One of the great pleasures of reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's luminous This is where the serpent lives is realising how of the flesh we are. Our desires and fears are of the body- a desire for another body, a fear of physical pain being inflicted on our own. The pleasures are ineluctably sensual and include the warmth from the sun on a winter morning; a drink from a clean, cool, stream after a long hike; the incomparable joy a rich, delicious meal brings. Then there's the pain of hunger, the thwack of a policeman's lathi, the burning agony of a body being electrocuted memorably described as the feelings of "a lamb who's insides have been turned inside out and intestines being hosed". We are of flesh, we live for it, we want to protect it, to flaunt it, deck it up, caress and be caressed.

Yet we are not just flesh- We feel pride and shame, and they are not of the body. They belong to the spirit or, more contemporarily, to our social being as opposed to our physical being. We are willing to bear physical hardship for our pride, ambition, a sense of justice, and we are willing to suffer, even kill ourselves, to avoid public humiliation. I'm certain there is an evolutionary, pack animal, primitive ape, convincing and entirely accurate modern explanation for those feelings. The poets still want to incline towards the soul, an essence of something grander than Selfish Genism. In this book Mueenuddin does not seek rationale for our aspirations and desires- his starting point is that we are who we are. The question he leaves us with is this- can we live with whoever that is we are, and where our aspirations and desires, weaknesses and generosity, have led us.

The first and the final novellas have protagonists who are opposites of each other. Bayazid is big, charming, loyal, voracious, easily loved; Sadiq is lean, intense, calculating, ambitious, demands admiration. Yazid is selfless to a fault, his only indulgence being food. Sadiq is astonishingly selfish, his entire being circumscribed by and subservient to his ever-expanding self-importance, a will spurred by his mother's unshakeable belief that her son is destined for greatness. Yazid sleeps well, Sadiq if ever. Both are capable of keeping secrets- one as a matter of principle, another as prospective leverage. Yazid's intelligence is subservient to his character and that seems preordained; He is certain of who he is, what he feels. Even his slips, most fatefully with Yasmin's glass, are indulgences and not planned transgressions. In a sense he is a genius reader of people because he is able to look past himself. Sadiq on the other hand is a mind controlling his body. He is cool-headed, in-control, acting based on his risk framework, purely rational until towards the end he realises that he's only been rationalising. Both men, towards the end, are left mostly with regret- at squandered opportunities, at misjudging people, and mostly at how their bodies have betrayed them.

The middle two chapters deal with people from the other end of the social spectrum. Rustom, Hisham, and, to a lesser extent, Shahnaz are feudal lords and are used to creature comforts, and more. For them their bodies are secondary considerations, to be fed by servants or caressed by lovers, but otherwise not meriting attention. And yet Rustom is afraid of being attacked physically, his reading of respect accorded to him is by how others contort themselves in his presence. The only time Hisham is afraid in the book is when he fears being pushed to his death by Nessim after he's caught with Shahnaz. The feudal lords can afford to live in abstraction for long durations because they are cocooned by their wealth. But on occasions when they feel uncomfortable, the threat they most feel is to their bodies.

I had a blast reading This is where the serpent lives. I picked it up for Pakistan but couldn't put it down for the fascinating, relatable, thick, juicy characters. For a book that spans from the 1960s to 2010s there's no mention of turn towards Islamism, the military coups, War on Terror and American money, Kashmir, or Bangladesh. While the conspicuity of the large absences is inevitably conscious, perhaps reflecting the insularity of lives of normal people, I still think its a miss. People, despite their self-centredness and tunnel-vision still think of, opine about, and are affected by the large Political and Economic changes, and not bringing any of it up, even obliquely, does feel like a very big gap. Having said that, what the book does well, it does it spectacularly. I had a blast reading about Hisham's hedonism, Nessim's trepidation, hard related with Rustom's fish-out-of-water general feeling, Yazid's irrepressible goodness, Sadiq's insatiable hunger, Shahnaz's suavity, and Gazala's pluck.

The one concept I kept thinking of, and wanting to learn more about, throughout the book was Feudalism. How is there a system that allocates large portions of land exclusively to one family, and turns everyone else who has lived off it landless? Then the newly-minted landless farmers become quasi-bondage labour- they are free to starve if they don't want to work there, and they can go nowhere else because other villages won't take them- and no matter how hard they work or how good the harvest is, neither will they directly profit from it nor will they ever receive land for their own agriculture? Seen from that lens, what Sadiq, and the older Munshis have done to the Atars, is justified. What is this arrangement where Hisham/ Shahnaz get to enjoy such returns by virtue of owning land while those who farm it and run the business hardly see a miniscule improvement in their lives? For all the handwringing Sadiq does whenever it bothers him that he's cheating those who trusted him, it is staggering to realise it is them- not he- who should be feeling guilty and ashamed. For all his good-naturedness, maybe its Yazid who's copped out and accepted his fate. Sadiq, bless his soul, refused to give in going so far as naming his son the king of the world.

As you can probably surmise, these are kickass characters displaying a large list of traits, and as tiring as it was being in Rustom and Nessim's presence (ironically characters most resembling me), you still see what Mueenuddin is doing with those characters. I also enjoyed the fact that he used close third-person. Sticking so close to a character made me see the world through their eyes, pointing the spotlight towards what they'd notice and what they sought. I find it more powerful than first-person because it gives us, with the narrative thrust provided by being able to enter a character's head, stability and orientation in the objective world that assures us that all that we're seeing, hearing, and construing are not fantasies playing inside a character's head.

This is confident, muscular writing , and I hope to read In other rooms, other wonders soon.