Book Review - This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Acclaimed for his short story collections, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s epic debut novel is an excoriating portrait of corruption and class divisions in Pakistan. Spanning several decades from 1955 to 2013, the narrative follows the intertwined lives of a wealthy landowning family and their staff. Mueenuddin, whose collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a masterful storyteller interweaving beautifully realised characters and a compelling plot.
Divided into four, self-contained stories, we first meet Bayazid (also known as Yazid) in ‘The Golden Boy’. Abandoned on the streets of Rawalpindi in the mid-1950s as a small child, he is adopted by Karim Khan, the kindly owner of a curry stall, and becomes his apprentice. Yazid later falls for his best friend’s sister, but rebuffed by the family’s maid for daring to cross social boundaries, he retreats to Azad Kashmir and tries his luck as a smuggler. He eventually settles as a chauffeur for Colonel Atar: “landowner, industrialist, till recently one of Bhutto’s backers, and who had now switched alliances to the new man.”
In ‘Muscle’, set in 1988, the colonel’s nephew Rustom
returns from studying in America to run the family farm. He finds himself out
of his depth, unable to manage the thefts and tensions of the feudal social
structure. He is initially reluctant “to show himself as an old-school
landlord—dentists and surgeons, as they called them, rearranging teeth and dismounting knees and elbows.” After
the villagers beat an ancient employee, Rustom enlists thugs to restore order
through brutal intimidation.
In the third part, ‘The Clean Release’, we glimpse the cold
calculation of Rustom’s cousin Hisham when he recalls how he met his wife Shahnaz
while studying at Dartmouth with his younger brother, Nessim. Hisham seduced
Shahnaz, originally Nessim’s girlfriend, during a camping trip together in the
mountains. Mueenuddin delights in exquisite, lush prose and economical turns of
phrase that speak volumes: “Shahnaz describes her love for Hisham as “like a
public building… compared to the unvisited ruin of her season’s love for
Nessim, that first love, abandoned and picturesque.”
The final, eponymous section focuses on Saqib, a bright
young servant boy, the gardener’s son, whose fatal flaw – “the strategic and
the sentimental were fluidly intermixed” – proves his undoing. Mentored by
Yazid, now a trusted member of the Atar household, Saqib works his way up in
Hisham and Shanaz’s estimation to become a munshi (estate manager), only to
throw it all away in an ill-advised plot to siphon money from the family
business.
Mueenuddin, who lives between Oslo and his farm in
Pakistan’s South Punjab, clearly knows this milieu, immersing us in a world
where property and influence are everything, while old retainers, like Saqib’s
father, continue to be “bent to obedience.” Yet through Saqib’s ambition, we sense
that a new order is emerging; had he been more ruthless he might have succeeded
in his machinations. Mueenuddin offers a profound meditation on identity, class
and privilege in a deeply conservative and patriarchal society.