A storybook encounter

In the kind of coincidence that usually only occurs in a masterfully written book, a short while ago I found myself locked in conversation with the nephew of an author whose work I desperately wanted to read.

Real life does not tend to include such happenstances, but on holiday while attending a wedding in Islamabad and having escaped the vibrant shaadi household for a quite afternoon in the Margalla Hills, that is exactly what happened.

It has been a while since I have come across a book that is unputdownable. I have a particular affinity for literature based on South Asianess (as I like to call it), which, probably because of who I am and where I am from tends to leave a more indelible impression than the rest.

I have searched to no avail in Dubai and Abu Dhabi for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. This collection of short stories tells of the lives of servants, feudal lords, corrupt judges and other characters, all of which are intertwined thanks to the ageing aristocrat and landowner KK Harouni. I looked forward to grabbing a copy off the shelf in the first bookshop I would come across in Islamabad.

It was sold out. From several shops. So when I happened upon the author’s nephew at my friend’s wedding, I got a fantastic preview of the stories I have yet to encounter.

I had read some excerpts from the collection in The New Yorker, and a review of the book and a profile of the author in The New York Times, where I gleaned that he gave up practising law in New York to work on his father’s land in the heart of Punjab. Once there, he apparently slept with a gun under his pillow. The article said the book was a thinly veiled account of his real-life experiences.

“It is not thinly veiled at all,” said his nephew. “There are people here who have read it and are not at all happy.” Aha! That’s exactly the kind of recommendation one needs to dig into a book.

His nephew had been handed a copy prepublication, had read it with much relish and then suggested to Daniyal that he not publish it. Daniyal did. His nephew chuckled and said: “I am glad he did.”

It is too early to know how successful the book will become, but Daniyal has already been compared to one of my other favourite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri, whose debut collection, An Interpreter of Maladies, won her a Pulitzer prize.

Whatever the case may be, Daniyal has managed to lift me from an ennui brought on by reading one too many books that desperately tried to be what his piece of prose ultimately achieved: a frank, unflinching look at life in the subcontinent, one that is easy to feel but hard to capture.