THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES

A multigenerational saga of high and low classes in Pakistan.

In his debut, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–finalist story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Mueenuddin deployed elegant prose to harshly critique a callow and often corrupt Pakistani aristocracy. In this book, his passion for the theme has only deepened. The constant thread and symbolic figure in this story is Bayazid (aka Yazid), who’s discovered on the streets of Rawalpindi as a child in the mid-1950s and put to work at a tea stall, eventually serving as a driver for a wealthy landowning family, the Atars. As a child, he demonstrates the skills necessary to serve the aristocracy: unquestioning loyalty, personability, and a capacity to deliver violence when necessary. As the story moves into the late 20th and early 21st century, Mueenuddin explores how the wealthy classes, gangsters, and corrupt police intertwine, and how a sense of entitlement powers all of them. That’s most visible in the relationship between Hisham, a scion of the Atar family, and his wife, Shahnaz; though a well-educated member of an elite family (one observer notes that she’s “the real brains of that operation”), she’s relegated to managing servants and abiding Hisham’s infidelities. In the book's closing acts, Mueenuddin reveals the consequences of defying this broken but intractable caste system, largely through Chaudrey Mohammad Saqib, a manager of the Atars’ nearby farm, whose missteps expose his bosses’ cruelty. Mueenuddin delivers all this in a graceful style that dignifies the lower-caste characters and intensifies the unjustness of their treatment. In his old age, Yazid has bulked up with the years, well-fed but unwell—another symbol for a class system that rewards loyalty with oppression and disloyalty with worse.

A potent and nuanced tale about the abuse of an underclass in ways both subtle and overt.