Book Review: A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti

Hulu recently reminded me of a date night that made me feel like I was back in graduate school. My fiancé thought I would enjoy watching the movie Kinds of Kindness in theaters. Because I fully trust him, I didn't think to read more about the movie or try to watch a trailer before agreeing to go. Then I had to orient myself as I experienced the movie through a literary lens, analyzing each of the stories in a way where I felt like I was back in my MFA.

Something this experience reminded me of was that I wrote a book review that didn't get taken anywhere, so I thought I would share it here today. For a Contemporary Fiction class, I read A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti and wrote this review.

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My Review of A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

Travel from India to America and back again in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti, a fiction short story collection that explores what the cost of happiness is in the context of culture, family, and relationships.

In the title piece of this collection, Nikhil has the desire to raise a child with his lover, Sharma, who might not be as interested in testing the fates in India during the 1980s. While Sharma is hesitant, Nikhil’s solution is to father a child between himself and Sharma’s wife, Tripti. Sharma is afraid that the country is not changing fast enough for them to share a child without repercussions, while Nikhil believes that Sharma’s marriage had been the ideal sacrifice and cover so that they could forever have a blissful relationship as carefree lovers. However, even the idea of a child alone has created a tension in their relationship that cannot be erased.

Aparna is a mother trying to take back the life that she sacrificed in “Lilavati’s Fire” so that she could keep the peace in her house between her son and her husband. Now that her son Sanjay has left the house in the name of adulthood, the cracks of her marriage are more turbulent than they were before. Her marriage was starting to taste like her husband’s cooking: “His pasta had a sour aftertaste and the potatoes were clumped in cream, but then she’d never had the right tongue for American food.” Too aware of how her role as the mother and wife in the household has changed, Aparna works on a secret project in her garage to earn the respect of her husband and to gain back her sense of identity.

Maybe this is a spoiler, but how cool would it be to be able to build your own aircraft?

Is a live-in nanny the answer to marital problems after welcoming a child? This idea is explored in “The Import,” when Raj’s mother sends him one of the household workers from India to try and restore the relationship between Raj and Bethany. Things in Raj’s marriage take a turn once he discovers that Rupa, the nanny, left behind her own child back in India. The secrets start to close in on Raj as “the stars edged closer to the lake, or so it felt, as if on this night the cosmos was aiming to suffocate him,” and he has to wonder if the cost of keeping the secret was worth his marriage.

Jonah is an American musician striving for perfection and decides to return to India one last time before his second child is born in “Prodigal Son.” While his guru’s family has become a kind of surrogate family for himself, his own talents could never quite compare to that of his guru’s son. During Jonah’s trip, his guru decides to share the news that it is time for the prodigal son to get married, Jonah is forced to evaluate his own life decisions that brought him to this point. He wanted one last chance to explore music, the thing that was making him happy, but what was it costing his pregnant wife and his newborn son back in America?

With only five pages, “Lessons with Father” is one of the shortest pieces in Chakrabarti’s collection, a story focused on the “courage to be angry at a dying man, especially if that man is [the narrator’s] father, but [they] loved him well enough to be angry with him then.” The story explores the relationship of an artist with her father before he passes. The narrator has desires of knowing their father and the culture they came from, and the only way they are able to get this information from the father before he dies is by threatening to learn from his juniors instead. They sacrificed her father’s comfort for knowledge that they will never know enough of where they came from.

There's nothing quite like family. But how do we define family these days?

There are a lot of complexities when it comes to the adoption process. These complexities are explored in “Daisy Lane,” where Shira and Harold are hoping that adoption will be the answer to their fertility issues and their desire to have a child. When they show up to pick up their son, they learn that there is someone in the adoption agency who is also attached to the baby boy. Is their desire to have a sole baby boy enough to take him away from what might be his only family? Shira’s desire to have the boy does not outweigh her desire to have him to herself.

Is love “The Narrow Bridge” that we walk on as we get older? Sarah and Eliza run a boarding house where they let Amit stay for free after meeting him at a Society for Ethical Culture meeting. Amit ends up being a relief to Eliza; his company means that someone is able to keep an eye on Sarah, who is slowly losing herself to disease and becoming a bit of a burden to Eliza. When Amit decides he wants to pursue his own life, Eliza is forced to face the truth of how she feels about Sarah. Eliza is led to believe that love simply does not last forever, that “she too was aging, and all the freedoms she imagined for herself would someday soon be whittled away, reshaped.” 

Unhappy with their situation, but unable to leave each other because of cultural pressures, “Mendel’s Wall” is a wall built by Mendel in his home with Leah. “Inseparable were the two original people,” and other than their marriage, the only other way they are connected in this home is through a hole that is not big enough to put a head through. Mendel had decided to give Leah more room in the house without asking, and as he grows uncomfortable in the situation, he finds that he is unable to bring down the walls that have been created by him and the nuances of his culture. 

I am not the person who would the construction in my own house without a supervisor.

While her son is “Searching for Elijah,” Malini is a widowed mother trying to make ends meet. As happy as Stephen makes her, Stephen’s overbearing mother is an overpowering personality in their relationship. Mrs. Cohen has convinced Malini that she needs to convert religions to stay in the relationship, and Malini is too aware that Mrs. Cohen is the one that holds the purse strings in the relationship she shares with Stephen. The process of converting has triggered Malini to think about her first husband more than usual as she throws away the culture they share so that their child can rely on a steady meal on the table. “She had loved what she had loved, and all the scars could not be hidden,” and Malini’s memories of the first person continue to haunt her as she tries to find peace in this situation.

Impersonation might be a crime, but it does not seem to be so when it comes to Indian culture. Rani impersonates Mrs. Chatterjee in “A Mother’s Work” in order to break up Shubho and Melody. While Shubho is being distracted by his sister, Rani uses the face of Mrs. Chatterjee to confront and bribe Melody to change her life. As someone who does not believe that infatuated love will last past a year, Rani has established herself as someone that never fails to break up couples, believing that Indian people should have their own culture and be married to their own people. The way that she endures her marriage is a testament to her faith: “Someday, [her husband’s] depression will lift, and they’ll observe the moon and sun together again. This is what she waits for, her patience a sword.” While she waits, she is working on breaking up other relationships.

Desperate for some control over his life, Prem allows for his mother to send him a tantric to solve his problems. “When the Tantric Came to Town,” she was able to scare some respect into Prem’s students and handle one major problem in his life. “He thought about the longing that can break a man, the kind that leaves him with what he will, in some afterlife, call shame, but which, in the moment,” led him to asking her to fix Prem’s marriage. Her solution? Kidnapping his wife Julia. Wildly, it works. While being tied up in a sheet, Julia agrees to rekindle their relationship so long as Prem’s mother is no longer allowed to live with them.

Indian weddings are fascinating to me because they are so intricate and elaborate in their beauty.

After his father passes, Chinmoy returns home so that he can be “A boy of incontrovertible brilliance, [as] his father once proclaimed.” Chinmoy is unable to find peace unless he is “In the Bug Room,” the prayer room of his childhood home. It is referred to as such because his father, as a devout pacifist as a result of their religion, would put all the bugs found in the house in that room with the window open. The bugs were welcomed guests for as long as they stayed; this is where Chinmoy goes to connect with his father, where “In his memory, the bugs had lived in partnership. Now it seemed that they kept their crumbs to themselves, as if sustenance were scarce.” A metaphor of his own guilt, anger, and lies, Chinmoy has to humble himself and confess to his mother about the few morsels he had shared.

Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, but Tara’s brother Mintu has abandoned him for a dip in ocean water near the end of “The Overnight Bus.” Afraid of commitment, Tara has convinced Mintu that he needs to abandon his wife and daughter so that they can become monks. When Mintu finds out that Tara actually just wanted to work outside of the city with no intention of ever returning, Tara reacts like a frightened animal and lashes out to Mintu, drawing blood. Mintu can no longer turn a blind eye to his brother’s ignorant desires, and Tara wakes up as his own country. As Tara doubles-down on his decision, he is forced to learn that, “...when a country is becoming itself, it’s hard to tell wrong from right,” and Mintu is already too far gone.

An enormous happiness occurs in “The Fortune of Others” as a result of sacrifices big and small. A survivor of war has managed to scrape by as a traveling merchant. One day he notices a beggar boy demanding ice cream, and ends up as a surrogate father to this boy and his dog after purchasing both vanilla and chocolate. This leads the war survivor to settle down in the next town and open a shop so that the three of them could share a home. Like ice cream melting, the war survivor’s heart has softened even as he accuses the beggar boy of “losing [his] heart”. The merchant must then make a decision that will alter the rest of their lives.

Ice cream is the small thing that makes me enormously happy as well.

With such a strong emphasis on Indian culture, it was sometimes hard to fully grasp the implications of the choices the characters were making, what they were choosing to sacrifice in the name of happiness. While there are points where Chakrabarti could suspend the weight of these moments to highlight just how significant these choices are and the impacts that will echo throughout the family unit, it is possible that he makes up for it with his ability to present us in such complex scenarios. What is the cost of happiness? “What a question to consider over a meal, what a strange question to even ask at all,” but Chakrabarti does, and he strives for the answer in his collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, if you are willing to give your time to it. 

More on Jai Chakrabarti

I first picked up A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness based on the title and the cover, and then I saw that one of his stories was included in an edition of The Best American Short Stories that I have on my bookshelf, so I am excited to get to that soon.

During a conference for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), I actually heard him speak on a panel and approached him. It was a panel about how to handle life while waiting for about ten years for publication. Chakrabarti was nothing but kind, and even signed my copy at the end of our conversation.

Here is a link to his website: https://jaichakrabarti.com/

This is my copy of A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti and a copy of The Best American Short Stories that I read for the aforementioned Contemporary Fiction class.

And here is a little bit about him from his about page on the aforementioned website:

O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. The novel was also recognized as the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was a finalist for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. 

Chakrabarti is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf), which was among The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. His short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. 

Chakrabarti’s nonfiction has been widely published in journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Chakrabarti is also a trained computer scientist. 

Born in Kolkata, India, he currently lives in New York with his family and is a faculty member at Bennington Writing Seminars.