In one of the best stories in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s acclaimed first book, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), when a Pakistani landowner dies the plan is for his house to be sold and his servants dispersed. Through this human death, Mueenuddin sees, from the perspective of the servants, the death of an older feudal order. The estate lay “in the heart of Old British Lahore, where the great houses were gradually being demolished, to make way for ugly flats and townhouses. That all was passing, houses where carriages once had been kept, flags lowered at sunset to the lawns of British commissioners. Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder.”
Inherited order is being tested everywhere in Mueenuddin’s stories. The opposite of order, though, is not yet freedom; it is still disorder. There are hints that new definitions and new norms might be about to emerge, but they are glimpsed, not heralded. Mueenuddin’s portraits of fading feudal life have a feeling of uneasiness more than the promise of a new day. You get the sense that the old order is not going to collapse beneath its own corrupt weight. It’s just not going to be equal to the changing conditions that are coming. It will die out in T.S. Eliot’s famous whimper, rather than being overthrown with a revolutionary bang.
Like Kiran Desai, whose recent second novel came two decades after her first, Mueenuddin has waited a long time to follow up on the success of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. He has done so now with a work of fiction that in style, in subject matter, and in approach is very much an extension of the earlier book. This Is Where the Serpent Lives also takes the measure of the old order’s erosion. Neither a short story collection nor quite a novel (the publisher calls it simply a work of fiction), the book is divided into four parts, the first three forming about half of the total, the final part reading as a kind of novella. Throughout, we move from rural Punjabi estates to British-legacy mountain retreats to Pakistan’s major cities. Crucially, the stories look over their shoulder to the cosmopolitan West: Paris and London, New York and the Ivy League. Two sections focus on precocious servants, two on Westernized landowners. That the pieces share characters and plotlines without sharing momentum has a tentative effect: These are moral tales with unsure conclusions—portraits enacting that whimper.
In the first section, “The Golden Boy,” we are introduced to Bayazid, or Yazid, an orphaned apprentice whose work ethic, self-education, and instinctive social skills pull him into the orbit of local college boys, including the son of a merchant whose family embraces him. That friend’s sister is Yazid’s awkward love interest. A servant in their house, described as an “ancient crone,” is suspicious and contemptuous of Yazid because he’s playing at rising from his servant sphere. In a charming gesture, Yazid puts his lips to the glass the sister had been drinking from. Spotted violating his station by the nemesis crone, he is forced away. A decade later, he returns to discover that his old friend is about to commit an act of violence. Forever loyal, Yazid takes care of the problem himself. Like the first two stories of In Other Rooms, this narrative section ends with unsentimental death. When the mature Yazid returns to play a critical role in the last story’s climax, that long section makes no reference to this pivotal moment in his young life. The reader is left to hold and intuit the impact of Yazid’s youth on his later stoicism.
The book’s second section, “Muscle,” centers on a young landowner named Rustom who was sent to the States for both boarding school and college and who has returned to Pakistan to manage family lands (a narrative that tracks the arc of Mueenuddin’s own life). Rustom has a girlfriend back in New York, Klara, whom he longs for but who, the story suggests, is not right for him, certainly if he stays on the family estates. The story focuses on the friction between Rustom and his neighbors, the Chandios, who chop down a rosewood tree that is technically on Rustom’s property, steal his telephone wire for the copper, and finally, to intimidate and insult him, beat his childhood servant. Rustom, the only heir, feels this testing deeply: “He was damaged goods—parents dead, schooled abroad too long, cut off from the oxygen of living in this place. Propertied as he was, he must prove himself, one way or another.”
Rustom does what his father or grandfather might have done: he calls in some “muscle” of his own, goonish old family connections, who move onto the estate and test their soft employer too, with bad manners and raw appetites and then, ultimately, by committing violence against the neighboring family that had been pushing him too far. Rustom is isolated and lonely. A woman his age tempts him to imagine a life without Klara. He thinks if Klara were here, he would have the strength to “do the right thing,” but the right thing in this context is not the right thing in a boarding school or on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He hasn’t figured out how to bridge the world that educated him to the world he’s inherited. His confusion in his home context distorts the reality of what he left behind: “In his telling all the American policemen were honest and all the politicians virtuous.” Obviously, comically, this is not a portrait of America so much as a confession of his struggle to adapt in Pakistan. Watching his cousin speak to a politician on the phone, he admires his mastery of the implicit protocols and the elegance of his transitions. After “settling into the choreography of goodbye,” the cousin pivots, and “like a fire almost extinguished and then blazing up,” the conversation turns to a second, choreographed bit of business.
The end of “Muscle” is tentative, unresolved. Rustom’s final encounter with the “goonda and his pet policeman” is one more test, one more “lesson” in how things have to work: “Finally, if he would pay the price, all the power was his—or would be, could be.” The section ends on that unsure note. Stripped of consolation and conviction, it is also stripped of emotion and personality. A kind of void or uncertainty lingers.
A later visit by Rustom to that same cousin, Hisham, is the occasion for the third section, “The Clean Release.” The narrative hands off to Hisham now, who tells the story of his marriage to Shahnaz, and of the related falling out with his brother, Nessim. The three had attended Dartmouth together. In Pakistan, when Nessim feels betrayed by Hisham, he returns to the States. This breakdown between brothers is one more image of the east-west, feudal-modern divide that puts pressure on all four of the book’s sections. Hisham stays in Pakistan and lives with the considerable privilege of the first-born son. His homes and possessions are opulent and enviable. The old order lingers with its servants and chauffeurs, its shakedowns and ancient protocols.
Yazid from the first story is also here, driving the brothers and making arrangements for them on their mountain outing with Shahnaz.
Again, the ending of this section is hesitant. Surrounded with land and power, Hisham wonders if his grounded first-born inheritance is really a better achievement than what his brother has in exile in New York: “Nessim flourished untouched in a faraway city that by contrast seemed to float clean above the clouds.” The section ends with that suspension, that floating, that openness: east and west, feudal and modern, offering tentative judgments only, of the other.
And so to the longest and final section, which gives the book its title, pulls the threads of the larger story together, and introduces the young servant whose rise and fall is more dramatic and more moving than any of the other characters or storylines in the book. Saqib, a child of servants, is swept up into the household of Shahnaz and Hisham and becomes a “favorite pet.” He is tutored by the esteemed and much-trusted chauffeur Yazid. In the privileged company of Shahnaz and Hisham, Saqib is awakened to the larger world. Traveling with them to a mountain villa, he feels “shiveringly alive” and tells himself that he “must savor this” glimpse of the world from new literal and figurative heights: “I’m lying at night in the mountains! he thought, feeling the loom of the heights around him, boy of the plains.” The energy of this feeling will be his downfall. Saqib sees and craves their world, but in the mountains, witnessing an act of vivid infidelity, he notes the corruption of privilege too.
This crack of resentment gives him permission to act out his own unsexual infidelity. Treated almost as a son—almost being the crucial qualifier—Saqib is offered the chance to become manager of an agricultural project along the river. When Saqib’s efforts with the cucumber farm become wildly profitable for his employers, he seizes the chance to gamble on a deceit that will give him life-changing money in one go.
The encroachment of the future on feudal ways has been slow and steady in Mueenuddin’s stories until the arrival, in this final section, of the device that will democratize change and revolutionize manners: the iPhone, with its palette of apps. On those phone screens, Facebook comes to the Punjab, and relatives living abroad, “long lost and rarely considered, suddenly reentered the villagers’ lives.” Western pornography makes smart phones more desirable to young men than motorcycles. It’s the iPhone that allows men and women to “communicate without meeting” and so changes “courtship rituals established for generations, mothers blind to the promiscuities their daughters practiced under their noses.” It’s the iPhone that allows Saqib, skirting the rituals of family arrangement, to connect to the woman he will marry. It’s the iPhone—this sleek gadget that comes packaged like jewelry, as Saqib’s wife describes it—that exposes Saqib’s eventual deceit to Yazid. Mueenuddin never explains the book’s title, but it’s reasonable, and maybe unavoidable, to think the iPhone is where the serpent lives, the world ending not with a whimper but a ping.
Saqib himself, though he splurges on the iPhone, is no tech-happy revolutionary. He has a deep attachment to his home, a village of unchanged rituals and norms, a village using the same methods and tools that were used “when the great Alexander passed through these lands two millennia before.” His ambition is not to topple the old order but somehow to rise above its strictures. When he is singed for reaching too high, the gravity of that same old order pulls him down to his proper place. Saqib’s punishing Icarus fall makes for the most powerful stretch of these four connected stories.
There is an especially excruciating moment with Saqib’s father, who had been called to witness the accusation of his son and to participate in his humiliation. This father, who moved at the margins of their family life without saying anything of consequence, who did his servant duty and little more, is bewildered by the sudden law-enforcement scene and yet unbroken in his sense of duty, “centuries of submission expressed through him.” When he is finally led away, leaving his son behind to suffer alone, the father was “snuffling, in shock,” and this is what catches his son off guard: “That was the worst image of Saqib’s young life, his father limping and shuffling away out through the gate of the dera, making little noises and not looking back. He could not imagine making any protest, not even to protect his own son, bent to obedience all his years, all these people here on the farm the same, all implicated in these histories.” Is it his worst moment because his father is so helpless and hurt, or because Saqib sees him, and with him everyone else who serves the long feudal order, bent by the weight, and the fate, and the cruelty, of submission and duty? Surely it’s both: the personal and the historical colliding indiscreetly.
Alone in custody now, a melancholy Saqib takes stock of himself and of the order whose motions he thought he understood: “He had been stupid beyond measure. All his plans had been wrong. He felt immeasurably weary. He had thought himself a new man, in a new era, with new manners, not subject to the laws that governed before. Look at the new man now.” He’s brutally defeated, and yet these recognitions expand as a kind of maturing. Being tortured by the police, Saqib is filled with disbelief and also shame: “Could they possibly be doing this to him, to little Saqib, this body that Gazala had shown him how to love, this father, this mother’s son?” He is not a powerful landowner like Hisham. He is not someone who can summon a politician or a cousin to intervene (or order up some muscle). But he is a person who had someone “show him how to love.” This moment is quiet, yet it feels like a breath of redemption and growth, like a softening and a receiving. When Saqib wakes up in his cell after being tortured, he hears “many sparrows chattering, playing in the dust.” Even more, his sense of smell “had become extraordinarily keen,” and “he could smell the river. It wasn’t far away, he knew that.” His ambition is chastened, but he has new awareness, new receptiveness, and maybe new appreciation for the simple dignity of being loved.
The book’s final stretch is poignant, and in it Mueenuddin does something unexpected. It was Saqib’s great champion and caretaker Shahnaz who initially insisted on his punishment. For most of his life, Saqib had tended to her with utter devotion. In his crisis moment, Shahnaz offers no empathy at all. As the narrative is poised to settle judgment on her for this lack of reciprocity, Mueenuddin instead humanizes her, away from Saqib. She takes stock of her life too, just as he did. If the moment offered by Mueenuddin is not quite forgiving, it is at least large-hearted, though maybe not—a word Mueenuddin explores and resists throughout the book—sentimental:
Only now these past days had she understood how Saqib had penetrated her reserve, touched her secretly. She had come now to an age for great decision, past childbearing for many years, and nearing sixty she was beginning to feel that it had come to final things, her last chances. Her lover, fourteen years younger than her, had finally given up and in turn married a younger woman that winter, and although she had not cared for him so very much as that anymore, still afterward she felt as if she looked at life through a pane of ice skimmed from a puddle, her vision unclear looking forward.
In the final scene we return to Yazid, who began the book as an abandoned boy, sitting in a market holding his shoes, waiting on luck and human kindness. Finding a place inside the old order made him loyal to that order to the very end, even when loyalty meant suffering for someone he considered a son. Saqib, but not Yazid, is ready to leave that order and duty behind. But neither servant is really triumphant. This portrait of their world in transition poses paradox instead: even unjust order provides stability, and the loss of that order is not suddenly felt liberation. Mueenuddin, so vivid in his depictions of this fading world, seems unsure what to make of its ruptured meaning—other than to hold the contradictions. And so, maybe the title evokes that other, older paradox, in which the most famous serpent in literature coiled around the branch of a forbidden tree, whispering knowledge of good and evil. Humans took the tempter up on the bet and slumped away with the spoils of freedom. Pascal wrote that we walk around feeling like kings deposed. In Mueenuddin’s world, we also wander like servants, craving better homes.
Aleksander Hemon once described Chekhov’s stories as containing more than anything kindness. Taking up that one-word challenge, I’d say Mueenuddin, the great admirer of Chekhov (and Tolstoy and Turgenev), is gentle more than kind. His enormous compassion is cooled with bewilderment. This new book is a collection of ambivalent moral tales, timid in their conclusions, deeply generous in their portraits of an old order eroding.
