Funny men in brutal cities

A Happy Place and Other Stories (HarperCollins, Rs 275) by Vineetha Mokkil attempts to scrutinize the difficulties of modern living. Mokkil’s stories unfold in the city of Delhi, and deal with a myriad lives: for example, a married scriptwriter falls for a tall, thin woman — “not model thin, not anorexic thin” — with a snake tattooed along the length of her arm, a youthful woman courageously rejects her employer’s unwelcome advances and sets out into a hostile world, and a man in his fifties looks at life with new eyes when he finds out that he is about he become a father. Mokkil can boast of a good command over the language; more importantly, she has the gift of good story-telling. She compromises neither on the grit nor on the tenderness in her prose. Mokkil’s characters are well fleshed-out; this is admirable, given the brevity of her stories.

The Roster (Supernova, Rs 225) by Anukampa Rawat is nearly 200 pages of stories of the men that the protagonist, Megha Narayan, dated before she finally met and married her husband. But that is not all — readers have to wait with bated breath for the husband’s opinion on Megha’s past, for the whole point of the book is to find out whether the husband will “overlook and ignore” his wife’s life before him or “react exactly in the manner that Megha had been warned about by the worldly wise.” Megha’s hope is that her husband will stay true to his lack of curiosity and his “un-Indianness” and take the stories of her ex-lovers with a pinch of salt — as all partners indeed should — but the problem is that readers, too, are expected to worry along with Megha, and wait for as long as she has to. Megha’s descriptions of some of the men she dated are downright hilarious — “Rufus was a colleague... with very dense foliage on his head. Expecting him to construct a simple sentence without multiple colourful expletives was like expecting a one year old to use cutlery” — but they go on for too long.

Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Piatkus, Rs 375) by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut proposes to tell you “how people judge you — and how to come out looking good”. The book is filled with trite advice, because “everyone wants to know how to be more influential.” Readers should be able to figure that out for themselves, without having to read the book.