When Daniyal Mueenuddin published In Other Rooms, Other Wonders in 2009, the book quickly became a touchstone for anglophone readers searching for fiction that could render Pakistan without performing itself as “context”, a civics lesson, or as a catalogue of calamity. Instead, it observed. It followed the currents of desire and dependency through households, estates, cities and the countryside. It was a book about hierarchy, but also about intimacy, about how closeness to wealth or authority can feel like belonging even when it is anything but.
His new book, This Is Where the Serpent Lives, returns to those terrains with a different architecture and a longer reach. Mueenuddin calls it “a very unusual shape”: three novellas “each of which is… twenty thousand words”, followed by a final piece “more than 60 000 words”, “longer than, say, the Great Gatsby”. He thinks of that last section as “a coda”. What links the parts is not plot in the conventional sense so much as a set of obsessions and pressures: the feeling of being born into a station and trying to live your way out of it; the seductive pull of proximity to power; the moment when ambition looks like escape, and then turns out to have its own trapdoor.
The novel is grounded in worlds Mueenuddin knows intimately. Born to an American mother and a Pakistani father who met in Washington in the late 1950s, he moved between Pakistan and the United States from childhood. After boarding school outside Boston and college at Dartmouth, he returned to Pakistan to live on and manage his family’s farm. It was not a pastoral retreat but a business, a hierarchy, a site where authority was exercised daily. That experience, he says, sharpened his understanding of class as something enacted rather than theorised.
The long gap between books followed a personal rupture. Shortly after his first collection was published, Mueenuddin’s mother died by suicide. He spent a decade writing a book about that loss, finished it, and then found he could not accept it as complete. Setting it aside made space for This Is Where the Serpent Lives.
The serpent of the title, he insists, refuses a clean allegorical meaning. It comes partly from poetry, partly from the literal hazards of the farm. Mueenuddin’s farm is home to cobras, vipers and kraits. The serpent becomes a way to think about power, fear, appetite, and the consequences of getting what you thought you wanted. “The book is about the things we want,” he says, “and the ways in which the things we want don’t end up being the things that satisfy us.”
In conversation, Mueenuddin is reflective and candid about the limits of writing from within the worlds he depicts. He speaks openly about self-censorship, about the stories he cannot tell because the people who inspire them are too close, too recognisable. He is equally firm about what he does not do. He does not write with an audience in mind. He does not tailor his work to western expectations of Pakistan. He does not believe that escaping one’s class is truly possible.
What follows is a Q&A with Daniyal Mueenuddin about class, violence, the limits of writing from inside proximity, and why he thinks readers may “understand the book better than I do”.
Q: Much of the novel is grounded in worlds you know closely. How did your own life shape what you were able to write?
Mueenuddin: My parents met in Washington in the late 1950s. My father was negotiating a treaty as a member of the Pakistani government, and my mother was a young reporter at The Washington Post. They moved back to Pakistan in 1960. We lived in Lahore and often went to my American grandfather’s farm in Wisconsin for the summers. At age thirteen I went to boarding school outside Boston, then to Dartmouth.
Growing up, we had travelled to our South Punjab farm every Christmas and every summer. As I was about to graduate from college, my father gave me a choice. If I wished to remain in the US and pursue a life there, he would support me in that. However, the South Punjab farm was threatened by the men running it, who had concluded that my brother and I were unlikely to return from golden America to the dusty plains of that remote area. My ambition then, as it had been for many years, was to become a writer – and life on the farm seemed well suited to that, with no distractions and much to write about. Throughout my twenties, for seven years, I live on the farm and eventually brought it under my control. Wanting to spend time in the West again, I applied to law schools and ended up at Yale. On graduation I worked for several years in a New York law firm. Eventually, I decided I did not want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer.
Q: You often write about both rural Pakistan and the urban elite. Why those worlds?
Mueenuddin: Those are the worlds I know. I know farm life very well, and I also know people who live in proximity to power, the urban elite.
Writing from within that proximity complicates things. My family and friends worry that I will write about them. I have to be careful not to offend anyone. If I wrote everything I know about the people closest to me, they would never speak to me again. I have many stories I wish I could tell, but I cannot.
Q: What prompted the decision to leave law and commit fully to writing?
Mueenuddin: I had always been writing. I started writing when I was seven or eight years old. I always wanted to be a writer. Law was something I did, not something I was.
For a long time, though, I did not want to be a fiction writer. Throughout my childhood and well into my twenties and thirties, I wrote only poetry and read a great deal of it. At some point, I realised my poetry was not good enough for me to achieve the distinction that I craved. With fiction, you can become a decent writer through effort. With poetry, if you do not have innate ability, no matter how hard you try, you will never become as good as you want to be. I wanted to be excellent, or I did not see the point.
So I began writing fiction, and that is what I have been doing since. I still own my farm in Pakistan and spend a lot of time there. My writing absolutely comes from lived experience.
Q: There was a long gap between In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and This Is Where the Serpent Lives. What happened during that time?
Mueenuddin: After my first book came out, my mother died. She committed suicide under complicated circumstances. I spent the next ten years writing a book about that loss. I finished it, but I was never satisfied with it. It is still extremely important to me, and I still intend to do that book properly.
I told my publisher that I was not going to be able to finish it at the moment and that I would rather give them a different book. That became This Is Where the Serpent Lives.
The book consists of four pieces: three novellas of about twenty thousand words each, followed by a final piece that is long enough to be a novel on its own, more than sixty thousand words, longer than The Great Gatsby. I think of it as a kind of coda. Together, the stories form a closely bound whole.
Q: Did this book exist in the background for years, or did it take shape once you began writing it?
Mueenuddin: I keep a very long list of stories I want to write, which has ballooned to some thirty pages now. When a story occurs to me, I open a document and write a paragraph or a few lines about what it might be. I chose the stories for this book from that list, after carefully considering which ones would allow me to pursue the themes that interested me.
I had begun to sense that this work would be about power and money. “The Golden Boy” was the first story that really worked, and then I built from there. The title story, in particular, had been in my mind for quite a long time. These and other stories existed in my mind for many years before they took their final form.
Q: Your earlier work is known for compression. How did your approach change when you were working at much greater length?
Mueenuddin: The basic unit of meaning in my work is the paragraph, and that does not change. When you are writing something as long as the title story, you spend a great deal of time thinking about the plot: how it works, what happens, how events unfold. But the paragraph remains the core unit.
Q: The serpent is such a charged image. What does it mean to you?
Mueenuddin: That is a very good question, and I am not sure I have a definitive answer. Part of it was simply pleasure. I enjoyed sprinkling the serpent references into the book.
The title comes from the first line of Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens. I don’t know exactly what the poem is about, but it moves me deeply. It’s twenty, twenty-five minutes long as he reads it, and I’ve listened to that probably a hundred times. I often listen to it when I’m going to sleep at night.
It both celebrates the power of the serpent and acknowledges all the negative history in mythology around these images.
A little watercourse runs through the garden at my farm, and this attracts frogs, which attract snakes. The walls around the garden are built of mud, and that too attracts snakes, which burrow in it. Thus I often see snakes when I’m there, and have many times had close calls with them, cobras and vipers and kraits. Throughout my childhood, the danger of snakes was everpresent. A grownup bitten by a cobra will probably survive, unless bitten in the upper body near the heart. But children often die if they’re bitten, because they have smaller body mass. So my parents were naturally concerned about snakes, especially in those days, because there were so many of them about – and because there were no nearby hospitals that could provide antivenin.
Q: What is the book ultimately about for you?
Mueenuddin: It is about the things we want and the ways in which they fail to satisfy us. We think we want one thing, we get it, and then discover we actually wanted something else. Or we achieve what we desire and find that the rewards are not what we expected.
Q: Do you write with a particular reader in mind?
Mueenuddin: No. I do not think about how the work will be received. I love having readers, but when I am writing, I do not think about the audience at all. I have no agenda, no message. I would be delighted if readers understood the book better than I do. I would applaud that.
Q: Do any of your characters truly escape the class they were born into?
Mueenuddin: That is almost impossible. Saqib, for example, does not just want money. He wants to be comfortable with power in the way people like Shaman are. That kind of transformation is rare and requires many factors to align.
That said, I do think some of these characters succeed. They achieve what they set out to achieve, even if the cost is high.
Q: Your work leaves little room for moral innocence.
Mueenuddin: Moral innocence is rare in life. We are all guilty of small and large things.
I love the line from Samuel Beckett: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” That could be the motto of our lives. We fail continually. We also succeed. It is all bound together. I have never met a person I could describe as morally pure. Even the most virtuous people have aspects of their lives that are far from virtuous.
Q: The violence in the book feels institutional rather than explosive.
Mueenuddin: Violence in Pakistan is very different from violence in the West. In America, violence is often spontaneous and personal. In Pakistan, violence is institutional. It is part of how the system operates.
When the police beat someone, they do not do it because they dislike them. They do it because that is how the system functions. Violence is part of how power is exercised, by farm managers, police, politicians. It is business, not rage.
Q: Is Pakistan a metaphor in your work?
Mueenuddin: I do not think you need to be interested in Pakistan to read my work. That is one way of reading it, but it is not the heart of the project. People are fundamentally the same everywhere. The externals differ, but desires, ambitions, and troubles are universal.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from This Is Where the Serpent Lives?
Mueenuddin: I hope they feel profound empathy for the characters. Whether the characters behave well or badly, I want readers to feel close to them.
