Author Tabish Khair, whose last two novels were set outside India, returns home with his new book which is about a man...
Author Tabish Khair, whose last two novels were set outside India, returns home with his new book which is about a man who builds his thriving business empire with the help of his trusted aide only to be compelled to find out more about him after an incident. "Night of Happiness" is described by the Denmark-based Khair as either a ghost story or a psychological thriller or both about a man who has experienced something most of us cannot even imagine.
'Night of Happiness' is described by the Denmark-based Khair
"How this man (Ahmed) lives a seemingly normal life with or despite this experience. And how someone like us - well-meaning, reasonable and limited (the narrator of the novel, who is a businessman named Anil Mehrotra) - reacts when exposed to the trauma of Ahmed's tragic experience," he says of his book, published by Picador India. 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, 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. As layers and layers of Ahmed's history are peeled off, Mehrotra finds himself confronting some deeply unsettling questions. Does Ahmed really have a wife? Does he keep her imprisoned in their flat? Is Ahmed deranged, or is he just making desperate sense of the horrors that afflicted him in the past?
Picador, India
"I have always been interested in narrating how people connect and fail to connect. This is a novel that takes the exploration in another direction: what happens when someone you think you know turns out to be different from what you had expected? How do we cope with the fact that other people are always different from us, that the other always exceeds the totalizing comprehension of the self?" Khair told PTI. He says that the book's narrator becomes a kind of Coleridgean Ancient Mariner.
"Mehrotra, the fictitious narrator - who was once a widely read man before concentrating on making money - is very aware of that too, as he discovers Ahmed's secrets, without totally understanding them. "He slowly realizes that like the ancient mariner he is talking about an obsessive and incomprehensible experience, and I hope that the reader realizes by the end of the novel that both the texts are about human suffering, guilt, empathy (or its lack), and the search for redemption."
The Thing About Thugs
Khair has chosen an important Islamic festival to base his novel upon - Shab-e-baraat. Asked if there was any particular reason, he says, "Shab-e-baraat attracts me as a festival as it has so many indigenous - Indian - elements in it, many of which are now being discarded by Islamic fundamentalists."
Born and educated in Gaya in Bihar, Khair is the author of various acclaimed works, including novels "The Bus Stopped", "Filming: A Love Story", "The Thing About Thugs", "How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position", and "Jihadi Jane"; poetry collections "Where Parallel Lines Meet" and "Man of Glass", and the studies "Babu Fictions and The Gothic", "Postcolonialism and Otherness", and "The New Xenophobia".
Aarhus University, Denmark
He is currently an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Leverhulme guest professor at the School of English, Leeds University, UK. Asked how different "Night of Happiness" is from his previous works, Khair says, "I try to write a different novel every time: so I hope it is different, but I will let the reader judge. In a simpler sense, I return to India with this novel. My last two novels (before this one) take place outside India, though they feature protagonists with South Asian backgrounds.
