Read Online In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin - Free Book Online Page A

observed expansively. Why shouldn’t he play along a bit, how difficult could it be? Toying with the idea in the following weeks, then deciding, Harouni resolved not to do things by halves. He began selling tracts of urban land and pouring more and more cash into factories, buying machinery from Germany, hiring engineers, holding meetings with bankers. Caught up in these projects, he spent increasingly less time at his family estate in the southern Punjab, relying instead upon his manager, the formidable Chaudrey Nabi Baksh Jaglani. Tall and stooped, wearing heavy square-rimmed glasses, his face marked with deep lines of self-control and resolution, Chaudrey Sahib grew paramount in Dunyapur, the place along the Indus where the Harouni farms lay.
    Thus, Chaudrey Jaglani’s moment struck. The more money that Harouni sank into the factories, the more they seemed to decline in a bewildering confusion of debts and deficits, until finally his bankers advised him to fold. A few months after this catastrophic event, Harouni summoned Nabi Baksh Jaglani to his house in Lahore. When the manager went into the landlord’s study, a dark place with a famous ceiling painted by the great surrealist Sadequain, and incongruously adorned with Indian miniatures and temple bronzes of dancing girls and Hindu gods, he found the old man sitting with his steno. Jaglani remained standing.
    ‘Come on, Chaudrey Sahib,’ said his master. ‘After all these years you can sit down.’
    They enacted this scene every time Jaglani came to Lahore. He complied, not quite sitting at the edge of his seat, as the steno Shah Sahib did, but keeping himself rigid.
    ‘How are things on the farm?’ asked the landlord.
    ‘The crops are good but the prices are bad.’
    ‘How are land prices?’
    Jaglani had been expecting this and saw in a flash where it would take them. ‘Low, buyers get nothing from the lands, so they don’t pay much for them. The Khoslas sold four squares at sixteen hundred an acre.’ He failed to mention that this land stood far from the river, at the tail of an unreliable canal.
    ‘In any case we need to sell. Have them prepare powers of attorney so that you can arrange the transfers.’
    They spoke for a few minutes about a murder recently committed by one of the tenants, a matter of a girl. Jaglani knew to do this, in order to paper over the embarrassment his master must feel at having to sell land held by his family for three generations.
    Walking out under the cool white verandah of Gulfishan, the name by which Lahore knew the great house, Jaglani reflected, Well, there’s plenty of it. He can sell for thirty years and he’ll still have a farm.
    The chauffeur, Mustafa, stood by the car. Seeing Jaglani coming, he flicked away his cigarette and went around to open the door. A short man with a chipped tooth, a small, careful mustache, and wavy hair, Mustafa had earned Jaglani’s confidence by his discretion and by his excellent qualities as a courtier. Although they spoke frankly and easily on the long drives to Lahore, Mustafa became mute in the presence of others, stone-faced as a chauffeur should be.
    Getting into the car, Jaglani said, ‘Well, now the game heats up.’
    ‘Good news?’ asked Mustafa.
    ‘Not bad, not too bad.’
     
     
    Accustomed to having almost unlimited amounts of money, K. K. Harouni began selling blocks of land, sold it with the sugarcane still standing, the hundred-year-old rosewood trees on the borders of each field thrown in for nothing. Jaglani would receive a brief telegram, need fifty thousand immediately, and he would sell the land at half price, the choice pieces to himself, putting it in the names of his servants and relatives. He sold to the other managers, to his friends, to political allies. Everyone got a piece of the quick dispersion. He took a commission on each sale. He became ever more powerful and rich.
    Harouni’s children, seeing their inheritance bleeding away, said to their father,