This is an extract from This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
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 shalvar kameez, 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 dal 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 savor. 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 travelers. 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 chapattis and the leavings from customers’ half-eaten plates—which otherwise would be poured back into the general pot. 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, jhadoo ghar—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 neighborhood 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 humor 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 mustachioed men, lovers or enemies, kidnapped or eloping or on the lam, as only time and a hundred pages would tell. Yazid had charmed hands, became a master at making chapattis, hunkered cross-legged over the tandoor, slapping the flattened dough down into its orange glowing maw. He learned the technique of making nan, doing it so well that the shop became known for it, the local housewives bringing pots to fill with dal and curry, a treat for their poor homes in the nearby alleys, and a bundle of nan 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.
(c) Daniyal Mueenuddin
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.