“Drink?” She elbows me in the ribs.
“Is that even a question,” I mumble.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if Daniyal Mueenuddin and Mira Sethi were friends or belonged to the same social circle, because they have the eerily similar vibes of the well-travelled and the delusional. Both their works include the type of pretentious, snooty writing that people of a certain elite circle seem to relate to, writing that people who have no sense of the country read and then pat themselves on the back for having read ‘diverse literature’. This is the kind of literature that wins prestigious awards, which you then force yourself to read and wonder what exactly the award was based on. One only needs to check the blurb of this title to see what I mean, because trust me, none of the adjectives used in that description fit any of the stories. This might be one of those cases where I can honestly, in as bewildered a manner as possible, ask whether the blurb writer and I read the same stuff.
Take, for example, the really weird descriptions of body parts, or the almost creepy obsession with breasts in the first story, Mini Apples. Focusing on a Pakistani man’s affair with a foreigner, the story started and ended with a short-lived fling that lead nowhere and ended in as vague a manner as possible. Was there something subliminal that I didn’t understand? Was there subtext that will only be visible if a professor teaches this in class? What were the multiple and mostly random references to breasts supposed to even mean?
Her feet were bare and her T-shirt dug a sharp V into the surf of her breasts.
The thought of her walking around in her cotton tunic, her breasts safe and fragrant, steadied him.
He buried his face in her chest, scented like cake.
I’m not even sure how to properly analyse some of the stories, parts of them were so arbitrary. A part of me was convinced at the beginning that a smarter editor could have maybe saved these stories, but eventually I faced the fact that the writing was too disastrous to be worth saving. Additionally, the pandering to a Western audience was staggering and mostly mortifying, in the sense that you want to look away, pretending you’re not in the room so that you don’t have to suffer from second-hand embarrassment as someone fawns over the gora in the room.
Soni was newly startled, every time, by how her English acquaintances exuded warmth iced with formality, even when they were happy. These were good people who worked hard, stuck to plans, who spoke gently of life.
Some of my favourite things-to-hate also reared their head, such as casual misogyny, of the sort where a woman’s makeup being too thick is sneered at, as an indication that this is the antagonist of the story and worthy of our censure.
Huma’s lips were overdrawn with maroon pencil…
And of course, no compilation by a Pakistani author published abroad can be complete without the addition of my particular pet peeve: the italicization of the desi word. This, coupled with the horrible spelling of actual desi words, such as ‘mamoun’, led me to moments where I was seconds away from flinging the book away from me as far as it would go. This was made worse by the fact that the random words would be italicized, and others just casually left alone. In one particularly disastrous sentence, a complete list of food items included a few arbitrarily italicized ones, while others were presented in their full English glory. What is the method being followed here? Either translate all the words, or leave all of them untranslated? Makes absolutely no sense.
In the reception room ZB’s choice of food had the easy look of a fatty rural feast: chicken cooked in its own brother; saag paneer with corn roti, mutton kebabs off the spit, rice garnished with cilantro; Kabuli chickpeas and egg stew…
Absolute disaster. Out of 7 stories, I couldn’t count even a single one as worth recommending. The characters were boring, the endings weak, and the writing terrible. Even the last story, which lends its name to the book’s title and should have supposedly been the saving grace of the whole endeavour, fails massively. On a personal note, I don’t care much for adultery as a sin, and found it hard to care for the heroine of the last story, the mistress to a married man’s extramarital behaviour. Of all the flaws that I manage to defend, and I can defend quite a fair few (all humans are flawed, all situations are contextual, sometimes a little empathy is needed, so on and so forth), adultery is the one I find the hardest to justify, because it speaks of such a pointed cruelty, such a needless malice towards the unsuspecting spouse in the weakening relationship. I don’t care much for it, or for characters who dabble in it, and usually need a healthy dose of carefully cultivated nuance to be able to get behind such a narrative. It was inevitable then, on the backs of the multiple boring stories I had read, that I would hate this last, feeble entry into the collection.
She understood, for the first time, her own pathetic ruse: rushing to thwart the relationship and gamely surrendering her demands the next moment. What good was it to step back and recognize the lunacy spilling from their interactions if she wouldn’t do anything about it?
Overall, a mostly weak collection with almost nothing worth writing home about. If someone had just written on the blurb ‘Read this if you liked Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’, I could have done myself a favour and avoided this. My one-word recommendation: Avoid.