For three years in my youth I worked in an Indian restaurant. With the exception of the food items, the only Hindi word I knew was “yes,” something that amused our young male patrons. Away from the restaurant, the strains of the songs the restaurant played ricocheted through my head. These Indian ballads were so familiar, I felt I should be able to sing them, but of course I could not.

At night in my sleep, I dreamt music without knowing what the sounds — the words — meant. Reading Ahmad Saidullah’s Happiness and Other Disorders (Key Porter, 256 pages, $29.95), I am reminded of this feeling. In love with the title and tone, I understand that if these stories are outside my grasp, it is due, in part, to my whiteness. Ironically, “Whiteness” is also the title of one of the stories within this confident first collection.

Set in India, Saidullah’s stories detail the journeys of elusive characters. In what may be a serious misstep, the collection starts with a fictional editor’s note: the narrator discovers a lost manuscript within a large, elaborate chest. This manuscript is of course meant to be the book you now hold in your hands. In 1955, Nabokov began Lolita with a found manuscript, but doing so was a joke against all those books that begin this way. Saidullah clearly takes pleasure in mirroring this opening — it winks at the reader, and is perhaps the closest he’ll draw you in — but in some ways it also raises the writer above the reader.

In “Vatan and the Cow,” for reasons not explicitly given, a man who has been put out of his home leaves his family to undertake a spiritual quest, from which he will return broken. In “Flight to Egypt,” the reader first sees an assassin as the victim of a religious riot before learning his true occupation and reason for running, and finally again (for real this time) as a victim hunted down for his crime. These twists, which ought to bring pleasure with their mystery, have the opposite effect, leaving the reader feeling distant and betrayed by the narrator. Unlike more considerate writers, such as Michael Ondaatje or Arundhati Roy, Saidullah leaves the historical backdrop enigmatic, and asks that you try to just keep up.

“What, did you think that once you saw it, everything would become clear, that it would be so easy to decipher? Like bits of coloured glass in a tube that fall into a pattern when shaken, a pattern that you could recognize?” So begins that story “Whiteness” — and I can relate. The conflict is this: the work is not easy, but neither is it meant to be.

The descriptions are impressive, measured but ecstatic: “Then, the city began to appear in the dark. The weave of overhead cables, rubbish mounds with rooting dogs, shanties, tenements, the looped entrails of city streets, fuming buses, scooter rickshaws, and cars in the blackening pall.” A master of restraint, he is strangely at his best when he takes risks, allowing the assassin to recall in startling detail his night with an adolescent prostitute, or the daughter in “Fifteen Sketches of Rumi” to fantasize by sighting her father’s gun on his forehead.

In spite of any complaints one might level at Happiness, Saidullah has thought seriously about what he wants to achieve, and has obviously taken great pains with the course of these stories, which are in turns cruel, humorous, political and, yes, even moral. His work lacks the warmth of other emerging Canadian writers who examine India from afar, i.e. Anosh Irani and Anand Mahadevan. However, his decisiveness and descriptions are beyond those of most first — or even second — efforts. 

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