New Delhi, March 8 -- In an interview to The New Yorker last year, Daniyal Mueenuddin described his story, The Golden Boy, as a piece that is "embedded in a much larger history". "Like a peripheral scene in some enormous battle painting-think of Goya or Breughel," the Pakistani-American writer put it. "All our stories-the stories of our lives-are so important to us, and yet we live in a corner of the painting, a corner of the tapestry."

In his new book, This is Where the Serpent Lives, published nearly two decades after his luminous debut In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Mueenuddin revives the metaphor, indulging in the delicate art of teasing out the stories that lie on the fringes, usually hidden in plain sight.

Like Shakespeare'...