From bag-loving monkeys to unrelenting umbrellas: Khyrunnisa’s Happy Go Funny is hilarious

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 stay to 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.

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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’.