Read on for an excerpt from Daniyal Mueenuddin’s novel This is Where the Serpent Lives.
The Golden Boy
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
1955 – 1970 – 1979
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, three or four years old, wearing just a shalwar qameez, barefoot and clean, holding a new pair of cheap plastic shoes tightly in his arms, as if afraid they would be taken away, and scanning the crowds passing by. The shoes had caught Karim Khan’s eye, not only because they were brand-new, but because the children of the streets, those sparrows, ran barefoot always.
In those early years following the great Indian Partition, families drifted about, mothers dead, fathers dead, murdered for religion’s sake, for politics, unwelcome children without parents thrown on some relative’s mercy. Karim Khan thought this must be one of those stories, Hindus stuck on the wrong side of the border and on the run, an unwanted child — though that didn’t explain the shoes.
Karim Khan kept an eye on the boy all through the afternoon and evening, serving customers by the light of a hissing pressure-gas lantern, dishing up daal or a meat curry that grew more delicious each year, for he never washed out the fire-blackened pots that sat over the coals, but replenished them with a double handful of lentils or meat, beef or mutton, whichever was cheaper, the mix of meat juices adding to its savour.
Through a kaleidoscope of colourful and complex characters and intersecting stories, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut novel captures the extraordinary proximity of wealth to extreme poverty in Pakistan, and the hunger to better one’s station in life. Eos presents, with permission, an excerpt from This is Where the Serpent Lives, published by Alfred A. Knopf…
The boy had a remarkable power of concentration, immobile all day and seeming quite unperturbed, but for the fierceness with which he held the shoes. He stood out even then as a person not to be treated lightly, as a being with resources of spirit, if not of fortune.
When Karim Khan finally approached him, the boy brushed him off, politely but firmly. He was waiting for his mother, who would soon be back, and must not move from this spot. Rebuffed, Karim Khan retreated back to his cook fire, the evening crowd getting a quick bite before taking a bus from the nearby station up to the mountains or out to the plains, for the shop served mostly travellers.
Finally, when the crowds had died, when pye-dogs began sniffing around under the charpoys in front of the food stall for a last chicken bone or scrap of dry bread, when the lights in the shops along the road faltered out, and the cold came down from the Margalla Hills so that breath showed in a little cloud, Karim Khan went to the boy, and took his hand, and drew him away from the road and over by the fire.
“Come on, have a dish of my curry,” he told the boy. “You’re shivering, you’ll get sick. Sit here and eat, you can still keep watch.” The boy came along easily enough then, his will weakened by hunger, heavy-headed over food and then burrowing under a blanket that Karim Khan pulled over him, lying on a charpoy in the open-fronted veranda where the cook fire had just gone out, asleep so quick.
At dawn he was back by the road, and for that whole day too he watched, not crying but just resolute, knowing that of course they would come back, his mother and father. Admiring the boy’s remarkable tenacity, pitying him, Karim Khan fed him morning, midday and evening with unsold chapaatis and the leavings from customers’ half-eaten plates — which otherwise would be poured back into the general pot.
Yazid grew up exceptionally large for a Pakistani, six feet tall by the time he first began shaving, and strong: big hands, big feet, a large head. He tended to be slovenly rather than unclean, ate enormously but without much discrimination, worked day and night slowly but implacably, and was a neighbourhood pet as a little boy, and a person of accepted station by the time he was thirteen. He didn’t banter or fling himself around, as teahouse boys often do — but had a humour that called forth smiles in return, and accepted all who accepted him, and damn the rest, and even them he forgave easily.
That evening, Karim Khan said to him firmly, “Come on, little man. I’m not rich enough to feed you on charity. From now on you clean up and carry out the plates and then we’ll see. Until your people come.” Earlier, he had been to the nearby police station but, as he expected, found the duty officer there quite uninterested in a street boy’s troubles. In any case, the boy had struck his fancy, though no one would have accused that Mardani Pathan of being fanciful, with his wife back home awaiting money and three daughters there to feed, and this food stall his enterprise, and his pride too — he’d built it up from a little cart that he hawked around the train station.
Karim Khan, who was a good man, took the boy in and named him Bayazid, after a Sufi mystic who was known to him rather as a magician, jadoogar — more fancy, indulging himself in poetry! — and treated him not like a son, perhaps, but like a cherished apprentice, miniature serving boy, dishwasher, runner, paid in food and treated unsentimentally but fairly, hardly any use at first, then gradually indispensable.
Yazid grew up exceptionally large for a Pakistani, six feet tall by the time he first began shaving, and strong: big hands, big feet, a large head. He tended to be slovenly rather than unclean, ate enormously but without much discrimination, worked day and night slowly but implacably, and was a neighbourhood pet as a little boy, and a person of accepted station by the time he was thirteen. He didn’t banter or fling himself around, as teahouse boys often do — but had a humour that called forth smiles in return, and accepted all who accepted him, and damn the rest, and even them he forgave easily.
Most remarkably, Yazid had a long view of bettering himself, told to no one, an ambling bear moving to his own North. He taught himself to read, first learning the alphabet, buying government school grammars with his own money, encouraged and corrected by one of the regular customers, a schoolteacher who came in the afternoons for a cup of tea, and whom he treated with ceremony and respect that kept the tuition flowing. To the extent that Karim Khan thought of such things, he accepted this as one of the boy’s caprices, a distraction in any station that he might achieve, but better than going to the cinema or flying kites.
At ten, Yazid would read aloud the Urdu newspaper to illiterate Karim Khan, a morning ritual after the shop was opened and before the customers came, choosing the stories that he knew his boss would like. At fourteen and fifteen, he could be found whenever he wasn’t working reading gruesome stories of murder, or stories of thwarted love or lovers dying requited, bought secondhand from stalls and bound like magazines, with lurid pictures on the covers of fat-bummed girls and moustachioed men, lovers or enemies, kidnapped or eloping or on the lam, as only time and a hundred pages would tell.
One spring, when Yazid was seventeen or eighteen, the Nizamuddin College boys developed a passion for carrom board, poor man’s billiards, played on a plywood square with the object of knocking round plastic pucks into corner pockets with a striker. Suddenly that year, boys all over Pakistan were playing the game, in cities and towns, with federations and tournaments and newspaper coverage.
Yazid had charmed hands, became a master at making chapaatis, hunkered cross-legged over the tandoor, slapping the flattened dough down into its orange-glowing maw. He learned the technique of making naan, doing it so well that the shop became known for it, the local housewives bringing pots to fill with daal and curry, a treat for their poor homes in the nearby alleys, and a bundle of naan too, flecked with sesame seeds, oiled shiny, crisp and then soft inside, hot and wrapped in day-old newspapers.
“Always your nose in a book,” said the regulars, and were rather proud of him as he handed over the goods and picked up and resumed his reading, sitting under a lone bulb hanging from a wire.
The bazaar around the food shop had been established in British times, with some newer office buildings of two and even three stories, a little park, and next to the park, the Sir Khawaja Nizamuddin Government High School, known simply as Nizamuddin College and acknowledged to be among the best in the city. The boys wore uniforms — blazer, straight-legged khaki pants, and pointed black shoes, even a blue-and-brown striped tie, which made them conspicuous at a time when most Pakistanis wore shalwar qameez.
They would come to Karim Khan’s food shop in the morning for a rusk and tea, or in the afternoon after school for daal, standing around the lean-to and shovelling the food into their mouths, shouting and making a clatter, very conscious of their uniforms and their elite status. These were the sons of the wealthier houses nearby, of business owners, owners of the larger shops, local ward politicians, wholesalers, members of a rising middle class, defined at the higher reaches by the ownership of a car, and at the bottom by the necessity of making hard sacrifices to buy their sons’ uniforms and pay for extra tuition.
Sitting at the tandoor and pushing out piles of chapaatis and naan, rising teenage Yazid had ample time to study these fortunate creatures. Gradually, he began to bend his attitude and his appearance toward theirs, not quite affecting to wear pant-shirt, which would make him ridiculous in the eyes of Karim Khan and of customers, but cutting off his long hair, which had been modelled on gangsters in the movies, taming his rich sideburns, ditto adopted from the movies, and generally toning down his naturally exuberant style, though his loose walk and large appetite and size would always set him apart.
Rarely leaving the food stall, Yazid yet knew much about the world, for he was observant, and all sorts came through the bus station en route to their far destinations. Weary travellers dropped their bags and filled travel-starved bellies with savoury curries and his hot-oiled naans and, afterward, unbuttoned themselves to the sympathetic serving boy, indiscreet because they would never see him again.
Gradually, as he became familiar with the college boys, he understood that their views were rather narrower than his, and this gave him confidence. While they might have fine manners and live in proper houses, cossetted by their mothers and sisters, they were tame and didn’t penetrate very far toward an understanding of the unforgiving streets and city.
He formed friendships with the college boys, never presuming on his acquaintance, always ready to step back into character as the fellow behind the tandoor, sparing himself from any rebuff by this discretion. Yet he observed them closely and bided his time. He wanted to make friends among them rather than among the boys like him who worked the shops and sold cheap trinkets to travellers and ran the scams around the gullies, gutter princes, loud and quick to dodge a slap, smoking cigarettes, shouting after the begging girls who floated around the bus stop unchaperoned.
One spring, when Yazid was seventeen or eighteen, the Nizamuddin College boys developed a passion for carrom board, poor man’s billiards, played on a plywood square with the object of knocking round plastic pucks into corner pockets with a striker. Suddenly that year, boys all over Pakistan were playing the game, in cities and towns, with federations and tournaments and newspaper coverage. Crowds of the college boys would gather around a charpoy set in front of the food stall, playing for cups of tea or plates of biscuits, standing in circles around the board with the seriousness of parliamentary debaters, discussing strategy, the real experts bringing their own favourite strikers.
Yazid would serve out the snacks they ordered and stand watching, occasionally dropping in some humorous comment. Initially they had a miniature board, which they would carry to Karim Khan’s stall, but when they banded together and bought a regulation-sized one, three feet to a side, Yazid offered to store it for them in the shop. He thus became the master of ceremonies, keeper of the board. He even found a rule book in one of the secondhand bookstalls and studied it and so became the acknowledged umpire, his word on the finer points accepted as final.
At night, alone, he would practise shots in his room, and so himself became an ace, rarely playing, because of his duties as a server, hard to get and therefore in demand, called when some outsider sat down and cleared the table of the locals. In the middle of a game, as he wiped out his opponent, putting away puck after puck with his striker, Yazid would say, chewing the tip of his mustache in the corner of his mouth, “I’m feasting on him, just feasting on him”, and this became a catchall phrase for the college boys, used indiscriminately.
By the time summer came, when it was too hot to sit and play out in front of the food stall, a little core had formed around Yazid. The centre of operations for the carrom players shifted to Yazid’s shabby room attached to the food stall, formerly a storeroom, looking on to a gully on the side.
For his first eight or nine years working for Karim Khan, Yazid slept rough on one of the charpoys lined up on a swept dirt apron in front of the stall, never even bothering to choose any one particular spot, but sleeping where he fell, cheerful under the stars, a fan to cool him in summer, and his clothes hung on nails in the filthy toilet that leaked sewage out into a little grassy plot at the back of the building, his comb on a shelf and then later a shaver and soap to make foam.
He hadn’t asked for the room. Karim Khan had told him one morning to empty the storeroom of the garbage lying there, empty Dalda ghee tins and piles of jute bags. Yazid had become too old, said Karim Khan, to be sprawled every morning in front of the stall, sleeping late as he often did and comfortably watching the street in front of him come to life as if in his own living room.
Now the room became a sort of clubhouse for the carrom players, so much so that several of the boys chipped in and had it whitewashed inside by a withered opium smoker who made a living in the neighbourhood as a handyman. There were two charpoys, with a table that held the board squeezed between them, teacups crowded to the side, players sitting cross-legged.
The great luxury was a ceiling fan, given to Yazid secondhand by some buddy in the neighbourhood, which made him the butt of his friends’ jokes, who called it proof of his love of fine living. He also nailed pictures of actresses cut from the Sunday papers on the rough brick walls, although these soon were dust covered and flyblown and quite unregarded.
What the boys liked about this arrangement was that nothing was expected of them in that room. There were no rules, all came and went as they liked, they played carrom or they didn’t, sometimes they played cards or just talked, sometimes one of them would be in a jam and would sleep there for a night or two. The college boys, who mostly came from respectable families, did not enjoy such freedom anywhere else.
Yazid had the one indispensable quality for a man establishing a club: he was always at home, sitting in the veranda of the stall making naan and chapaatis, or slumbering in his room if he had no guests and, even if he had gone off somewhere on an errand, the room was never locked.
Karim Khan had by now taken up another little boy off the streets, this one of known parentage but with parents who asked no questions and gave him up to this business as a riddance. Yazid thus assumed an emeritus position in the enterprise, though he still made the naan and still dealt with the cash when Karim Khan wasn’t present.
The old man — by then he would have been over seventy, wiry and likely to live forever — would go off to his home in Mardan for several weeks at a time and, when he returned, Yazid would hand him every paisa that the shop earned, keeping a notebook with any subtractions carefully noted, cigarettes, a trip to the cinema, for he still took no salary, but asked for money when he needed it — never asking for much, a few times asking a lot, given over by Karim Khan without ever a question.
One afternoon, several of the boys had gone shares on a case of pilfered beer sold from the back gate of the Murree Brewery, a side-line for the brewery workers. Kamran Khokar, a senior boy whose father was a councillor in the Rawalpindi wards, knew one of the brewery managers, knew all sorts of tricks and could get his fellow students into scrapes and then out of them unscathed. A junior school student who served as Kamran’s bullyboy and gofer brought the bottles in a gunny sack, the jute wet from being stashed in a nearby icehouse that belonged to yet another student’s father.
“Is it cold?” asked Kamran, pulling one of the bottles out of the sack and putting it against his face. “Oh, it better be cold!” He pinched the boy’s cheek and slapped him gently. “You’re lucky, anyway,” he said indulgently. “It is cold.”
Yazid loomed over the carrom board planning a shot, his thick fingers dusted with the talcum powder they used to slick the surface. Without looking up, he said indifferently, “Take some money, it’s in that vest hanging up there.”
“There you go again,” said Kamran, sitting down and putting the sack under the charpoy, pulling out bottles and handing them around. There were three other people in the room, the boy who brought the beer and two others of the core gang. “You drink on the house, we all know you’re broke.”
“I am the house,” said Yazid complacently. He took the beer and popped the top off with a quick smack on the wooden charpoy leg, catching it neatly in the air and shooting it into the corner — one of his tricks.
“You’re not a house,” retorted Kamran, “you’re a barrel. It costs the rest of us a fortune keeping you full.”
“I keep telling you not to bring all that garbage. You guys with your bags of samosas and God knows what. This is a tea stall, remember? I eat free.”
The younger boys grinned at Yazid’s insouciance with the big square-headed school bully. Kamran walked with a swagger and played the same role in the school that his father played in his ward of the city, keeping a hand in all the pies and pushing in wherever he could. He kept close to the powers above him, young Kamran trustee to the Nizamuddin College headmaster, unctuous when he needed to be, playing enforcer, too. They had nicknamed him Cuckoo, after the parasitic bird that drives its siblings from the nest because, sometimes for sport and to keep his hand in practice, he would beat up his squeaky elder brother.
Soon a heavy fug of cigarette smoke hung over the players. They were betting for small stakes, Yazid winning, talking a bit of trash down to his opponents, studying the board the way chess players do, then cracking a shot, making cunning deflections and rebounds.
Another boy came in, Zain, whose grandfather and now father owned the old British grocery in Rawalpindi, selling fancy produce and select foods to the civil servants and officers and diplomats stationed there, the family distinguished by this commerce with foreigners and the wealthy, more worldly for it. He stood at the door, without entering, looked at Yazid and caught his eye, nodded.
“Hey mister, come in and slum around with us a bit,” said Yazid affectionately, patting the charpoy beside himself.
“I’ll come back later. I brought you something.”
He stepped into the room and put a bag of apples on a charpoy, then continued standing by the door. “From my father,” he said. “We just got them in at the store.”
“Look at him!” cooed Kamran. “He’s so shy. It’s adorable!”
Yazid and Zain had taken to spending time together, one of those odd couples, Yazid big and broad and hirsute, walking with his rolling gait, and Zain small and fine and finicky, with small hands, small feet, a long straight nose, and curly hair worn slightly long in the back as his single extravagance, even in this following the fashion rather than defining it.
Zain brought Yazid serious books, not like the romances and adventure stories that formed his usual literary diet, histories and leftist political tracts, his father an old-school lefty from the days of the anti-British movement, despite or because of his regular interactions at the store with the blimps and pukka sahibs and their wives. Yazid jokingly called Zain the Professor and took pride in the connection.
“Tell your friend to sit down and join us,” said Kamran. “Give him a beer, it’ll do him good. Tell him not to be so ladylike.”
“I can speak for myself,” said Zain sharply.
Zain did, in fact, seem too prim for the situation. Slipping in, he perched at the edge of a charpoy near the door, legs crossed, then borrowed a penknife from Yazid and cut up apples and passed around slices fanned on the palm of his hand. The other boys all thought there must be something going on between him and Yazid, a common enough occurrence at an age and in circumstances where girls were quite unavailable and hormones in full raging flush, Pakistani boys and their boy crushes, and all forgotten when they married in a few years.
“Leave him alone,” grunted Yazid. “Cut the bullshit and let’s play.”
“Playing with you is like shovelling money into a well,” grumbled Kamran. “I’d rather bullshit.”
“It’s a paisa a point, man. Nothing for the rich politician’s son! Anyway, it’s good luck, tossing coins in a well.”
“My coins and your luck, boy. I bring the booze, and then I pay for the privilege, too.”
Boys came and went, Yazid playing or relinquishing the table if he lost, a freewheeling game. Only a few of the boys drank, the ones who knew they could slip past their parents at the end of the evening, Kamran and a couple of his close buddies.
Yazid kept up too, chugging off bottles when challenged to by Kamran, the two of them rivals here as in other things, in carrom board, in cards, even in arm wrestling, the son of the ward boss ready to crack heads.
Excerpted with permission from This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin and published by Alfred A. Knopf
Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 17th, 2026
