moving from sadness to happiness (microfiction)

02.12.2025

A: You have been grieving. You have been mourning a loved one.

S: Does mourning ever end? Is it finished? Why the past tense?

A: Yes. Because you are moving into happiness. How does it feel moving from sadness to happiness?

S: The ones that we have lost, we still remember them. The sadness of their loss. It doesn’t matter how happy we are. The cut goes deep. And, moreover, I am not mourning the dead. I am mourning the living. The quick and not the dead. How can the mourning for the living ever end?

A: Yet you must feel happiness?

S: I feel the intoxication. It has happened again. Yes, I feel happy.

A: Don’t cling to the dead. Free yourself from their arms.

S: Those arms are grasping at me. They want to pull me into the sea with them.

A: I have told you not to think those thoughts.

S: Because of them, I think that anyone I am with will betray me and leave me.

A: You are saying that you are scared? You told me that you do not fear.

S: I do not fear anything for myself. I am not scared of death or battle. But the ones that I love? Losing them fills me with terror.

A: You are wrong. You can live without them. You have proved it.

S: I don’t want to live without them.

A: You have told me yourself. However brutal this life is, you have to live it. The mourning period is over. It is finished now. There is someone now.

S: Do you think that if your brain has been habituated to mourning for years, that it can suddenly shake itself off from that mourning just like that? Do you think that someone with a memory like mine can just lose the memory of trauma?

A: You will have to. You owe it to yourself and to this someone. Everything takes time. Your happiness is new. It is being reborn. You were happy once before and you are happy once again. Happiness is the natural state of things. Forget the past. Don’t think on it. Learn how to trust again. The mark of bravery is trust and love. Everything will work out. Just enjoy happiness and contrast it with that sadness and the emptiness that you felt. That betrayal.

S: I want that happiness. I want to free myself from death.

A: Good. Then do so. Desire is the mother of action.

a bubble of happiness (microfiction)

31.10.2025

A: Halloween comes once again.

S: Every day and night the dead haunt us. What is special about this day?

A: You are haunted. You always speak for everyone. When, in fact, you are different from everyone else. Do you ever feel happiness in your life?

S: I feel happy sometimes. I felt happy yesterday. You know that, naturally, I have a positive disposition. All my friends tell me that I have a positive energy. Unhappiness has been forced upon me. And I only feel the unhappiness most keenly in the night time and in the morning when it is hard to rise.

A: Yes, it is indeed remarkable that despite the amount that you complain, you never actually seem to be that low. Then we have your words in the night, a shocking contrast. Like Jekyll and Hyde. But to the question. How does a jaded and cynical, pessimistic person like you even feel any ounce of happiness?

S: There are people that make you happy. Everything comes from other people. They can make you happy. And then they can hurt you and make you sad.

A: Why talk about sadness?

S: Because that is what gives happiness meaning. Death and sadness, intolerable suffering, this is what gives happiness its meaning. In the old paintings, happiness was depicted as a child playing with a bubble. Happiness is a bubble. It is fragile and delicate. It is a shining orb of light which will only exist for a moment in this hard world. Look carefully at the surface of the bubble of happiness. It shines with light. It has all of the colours within its iridescence. It is beauty. The roundness of the bubble shows its perfection.

A: You can have the bubble forever.

S: The bubble has its enemies. What they should have shown in the old paintings is that the child has to protect his bubble from the world and the others. They are watching it jealously, hoping to prick at it and end its brief soujourn through the world.

A: So that is how you approach happiness? With fear?

S: Not fear. Caution. A warrior does not know fear. Do you know what the hero, my hero, Sunny Deol, the Punjabi Tiger says in the film ‘Jaat’? They ask this warrior who he is. He says that he is one that knows the value of life, but still puts his life in danger. What is most precious is what we risk in this life. That is the warrior culture. The bubble is precious. It is the most precious thing in the world. And we have to protect it. But we also put it at risk. In India, they believe in the evil eye. The eye of envy. It is real. Suffering in this world is created by people. But without risk, there is no meaning. And who am I? The biggest risk taker. The Tiger is known for his daring. Find someone braver. It is impossible. Because Tiger dares his whole heart on the people that he cares about and the things that he loves. Knowing the pain. Find someone else like that in this wretched universe.

ultimate happiness (microfiction)

30.09.2025

‘Where do you think ultimate happiness lies?’ Alfonso asked me. We were eating sushi together. It was a supermarket version. Although he had, I had never eaten sushi in a restaurant. I was taught to be careful with money. Sushi was expensive. It is difficult to drift from a culture of thrift. The supermarket stuff wasn’t absolutely appalling.

‘The answer is just three letters: SEX.’

‘Aah. A sensualist. Come on then. Why sex? I heard the capital letters in your tone.’ It was a purple shirt today. Very classy.

‘Because you are able to forget everything in the moment.’

‘Why then,’ Alfonso asked me, ‘if it is so pleasurable, that people won’t take every opportunity to have sex? Do they not want to be happy?’

‘I told you that I will not make any comments about women,’ I said to Alfonso. ‘And the answer to this question necessarily relies on me talking about women.’ After all, life teaches you to hold your tongue.

‘Necessarily?’

‘If you want to ask unhappy people why they are unhappy, you should ask them. My answer is that I am unhappy. Read between the lines.’

‘Food makes you happy though. I have seen it.’

‘Yes, I am also a glutton. That is another aspect of being a sensualist.’

‘And company makes you happy. Friends make you happy. Natural beauty makes you happy. Creativity makes you happy. Education makes you happy. Why then do you say sex is the ultimate happiness?’

‘Because sex will give you babies and a family. The other things might be well in their own way, but the only way to secure long term happiness is through sex. These people that don’t and won’t have sexual relationships are going to be even unhappier in the future.’

‘Don’t speak for other people. You don’t know their minds.’

‘Let’s change the topic. What is your ultimate happiness?’

Alfonso was always asking me things about what I thought. And then questioning them. What did he think?

‘Happiness is friendship. Having good friends for company.’

‘But I contrast friendship with a family. You cannot build something with a friend like a family.’

Alfonso sighed. ‘That is your problem. You have good friends. You have satisfying work. You have money. Your health is not absolutely in tatters. You are still young. You have so much going on in your life. And all you can think about is that family that you do not have. Why can’t you be like all the others and forget about having a family?’

‘It is the most important thing in our culture.’

‘Do what it takes to get it if you think it is so important.’

‘I told you. Family is the most important thing. I have to look after the ones that I have got. They are not expendable.’

‘So the family is destroying your family?’

‘What a world, eh?’ I grimaced. ‘No one can forgive you for being loyal. For disloyalty, they can forgive you everything. And then, all the other things you have to do…’

I trailed off. There was no point saying anything. Because having an opinion on this topic was dangerous. Dangerous and unproductive. There was no point to it.

something happy (microfiction)

21.08.2025

‘For once, why don’t you write about something happy?’ Alfonso looked at me kindly. At heart, he was soft. Despite the sneering, the taunting and the criticism. He had a heart of pure gold and he looked after me. He would spend time with me and always give me advice because he cared about me.

‘Is it only what is happy that is beautiful?’ I asked him.

‘For your persistent reader, why don’t you try and give them joy instead of the pain?’

‘Do you want a moment of sheer joy? I have always been the lover of music. And one time, my father went abroad to work. He asked me what I wanted from there when he came back several months later. More than anything else, I wanted my own personal music player. He brought me the top model – at the time it was a Sony. It was black with gold writing on it and shaped like a little box. It played my Hindi film cassettes and, even better, it had a radio inside. That was happiness. Because music is happiness and family is happiness.’

‘You got what you wanted. Is that what you think happiness is?’

‘Is it not? What else could it be?

‘Things that are unwanted can be happiness. You have told me often enough in life that your life has not gone exactly to plan.’

‘Do you want another moment? A good book.’

‘But were the thoughts of another happiness, or were your own thoughts about the book happpiness? It is harder to arrive at a supposition.’

‘What does it matter what causes the joy?’

‘Because you want to replicate the result.’

‘Happiness was a relationship.’

‘Of course. Get another one.’ Alfonso smiled at me. ‘See, it is not so difficult to have happiness. Just good company, a good book or good music.’

‘In the moment, I am happy. In a film. In a book. In a play. Acting. Singing. Dancing. Making art. Talking to people’. I frowned. ‘It is when I go home and sit in my empty room and then lie in my empty bed…’

Alfonso frowned back at me. He shook his head. ‘We are talking about happiness. We are not talking about sadness or loneliness or emptiness.’

‘Happiness cannot exist without sadness, loneliness or emptiness. You would not feel it. Only the loser knows that it is to win.’

‘Do you think that only you are sad? Do you think that these people here enjoy lying in their beds at night all alone?’

‘Yes. Otherwise they would have someone.’

‘Life is not as simple as you make it.’

‘All it is is hanging out with someone that you like. That is not difficult.’

‘Says who? Perhaps it is the most difficult thing in the world.’

‘Alfonso,’ I said. ‘It is time for the lonely night. Let us sleep. Sleep might not be happiness but it is at least a break from this tired life.’