The tragic exploitation that puts food on our plates
Tragic heroes, typically perfect in all aspects but one, often suffer from an excess of virtue. The titular narrator of Celina Baljeet Basra’s debut novel, “Happy,” is a young Sikh man cursed with stubborn optimism. “Forgive me if I smile too wide,” he says. Raised on a farm next to an amusement park in Punjab, India, during the fever pitch of globalization in the ’90s, Happy aspires to act in movies, write screenplays and achieve international fame. Dissatisfied with his job as a “Wonderland assistant” at the amusement park, he leaves for Italy with a group of “clandestine” travelers.
Basra’s experimental novel opens with a painstakingly crafted cover letter signed “Happy Singh Soni,” fleshing out our protagonist’s economic background and reasons for leaving home. Though much of what follows proceeds through more traditional narration in the voice of Happy, it is sporadically interrupted by the monologues of inanimate objects: an ancient necklace from Moenjodaro, a piece of luggage at a train terminal. This formal dexterity keeps the book deceptively lighthearted, offering distraction from the horrors of reality. So does his self-abasing humor. “Clandestine travel is a lot simpler if you cross out your name on your passport and choose to become no one,” Happy says at the start of his journey.
Readers understand that Happy is being smuggled into Italy, even if he and his fellow migrants appear misinformed and underprepared, as seen in their style of dress: They opt for “a Punjabi version of that global all-American look,” wearing jeans, tracksuits, letterman jackets, “striving to look like a postcard of Sylvester Stallone from the ’80s.” As the repurposed fast-food truck they are carried in enters the Lut Desert in Iran, and as they unload and walk over snowy mountains, Happy distracts himself with imagined conversations. His interlocutors include a flighty femme fatale named Europe and a backpacker en route to Kabul to visit the conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti’s One Hotel.
Basra has a penchant for surrealism. Happy in many ways resembles the ingenue at the center of
Yoko Tawada’s dreamlike novel “The Naked Eye,” a film-obsessed Vietnamese abductee in Paris. Basra’s plot, by contrast, calls to mind Nabarun Bhattacharya’s cult classic “Harbart,” a tragicomedy set in Kolkata that begins and ends with the death of its titular character. Readers will fear for Happy even before he arrives in Italy. Indeed in Rome he is stuck working for 20 euros a day, with no chance of offsetting the 11,987.10 euros he owes his “coordinators.” After several involuntary relocations, Happy winds up near the city of Latina in central Italy, where he and other, mostly Sikh, “general farm workers” harvest radishes year-round.
As the work wears Happy down, his optimism grows more complex, transforming into a kind of empathetic, almost critically conscious hope. He describes himself and the other farmworkers not as Stallone look-alikes but as “brown men with tiny shovels.” He remarks, “All shovels are Communists.” One of his roommates is a charismatic man named Zhivago, to whom Happy is attracted. Zhivago organizes consciousness-raising sessions where a worker previously employed at an orange plantation tells of Malian migrants who protested, acquired their own land and started selling organic produce. Zhivago inspires the radish pickers to do the same: “Death to the radish!” they shout. But the plan goes south, delivering the novel to its tragic climax.
In her acknowledgments, Basra writes, “If Happy and his fellow farm workers had been successful in their uprising, maybe they would have gone on to found an initiative like Barikamà.” Barikamà is an organic farming cooperative in Rome started by Suleiman Diara, a Malian migrant who was making 20 euros a day picking oranges and living in a shack when he decided to strike out as an entrepreneur. Details from Diara’s story, including his daily wage, are echoed in “Happy,” but unlike Diara, who built what United Nations experts have deemed a model of sustainable agricultural development, Basra’s hero does not get a happy ending.
The choice to rewrite Diara’s success as a tragedy is a sobering reminder that stories about individual heroism can divert focus from the exploitative
conditions that compel them to act in the first place. Tragedy, on the other hand, does not obscure the power of the hero’s adversaries. Instead, it renders this power unmistakably visible. For Basra, tragedy also highlights the value of the simple needs and pleasures imperiled by criminal labor practices.
Embattled against his fate, Happy clings to every beautiful diversion he encounters. “Winter has reached Latina,” he reports from the radish farm. “We have one portable radiator to share between us: exquisite, hypnotic iridescent hotglint half-god of heat.” On another occasion, he steals a glance at Zhivago eating stolen fruit, “ambercolored peach juice trickling down his chin.” Amid their shared struggle, Happy’s stubborn optimism exalts and affirms the inner lives of his fellow workers.