"Nawabdin Electrician"--Daniyal Mueenuddin

I am interested in Mueenuddin's setting description. I see a lot of ecological devastation, or at least land unfairness as the context for this crime. Nawab is saved because he is locally respected and he is respected because he has been cheating the power company. So his good reputation is predicated on his theft. And Nawab’s small time theft only mimics the institutionalized theft of the absentee landlords growing water-crops in the desert. There is also a way in which Nawab has stolen his daughters’ destiny to provide one for his son; he has more daughters than he can afford to marry in pursuit of his goal of having a son. Still, he is generous too—in small ways, like with the sugar treat for his children. Does this redeem his character? To me, the story is not about whether he is a wretched or evil man, or not, but about how all judgments of good and evil are made in dubious contexts. The motorcycle thief gets no sympathy from anyone, and perhaps he should not; he was craven enough to shoot someone, but too cowardly to shoot to kill; he is a loser in the literary, not moral, sense. That is simply the role assigned him in this story.

What about Frank O’Connor and the lonely voice? O’Connor says that all stories are about the Little Man, a member of a submerged population dreaming of escape from a world that ignores or oppresses him, or a world he does not understand. And all stories end in a failure to escape in which the lonely voice of the character looks with sharpened nostalgia on the world and his failed dream of escape. Sure Nawab was dreaming of escape which he thinks he gets in obtaining a motorcycle—of getting status and becoming someone, etc. Maybe the story is about the fact that Nawab values a motorcycle above another man’s life, even the life of a theft and assailant; there is no doubt a defeat in that.

The story ends with a man begging for help in the face of death and no one does anything. Nawab is tempted to look at that, but chooses instead to think about the heroic light in which he can cast himself as having saved his motorcycle and survived six bullets. Ironic that, having been shot six times, he is thinking about his good luck.

The image of the snake in the birds nest suggests the rapacity of nature, so this is not simply a story about alienation from nature.