Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Happy Birthday! and other stories

Happy birthday is a book of 13 short stories.  Each story gives us a glimpse of the present and delves into the past explaining the current situation.  The cover illustration was a bunch of balloons and my first impression was that they would be happy moments of life.  But life is life and mostly the stories cover an array of emotions with glimpses of happiness.  Majority of them are set in India and America.  Mainly one can see the selfish, cut throat nature of our society that pushes us to go above and beyond to protect ourselves. 

Do I need an intelligence to read this book.  Probably! because after every short I had to take a break to let it sink it and relate to what the author was trying to say.  I had to have some kind of emotional intelligence to understand the message which is written subtly under the many shades of each characters.  She does not come forth and draw a line, in black and white for us to understand.  After Ashes story was much more than I thought it would be.  The lemon and chilli story with episodes of life around India and America touched my heart.  It could have been anyone's story.  But I had to choke back a sob.  Sometimes I too fear of the future.  Every time I reminiscence I think of a different meaning.  The same character who was an protagonist of the story suddenly turns antagonist and I was too overwhelmed then to understand such workings of the human mind. 

The author is a journalist.  So her characters are very structured and I think the characters could have been etched from her personal and some professional experiences too.  But all together the stories are being told with such audacity that we would think it is happening around us, perhaps to a neighbour or a person showcased in media.  Some were open ended stories.  I know they are shorts and only a glimpse of the story would be given, but somehow I cannot help pondering how it would have gone, positive or negative!  The author has already won many accolades for her novel One and a half wife and I am really psyched to read it one day.

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