2 hours ago
6
Imagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel. Reminiscent of Neel Mukherjee’s dazzling circular depiction of Indian inequalities, A State of Freedom, it’s a keenly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed short-story collection with which he made his debut in 2009, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – also portraying overlapping worlds of Pakistani class and culture.
We begin in the squalor and bustle of a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, where the heartbreaking figure of a small child, abandoned to his fate and clutching a pair of plastic shoes, is scooped under the protection of a tea stall owner. He proceeds to raise the boy as his own son, having only daughters, but Yazid is also adopted by the stall’s garrulous regulars, who teach him both to read and to pay keen attention to the currents of class, wealth and power which flow past him every day.
Loved, popular, clever, Yazid grows into a bull of a teenager with keen entrepreneurial instincts; he soon makes the tea stall, and his shack behind it, the cool place for a gang of privileged schoolboys to hang out, smoke and play games. From among this group he wins a scholarly, adoring friend, Zain. Zain’s intellectual, leftwing family take him to their heart and Yazid is soon smitten by his sister, Yasmin, with devastating consequences that catapult him out of all his small, hard-won securities and into the service of an army colonel and politician in distant Lahore.
Mueenuddin then moves us to the deep countryside, where the colonel’s nephew Rustom, who has returned from a long spell studying in America, must negotiate local webs of corruption and violence as he attempts to revive the fortunes of the estate neglected by his late playboy father. His time in the US has softened him, apparently, and the gentle, democratic instincts he has acquired there are no match for the rotten local police or the tribe of gangsters who have long been his family’s enforcers and whose help he rashly asks for when a boundary dispute threatens to escalate. In Lahore to ask advice, and plead his case with relatives when the goondas get out of hand, he falls under the spell of his rich older cousin, Hisham, who has also been educated in America, and his equally glamorous wife. They treat him like a kind of hapless pet and are soon matchmaking for him.
Next we are inside the head of Hisham and find the queasy truths behind the polished front and impeccable marriage. Mueenuddin compellingly portrays the backstory to his relationship with queenly, worldly Shahnaz. Hisham and his adored, more studious brother are the sons of the colonel who took young Yazid into his household; they are sent to university in America, where it’s the brother who initially falls for Shahnaz. Hisham is the one with the killer instinct, and the fact that she is seduced by this, as though sensing a kindred spirit, colours indelibly the marriage that follows. Every detail is noted and tucked away by Yazid, who has been feudally handed down from the colonel as the couple’s muscle and fearless chauffeur, and equally by Saquib, a poor boy from the village, now mentored by Yazid and effectively sponsored by the childless Hisham and Shahnaz as a risky mixture of servant and project.
The novel’s final section, in effect the fourth interlinked novella, comes full circle by homing in on this Saquib and how he repays the support first of Yazid and then of the wealthy employers who are charmed by his quick wit and natural elegance. This section is the most reminiscent of Mukherjee in its juxtaposition of wit and brutality, and its savagely sudden closing down of prospects.
Mueenuddin’s writing is always fluent and often very funny. He brings the smells and tastes of Pakistan to vibrant life; the birds and trees feel as present as the weight of history and the impossible tangles within tangles of corruption and responsibility. The novel begins with a long list of major and minor characters, as in some editions of Dickens or early English translations of the great Russian novelists, but any fears of overcomplexity this raises are quite unfounded; the names may be grand and long but the portrayals are immediate and never confusing, the storytelling as instantly involving as anything by Amor Towles.
If I had a criticism it would be that the four narratives give no space to a female outlook. The women – Yazid’s adored Yasmin, Rustom’s girlfriend in America, ruthless Shahnaz and Saquib’s ambiguous young wife, Gazala – ultimately all retain their secrets from the reader. Nothing in Mueenuddin’s supremely controlled writing is accidental, and his superb short stories repeatedly come from female perspectives, so perhaps he is tantalising us to make a point about a culture in which the male voice dominates. And this is a minor quibble born of being greedy for more; This Is Where the Serpent Lives looks set to be one of the standout novels of 2026.
