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Somehow, with the lamented disappearance of the cosy ways of the past–handwritten letters and coiling telephones–what has also gone missing is the easy humour one used to find in the most ordinary days of life. It needn’t be as momentous as a humiliating fall before an audience, but as simple as misreading someone’s warning of monkeys on the road as a reference to the noisy kids next door. Only, you need the right language to convey the humour of those very ordinary days, the ordinariness of it slightly disturbed by your tryst with a monkey or an umbrella that fails to close.
Beloved writer of children’s books Khyrunnisa A comes both with the language and the timing you need to make humour work in her newest collection of essays, Happy Go Funny - The Lighter Moments of Life. In her third book for grown-ups, or rather for all age groups, it is mostly her choice of phrases that does the trick. To describe the cacophony of the ceremonious weddings these days, she’d casually add that while the guests mostly missed the wedding, they’d be treated to a ‘rich variety of photographers’ backs’.
Her writing is a curious mix of an English teacher’s (which she had been for decades) compulsion to use the proper language at all times and the helpless urge of a comedian to find the humour in every situation even remotely funny. Sometimes she invents the situation when there is none. In a chapter about Indian weddings, she writes about a friend who insists that Khyrunnisa see her daughter’s wedding album and then comes back with a suitcase. The writer thinks: Excellent manners, she makes me look through a photo album and then decides to leave the house. Only here, the the wedding album came in a suitcase, much to the writer’s surprise.
A reader with an imagination may find it easier to put oneself in her place, empathise with the difficulties of a live situation that would later, on recollection, become a series of funny visuals. The teacher pops out now and then, and you will find her putting down her misadventures into neat little categories - The Great Indian Road Trick, What’s Up Doc, For Better For Worse (about weddings, of course).
Readers who have traversed through an Indian road could immediately relate to the unending honks, the rush to wedge into whatever space was available in the thick traffic of the day and the misfortunes of being a pedestrian on these roads.
About the autorickshaw experience, she writes: Operating purely on the principle that if the front wheel can be forced into a gap in the traffic the rest of the vehicle will take care of itself, the autorickshaw makes its jaunty, devil-may-care progress through the congested road.
She laughs merrily at herself, but does not hold back on taking a dig at humanity as a whole. There will be lines like: “As a race, we are never happy with the existing weather, perennially craving for what it isn't". And second to her, the most recurring character in the book is her husband Vijayakumar, another retired college professor, who is referred to as ‘Husband’. She has dedicated the book to Vijayakumar, who is ‘stuck in the book’.
Khyrunnisa mostly keeps her observations to the everyday events, staying away from the serious side of life. Occasionally, though, she lets her remarks allude to the affairs of the world, sometimes slyly by tucking in a contemporary event (“bet my last demonetised 500 rupee note”), or reality (“faster than fake news on social media”), and other times, more obvious observations. Rarely, she takes a moment to make a serious comment on the pointlessness of NOTA (in elections) or the unhealthy competition between children or the practice of spitting on public roads. Almost unnoticeably, she makes her views clear, like with a passing reference to the racism in matrimonial columns.
Admirably, Khyrunnisa also puts a short context and some history in small paragraphs in the middle of a witty anecdote, like the origin of ‘sandwich’ or the evolution of the word ‘OK’. She leaves names of people without a description, making you do your little research and collect tidbits of information, without realising it. She must have been one fun teacher, you imagine, though there are not a lot of anecdotes from her teaching days.
One might disagree with certain views, made in passing, but the focus of her writing is not the remark itself but the lighter moments she plucked out of a situation. Nitpicking those would be going against the very purpose of the book, viz, distracting yourself from the heavier side of life for a little while. And in this little undertaking, that is clearly not a ‘light’ task in itself, Khyrunnisa is an unbeatable master, sorry, professor of the game.