In an interview on Understanding Pakistan

Your next choice is In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I can remember this book coming out to rave reviews a couple of years ago. Why have you put this collection of short stories on your list?

I put it on my list for two reasons. The first is that simply he’s so good. Some of his stories I would say rival Chekhov in their ability to put across character, place and situation in a very vivid and deep way in a very short space. I mention Chekhov and the Russian writers deliberately because I think the other thing that makes him so interesting is that besides being half American, he also represents a Pakistani educated class which is very Western influenced and which speaks English, but which, like the Westernised Russian intelligentsia and landowning class of the 19th century, lives in a country where most of the population holds to a very different traditional and religious culture.

But most of the Pakistani writers of fiction, and most Pakistani intellectuals in general, are purely urban. Mueenuddin is much more in the mould of 19th century Russian writers. On the one hand he himself has a Westernised culture but unlike other Pakistani writers Mueenuddin is actually a landowner. He manages his family estate in the southern Punjab and is therefore close to the rural masses in Pakistan and rural society in a way that other Pakistanis writers are not. Mueenuddin therefore has a deep understanding of the ways in which Pakistani life goes on, the ways in which power is exercised at ground level, the whole texture of life in the Pakistani countryside, which I think is wonderfully described but also very important to understand. Equally, his Western background gives him the distance to see that society from the outside and to grasp it as a whole.

I know this is only his first book of short stories, but they do compare to, say, Turgenev, who is probably a better comparison than Chekhov, because this business of being a Westernised, noble landowner in the midst of a very un-Western, traditional society was precisely Turgenev’s position.

The stories follow the lives of the Harrouni family, who are rich landowners, and their servants and employees. Are they semi-autobiographical?

They’re not directly autobiographical, I believe, but they are heavily influenced by his own personal experiences of being a landowner and managing a big estate in the countryside Unfortunately, most of the people who have that background in Pakistan have not been capable of writing about it in ways that bring out their life for a non-Pakistani audience. The bulk of the Pakistani urban intelligentsia doesn’t know that world. Also the liberal intelligentsia in Pakistan would very much rather believe that that world didn’t exist. They prefer their mythologised idea of the Pakistani masses. They feel, and I can understand why they need to believe this, that somewhere there is this pure mass of the Pakistani people who are moderate and who only want justice and progress and so on. That is not the impression you get from Mueenuddin’s work.

The powerlessness of women and the poor is a recurrent theme in the stories.

There is a very deep sympathy with the sufferings of the poor and the powerless, and women in particular. There is also a desperately moving short story about this man whose wife disappears and then he himself is essentially tortured to death by the police. It brings out the relevance of so many of the things we talk about in Pakistan when it comes to the experience of ordinary poor people.