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Literary Review
CONVERSATIONS
Postcards from no-man’s land
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Pakistani novelist MONI MOHSIN catches up with Daniyal Mueenuddinwhose debut collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was published recently.
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Author to author: Moni Mohsin.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a wondrous collection of short stories about a wealthy aristocratic family, the Harounis, is the Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenduddin’s literary debut. Born of an American mother and a Pakistani father, and educated in both places, (Lahore American School, Dartmouth College and Yale law school) Mueenuddin is equally at home in New York and Rahim Yar Khan, and equally an outsider in both places. “These stories are written from that place in between,” he says. Most of the stories in the collection are set in rural southern Punjab and have their origins in Mueenuddin’s own experience of managing a farm there. Chronicling the lives of masters and servants, landowners and peasants, his stories capture all the allure, cruelty, tragedy and the banality of life in modern-day rural Punjab. Excerpts from the conversation with novelist Moni Mohsin who too grew up in rural Punjab…
Why did you choose the lesser-used vehicle of the short story to relate the life and times of the Harounis and their retinue? Why not a novel?
Lesser-used sounds slighting! Short story writers are the princes of modern fiction, Chekhov, Lawrence, James, Maupassant, Turgenev — all of whose short work is arguably their best. Before 2002, when I began an MFA programme, I had written only poetry. When I began writing fiction, it seemed better to start with short stories rather than a novel because short stories require more discipline, a tighter line, no extraneous characters — the arc must be straight, like the arc of an arrow. In an ideal world, a story would be so perfectly constructed that a single word removed or added would distort the structure. A novel requires less discipline and for an apprentice writer discipline is everything. First-time novels have a tendency to develop elephantiasis, which is sometimes communicated to the author, and thereafter incurable. (See Norman Mailer.)
Your stories contain all the sorrows of the world. Love — however deeply felt — is at best a fleeting consolation. Can it not have at least some redemptive power?
Love is certainly redemptive, at least in that it gives private meaning to the lives of those who experience it and who live in it and through it. And I certainly believe that art must be affirmative. One of the greatest moments in literature is the ending of Ulysses —Molly’s YES. However, in a short story, it’s tricky to create resolution through the redemptive power of love. In real life many are saved by the love of a good woman or man but in fiction it should be attempted rarely and only by experts.
In the rural southern Punjab of which you write, violent sectarian politics of ‘religious’ parties hold sway. And yet your country stories, which otherwise contain a rich cast of political characters — hard, ambitious managers, arrogant, self serving feudals, effete grandees and a corrupt police — the radicalised mullah is notable by his absence. In fact, the only mullah we encounter is a timid, pliant fellow. Is this omission deliberate?
Not deliberate, but rather reflective of the state of things in that part of the world, during the period about which I am writing. The maulvis played an important part in the life of the village — but most people identified with the sufi tradition — and the maulvis were bound into the community by their piety and not by their rhetoric or their politics. This is now changing, and a story set in the present might include a mullah of the kind that you describe.
You have said that being part American and part Pakistani, you belong and are yet an outsider in both places. Do you not think that all writers are in fact outsiders?
Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Writers are generally outsiders, first because they perceive themselves that way — the cape and the Gauloise and all that, the 20-year-old who one day wakes up and with delight sees in the mirror … a poet — and second, because they produce nothing useful. A military band may lead men into battle, or drive them into it, and a satirist may bring down a government or a ministry but a fiction writer at most — and this rarely — expands the readers’ inner space, enlarges his experience and his way of experiencing. Furthermore, writers must be critics, in the largest sense — representation is criticism — and criticism always implies a critical perspective.
Despite your lyrical descriptions of Punjabi landscape, the place you portray is hard, unforgiving. Have you found it unremittingly so?
Not at all. Pakistan is, to my taste, perhaps the most beautiful country in the world, and I’ve experienced greater generosity from people here than anywhere else. It is a desperately poor country, however, and so people struggle more violently and with more deadly intention in order to secure their lives than they do in the affluent West. Grub first, then ethics, as the epigram says.
Nabokov said of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’, ‘The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes and dreams.’ I feel much the same about your stories. Can we look forward to more stories of the Harounis? Or is something else on the anvil?
I’m writing a novel, also set in Pakistan. It’s a love triangle, and the three main protagonists are new. However, some of the characters from this book will appear in cameos — I’d like to give Husna another chance, and I’d like to see how Lily is faring.
What are you reading these days?
I always have a pile of books by my bedside, which are in rotation. I’ve just been in Jaipur at the literary festival, so I’m reading the books of authors I met — Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus, Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Nights. I recently discovered W.G. Sebald –– love his Rings of Saturn, which is this strange, slow-moving, dreamy book, limpid and full of surprises. I just reread Sara Sulieri’s Meatless Days, which is an unjustly overlooked novel by a Pakistani. She sort of stands alone, between the earlier generation, which included Bapsi Sidhwa, and then the ones who are writing today.
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