There’s an emptiness that she senses but can’t put a finger on. Sample this: “Now it had all been shoved to the periphery to make room for this unbearable… what?” What drives this story, however, are the feral creatures that make a mess of Marta’s solitude. In a bid to ward them off, she happens to meet Yonas, a refugee. Their conversations demonstrate how easy it is sometimes to connect with strangers, and foster a sense of belonging.
Yolki-Palki is the strangest of this lot. A Russian hitman Varlam—which may be a false name owing to his profession—is paralysed reminiscing his past and, in a dreamlike situation, meets a Healing Touch professional. Its ending leaves one baffled. Started Early, Took My Dog features a queer couple—Ani (Anika) and Freya—who find themselves threatened by a stranger’s incomprehensible presence in their neighbourhood. Ani is enamoured by Emily Dickinson’s poem, which had that “unexpectedly burst—an aneurysm of meaning” in her life. Dickinson’s verse is intricately woven into the story, making it a mesmerising read.
Charity again makes one realise that often one’s disappointment in life forces one to trace back one’s roots. In Obscure Objects, a story-within-a-story form is explored through a writer Charlotte, who has joined an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) institute, but desire is what’s central to this story. Then, the stellar and moving story titled From the Archives of the Hospital for the Insane, whose characters and their personality traits are borrowed—and fictionalised—from multiple journals and sources, not only pushes the form of the short story but also attempts at exhuming the stories of outcast women from the past century.
Comprising of eight stories, this collection, as the title suggests and the author notes in an interview, “considers what it means to find happiness, and how we so often seem to understand it through our encounters with the lives, and the stories, of others.” But more than what being happy can mean for someone, these stories reflect the actions this goal influences: a purpose these characters tend to chase when faced with an existential or identity crisis.
