Cracking Pakistan

Books Daniyal Mueenuddin's short stories examine the costs and rewards of ambition at every level of Pakistan's stratified society. Andrea Walker reads his debut collection.

We're not so different, you and I: Faisal Malik (left) talks with his farm manager on his 150 acre plot near Bahawalpur, Pakistan.

Daniyal Mueenuddin's short stories examine the costs and rewards of ambition at every level of Pakistan's stratified society. Andrea Walker reads his debut collection. In Other rooms, Other Wonders Daniyal Mueenuddin Bloomsbury Dh78 In Provide, Provide, one of eight interconnected short stories in Daniyal Mueenuddin's Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a member of Pakistan's feudal landowning class named KK Harouni decides to sell off several tracts of his ancestral estate in order to invest money in factories. He summons his farm manager, "the formidable Chaudrey Nabi Baksh Jaglani", to his lavish Lahore home, and explains his plan. Jaglani informs Harouni that he will not get much for the land - "the crops are good but the prices are bad" - but Harouni is resolved. A less canny or more dutiful farm manager might take this as a diminishing of his power. But Jaglani sees it as an opportunity for advancement. While fulfilling his masters orders, he will consolidate wealth for himself by selling the land at half price and pocketing the commissions. Rather than feeling boxed in, Jaglani leaves Harouni's mansion with an air of nonchalance. "Well, now the game heats up," he remarks to Harouni's chauffeur.

That "game" - the process by which individuals achieve and maintain power in a society rigidly bound by class and tradition - is the focus of Mueenuddin's exquisite debut. In immaculate stories that range in setting from rustic Punjabi farms to effete Islamabad house parties, Mueenuddin shows how the struggle to transcend social and cultural limitations shapes entire lifetimes. The word "ambition" occurs frequently, as do "pride", "mettle" and "shrewd." The strength of Mueenuddin's writing is to capture "the game" without crudely moralising about his characters or the system that constrains them. Instead he writes in a dispassionate manner that verges on the anthropological, rendering a stratified universe where free will and inescapable realities are equally on display.

Jaglani, for instance, advances by living "an opportunistic life, seizing power wherever he saw it available and unguarded," and by not developing "sentimental attachments, to the tokens of his power, land, possession, or even men." This changes, however, when a woman with a "hard pale face, angular, with high cheekbones, almost beautiful, but too forceful," comes to work as his housekeeper at his farm residence in Dunyapur. Zainab reminds Jaglani of a woman once caught stealing cattle - traditionally a man's game - and although he acknowledges "her aloof coldness, the possibility that she would mar his life," he cannot resist taking her as his second wife. This proves to be his undoing, in that it causes his first wife to turn his family against him. But Mueenuddin portrays the impulse as one almost impossibly difficult to resist for a man who has spent his life making purely pragmatic decisions: "He felt that he had risen so far, had become invulnerable to the judgments of those around him, had become preeminent in this area by the river Indus, and now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice, but to surrender to his desire."

Other characters' downfalls come about not because they deviate from the rules of the game, but because there seems to be built-in restraints on how far they can rise, given their class or gender. Saleema features an indigent woman from a clan of "blackmailers and bootleggers, Muslim refugees at Partition from the country north-west of Delhi,"; her father is a heroin addict and her mother a prostitute, her husband addicted to "rocket pills" (amphetamine). She becomes a servant in Harouni's household and seduces his valet, forcing the rest of the staff to treat her with a modicum of respect. She flourishes as long as the valet is in Harouni's employ - and as long as his wife in a distant town does not learn of her existence. But after the wife finds out and the valet is released, Saleema has nothing to fall back on, and she resorts to begging.

The book's title story centres on Husna, a woman who occupies "an indefinite space, neither rich nor poor, neither servant nor begum" and uses her "determination and cunning" to become Harouni's mistress towards the end of his life. Husna revels in her new-found luxury while it lasts, but (as with Saleema) once her lover is gone her dismissal is quick and cutting. "There was and is nothing for you," Harouni's youngest daughter informs Husna after ordering her to vacate the property.

Mueenuddin writes mostly in the third-person objective, and he rarely renders a character's thoughts outside of speech or action. The primary effect is to generate a sense of general detachment that heightens the reader's awareness of Pakistan as a cut-throat place where only the hardened survive. But the understated narration also serves to highlight Mueenuddin's moments of metaphorical writing, which are splendid: birds wheel on afternoon thermals "as if the sky itself were slowly turning"; a woman's restless thoughts duck "in and out of holes like mice"; a guilty man's head sits heavily on his shoulders "like a sand castle on the beach after the sea has run in over it."

The detachment is most noticeable in the stories which showcase the lives of upper-class characters, and (presumably) draw on Mueenuddin's background as a half-Pakistani half-American citizen, a descendant of the feudal farming class recently supplanted by new industry, and a person with footholds in two very different landscapes: the rural family estate he manages in southern Punjab, and the urban environment of Manhattan, where he once worked as an lawyer.

Lily considers the divide between country and city from the perspective of a pampered Islamabad girl who fritters away her time at parties where the hosts make artificial beaches for the weekend by having their servants bring in truckloads of sand. Lily is both drawn to and repulsed by this scene, and tries to reinvent herself by marrying an educated farmer, only to find the transition to a chaste rural life harder than she imagined:

"She had believed that her personality would be subsumed in their larger personality as a couple, living into each other, but already the strangeness of the initial engagement wore off and she went back to being - exactly - herself. A little crack opened up as if in the perimeter walls of the compound at Jalpana, through which a poisonous scent, like very strong attar, overpowering, overripe, musky, seeped into their life together - the pull of her old life, of other lives."

Lily and her husband Murad end up fighting with a tenacity which would not be out of place in a DH Lawrence novel, her hostility marking the extremes of her despair at not seeming to fit in anywhere. Our Lady of Paris sees Helen, a mild-mannered American girl, tested by Rafia, her Pakistani boyfriend's mother, during a tense week in Paris. Rafia is the wife of a Karachi industrialist (brother to one KK Harouni), equally at home in their "rambling pile" or an apartment on the Quai des Grands Augustins. She exhibits a glamorous froideur toward Helen, who speaks of her quaint Connecticut childhood in a "house with cats and a garden."

Rafia does not think that Helen is strong enough to make a life with her son in Pakistan, and has no qualms about telling her so. "You're not built for it," she explains. "You're too straight and you don't put enough value on decorative, superficial things - and that's the only way to get by there." Like Jaglani, Rafia has had to become tough and domineering in order to maintain a certain societal position: in this case, her husband's. As she tells Helen: "I've spent or misspent my life helping my husband's career and more or less having a career myself, as someone who knows where the power lies and how to focus it." Unlike Jaglani, she never questions the system or steps outside it.

The sharpness with which Mueenuddin draws his character's striving is itself a critique of their lives, but he also evinces deep sympathy for the ways in which their circumstances tend to close as many doors as they open. During a dinner conversation in which each person identifies the place they would most like to have been born, Rafia's husband settles on America. "The one thing I've missed," the successful businessman elaborates, "is the sensation of being absolutely free, to do exactly what I like, to go where I like, to act as I like. I suspect that only an American ever feels that. You aren't weighed down by your families, and you aren't weighed down by history. If I ran away to the South Pole some Pakistani businessman would one day crawl into my igloo and ask if I was the brother of KK Harouni."

In the stories that bookend the collection, Mueenuddin invents characters who find contentment not through guile or caprice, but in stoicism and pride. The title character of Nawabdin Electrician is a mechanic who makes his living by cheating the electric company to make the wells that irrigate Harouni's farms run for less money (OK, a little guile). He finagles Harouni into giving him a motorcycle, so that he can make his rounds more easily. When a thief tries to steal the bike, Nawabdin fights back, and the thief is fatally wounded (though not before shooting Nawabdin six times).

The electrician refuses the dying man's cries for forgiveness. "I did you wrong," the robber admits, but claims that Nawabdin doesn't know what he has suffered, the deprivations that drove him to crime. "Go to hell," Nawabdin says abruptly. "My children would have begged in the streets." His self-regard is, we sense, his sustenance and even his pleasure. "Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him," he thinks to himself with proud glee.

In A Spoiled Man, an aged hermit named Rezak enjoys an unexpected windfall - only to see his riches evaporate through bad luck and an episode of police brutality. But he refuses to give in to self-pity. "Why should I complain? The policemen did as they always do... God gave me so much more than I deserved, when I expected nothing at all." Nawabdin and Rezak both attain a tenuous liberation (it might not be anything robust enough to call happiness) because they can support themselves in ways that characters like Saleema and Husna can't, and because they adopt a more insouciant attitude than characters like Jaglani or Rezak, who must vigilantly guard their gains.

"In Pakistan all things can be arranged," says a character in About a Burning Girl, a story that details the endemic corruption in the country's legal system from the perspective of a Lahore High Court judge. Mueenuddin gives us indelible portraits of those who profit from this truth and those who suffer because of it. It is a sign of his ambition as a writer that he weighs all of their aspirations equally, and subjects their variegated lives to the same scrupulous gaze.

Andrea Walker's writing has appeared in Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement and the Barnes and Noble Review.