Daily Times

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

By Daniyal Mueenuddin

WW Norton & Company; Pp 256

“Not that the story need be long, But it will take a long while to make it short” — Henry David Thoreau.

Stories are simple yet complex. Not a single story can be narrated as if it has only one story in it. Therefore, the process of telling a story making it terse and compact becomes complicated and difficult manifold, turning it into an intricate art. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, this art is manifested clearly and cleverly by the debutant writer Daniyal Mueenuddin. The half-Pakistani, half-American Mueenuddin makes his literary debut with this book of short stories. One of his stories, ‘Nawabdin Electrician’, was selected by Salman Rushdie to be included in The Best American Short Stories in 2008; some of his stories have also been published in esteemed publications such as The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope.

Mueenuddin’s eight stories are all set in the landscape of Pakistan, thus imbibing them with an overwhelming aura of the familiar, the known. He writes about things that are part of the world he inhabits closely, naturally, and even uneasily at times. Anything and everything in his stories is real and relevant to the places mentioned in them. Since times immemorial, faceless and nameless hordes of people have existed inconspicuously in our feudal set-ups; here Mueenuddin gives them voices and identities. Some of his stories have urban settings, and even they resonate with a truth that is uniquely our own.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, the author, maintaining constant simplicity of language and the straightforwardness of his words, manages to keep the writing taut and to the point. There is an unusual fluency in his writing, making him stand out from most of his Pakistani and Indian contemporaries. Unlike most of the writers of this part of the world, his writing shies away from the overly dramatic words and the superfluous usage of language. He does not use big words even when he talks about the huge events that rock the lives of his characters. The ease with which he uses his words to narrate his simple stories make them comfortable reading, which to me is a great feat for the debutant writer.

The author has a deep and penetrating understanding of the physical world around him. Nothing escapes his eye and nothing is too small for his observation. His descriptions of places, seasons, landscapes, animate and inanimate objects are refreshingly vivid and constantly interesting. The events — big and small — characterising the people in his stories, take on an eerily life-like depiction set against his starkly truthful backdrops.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders one gets the impression that Mueenuddin is trying to teach us a simple lesson, which is that the patterns of life are selfish and unforgiving. In his intersecting eight stories, he opens our eyes and our hearts to the deep, complex patterns of life within a certain section of our society. All his characters express, knowingly or unknowingly, the tensions between the past and the present, between the old world and the new. The stories are linked to each other because all the characters come from the family, circle of friends, and household staff of K K Harouni, the ageing landowner from the south of Punjab, and a former bureaucrat. Here is a needy young woman who in order to elevate her financial status becomes the mistress of an affluent relative. Here is an ambitious poor electrician who grabs every opportunity to better his life. Here is a maid who, while trivially seducing, falls in love unexpectedly. Here is a farm manager who steals his way through life, coveting wealth and respect. Here is a young beautiful socialite who marries for the wrong reason. Here is a modern Pakistani young man engaged to an American girl, defying his family traditions. Here is a middle-aged upper-crust Muslim woman interacting with her son’s foreign fiancé, hating her for upsetting her well-laid plans for her offspring. And, here is an old man who tries to entrench himself in a place with the flimsiest of structures. Their stories are told with compassion and depth, making the storyteller an actual eyewitness to their lives. Throughout the book there is a dominant tone of empathy for most of these apparently insignificant lives, thus marking them as noteworthy and relevant.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s book has been hugely lauded; it has even been touted as the greatest literary phenomenon of 2009, hence making it a tremendous success for a first-time writer. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response it has generated, the book fails to leave any considerable impact on me as a reader. The title In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is one of the most intriguing and attractive ones ever given to a literary work, yet the stories leave no lasting impression. His interesting notation of the world reminds us that description is one of fiction’s first and gravest tasks. Whereas his descriptions of the superficial world are necessary and instrumental to the flow of his storytelling, his stating the emotional content of his characters is overdone, hence marking its redundancy. The biggest flaw in his writing, in my limited but personal opinion, is the over-simplification of his narration. All his characters go through their quotidian and even extraordinary dilemmas, highs and lows, upheavals, tragedies, joys, celebrations, good and the bad…and he describes all that with an undisguised pathos and in an unvarnished matter-of-fact way. He strips them of every layer they have wrapped themselves in and presents them devoid of any disguise. Nothing is left to the imagination and nothing is left for imagination. Everything is laid out in the basic shades of black and white — the characters are out there, blatant but disappointingly unimpressive. They say too much, they express too much, they explain too much, and they justify too much. This to me is what makes them weak and short-lived, hence making the book uninspiring and ineffective. Short stories are what they are, i.e. short stories. The characters and the events surrounding the lives of those characters may be complex and intricate, but the vocabulary employed to describe those need not be all-consuming and all-revealing. A short story is not a screenplay where each and every detail — emotional or material — has to be enunciated loud and clear. In Mueenuddin’s stories, there is nothing to be understood, nothing to be read between the lines, nothing to make you wonder, because instead of leaving certain things to the reader’s own comprehension of his writing, he makes sure all is understood as the writer meant it to be. You may remember his book, but you may forget what it was all about.

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com