"So, what are the wonders?” you might ask upon encountering Daniyal’s Mueennuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a Story Prize finalist (the prize winner will be revealed tonight, in NYC). Many interpretations of the title are possible: the stories themselves, the characters in them, valuable objects. But the predominant "wonder" derived from reading the story turns out to be a stark realization of the human thread connecting the reader and the characters, all of whom stem from diverse cultural backgrounds. And not just the wonder of that connection, but the wonder of our collective ability to continually forget it.
The book starts somewhat simply, with the tale of a poor servant, Nawabdin. He works for a powerful landowner (K. K. Harouni, an imposing figure throughout the book due to his extensive political and pastoral power), but earns extra money on the side by cleverly "gaming" the electrical system: cheating the electrical company out of money but saving his fellow citizens (who then pay him in bribes) money. He buys a motorcycle with the money he earns through this service. As a result of his newfound status symbols, people “begin asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knows absolutely nothing.” The assumption that wealth confers knowledge is a dangerous one that runs throughout our own society as well. So when Nawabdin, enriched through thievery, is confronted with a life or death situation, will he remember his own struggles with poverty, or punish a fellow indigent for a theft more literal than his own?
The book is fraught with similar moral conundrums stemming from those most basic of problems: love and money. From the search for love in the face of a society that’s overwhelmingly stratified along class lines, to the possession of paralyzing luxury and power, Other Rooms literally shows the various “rooms” of extensive estates (including the servants' quarters), and the wonders—both wondrously bad and good—they contain. Whether it's a man conspiring to kill his wife or a woman "marrying up" under false pretenses, most of the characters have motives or take actions that are significantly unsettling.
But equally unsettling, and clearly the cause of these morally questionable acts, is the intense class stratification of the Pakistani society depicted. Servants are omnipresent but largely unseen by the upper class: even one landowner who marries a servant keeps the union a secret from his family. Lack of money is a persistent issue for servants locked into a lifestyle they hate, living great distances from their families (who are not always their loved ones) just to make it from day to day, perhaps holding on to hopes that they can acquire the wealth that will make their struggles end. But even the richest are not necessarily happy, managing servants, taking bribes, dealing with demands—or, in the case of some (often the wives, stranded without obligation or meaning), dealing with emptiness. As one wealthy mother points out, "It's as difficult to have a meaningful life with a lot of money as without."
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a difficult book to read, at times, centering as it does on class conflicts and the futility of such divides, bringing pleasure to no one. From servants struggling to feed their families to rich men bored with their luxurious lot in life, the stories cast a dismal yet true light on the varying hardships we all experience. We should all be so lucky, one supposes, as to have servants bring us whiskey on a balcony, like one wealthy wife. We could also be so lucky as to have our own tin huts, our own small realms to reign over, places that truly mean something to us: something, perhaps, more than money.
Yet wealth remains a touchpoint in the world of the story: "There's more than you can see. If you like, I'll show you later," says a senior servant to Saleema, a household servant saddled with a drug-addicted husband, while shows her the beginning of the property's vast expanse when she joins the staff. Saleema first looks for love first in the arms of the household cook; after he shames her, she turns to a married older servant, Rafik: the man who welcomed her with the above line. The tender relationship between Saleema and Rafik is perhaps the closest the book comes to love, but their affection is doomed by their marriages and their tenuous union as, essentially, coworkers, and members of a lower class.
In almost every story in Rooms, almost every character has an ulterior motive. Everyone is always after something, always using other people for their own gain, even if that perceived gain never has real benefits. An upper-class man marries a beautiful servant girl, unofficially elevating her status to his own, but his delight in her is based on ownership, not love: “Seeing these little tokens of her presence [around the house] made him happy, made him feel that he possessed her” A lower-middle-class woman fights her way into the bedroom and the household of the feared/respected K. K. Harouni, but at the end of their relationship she is no better off than she was before. The stratification of society and fixation on money are so dire that characters are driven to set their wives on fire—and bribe their way out of punishment.
Even on the happiest day of one's life, class differences come through clearly. After her wedding to a rich landowner, beautiful Lily sees her neighbors (of a sort) spying on the wedding:
[H]anging there at the far end [of the tent], disembodied faces rippled behind the plastic, three, four, five of them, fixed on her, distorted, larger and then smaller as the breeze shook the tent. All evening they must have watched, sitting on the compound wall, invisible when the lights inside the tent were bright. These must be from the slum, the people who lived illegally on the banks of an open sewage channel that drained the millionaires' district. Why shouldn't they curse the rich lives of the bride and groom?
But then, Lily thinks, "It doesn't have to be that way... These men also ate from the wedding table." (The servants would have shared the leftovers.) "They too could bless her, figures of propitiation."
Early in their courtship, Lily's now-husband quoted a Persian poem to her after she thought he nearly drowned:
Standing there on the shore
What do you know of my troubles
As I struggle here in midstream
This, perhaps, is the wonder: that we all struggle, yet never begin to understand each other's difficulties. The Rooms we live in are built on deceit and artifice. Beneath these facades are plenty of genuine feelings and ideas, but somehow we consistently fail to truly share them, to wonder in the reality of shared humanity rather than the unreality of unattainable dreams.
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