‘Farming enables my writing, and my writing enables my farming’: Daniyal Mueenuddin
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The epigraph of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first book, the multi-award-winning short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is a Punjabi proverb: “Three things for which we kill – land, women and gold.”
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After 17 years, Mueenuddin has poised himself yet again, bringing similar stories, driven by the proverbial motivations of the feudal systems from the mofussil farms in South Punjab in Pakistan, a heady cocktail of izzat, mulazims, and the mulk itself in This Is Where the Serpent Lives.
The rich tapestry of the goings-on in the farms – managed by munshis, and overlooked by the mian-sahibs – is divided into four sections. Each one reads like a novella. Their interconnectedness isn’t, however, a mere coincidence. It’s woven into the fabric and themes of the stories Mueenuddin chooses to centralise. In the sense that respectability, repeatability and novelty are part and parcel of the very everyday life in the subcontinent.
While the section “The Golden Boy” focuses on an orphaned, enterprising boy’s rise to become a chauffeur in an influential family, the Atars, in “Muscle,” we meet the US-returned Rustom, who must come to terms with the idiosyncrasies of running a farm, of which he knows nothing, as he grieves his parents and his much-feared land-owning grandfather. Heavily controlled by his...