If Charles Dickens wrote Downton Abbey: This new Pakistani novel has charm, beauty, and unrelenting cruelty

The book is divided into four linked sections, each a complete story on its own. At the centre sit Miyan Hisham Atar and his wife Shahnaz bibi, with a large ancestral estate in Punjab and intertwining webs of business and politics spreading across Pakistan. Their family members, servants, and guests make up the four stories, presenting a cross-section view of Pakistani society from the 1950s to the 2010s, where privilege, class, and even servants are inherited, where power is a language you need to be born speaking, and where no amount of loyalty or affection can grease certain doors.

Bayazid: a ‘golden boy’ in a sullied system

The book opens with Bayazid, an orphan boy lost/abandoned on the streets of Rawalpindi, who is taken in by a kind tea seller. Tall and strong, street-smart and likeable, Bayazid makes great naan, tells great stories, plays great carrom, and can hold his own in verbal jousting as well as physical fights. He also has plans to improve his lot; in the author’s words, he is a bear ambling towards his own North.

This was my favourite section of the novel — warm, bright, and utterly captivating, with Bayazid a refreshing version of masculinity in the manosphere era. If Bayazid’s arc doesn’t live up to this potential, is that a failing of the novelist, or of the feudal Pakistani society to which the novel is an enchanted mirror?

The Abdalahs and Atars

Bayazid eventually becomes a trusted chauffeur-cum-manager to the Atars. The protagonist of the second section, Rustom, is Hisham Atar’s cousin. Like Hisham and Shahnaz, Rustom was educated in America, and struggles to make sense or use of his liberal education at his rural estate of Dunyapur.

Rustom is the young master, inheriting too soon after his family patriarch grandfather and playboy prince father pass away. Mueenuddin’s skilled prose notices all the tiny details in which the village mocks Rustom, all the while performing the proper genuflections.

Mueenuddin shows that life above the stairs has its own challenges. Shahnaz and Rustom are lonely, Hisham’s younger brother Nessim has fled to the US because he couldn’t bear to always hold the dagger against the heir, wondering if he will give in to the temptation to stab.

Can Rustom become another Hisham, sophisticated and urbane one second, ruthless and in command the other? All the power “would be, or could be” his, believes Rustom, “if he would pay the price”. What his position doesn’t require him to ask, what Hisham doesn’t ask, is what his decision would mean for the many over whose heads the price would be paid.

The serpent

The novel’s longest section is for Saqib, the son of the Atars’ gardener, who rises through the servant ranks at dizzying speed to get to the level of Bayazid, and surpassing him, to become Shahnaz’s pet.

But while Bayazid is content to be Atlas, holding up the sky, Saqib is Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

Saqib plans a heist, just one transgression in a career of sterling service. While all managers steal from the landowners, he wants to go beyond petty pilfering that the sahibs condescendingly condone. Wanting not just the gold, but also some of the gold dust sprinkled on the sahibs‘ lives, he tries the corruption of their class, of laundered money and doctored books. And at once, the trapdoor snaps shut on him.

The Atars, after turning the full force of a pitiless, hungry system on Saqib, pull back, sending Bayazid with the message that they “did not wish or order this”. Whatever the cost to Saqib, their notions of their kind selves must be protected, and Bayazid is dispatched as messenger and final rescuer of his once protege. Bayazid, the orphan with “that original crack in his happiness”, goes to explain to his “almost son” that “whatever the sahibs have, it is not for sale”. And the scheming Saqib, who almost loves this faithful giant, knows they must part, for Bayazid is a “devotee of a faith he no longer could share.”

The golden boy’s arc ends with a morbidly obese man who realises that after 39 years of faithful service, all he has to show for his life is “this fucking belly”. But he cannot renounce the faith of devoted service to the Atars, because that is all the sense of purpose and meaning the society has allowed him. All his talents and kindness and charm and personality must be devoted to propping up the skies, for if they fall, would they crush all beneath?

See you on the last day of April now,

Yours Literary,

Yashee

yashee.s@indianexpress.com

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