Night of Happiness and Other Stories

by Tabish Khair

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Thrillers

Synopsis

A collection of other stories from shining India—those not often told.

In “Night of Happiness,” pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms; he bothers no one, and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide. What will he discover: madness, or something worse? And does he have the capacity to understand what he discovers?

In a series of three linked stories, “The Corridor,” “The Ubiquity of Riots” and “Elopement,” Khair traces, through the eyes of an adolescent, the tensions of living as a liberal Muslim in India in the 1970s and 1980s, tensions that isolate families, break friendships, and point to the violence that is to come. The narrator of these stories, now a busy professional, returns in the third person in another story, “Olden Friends are Golden,” about belonging and exclusion on WhatsApp, and elsewhere, in the present. Then there is the lightly narrated but deeply troubling “Scam,” about a crime that can only be comprehended as a scam perpetuated by the victim, and two gothic stories, “Namaste Trump” and “Shadow of a Story,” where oppression and violence return in unimaginable shapes.

“The Thing with Feathers” is perhaps about hope, but it is hope beyond despair, hope perhaps gone mad: or, is all hope mad now? Finally, “The Last Installment” narrates the story of two farmers, a father and a son, in the hinterlands of Northern India, caught in a corporate vice: the breathless sentences of the story making the reader literally sense the desperation of the central character as he finally fights to breathe, to live.

By turns poetic, chilling, and heartbreaking, ranging from understated realism to gothic terror, this is a book of stories about precarious lives in a world without tolerance.

Praise for Tabish Khair

“Ingenious and mischievous …”
– The New Yorker

“Khair writes brilliantly ... Unmissable …”
– The Times

“Irreverent, intelligent, and explosive.”
– The Independent

“For a book so concise and witty, it is also surprisingly textured …”
– The New Republic

“The picture that emerges may sear your soul much like your all-time favorite film.”
– India Today

“Intelligent and argumentative …”
– London Review of Books

Release date: July 4, 2023

Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc

Print pages: 256