In Other Rooms, Other Wonders , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Daniyal Mueenuddin

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110 pages

English

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Moving from the elegant drawing rooms of Lahore to the mud villages of rural Multan, a powerful collection of short stories about feudal Pakistan. An impoverished young woman becomes a wealthy relative's mistress; an electrician on the make confronts his desperate assailant to protect his most prized possession; a farm manager rises far in the world-but his family discovers after his death the transience of power; a maid, who advances herself through sexual favours, unexpectedly falls in love. In these linked stories about the family and household staff of the ageing KK Harouni, we meet masters and servants, landlords and supplicants, politicians and electricians, village women, and Karachi housewives. Part Chekhov, part RK Narayan, these stories are dark and light, complex and humane; at heart about the relationship between the powerful and powerless, bound together in life-and in death. Together they make up a vivid portrait of a feudal world rarely brought alive in the English language. Sensuous, graceful, melancholy, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gives you Pakistan as you have never seen it. It marks the debut of an amazing new talent.

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Short story

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	01 octobre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002188
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A stunning achievement a writer of enormous ambition, and he has the prodigious talent to match.
M OHSIN H AMID
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders may be fiction but it is of such an authentic stamp that it is history as well, more so by the day, and deserves to be read as such.
T HE T IMES
Mueenuddin writes with the freshness of an exile and the intimacy of an insider about Pakistani culture.
O BSERVER
A collection full of pleasures on every page there are wonderful, surprising observations and details.
W ASHINGTON P OST B OOK W ORLD
Mueenuddin has uncovered the violence and callousness of everyday life in rural west Pakistan.
R AMACHANDRA G UHA
A heart-wrenching debut by a gifted writer.
T IMES OF I NDIA
The magic with which he weaves his tales lyrical, humorous, tinged with melancholy and gently ironic in turn is entirely of his own making.
T HE H INDU
A bold portrayal of a truly troubled society Daniyal s rendering of a feudal society caught between tradition and modernity is exemplary.
P EOPLE
Mueenuddin s language [is] unafraid of being sentimental, brutal, humorous; often combining the three to present a Pakistan that we haven t encountered so far in literature.
I NDIAN E XPRESS
More praise for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
The new comet of English fiction out of Pakistan. Outlook
The canvas of his eight stories is stupendous. Business Standard
Uniquely Pakistani and uniquely Punjabi. In this world, corruption is rife, loneliness is a heartbeat away, and wretchedness never too far. Hindustan Times
Some works of fiction announce themselves instantly as classics, and this book of many wonders is one such. Mint
There is something arresting, beautiful, or wise on every single page. I can hardly believe this book exists-it s so remarkable, I admire it so deeply. Nadeem Aslam
In this labyrinth of power games and exploits, Mueenuddin instills luminous glimmers of longing, loss and, most movingly, unfettered love. New York Times
Illuminat[es] contemporary Pakistan s societal contradictions in prose as clear and serene as the contradictions themselves are subtle and tumultuous. Boston Globe
The writing here has a clarifying beauty This is a marvellous collection. Daily Telegraph
Mueenuddin has sophisticated language and a powerful range of cultural references at his disposal, and a rare sensibility. The Spectator
These stories are so engrossing that there is a wrench when one ends and the next must begin. Sunday Times
Unveils a nuanced world where social status and expectations are understood without being stated, and where poverty and the desire to advance frame each critical choice. Wall Street Journal
Mueenuddin excels at prising out the complicated power structures that lie between master and servant, parent and child, husbands, wives, lovers A compelling storyteller. The Independent
Given the power and beauty and deeply affecting quality of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, I can t stop myself from wondering if Pakistan has found its Chekhov. Miami Sun-Sentinal
Evokes 19th-century Russian masters like Turgenev and Gogol, along with the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner and Truman Capote Mueenuddin is a prodigiously talented writer. The Daily Beast
From the wistful title to the final pages, Mueenuddin transports you to a faraway land His crisp, vivid voice glides effortlessly into his various characters heads Dark stuff, but full of beauty. Entertainment Weekly
IN OTHER ROOMS,
OTHER WONDERS
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2010
Copyright Daniyal Mueenuddin 2009
An Urban Convalescence, copyright 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University, from Collected Poems by James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Nawabdin Electrician, A Spoiled Man, and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders originally appeared in The New Yorker. Provide, Provide appeared in Granta. Our Lady of Paris appeared in Zoetrope: All Story. Nawabdin Electrician also appeared in Best American Short Stories 2008.
Calligraphy on page 8 by Saberah Malik
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B,
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002188
For my mother
Three things for which we kill-
Land, women and gold.
- Punjabi proverb
CONTENTS
Nawabdin Electrician
Saleema
Provide, Provide
About a Burning Girl
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Our Lady of Paris
Lily
A Spoiled Man
NAWABDIN ELECTRICIAN
H e flourished on a signature capability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters, so cunningly done that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings. In this Pakistani desert, behind Multan, where the tube wells ran day and night, Nawab s discovery eclipsed the philosopher s stone. Some thought he used magnets, others said heavy oil or porcelain chips or a substance he found in beehives. Skeptics reported that he had a deal with the meter men. In any case, this trick guaranteed his employment, both off and on the farm of his patron, K. K. Harouni.
The farm lay strung along a narrow and pitted farm-to-market road, built in the 1970s when Harouni still had influence in the Lahore bureaucracy. Buff or saline-white desert dragged out between fields of sugarcane and cotton, mango orchards and clover and wheat, soaked daily by the tube wells that Nawabdin Electrician tended. Beginning the rounds on his itinerant mornings, summoned to a broken pump, Nawab and his bicycle bumped along, whippy antennas and plastic flowers swaying. His tools, notably a three-pound ball-and-peen hammer, clanked in a greasy leather bag that hung from the handlebars. The farmhands and the responsible manager waited in the cool of the banyans, planted years ago to shade each of the tube wells. No tea, no tea, he insisted, waving away the steaming cup.
Hammer dangling like a savage s axe, Nawab entered the oily room housing the pump and electric motor. Silence. He settled on his haunches. The men crowded the door, till he shouted that he must have light. He approached the offending object warily but with his temper rising, circled it, pushed it about a bit, began to take liberties with it, settled in with it, drank tea next to it, and finally began disassembling it. With his screwdriver, blunt and long, lever enough to pry up flagstones, he cracked the shields hiding the machine s penetralia. A screw popped and flew into the shadows. He took the ball-and-peen and delivered a cunning blow. The intervention failed. Pondering, he ordered one of the farmworkers to find a really thick piece of leather and to collect sticky mango sap from a nearby tree. So it went, all day, into the afternoon, Nawab trying one thing and then another, heating the pipes, cooling them, joining wires together, circumventing switches and fuses. And yet somehow, in fulfillment of his genius for crude improvisation, the pumps continued to run.
Unfortunately or fortunately, Nawab had married early in life a sweet woman, whom he adored, but of unsurpassed fertility; and she proceeded to bear him children spaced, if not less than nine months apart, then not that much more. And all daughters, one after another after another, until finally came the looked-for son, leaving Nawab with a complete set of twelve girls, ranging from infant to age eleven, and then one odd piece. If he had been governor of the Punjab, their dowries would have beggared him. For an electrician and mechanic, no matter how light-fingered, there seemed no question of marrying them all off. No moneylender in his right mind would, at any rate of interest whatsoever, advance a sufficient sum to buy the necessary items: for each daughter, beds, a dresser, trunks, electric fans, dishes, six suits of clothes for the groom, six for the bride, perhaps a television, and on and on and on.
Another man might have thrown up his hands-but not Nawabdin. The daughters acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue-the salary he received from K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor-condemned by him. He tried his hand at fishfarming in a little pond at the edge of one of his master s fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur even when asked to fix watches, though that enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited, Nawab would place himself night and day at the door leading from the servants sitting area into the walled grove of ancient banyan trees where the old farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the household machinery, the air conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer i