“Page after page of my sketchbook has drawings of glow-worms, butterflies, and geckoes and their tails that keep twitching even after they have dropped off.” So says Raheela, the narrator of “Fifteen Sketches of Rumi,” one of 10 clever, powerful, and poignant stories gathered in Ahmad Saidullah’s debut, Happiness and Other Disorders. Raheela is referring to her artistic formation, and in particular to her obsession with “disguises, lures and transmutation.” However, she could just as easily be describing the strange and lasting effect of this excellent collection, which lingers and twitches in the mind like a creature clinging to life even as it is dying.

According to the fictional Editor’s Note that opens the book, most of the stories have been lifted from a manuscript found in a mysterious trunk complete with two false bottoms and several nearly impassable locks and barriers. Set in a small town in north India recently riven by religious violence, the tales “reconstruct the secret lives of a group of characters associated with the Ashfaqs, an upper-middle-class Muslim family.”

And yet, the collection represents much more than a glorified family tree or a far-reaching chronicle of a village and its residents. Instead, the author’s stunning prose and subtle sense of the symbolic allow the tales to transcend their conventions. While the artist Raheela’s story follows a coming-of-age trajectory, it also encompasses a meditation on art and memory and a condemnation of the types of gender- and class-based roles that can sever relationships irrevocably. In “Vatan and the Cow,” a seemingly simple allegory becomes something bleaker and more telling after the hero embarks on a quest to reverse a curse on his family and crops. His final destiny suggests the pointlessness of blind faith.

Saidullah does not shy away from human atrocity, particularly in “The Sadness of Snakes,” wherein the village plays host to a motley crew of Allied troops, followed by a brutish group of Japanese soldiers. The children of the village witness gut-twisting scenes of torture and violence, and eventually find themselves on the run through the jungle, stepping over a writhing mess of snakes on the forest floor. The story feels in places like a horrific prologue to an uneasy peace, while in others it seems like a single chapter of a prophetic book whose whole is too terrible to contemplate.

Still, Saidullah seems aware that compelling themes do not necessarily make for compelling fiction, and takes full advantage of the stylistic freedoms the short story form allows. Throughout the book, he uses truncation, unexpected allusions, and meaningful (if tricky to bridge) lacunae in plot to delve into the difficult topics of political and religious unrest, war, the Indian caste system, racism, and intricate family tensions. Take, for example, “The Guest,” a strange and funny little account of a young, educated woman named Huma who is possessed by a somewhat uncouth Glaswegian, “Callum McCallum, born o’ the Clyde.” A send-up of both psychotherapy and superstition, the story nevertheless ends on a sorrowful note. Huma – despite the fact that she has stopped approximating bagpipe noises or “heehawing through the nose” after having endured an exorcism and electro-shock therapy – is now an empty husk of a human, and we are left to ponder her odd fate.

In “Whiteness,” narrated from the point-of-view of a woman wrestling with her cultural identity and the confines of her marriage, Saidullah shifts from a second-person perspective to a third-, and finally to a first-person perspective. This has a curious effect; we feel at first alienated from the protagonist, then sympathetic toward her, and finally uncomfortably immersed in her dangerous (and possibly well-founded) delusions.

Saidullah’s bouts of description are either grounded in sensory detail – “the tinkle from the local shaka, the lowing of cows being milked, the rococo of a distant, laggard cock, and the occasional roar of a lorry rushing past” – or float away on a raft of dreamlike imagery. Either way, the writing is mesmerizing and confident. In the closing story of the collection, a blind woman weaves her foreboding “visions” onto a loom, even as the rest of the villagers follow a pied piper-type figure to what must surely be their downfall. Like his weaver, the author of Happiness and Other Disorders possesses an entirely singular form of ominous and lovely second sight; he also has the literary chops to give it voice. Saidullah is a tale-spinner of the first order, and this collection is both a mystery and a treasure.