Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is much better so far than the dry, mannered stories excerpted in the New Yorker. His style is determinedly unflashy like Jhumpa Lahiri’s, but the feudal Pakistani context is not as familiar. He occasionally flexes his rhetorical muscles, and the results are reminiscent of Saleem Sinai:

So far as I am aware, Mian Sarkar wore a cheap three-piece suit and a pair of slightly tinted spectacles of an already outmoded design on the day that he emerged from his mother’s womb. When he leaves the office in the evening, exactly at five, he doesn’t turn a corner or get into a cab or a bus, he simply dematerializes… Before speaking he clears his throat with a little hum, as if pulling his voice box up from some depth where he secretes it for safekeeping. His greatest feature, however, is his nose, a fleshy tubular object, gorged with blood, which I have always longed to squeeze, expecting him to honk like a bus…

There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed… He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written… He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously… This is the bacillus my wife sent to resolve Khadim’s case as she wanted it resolved. Mightier men than I feared him.

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Two Langston Hughes poems for the brown brotha in the high chair:

Poet to Bigot

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.

I, however,
Have such meagre
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.

But your hour is
A stone.

My Moment is
A flower.

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Karan Mahajan’s debut Family Planning is a comic novel about a Delhi minister with 13 children. Arjun, the eldest, is a Bryan Adams fan who pulls together a band to impress Aarti, a cutie on his bus route. His dad Rakesh keeps having kids because he’s only attracted to his wife while she’s pregnant. He’s a good manager in charge of flyovers but a poor politician, turning in his resignation histrionically every time he wants a day off. But he runs into trouble when female protesters besiege Parliament after a popular serial hunk is killed off on screen.

This novel covers upper middle class Delhi and is a fine parody of Indian politics. It starts with promise, but the writing is inconsistent. You get the sense that the 24-year-old Mahajan hasn’t quite found his voice. At its finest, Family reads like the ineffectual, bumbling Mr. Biswas and is written with flair. At its weakest, it’s 90210, delving into the de facto horniness and low-level fears of a callow Delhi teen without making us care.

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My friend Amit Varma just finished up his debut novel, My Friend, Sancho, which was longlisted for the Man Asian prize. It’s the tale of a Bombay crime reporter written in Amit’s typically clean style. Here’s an excerpt:

We reached the station. Thombre was waiting for me outside… His eyes were red. His hair was moist and neatly combed… “Ganguly, Hegde, hello. I was waiting for you. Exciting story, gangster hideout, police investigation, bold arrest.” Thombre often spoke in bullet points, and always in English, even though it was his third language. He would probably have been offended if we tried to chat with him in Marathi or Hindi, so we indulged him. His English skills were functional, and functional is all that matters in Bombay…

I hoped there wouldn’t be a gunfight. I hoped Thombre would quietly call us in after ten minutes, let Santosh take pictures of three handcuffed dudes and a table on which packets of cocaine had been spread out for display. Or even homeopathic powder. That would be just fine…

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Sadia Shepard, whose mother is Pakistani Muslim, father is Christian and maternal grandmother is Indian Jewish, went to India on a Fulbright to trace her family history. Here’s an excerpt from The Girl from Foreign, which I’ve just begun:

I take a seat in the phone booth and look up the phone number of one of the two Pune synagogues in my notebook; I dial the number of one of its directors… [and] ask if I can make an appointment to come and see the synagogue the following day. I hear him put the phone to one side and say to someone else in the room: ‘It’s a Muslim name…’

He returns to the line, polite and firm: ‘I’m afraid it won’t be possible. You will please call back in one week’s time.’ And the line goes dead, abruptly.

At the phone booth, she met Rekhev, her future fling:

He has a studious air, and there’s something comfortable and musty about him… he smells like books… ‘Do you know where I can find something to eat?’ I ask after him…

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