In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Originally published in Time Out New York, February 5, 2009

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut collection of interconnected stories awakens all the senses, evoking the vibrant sounds, tastes and scents of the countryside outside of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. Beneath the lush descriptions of jacaranda trees and baked chapatis, however, a somber pulse drives each tale. The common thread running through the book is K.K. Harouni, a prominent landowner with a staff of dozens. Masters and servants alike are motivated by greed and self-interest; often the sympathetic characters fare no better than the despicable ones.

Take, for example, the title character in “Saleema,” who unexpectedly finds love with a fellow servant only to become separated from him when Harouni dies; she winds up addicted to pills, her son a beggar on the streets. That’s not much worse than the fate that befalls Zainab, who in “Provide, Provide” manipulates her married lover, one of Harouni’s overseers, into giving her one of his children to raise when she learns she is barren.

Aside from the book’s knockout first selection, “Nawabdin Electrician,” chosen by Salman Rushdie for 2008’s Best American Short Stories, most of the characters and individual plotlines don’t leave a lasting impression. Instead of building upon each other, Mueenuddin’s stories blend together, circling around the same themes of power and corruption. As a portrait of a feudal society caught between tradition and modernity, the collection succeeds, though one is left with the sense that Mueenuddin could have delved deeper into the psyches of the men and women who inhabit his book. Despite Mueenuddin’s redolent descriptions of Pakistani life, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders never quite achieves literary liftoff.