A New Yorker debut story - and what sets this one apart

Story in the current New Yorker, The Politics of the Foot, by Taymour Soomra, comes w/ the intriguing author's note that he's a student in East Anglia and this is his first published fiction. Wow, that's completely unexpected from the New Yorker, so one would expect this story as a work of literary genius that immediately rose from the slush pile and grabbed an editor's attention from the first sentence. Well, those expectations are too high. No doubt the story rose up from the masses of submissions in large part because of its 3rd-world setting: It opens w/ a brief description of a commercial street where, between a beauty parlor and some other small enterprise, an itinerant shoe-repair man has set up shop, and a man who lives nearby engages him in conversation about shoes. This kind of opening is atypical of the New Yorker of late, but not unique in literature: We could be entering a Naipaul novel or a story by any of many India-born authors, notably Rohinton Mistry. As it happens, this story is set in Karachi, Pakistan, and Soomra interlaces the narrative w/ many words untranslated - some familiar to most readers (ayah = maid, servant), others, not. The story will need more than exotic veneer to carry its burden of high expectations, and Soomra comes through, for the most part. Though the going is rough at the outset, do to the choppy, fragmented narrative lacking at times clear referents as to who is speaking, where, and when, the story emerges gradually as a coherent whole composed of its many fragments: We come to see that the central figure is a young man whose family was politically prominent; his father was assassinated and their large urban complex/estate was seized, and now he and his mother and a servant are living in cramped quarters on a commercial street across the road from a major construction site (a mosque being built, w/ a towering minaret). The young man has many conversations w/ the shoe-repair vendor, much younger, and we learn toward the end that they are interested in each other sexually, though not clear if they consummate their relationship. At first, the homosexuality seems to come out of nowhere, but then a quick re-read shows that there are references, particularly to homophobia, earlier in the story. There is not sharp conclusion - the story more or less ends where it began, with the mother upstairs w/ fading mental capacity and obsessed with the riches that once were hers - again, a familiar trope in much third-world fiction - things are what they used to be! - but handled w/ subtlety here, leading us to a dissonant, unresolved conclusion. In short, an impressive debut story by any measure though I have to suppose that a similar story set in contemporary London or New York would still on that slush pile.