“These guys don’t understand their own people. The hierarchy is so bred into them that they condescend.”

DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN Pakistani-American writer


By SABRINA TAVERNISE


MUEENABAD, Pakistan - In the steamy heat of central Pakistan, there is a hidden world where servants and their feudal masters mix with the powerlessness of poverty and the corruption that glues it all together.

These lives, tucked away in grand estates and mud-walled villages, are rarely seen by outsiders. But Daniyal Mueenuddin, a Pakistani-American who lives here, has brought them into focus in a collection of short stories, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.”

They are intimate portraits that raise some of the biggest questions in Pakistan today. Why does a small elite still control vast swaths of land more than 60 years after Pakistan became a nation? How long will landlords continue to control the law and the lives of the peasants on their land in the same wayBritish rulers did before them?

Mr. Mueenuddin, 46, offers a richly observed landscape. The estate he lives on in southern Punjab, Pakistan’s biggest province, belonged to his father, a prominent Pakistani civil servant, and he used to come here as a boy.

His parents met in the United States in the 1950s. His father was negotiating a treaty, and his mother was a young reporter for The Washington Post. They moved to Pakistan, but she took her sons back to the United States when Mr. Mueenuddin was 13.

Memories of this land stayed with him, however, and he returned after college in 1987 as an aspiring writer. He found upon arrival a decaying, colonial-era system, whose owners - his family - had long stopped paying attention. The managers were pilfering land and planting their own crops.

“It was in their mouths when I pulled it out,” Mr. Mueenuddin said, speaking on the estate, where he now lives with his wife.

Mr. Mueenuddin slowly became part of the changing Pakistan he wanted to capture in fiction. The managers of the estate were powerful when he arrived, and extracting them from the business of running the farm was a delicate procedure. He slept with a gun and worried that his food might be poisoned. “It occurred to me that they could kill me,” he said.

Slowly, Mr. Mueenuddin reclaimed the farm, which now does a brisk business in mangoes, sugar cane and cotton.

The characters in his fiction are convincingly local: corrupt farm managers; spoiled children of wealthy landlords; and servant girls desperate to improve their station in life. The stories explore the power dynamic between servants and their masters.

Mr. Mueenuddin argues that he is a farm manager whose business does well because he treats his workers fairly. He pays them $84 a month, triple the going rate. In Pakistan, landlords rarely delve into the business of their farms in detail and workers are paid around $25 a month.

“These guys don’t understand their own people,” Mr. Mueenuddin said of that class. “The hierarchy is so bred into them that they condescend to people.”

But the cast of characters is changing, a shift that Mr. Mueenuddin’s prose captures. Farm managers, the most powerful servants, have now become part of politics in some places. But instead of making the system fairer, he says, they have seized their own chance to profit.

Meanwhile, poverty has become more pronounced. And mullahs of the fundamentalist Deobandi school have grown powerful in southern Punjab, spreading an aggressive, anti-Shiite, antistate message.

The spread has touched Mr. Mueenuddin. A religious group was building a mosque on the edge of his property, and one day a young man shouted at him, “The first thing you’ll know is when the bullet hits you in the forehead.”

He ordered a wall erected along the property line.

“People are getting more and more desperate,” he said.