Happiness Is a Collage: Stories from India by Gita V. Reddy

Happiness Is a Collage: Stories from India by Gita V. Reddy
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Contemporary
Length: Short Story (124 pages)
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

This collection of fifteen stories leads the reader into a world that is at once Indian and universal. The stories explore love, life, loss, and relationships.

A painter derives inspiration from a long lost love. Every night after going to bed, a woman scours a vast desert for her missing husband. A young woman strides through two worlds. A son experiences the miracle of his father’s immense love. An actor’s wife struggles to keep her husband from slipping into his reel life. And a busy professional tries to factor in pregnancy and motherhood into her hectic life.
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Among those traversing this space are a henpecked billionaire, a homeless boy, a middle-aged wife dealing with infidelity, and a seeker finding solace with a lion and a deer.

Everyone has a secret if you dig deeply enough into their most private thoughts.

“Happiness is a Collage,” which shares the same title as this book, showed what happened when a young Indian woman travelled home again after getting divorced and being away from her community for a long time. I loved the protagonist’s descriptions of the conflicts between the culture she’d grown up in and the freedom she longed to have to make her own decisions. Every choice she made had unexpected benefits and consequences. Not knowing which path she was going to ultimately choose for her life made it hard for me to stop reading until l had my answers.

All of the stories in this collection were interesting. There were a handful of them that I thought could have benefitted from having more details included in them. For example, Usha, the main character in “A Dangerous Blend,” had just learned that her husband was cheating on her before the first scene began. She had to decide how to respond to his betrayal and what the rest of her life would look like. I had a great deal of sympathy for her from the beginning, and I looked forward to seeing how she’d put her life back together after her spouse shattered it. As much as I enjoyed it, I would have liked it even more if I could have more clearly understood why she responded to him the way that she did.

In “Time and Space,” a grandmother named Pramila had to adjust to living with her adult daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren when what she really wanted to do was to have a quiet house to herself once again. I had a lot of sympathy for this character. Living with other adult relatives can be difficult under the best circumstances, and this becomes even more true if everyone isn’t willing to follow the same rules about how a house should be run.

I’d recommend Happiness Is a Collage: Stories from India to anyone who is in the mood for some kind-hearted fiction.