Summary and Reviews of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

A complete short story from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders......

Saleema

Saleema was born in the Jhulan clan, blackmailers and bootleggers, Muslim refugees at Partition from the country northwest of Delhi. They were lucky, the new border lay only thirty or forty miles distant, and from thieving expeditions they knew how to travel unobserved along canals and tracks. Skirting the edge of the Cholistan Desert, crossing into Pakistan, on the fourth night they came to a Hindu village abandoned by all but a few old women. They drove them away and occupied the houses, finding pots and pans, buckets, even guard dogs, which grew accustomed to them.

During Saleema’s childhood twenty years later the village was gradually being absorbed into the slums cast off by an adjacent provincial town called Kotla Sardar. Her father became a heroin addict, and died of it, her mother slept around for money and favors, and she herself at fourteen became the plaything of a small ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. The figure of the wealthy landowner K. K. Harouni is the recurring thread that connects the lives of the disparate characters in Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. Describe the nature of the feudal system as defined by this figure sitting atop the pyramid and all his subordinates, acquaintances, and relations.
2. Even as Mueenuddin reveals that his stories are set in the present-day, the reader is struck by the timelessness of the stories, as if they were fables. How is this effect achieved, and to what end?
3. Many of Mueenuddin's characters fall into predicaments beyond their control, and these predicaments define the conflicts at the heart of their stories. Women and the poor, in particular, are ...