NIGHT OF HAPPINESS

NIGHT OF HAPPINESS TABISH KHAIR

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? By turns poetic, chilling and heartbreaking, Night of Happiness is an unforgettable novel set in a world without tolerance.

TABISH KHAIR

Born and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, TABISH KHAIR is the author of various acclaimed works, including the novels, The Bus Stopped, Filming: A Love Story, The Thing About Thugs, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, and Jihadi Jane (available as Just Another Jihadi Jane outside India), the 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. Khair is currently an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Leverhulme guest professor at the School of English, Leeds University, UK. He has won the All India Poetry Prize. His novels have been shortlisted for major prizes, including the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Encore Award, and translated into several languages.