Happy Endings – Review

 Book Review

Title: Happy Endings

Author: Suchita Agarwal

 

There is no rainbow without clouds and rains. Joys and sorrows are inextricably intertwined in human life. Are there more sorrows than joys? I know people who have endured the most terrible things in their life without much consolation, not even that of an occasional comic relief, in between. Their tragedy becomes more intense when we realise that most of their sorrows are created by forces that are beyond their control. Since I don’t believe in Karma, the consolations of that dogma are denied to me. I choose to believe in destiny. And I also believe that destiny is a blind force that is guided by none of the benign principles of justice or dharma.

The sole redeeming factor in many cases is the resilience that springs eternal in the human breast, to paraphrase Alexander Pope. Suchita Agarwal’s stories in this collection are suffused with that resilience. There are five stories and each one of them is titled after the protagonist who grapples with an inevitable trauma of life. Each one grapples with the trauma successfully and emerges a winner, thanks to the resilience that springs unflaggingly in their hearts. Suchita’s characters are fortunate in one thing: their sorrows are not created by any external human agencies. So there are no villains in these stories. Rather, the villains are destiny’s inevitable forces like cancer (Sameera), midlife crisis (Mayank), loss of a sister (Urmilla), or an unresolved psychological backlog (Pranjal).

It is easier to bounce back to joy if the villain is not a human being, I think. It becomes still easier if there are some people to support you through your anguish. Sameera has Dr Khera to impart to her the reassuring feeling that “everything would turn out okay.” Mayank has a sister-in-law to probe his inner emptiness and to teach him that “not every act we do has a reason.” Avantika has a Raj who knows that running after our dreams instead of running after our goals is a terrible mistake we tend to make.

That reminds me of one of the sublime qualities of Suchita’s stories: effervescence. You get uplifting messages like: “Dreams by their very nature are pristine. Unreachable because in our heads they represent a core of us that is undefinable. We have to turn them into goals…. Because goals are practical. They are achievable. They make sense in the real world.”

Inability to make sense of our world is a terrible state of affairs. As Vaclav Havel said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” All of Suchita’s characters struggle with the problem of making sense of what is happening to them. But they all, without exception, end up in a state that not only makes sense but also leaves much room for a fairy-tale-happy-going.

The book is titled Happy Endings not without reason. Each story ends in a state of fairy-tale bliss or the promise of it. I don’t want to bring in spoilers by quoting some of those beautiful endings.

This is an eminently readable book which is tilted heavily towards the more benign shades of human life. It cajoles you into acknowledging that life is to be enjoyed rather than endured. Life does bring in some hurts but it has a way of healing the wounds too. In some extreme cases like in ‘Urmilla,’ the healing may come as the ashes of a sibling are being immersed in the waters of the Ganga at Haridwar with the soul of the sibling uttering a redemptive whisper in your ear. The redemption is as much the departed sibling’s soul’s as yours too. There is redemption at any rate at the end of every story. The book is worth reading just for that redemption. Not just that, however. Every story engages you in a gentle, sublime way.

PS. This review is part of Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. You can download the book free here. 

My book, Humpty Dumpty’s 10 Hats, is also a part of that carnival.