Tabish Khair’s seventh novel opens in a five-star hotel room in a “teeming North Indian city”. In a drawer, beside The Bible and the Bhagavad Gita , lies a manuscript. No author is named, and the title, ‘The Spectral Infinitude of Small Distances,’ is struck out.
The narrator of this manuscript, which forms the rest of Night of Happiness , is Anil Mehrotra, a prosperous businessman. Mehrotra once hoped to become an academic; his wife was an aspiring novelist. Now he runs an export-import company, and she organises literary events. But they don’t dwell on abandoned dreams. At least on the outside, Mehrotra is complacent and self-satisfied.
Halwa night
The reader may wonder, early, why they are supposed to care about this family. But Mehrotra is in the tradition of narrators who are interesting not for themselves but for the story they tell, and, Nick Carraway-style, serve as intermediaries between the reader and another, enigmatic character. This is Ahmed, Mehrotra’s “right-hand man,” his most trusted employee.
From the outset, Mehrotra sets Ahmed up as a kind of inverse of himself. Mehrotra is Hindu, and had a privileged, cosmpolitan upbringing as the son of a diplomat; Ahmed is a working-class Muslim, brought up by a single mother in the fictional Bihar town of Phansa (it features in several of Khair’s novels, and bears a resemblance to his native Gaya).
Mehrotra has degrees from IIT and Columbia, but is intellectually and culturally shallow; Ahmed is an autodidact who speaks 13 languages (plus a “smattering of Chinese”).
Mehrotra is professionally reliant upon Ahmed, but also longs to know more about him. Ahmed does not appear to observe Eid or other Muslim holy days; he only asks for one day of leave a year, for Shab-e-baraat, a festival Mehrotra has never heard of. Ahmed translates it as “night of salvation”, but notes that baraat also means happiness. It is a day when “we recall our ancestors… And, of course, we make halwa at home.”
On the eve of Shab-e-baraat, Mehrotra drops Ahmed home from work as an excuse to meet his wife and eat her famous halwa. He does not get to meet her — she observes purdah, although Ahmed says he disapproves of the practice — but in Ahmed’s flat he has an experience so bizarre and unsettling that he spends the rest of the novel in pursuit of the truth about Ahmed and what happened that night.
Private eye
Detective Khair plays to excellent effect with the conventions of the mystery novel. Mehrotra hires a high-end private detective, Devi Prasad, to investigate Ahmed’s past, and much of the novel is told through Devi Prasad’s reports.
In India, the detective explains, there is no need to go in for Hollywood-style shadowing of the subject. Detectives rely instead upon interviews, which they use to construct a biography.
Mehrotra knew that Ahmed’s cultural sophistication and his polyglottism had their roots in his years as a tour guide in Bodh Gaya, near Phansa. Devi Prasad’s report begins with an account of Ahmed’s intellectual formation, before moving on to the shocking personal revelations that Mehrotra is looking for.
Khair writes especially well about Phansa, and the particular qualities of a small town that is shaped by foreign tourism. This section is central to one of the novel’s most impressive achievements: Ahmed’s plausibility.
Crucial misperceptions
Khair — a columnist for this newspaper — is as well known for his cultural and political essays as for his fiction. It is no surprise, then, that Night of Happiness , while undeniably a “literary thriller” with a gripping and well-constructed plot, is also a penetrating inquiry into, among other things, the nature of loss and trauma — in this case following the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 — and of the varieties of Muslim faith in India.
He has written a metafictional novel that wears its self-consciousness lightly, at no narrative cost. Mehrotra refers to his own narrative as “compulsive… it ignores everything else for just one story;” and the reader readily agrees, because the novel ruthlessly excludes extraneous detail (we know nothing, for instance, about Mehrotra’s business).
The few digressions are usually comic — a satirical account of a corporate felicitation for an NRI writer; or a hilarious episode where Mehrotra is so rattled by Ahmed’s behaviour that he starts ‘unfriending’ people on Facebook (“As I did so, I regretted the fact that people were not so easy to unfriend in real life”). Yet Mehrotra’s own misperceptions and half-knowledge are crucial to the novel’s mystery. He is, for instance, pristinely incurious about women, beginning with his own wife, and ignorant about Islam and India beyond the metros (he describes Surat, one of India’s largest cities, as a “relatively small place in Gujarat).
He is a well-chosen and subtly drawn narrator for this skilful and intriguing novel, a book that reminded me much more of Paul Auster than of any of Khair’s Indian contemporaries.
The writer is based in Delhi.
