Excerpt from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She found Hassan in the kitchen, muted for once.

“What’ll become of me?” she asked. After all, something must come of his intimacy with her. She had slept with him, held him. The stark fact of her body shown to him, given to him, must be worth something. She wished for this, and knew that it wasn’t so. With Rafik it had been different, he had raised her up, but Hassan had degraded her. She saw her hopes receding. Again she became the stained creature who threw herself at Hassan, for the little things he gave her.

“You came with nothing, you leave with nothing. You’ve been paid and fed for some time at least. You have decent clothes and a little slug of money.”

“What of you and Rafik?”

“We’re being put in the Islamabad house.”

“And did Rafik say anything to the mistresses about me?”

“Nothing,” Hassan said cruelly. “Not a word.” He put his hands on the counter and looked directly in her face. “It’s over. There never was any hope. I spent my life in this kitchen. Look at me, I’m old. Rafik’s old.”

So Rafik had renounced her. At the end of the month she had found another place, with some friends of Harouni, who took her because she came from this house.

Before leaving she said to Rafik one day, “Meet me tonight in the kitchen. You owe me that.”

• • •

She found him waiting for her, under a single bulb. He had aged, his face thin, shoulders bent. Worst of all, his eyes were frightened, as if he didn’t understand where he was. K. K. Harouni had been his life, his morning and night, his charge, his wealth.

“What of the child?” she asked. “Will you help him? When he’s grown will you find him a job?”

“I’ll be gone long before that, dear girl.”

“Say that once you loved me.”

“Of course I did. I do. I loved you more.”

Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, which she once had so much despised, lost her job, went on to heroin, leaving her husband behind without a word. She knew all about that life from her husband and father.

The man who controlled the lucrative corner where she ended up begging took most of her earnings. This way she escaped prostitution. She cradled the little boy in her arms, holding him up to the windows of cars. Rafik sent money, a substantial amount, so long as she had an address. And then, soon enough, she died, and the boy begged in the streets, one of the sparrows of Lahore.

Excerpted from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. © 2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Excerpted by permission of W.W.Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.