A number of the stories in this collection cluster around the figure of K.K. Harouni, an elderly landowner in 1970s Pakistan, with a big house in Lahore and farms in the Punjabi countryside, just as Harouni himself exists at the centre of a far-reaching network of subordinates and dependants. In some of the stories he's a remote master, viewed from the perspective of the people who work his land: when occasionally he descends on his farms, his subordinates accept that he needs to be surrounded with his 'mechanical cocoon' of 'air conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators', as if he belonged to a different species. In other stories we meet him in his own social milieu, or enter into the machinations of his manager, or into the private lives of his household servants.

LRB 23 July 2009 | PDF Download