(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Bayazid has had a tough start in life - doesn't even know exactly what it was.
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN: (Reading) Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people - a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi, a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found. That was a bitter day, when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd. He might have been abandoned, not lost. Karim Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where his known history began, could tell him only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day, 3 or 4 years old, wearing just a shalwar kameez, barefoot and clean, holding a new pair of cheap plastic shoes tightly in his arms.
SIMON: That's Daniyal Mueenuddin, acclaimed short story writer, reading from his debut novel, "This Is Where The Serpent Lives." It's a sprawling novel that winds through families, decades, crimes, corruption and power in modern Pakistan. Daniyal Mueenuddin's previous collection of short stories, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He joins us now from Oslo. Thank you so much for being with us.
MUEENUDDIN: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: What do those shoes in a little boy's arms say to Karim, the owner of the tea stall, who takes him into his life?
MUEENUDDIN: Well, I think that - I'm not sure what they say to him, but certainly they intrigue him. It's so odd that the boy should have the shoes and that they should be new. So I think it's just a question mark that is put in front of him.
SIMON: And the tea stall becomes his school of life, doesn't it?
MUEENUDDIN: Yeah. That's right. I mean, it's - he has - throughout the book, there are a number of schools that he passes through, none of them formal. But, yeah, that's the first one.
SIMON: There's a startling scene where Bayazid deliberately, calculatingly plunges a knife into his own leg rather than to lash out at his bullies. What's the effect of that?
MUEENUDDIN: Well, I think it - what it shows his bullies is, A, that he's capable of violence and, B, that he's able to control his capability. The threat was that he was going to stab his opponent. And by stabbing himself, he's proven how brave he is and yet has not gone to the extreme of hurting somebody, which would have - lead to trouble because he's the weakest member. He's the poor one. They are rich. And if he had hurt them, there would have been severe repercussions. It's a very smart move. The actual person upon whom Bayazid is formed - that's the one story in the book that actually is true from life - he told me that that happened to him when he was young. So I stole it lock, stock and barrel from him.
SIMON: Well, that's what novelists do.
MUEENUDDIN: That's true.
SIMON: Tell us about the relationship between Hisham and Shahnaz.
MUEENUDDIN: Yeah. Hisham and Shahnaz are - you know, they're these wealthy Lahoris who - in the beginning, of course, it's romance. And at some point, the marriage becomes no longer a romantic attachment, but a partnership. And these two are particularly partnered because they're running their business together. Hisham is the sort of public face, and Shahnaz is sort of the brains, I think you would say. So I think this is very common in Pakistan. And often, in fact, the women are the real - the ones who have the real power, but they exercise it through their husbands.
SIMON: And Hisham is a landowner. Help us understand what that means in their slice of Pakistan.
MUEENUDDIN: Pakistan is sort of one of the last bastions of feudalism, although it's now - much less now in 2026 than it was at the time when the book begins, certainly in the '80s. And basically, these are people who have hereditary landholdings. But what's different about being a farmer, as we call it in Pakistan, is that you're not just running a business. You're part of a, you know, very large connected community, which you head, and you have responsibilities which go far beyond simply paying a paycheck. When the people who work for you or who live on your land - when they get married, they come to you, and when they get buried, they come to you. So you are responsible not just for their wages, but for everything about their lives. It's like a family, but like a very dysfunctional family.
SIMON: Will you help us touch on the fact that you have a character, Rustom, who returns to Pakistan to run his family farm after he's been to boarding school and college in the U.S.? This is a little autobiographical, isn't it?
MUEENUDDIN: (Laughter) Quite right. Yeah. I think he's the character who probably most resembles me, although I hope I'm not quite as clueless as he is. But, yeah, exactly. This is the one who's most like me. That's exactly what happened to me. After I finished college, I went back to Pakistan. I knew nothing about farming or Pakistan. For that matter, I had been away for school since I was 13. And so I was thrown into the deep end just as Rustom is. Like Rustom, my father - he didn't - wasn't - hadn't quite died, but he was very ill, and my mother was in America. So, yeah, there is a lot of similarity between our stories.
SIMON: I have read that your next novel is set in Wisconsin and New York City.
MUEENUDDIN: Yeah, that's actually not true. That's gone by the wayside. You know, I wrote that book, actually. I worked on that for 10 years. That's why I haven't been published in so many years. My mother died in 2010 under complicated circumstances, and I spent 10 years writing a book about her death and about her. She was from Wisconsin and lived in New York. I just could never quite get it home, and finally, I put it in a drawer. They say that you put a book in a drawer and it either ripens or rots, so we'll see which way it goes. But I was hiding from the truth. I was hiding from what I needed to say. I couldn't bear to say what I needed to say.
SIMON: Forgive me. You couldn't dare to say what you needed to say in the book about your mother?
MUEENUDDIN: Well, I mean, I might as well say my mother died by suicide, and it was very traumatic for me. And I needed to be open and bare and frank about her in ways that I couldn't be because of the block of that emotion and that event and that experience. I wrote lots of words. The book at one point was over 600 pages. And I think I was just sort of churning around, and instead of actually getting close to what I was trying to say, I kept going around what I was trying to say. There's a whole deeper level of honesty that's required to write, and I could never be that honest about it, I think.
SIMON: Could that one day come out in another one of your novels?
MUEENUDDIN: I think it will. The - my next book is going to be about her, but it's a love story. And I think that certainly all of the experience I have of having spent so much time thinking about her and writing about her and writing aspects of her character - I think all of that will go into the next book, which is set in Pakistan.
SIMON: You know, so many points in "This Is Where The Serpent Lives," you're struck by the enormous differences between rich and poor. Americans should learn about Pakistan. But I wonder if American readers of this novel should see it as just a reflection of life in Pakistan or look a little closer to home, too.
MUEENUDDIN: Absolutely. Without a doubt. I'll have failed miserably if readers don't see in this a great deal of themselves and of their communities and of the way that they engage with people and of the politics, even. So I certainly hope that they will look at it and see it as a sort of a distorting mirror that allows them to understand themselves better.
SIMON: Daniyal Mueenuddin, the acclaimed short story writer, has written his first novel, "This Is Where The Serpent Lives." Thank you so much for being with us.
MUEENUDDIN: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALFA MIST'S "RUN OUTS")
SIMON: And if you or anyone you know is in crisis, remember, please, that you can call, text or talk with the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALFA MIST'S "RUN OUTS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
