"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.” In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is about the life that you see through this little crack, not necessarily only in the “compound at Jalpana” but through the entire social pile of Pakistan.  The “poisonous scent” of betrayal, greed and loss permeating the stories, characters are driven by delusions and cross-purposes. 

Spreading his narrative web into the business of daily living carried out in the K K Harouni household and in the world outside his realm, Mueenuddin weaves his narrative, threading together lives of shrewd upstarts, servant girls, rich heirs and so on. Jaglani, the manager of the Harouni properties who had risen by dint of “seizing power wherever he saw it available and unguarded”, Saleema, Zainab, also Husna, all originating in the bottom of the social tier and forced to advance their ambitions only through sexual favours are relegated to a feeling of helplessness and alienation that also anguishes Lily, the inveterate binge socialite. As Mueenuddin says in one of his recent interviews the Pakistan in his novel is a place “fragmented, jagged, dysfunctional”, where, Helen’s “barefoot need” for vital life turns into “ the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life led, out of love spent.”

Ruled by the values of a traditional society in the throes of change, tension between the classes and power struggle between the genders take central place in these string of short stories. Often haunting in its content Mueenuddin’s kaleidoscopic approach zooms into the rooms of masters and servants alike. Simple and direct in its style the stories bring out universal emotions of love, betrayal, decadence as they concentrically revolve around the Harouni empire in its decadence. The social context of the late 20th century Pakistan with the its westernized glitzy elite often given to crass immorality and the hierarchy of exploitation within their retinues of domestic help - different rooms spill out in different wonders for the reader; a world where a thriving middle class is practically non-existant. Servants strive to escape the sordidness of their situation by birth and get ostracized in the process. "Nawabbdin Electrician" and "A Spoiled Man" are stories of injustice in a society marked with lawlessness and chaos.

Though woven deftly around the central character of the once veritable feudal lord K K Harouni, he remains the least in focus in the whole collection, as he slowly and surely gets reduced from his position of former preeminence, selling off lands to cover piling debts – it is a tale of decline like many of the great houses around Lahore, that have survived from the colonial days. That Mueenuddin writes from his own experiences in the legal profession is clear from the objective view he takes of crimes and human failings in stories such as “The Burning Girl” and “The Spoiled Man”. Justice gets shrouded in avarice and loses its impartiality; the police emerge as the opportunist rather than lawgiver. 

The East-West conflict at the cultural and the more personal level is handled beautifully, almost like fragile chinaware in the exchange between the western-educated  Sohail Harouni’s girlfriend Helen and his mother Rafia on the question of Helen and Sohail’s future together. Avoiding the outcome of these two young, independent people in the space of the same short story Mueenuddin almost casually but masterfully gives away the consequence in another story where we see Sohail married to another American woman Sonya.

The stark absence of cadence in a few sections and the dominance of pithy details in its place is wholly in keeping with the subject of abject misery that hits the servants with the fall of Harouni household. In the course of ten lines Saleema dies a beggar leaving her son “begging in the streets, one of the sparrows of Lahore”. Husna who in the beginning of the story is “Given to crushing gray lassitude and then to sunny, almost hysterical moments, she had always expected to escape the” has her fate sealed as she leaves insulted for the same stifled “gloominess of her parent’s house” in an unfashionable part of the Old City. Occasionally the prose breaks out into brilliant lyricism through montages of life affirming revelry; the nuptial dance of Lily and Murad in the sandstorm or the final confrontation of the lovers in “Our Lady of Paris”, freezing into a moment of emotion.  

A deep understanding of people across the social pile, also the extreme honesty in depicting the loss, infidelity, the livelihood struggle of real characters, this collection of short stories is one that brings you closer to the inevitable quandary of the human condition.

	Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now lives on a farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab.

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