.  There are either loyal servants or corrupt employees. They are either rich woman unable to find meaning in life or poor and abandoned woman bedded by their masters. As much as I enjoyed his writing about the Pakistan that I have not read about, I kept waiting for his characters to rise to peak out of the cardboard boxes they were in.

People who populate Mueenuddin’s stories are corrupt but the author manages to inject a lot of humanity in these stories with insight into life like desire, loss, disappointment, love, injustice, insecurity and the search for that one thing that will change their lives.

PS: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders might be difficult to find in Kathmandu