How did you arrive at the title, drawn from Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Auroras of Autumn”?

I keep a list of possible titles for books and stories, picking them up from everywhere. (Driving through Lahore recently, I saw a sign for an ice cream shop: “Where Bliss Melts.” Surely that would grace a story someday!) The serpent title had been with me for a long time, attaching itself to various projects. It’s the first line of the poem, which is grave, almost lugubrious, hypnotic and striking. (Stevens reads it wonderfully—you can find it on Youtube or Spotify.)

The title’s meaning is deliberately obscure. As readers pass through the book, they will seek the meaning, and in doing so they will think explicitly about the book’s themes—this was my intention. The subject of the book is power and status and the ways in which people seek to gain them. The serpent may be a reference to this—it is the complex, poisonous, thrilling, scary aspect of that hunger. 

I intend other meanings to be attached to it. Literally, it might refer to geographical places: Pakistan generally, the farm at Ranmal Mohra, where the book story out, as well as the household of the Atars and Rustom’s Dunyapur farm. Actual serpents are mentioned at several points, although that may be a distraction rather than a part of the title’s meaning. A very motivated reader might seek out Stevens’ poem, which will stimulate a deeper reading of the book.  

Bayazid, an orphan who rises to become a trusted intermediary of Hisham and Shahnaz, the elite authority, and Saqib, their skilled but socially vulnerable manager who seeks upward mobility, begin with very different hopes, with one looking for belonging and the other for advancement. Yet both are gradually absorbed into the system of patronage and hierarchy. Are you suggesting that within such social structures, personal qualities like intelligence and ambition matter less than the roles people are compelled to play?

No matter where, in Switzerland or in south Punjab, there are bristling and layered barriers against those seeking to rise. The road leading up to the rockcandy mountain is always guarded carefully and there are many gates and fierce guards. It’s never easy to become powerful or rich when you are born poor and powerless.

But maybe—if you have forged a personality like either of my two friends, Bayazid and Saqib—and if you have luck and pluck and resilience and perseverance, then you do rise, or can rise. Most people find their level at birth and remain there. The postman’s son is a postman, the shopkeeper’s son keeps shop, the gardener’s son is a labourer in the fields. But these two fellows rise, and that is their triumph. In their own eyes and in the eyes of those around them, these men are a success. Poor Saqib has a bad moment at the end of my book. But I suspect someday his address will be a McMansion in Houston or a nice house in Surrey, depending on which way that first jumbo jet carries him when he leaves Pakistan on the strength of a forged visa.

In the chapter “Muscle”, the protagonist Rustom Abdalah returns from the US to manage his family farm in Pakistan, as you had done too. How close are your experiences to Rustom’s?

Rustom’s story tracks mine, particularly in that we both returned from abroad to take over a mismanaged family farm, were clueless, and had to learn how to manage a tough job on the fly. However, his personality is not much like mine, including the fact that he has no ambition to write. When I returned to Pakistan and began farming I did so partly because it offered a way to finance a writing life—and also offered experience of the world that would give me something to write about. Rustom doesn’t really know what he wants—he’s conventional that way. 

Rustom does have the makings of a farmer, however, because he’s conservative in the best sense. My mother used to say about farming, “To succeed, fill what’s empty, and empty what’s full.” That’s the essence of conservatism. Rustom and I share this impulse. We’re both caretakers.

This is Where the Serpent Lives is a four-part narrative covering nearly seven decades of Pakistani life. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Zain and Bayazid are briefly intoxicated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s socialist rhetoric, with its promise of justice and reform. If these characters are transposed to today’s world, would they be drawn to a figure like Imran Khan?

No. The idealism that Bhutto represented was lost and can’t be regained so easily. The trickster Bhutto found an earnest, striving people well-prepared for his rhetoric, and took advantage of them. We were culturally in our youth then. That youthful idealism, once lost, is never regained entirely. Bhutto inoculated our people for generations against that sincere—call it innocent, call it foolish—idealism.  

Look at history. The idealism of the Indian elite had been quickening for generations, nurtured by the British, who opposed their rise but also fostered it. Because they were kept away from real power, the intellectual and political elite could develop their ideals in isolation. The British—reluctantly, resentfully—knew that they would have to leave, and so created spaces where liberal ideas could flourish. Bhutto tapped into all that. Besides, he was a master of rhetoric.

Pakistanis are drawn to Imran Khan because he seems better than the rest. When all politicians are caked with filth, the one who pays tribute to hygiene will gain a following. The voters are disgusted, jaded: to them he seems at least like a decent man, their cricket hero. Bhutto offered them “roti, kapra, makan”—bread, a decent coat on their back, and a house of their own. Imran Khan needed to promise only to end the corruption that poisoned the state.

In Other Rooms was a book of interlinked stories, and This Is Where the Serpent Lives still carries that short story DNA. How did your journey as a short story writer shape this novel’s form? Also, what is your definition of a novel?

The form developed organically—I wrote one story, then the next, and at first was not quite certain how to piece them all together. I had a theme right from the beginning—exploration of the nature of status and power, in Pakistan and universally. But I knew that a conventional, 250-page novel, all one story without any swerves and stops, would not do justice to the complexity of what I intended to describe. I’m not sure that Pakistan today and these themes will fit into any form as well-groomed as the novel’s. (Please, let some brilliant young Pakistani prove me wrong and write just that novel!)

The readership has also changed. Readers who spend their time absorbed in their phones have a limited attention span. I thought to sneak in a few hundred pages past them by giving it this weird shape. I don’t know of another book that has this form, and I suppose that adds to the interest of a reader who is no longer interested in conventional, long narratives.  

The form also fits the material. A place as chaotic as Pakistan needs a jangled, torn-up, cobbled-together story.

Another advantage of this hybrid form is that it allows me the benefits of the short story—compression, shape—while also giving me the perks of the novel form—its sweep, scope, complexity.

A novel can’t be read at a single sitting. It is composite, not unitary. A short story is a pistol shot; a novel is an artillery barrage.

Islam is present as a background fact of life in your novel, not as the primary lens through which the characters are viewed. Was it important for you to resist the outsider’s tendency to read Pakistan chiefly through religion and to insist instead that the access to power remains the more decisive force shaping lives? 

If religion improved people’s character, we would be living in a very different world, and history would be much less interesting. It’s not just Pakistan. Even in the strictest theocracy the central struggle is about power. Think of the popes, those worldly men, think of the Mahdi [Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah of Sudan, a 19th century religious leader and Sufi sheikh who claimed to be the “Guiden One”], ignorant and fanatic as he was. The British spent a lot of energy destroying him not because of his religion but because of his politics (and because he dared to murder one of theirs). Chiliasts don’t run countries.

Most Pakistanis are religious in the sense that they believe absolutely, unquestioningly. But we do not, as a rule, live according to the precepts of our religion. We live for bread and love—and want to have more of both than our fellows do. That’s universal.

Your sentences are always very precise, cut cleanly, accumulating details through commas rather than through conjunctions or semicolons. Is that a conscious stylistic discipline?

It’s an aesthetic choice, the lines laid one after the other according to a rhythm that I hear in my mind as I write. That’s my magic sauce, building sentences and paragraphs that fit together according to a poetic logic that resists analysis. That’s where I express my personality, in making those choices of sound and rhythm.

The book is set in rural Pakistan, at a farm called Ranmal Mohra. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock

There is a gap of nearly two decades between your debut work and this novel. How do you work: do you write continuously and refine over years, or does the book live in your head for a long time before you finally sit down to write it?

Writing is a muscle that must be exercised constantly. It’s possible to massage that muscle by reading and maintain it in some condition. But to build those muscles, to get biceps and a six-pack, you have to put words on a page.  

I write a lot of words—letters, notes, journals—and also a lot of fiction, finger exercises. Some of the most useful writing I do will never see the light of day. The pianist only appears at Carnegie Hall a few times.

Some critics have found my work too polished, lacking spontaneity. It’s a fair criticism.

In the novel, I was struck by how women are often shown as exercising decisive authority not in public roles but from within domestic and familial spaces. Shahnaz, for instance, rarely participates in overt confrontations, yet her instructions to Hisham, her husband, can determine the fate of the people around her. When you were writing these women, were you consciously exploring how authority in elite households often operates from behind the scenes? 

This has always been true historically. In the West, this is no longer the case so much any more, and this is one of the ways in which humanity has changed for the better in the past couple of hundred years, by sharing the public space more equally with the superior sex. In Pakistan, women still live very much under a tyranny, in villages and in cities. So, like all tyrannised populations, they must find ways to exercise power by exploiting the foibles of tyrants.  

The novel is saturated with micro-rituals—who can enter whose home, who can sit, who must stand, who can speak freely. Are these expressions of etiquette or are they violence made polite? 

I like that—just as diplomacy is war by other means. The signals are important. They prevent people from having to wear swords. I have 10 followers, you have six. We need not fight for precedent.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives expands on the terrain of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

You’ve spoken about your admiration for writers like Chekhov. Which other writers are you inspired by?

My reading is sadly disjointed, but then, I’m no scholar. Lately I’ve developed a great admiration for R.L. Stevenson, having loved him as boy and now coming back to him. And Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Jack London. I’ve read and translated Manto, but I read Urdu so poorly that I don’t know the literature. I’ve come to like rough, plain prose and juicy stories well told. Probably in my lifetime the book I’ve read most persistently is Ulysses, which is very juicy, but not very plain. I’ve read Proust for many years. 

As I’ve aged, I’ve found myself rereading a lot. In general, I think it’s better to know a few great books extremely well—to live in them and by them—than to know many books superficially. My prose has been shaped more by reading poetry than by fiction and I like the greats poets’ attitudes. In my ideal world, poets would be the arbiters of all things.