Summary

“A Spoiled Man” begins with “There he stood at the stone gateway of the Harounis’ weekend home above Islamabad, a small bowlegged man with a lopsided battered face.” The man is Rezak, an elderly part-time servant to Sohail Harouni and his American wife Sonya. Narration describes how Rezak gets by with making a small income doing odd jobs around the Harouni house and how he calls a small, portable cubicle, constructed out of pieces of salvaged junk, home.

A senior servant of the Harounis takes pity on Rezak and asks Sonya to give him a job tending her new gardens. She agrees and arranges to offer Rezak a salary, narration commenting that “it made her happy to think of spoiling him in his old age.” (227). Rezak packs up his cubicle and moves it onto the Harouni estate where, at one point during a Harouni...