‘Happy-Go-Funny’ book review: Ordinary life, but with a little wink

The first chapter of Happy Go Funny features a monkey snatching the author’s bag. She retaliates with a stern lecture that begins with “How dare you?” and ends with “Don’t you dare!” before she snatches it back. This tells you more about both the book and the author than any blurb could. By then, Khyrunnisa will have already won you over.

Her humour is built on observation, and it makes sense: the jokes grow out of situations you recognise, and they land because they are true. That is the book’s charm. It finds the irony in an ordinary day and trusts the reader to see it. While I was reading it at my desk, I laughed out loud and spent the next minute pretending I hadn’t.

The chapters, grouped into sixteen sections, are short enough that “just one more” quietly becomes five. Each feels like a conversation you have walked in on halfway and don’t want to leave. Much of the pleasure lies in her ear for words. Her phrasing is so playful that even a plain situation turns into a comic picture in the reader’s mind, and the wit that frames it is just as quick. Her remarks arrive exactly when they should, which is more than some of us manage. Reading her, I kept wishing I could answer the world the way she does, with a comeback that arrives on time instead of an hour late.

She also seems to have a gift for the digression. In “Ode to the Sandwich”, she moves quickly from a packed lunch to John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who did not want to leave his table while gambling and asked for a slice of meat between two pieces of bread. In another chapter, her husband’s passing mention of the Telegram app leads her to the earliest telegraph messages ever sent. With detours like these, readers will likely find themselves picking up quite a bit of history along the way.

Her home state is never far away. In one chapter, she borrows Tagore’s “where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high” for a worried man who must keep looking up, afraid of a falling coconut. She playfully suggests that the younger generation taking up white-collar jobs has left the trees unclimbed and the people on the roads at risk. She picks out what we have stopped noticing and lets humour and satire make us ponder it.

In “Of Babies and Wonder Kids”, she turns her satire on childhood itself. Today’s children, she observes, are hardly allowed to be children, and the old line about the child being the father of the man has become true “in much more than the Wordsworthian sense”. The irony here invites a nod, more than a laugh. Elsewhere the humour lives in smaller things, like an umbrella that does its job in reverse or the recurring mystery of her missing footwear. The situations are funny enough, but it’s her clever wordplay that earns the laugh.

There is something infectious about Khyrunnisa’s way of looking at the world. Her sharp wit and her playful, perfectly placed phrases turn the most ordinary situations into small comic triumphs, often leaving you wondering how you missed the joke yourself. Before you know it, you have lost track of time, happily following her from one digression to another. Happy Go Funny leaves you with a lighter mood, a few new bits of trivia and, perhaps, a wish to look at everyday life a little differently.

Happy-Go-Funny

Author: Khyrunnisa A.
Publisher: Westland Books
Pages: 227
Price: ₹399