Barker on books
'Other Rooms' offers glimpse of Pakistan
By Dan Barker (Contact)
Friday, April 24, 2009
“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” by Daniyal Mueenuddin is a collection of existential stories which paint a picture of a different land — the changing face of Pakistan.
Since Pakistan is a center of U.S. international concern, we owe it to ourselves not to stereotype Pakistanis, and Mueenuddin’s stories can help to give a picture of life in a country perched between the Middle East and India.
This book is a compilation of short stories that have been published in The New Yorker magazine and other venues. That should come as no surprise, since Mueenuddin spent time with his mother in Wisconsin and graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, even though he lives and farms in the region he writes about.
At times conjuring up the sophistication of urban life or the seeming innocence of pastoral pursuits, Mueenuddin has a way of making words put the reader in the scene:
“Nawab each evening put the (motorcycle) on its kickstand, and waited for his (12) girls to come, all of them, around him, jumping on him. His face often at this moment had the same expression, an expression of childish innocent joy, which contrasted strangely and even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble.”
The same man later has to fight a life-and-death struggle to keep his motorcycle, on which his livelihood depends, or his family would be reduced to begging.
Mueenuddin writes about a Pakistan emerging from its feudal past into the industrial world, but in which its social structure is still archaic and uncertain:
“(The men) in the room, mostly provincial politicians risen from the business classes, held their phones in their hands when not speaking into them, displaying this new status symbol recently introduced in Lahore and the other big Pakistani cities.”
Their social status is ambiguous, though.
These are stories of people touched in one way or another by fictional feudal landowner and lord KK. Harouni — whether as lover, servant, relative or distantly — during the days of his decline, a symbol of the change that is happening in the country.
It is an in-between time, when even “salaried” men, which means people who work for a company, are considered servants, almost slaves from our American perspective.
Everyone is either master or servant, and those who do not fit that mold are confusing to others:
“She behaved and spoke ... (as) neither rich nor poor, neither servant nor (ruling class), in a city where the very concept of a middle class still found expression in only a few households...,” Mueenuddin writes.
Everything in these people’s lives is about how much money a person has, who one marries — and burning a woman to death can be handled with enough bribes.
The way the whims of those who wield personal power rules everything and everyone, changing and often ruining lives, gives an insight into how this society runs, especially for the almost powerless women.
At the same time, the reader can see the simplicity of this life, even for the underclass. In one section of a story, a woman is washing clothes for her mistress from a garden faucet.
“She felt happier perhaps than she ever had,” Mueenuddin says, as she sits in an opulent garden amid a country estate. Small moments make up the lives of the characters and, one senses, of many Pakistanis.
In this book we hear firsthand about the lives of rulers and servants alike in a poor land which is full of pride, honor and, sometimes, the foolishness of humans everywhere.
Pakistan is not like the U.S. These people do not perceive the world or fellow humans in the same way as Americans, and this book is one easy way to get a feel for that.
Don’t settle for my explanation, give it a try.
Contact Dan Barker at
business@fmtimes.com.