In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
By Daniyal Mueenuddin
WW Norton & Co $23.95 224 pages

It was an Indian novel, The White Tiger, that won last year’s Booker Prize, and another piece of Indian fiction, Q&A, that was adapted into this year’s Oscar winner, Slumdog Millionaire. But 2009 nevertheless looks set to be the year that Pakistan emerges from the literary shadow of its great neighbour. Just as Pakistan as a nation state seems to be disintegrating, Pakistan as a force in literature is gaining ever greater cohesion.

Until two or three years ago, Pakistan seemed to be a literary desert in both Urdu and English. Now, quite suddenly, it has produced a cluster of remarkable bright young novelists able to match anything coming out India: in fiction, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif and Kamila Shamsie; and in non-fiction, Ahmed Rashid and Ayesha Siddiqa.

At the literature festival I helped direct in Jaipur this January, it was the Pakistani contingent that stole the show – despite attempts by Hindu fundamentalist parties to ban Pakistani books from Indian shelfspace. The writers spoke eloquently about the difficulty of writing in such a volatile environment – Aslam talked of “writing fast with a burning quill”. He and Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes, compared their experiences to what the writers of Latin America faced in the 1970s: a repressive political environment that could not be escaped, and which had to be confronted on the page.

If there was one thing the new Pakistani fiction seemed to lack, it was a Midnight’s Children – a single text to which the word masterpiece could unquestionably be attached. Now that moment may have come in the shape of Daniyal Mueenuddin and his outstanding collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It is one of the most startlingly authentic works of fiction to come out of south Asia this decade, rooted in a rural landscape like the stories of RK Narayan, but far bleaker and blacker than anything in Narayan’s Malgudi tales. The trajectory of each story ends, almost inevitably, in a shell-burst of loss and tragedy.

Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Other Rooms is a book that seems at first to come out of nowhere, owing nothing to the literature produced by the writer’s contemporaries or compatriots. But while Midnight’s Children in reality leapfrogged Europe to seek inspiration in the magic realist writing of Latin America, Other Rooms has made a stranger leap still. It looks for inspiration not in the writing of south Asia or indeed anywhere else in the modern world, but instead draws on the stylistic example of Turgenev and Chekhov, and the soul-searing bleakness of vision of Dostoevsky or Gogol – but with the action transposed from the Russian steppe to the Pakistani Punjab.

Like Turgenev in his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by wholly believable rural folk who cluster around the townhouses and estates of the landlord, KK Harooni (clearly modelled on Mueenuddin’s own father), all sketched with wonderful economy and lightness. We meet Rezak, who lives in a little hut on the edge of the estate, and who finds happiness with a young mute wife, who then mysteriously disappears, presumed abducted; the ingenious “Nawabdin Electrician” with his “signature ability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric metres”, who is shot by a robber and nearly killed; Saleema the kitchen maid who falls in love with Rafik the butler and bears him a child, but who is abandoned when Harooni dies and Rafik returns to his wife. She ends her days begging at a road junction, cradling “the little boy in her arms, holding him up to the windows of cars ... one of the sparrows of Lahore”.

Mueenuddin’s Pakistan is visually beautiful – there are wonderful sketches of the rhythms of the landscape with its banyan trees and mango orchards. But it is brutal and savage too. Individuals can be generous and dutiful, but fate is rarely kind: men are killed, women are abducted or taken to the Karachi brothels, while the police beat the innocent and helpless, and the powerful trample on the poor. Emotions are left unspoken in this conservative society; apparently flexible barriers of class and wealth prove in the end cruelly insurmountable. Jaglani, the unscrupulous land agent, takes another man’s wife: “Please, Chaudrey Sahib, you and I grew up together in Dunyapur, we played together as children,” says the husband. “I beg you don’t take what’s mine. You have so much, and I so little.” “I have so much because I took what I wanted,” replies Jaglani. “Go away.”

If Other Rooms is unlike anything recently published in India, this is partly because of the very different trajectories the two countries have taken since 1947. Almost immediately after Independence, the Congress party broke the power of the Indian landowners, emasculating them with income tax and land ceiling acts that instantly shredded their estates. This legislation was never passed in Pakistan, which continued to be dominated by its old feudal elite, just as Tsarist Russia once was.

So while most successful Indian writers in English are the product of urban middle-class backgrounds and now tend to live in London or New York, there are no Indian Daniyal Mueenuddins who live like Tolstoy or Turgenev on their estates. Mueenuddin has lived on his own as a farmer for 20 years, hundreds of miles from the nearest urban centre, and can describe with real authenticity the rural world he daily inhabits.

It is true that the quality of a writer’s fiction should never be judged by his home address – Joyce after all wrote the Dublin of Ulysses from Trieste. Yet here the difference is striking. Compared to the thwarted, tragic grandeur of Mueenuddin’s women, Deeti, the opium farmer’s wife who is the heroine of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, seems paper-thin: Bihar as imagined from Brooklyn.

The critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked the “slickly exilic version of India” manufactured by diasporic English-language writers from India, describing them as a “cosmopolitan third world elite”, their fictions “suffused with nostalgia”. No one could make this charge of Mueenuddin. His stories have not just a fluency and perfection of shape; above all they have an authenticity of observation and dialogue rooted from long experience living among the people he is writing about. The result is a unique book, probably the best fiction ever written in English about Pakistan, and one of the best to come out of south Asia in a very long time.

William Dalrymple is author of “The Last Mughal’” (Bloomsbury). His new book, “Nine Lives: Searching for the Sacred in Modern India” is published by Bloomsbury in October