Almost Happy: 12 Short Stories and Personal Essays

By Ella Voss

The modern notion of happiness – a state of constant joy when ticking off the shopping list of life, including marriage, children and a career – is a tricky one: Either it is unattainable, or it does not lead to the expected fulfilment. Instead, we need to make sense of our life journey on our own terms. And at its crossroads we feel most alive and encounter our true selves. Rather than mourning the lover we did not kiss or the path we did not take, this book celebrates the Almost Happy of such encounters.

In 12 short stories accompanied by personal essays, Ella Voss takes us on a wild journey of soul-searching. She makes us walk beside a panther in New York and encounter Gaudí in Barcelona. Her journey takes us from India to Paris to Bali, to the deepest abyss of the human soul and back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146995

Ella Voss

Ella Voss is an author of literary fiction based in Munich. After having lived in Geneva, London and Chennai, her creative soul speaks English. Her first novel Like a Fox to a Swallow (2021) was long-listed for the Devon & Cornwall International Novel Prize. When not writing, she can be found cooking for her friends or running with her greyhound in the English Garden.

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Contents

Prologue

Part I:  Oh Youth

1  The Saints of Chennai

2  Covid-24

3  The Dove in the Attic

Part II:  Almost Happy

4  Miyazaki and the Panther

5  Shelter

6  The Sky at Her Feet

7  Potty Love

Part III:  Roots

8  Winter Walkers

9  Sugar and Ice

10  The Germanic Nights

Part IV:  Breaking Free

11  The Last Days of Gaudí

12  Of All Things, It Is First and Foremost a Song

Epilogue  The Lovers

Part V:  Story Notes

1  The Saints of Chennai – or the glory of the What-If moment

2  Covid-24 – the post-pandemic brave new world

3  The Dove in the Attic – where do stories come from?

4  Miyazaki and the Panther – on spiritual extensions in storytelling

5  Shelter – or the curse of opportunity

6  The Sky at Her Feet – empowering a character by elements of nature

7  Potty Love – children are the best storytellers

8  Winter Walkers – we need connection, we desire independence

9  Sugar and Ice – on authenticity and grieving

10  The Germanic Nights – or rather, The Germanic Silence

11  The Last Days of Gaudí – how art can save a life

12  Of All Things, It Is First and Foremost a Song – keep it simple, keep it happy

Epilogue  The Lovers

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Happy people don’t write books!’ is a cliché authors often hear in their creative life. The artistic urge is believed to stem from a deep inner unrest, a suffering that wants to come out and be shared with the world.1 So, do you, dear reader, need to worry about me, the author, as you hold my second book in your hands? Am I truly only Almost Happy?

The modern notion of happiness, in the absence of a religious or spiritual framework, boils down to a kind of ‘having everything’, which shall lead to a state of constant lightness, smiles your only facial expression. A state which can best be achieved by ticking off what I call ‘the shopping list of life’. As a woman, big boxes to be ticked include: meeting the love of your life (early on; the best fruit goes first), marriage (timely, but maybe not before you turn thirty), cute children (at least three; whenever you can squeeze one in) and/or a career (a stellar one if you have no kids, because it still has a whiff of Plan B).

But life is not always as predictable as the list may suggest. Some ingredients might be unattainable: the right partner is not in reach or your body refuses to get pregnant. Or the listed items are simply not suitable for you: the connection you seek is not marriage, pursuing a professional career does not lead to the expected fulfilment. Yet if we can’t tick off the list, we are led to believe that life has failed us. Or even worse: that we failed.

Almost Happy is a collection of stories which I wrote over ten years, during my soul-searching thirties. During this decade, I ticked none of the big boxes. Some I missed by choice; others were simply not on the cards. The shopping list to happiness did not get any shorter. There certainly was a lot of coming to terms with emotions such as grief, loss and a sense of social isolation. But more so, it was a magical time. Soaked up with empowering, life-changing encounters, discoveries of mind-blowingly beautiful places and deep human connections. It was Sigmund Freud who said: ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.’ And I can only agree. It was at the crossroads of my journey where I felt most alive, encountered my true self and recalibrated to my very own path.

Happiness, or a certain peace of mind, is a state we all strive for, and I am certainly no exception. Your thirties are also a decade where you need to make peace with the person you have become. You need to find a way to soothe all the little demons that whisper What if? in your ear. For me, a fulfilled life is much about having a good story to tell, and to feel inspired enough to tell it. It was also in my early thirties that I started writing, and for that alone I will be eternally grateful. So rather than mourning the lover we did not kiss or the child we never had, rather than brooding over a box we never ticked, this book celebrates all the magical Almost Happy encounters of our lives. They deserve celebrating, as they are as much an essential part of our personal journeys, and they make us who we are.

As the stories in this book are fictional and yet very personal to me, I have added a short personal essay to each story – and I hope you enjoy reading those as well. And please connect with the author, whenever you feel like. I’d love to hear your Almost Happy thoughts!

Ella Voss

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1 Elizabeth Gilbert has written an entire book on unravelling that myth. I much recommend reading Big Magic (published in 2015 by Riverhead Books) for more positive creativity.

Part I:

Oh Youth

1

The Saints of Chennai

How many miles to Babylon?

Three score miles and ten –

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes and back again –

If your feet are nimble and light

You can get there by candlelight.

18th-century nursery rhyme, author unknown

In my early thirties, after a horrid break-up on New Year’s Eve, I felt a strong urge to escape my life back home. And like many Westerners in crisis, I was drawn to exotic India, fuelled by books, documentaries and incense sticks. I daydreamed about wandering amidst its condensed presence of life, love, dirt, divinity and death, which seemed most suited to wipe away the banality of my own life. After sending out job application after job application, I finally got an offer to intern as a paralegal at the Chamber of Commerce in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It was only for a year and almost unpaid, but I could not wait to finally box up this place full of photographs and plates which had been bought while holding hands – and moved to India.

The very first person I met at the airport was Ryan, a British national like me, who had been with the Chamber for the past year. I had barely set foot on these hot and humid grounds and already I felt the decree of fate when I shook his hand. We were going to stay in the same place, so it was his task to pick me up from the airport.

It turned out that not only did Ryan know everything about managing life as a foreigner in Chennai, and was therefore the best possible guide for a rookie like me, but he was also deeply in love with it. I don’t know if I would ever have come to love this place as much if I had not watched him love it. Despite all my longing for this place, in the first days, the organic bustling of Indian life was more than I could take. I thought I was prepared and then I was not.

The Chambers always arranged accommodation for its expat staff. A former director owned an old colonial-style villa and sublet the rooms on the otherwise empty second floor. So Ryan and I lived in adjacent bedrooms, sharing a kitchen and a wonderful terrace in the back. The villa was in Adyar, near the beach, an upper-middle-class quarter and heaven in Indian residential terms. The Chambers therefore deemed it safe to place us there, and safe it was. But it was by no means a quarter where foreigners or tourists were a common sight. I quickly found that there were hardly any ‘white people’ in the whole of Chennai – and none of them seemed to live in Adyar. At first, that made me a little nervous. Then it made me a ridiculous kind of proud. Proud to live where none had lived before, so to speak. It also increased my sense of adventure, as I expected that after all the experience of humiliation during the Commonwealth era that India had gone through, white people would not exactly be welcome. But it was quite the opposite. The Tamil people of Chennai were crazy about white skin. And as a pale British woman with reddish hair, pale skin was my jam. I began to feel like a pop star, walking in the street with every bystander raising their smartphones to take a picture.

To be fair, Ryan turned a few heads as well. Tall, a well-trained body, high cheekbones and intense blue eyes. He knew how to dress that body too and would never leave the house without Ray-Ban glasses. But people are not so much impressed by clothes as by the attitude they are worn with. And he always carried himself in a relaxed, composed manner, so confident, and totally at ease with how things evolved around him. Everybody loved Ryan. Like literally everybody. In the office, we had three boys taking care of the place. Their faces would light up as soon as Ryan entered the building in the morning. They would jump to their feet and flock to him like children around an ice cream vendor. They would ask him how he was, carry his bag the 3 metres from the door to his desk, and spend the whole day thinking up all kinds of tasks to please him. One day, he told them that he had bought a piece of antique furniture and was trying to figure out how to ship it home. It was like the sun would never go down again when they were given the task of organising the shipping, trying to beat each other in being useful. Although the only thing that is more popular in Chennai than a white man is a white girl, I never stood a chance against Ryan.

It was the same wherever we went. At the lunch place near our office, the waiters awoke from their state of apathy in the midday heat, ready to serve, yearning to be loved by the handsome white man. In the small shops in our neighbourhood, everyone would be up on their feet the very instant he appeared in the door frame, hoping they would have the right thing on the shelf and therefore matter to him, become his friend.

In the first weeks, it seemed disgraceful to me, that sudden desire to serve because a white man entered the room. But you don’t wipe away centuries of servitude overnight. And also, Ryan was a special case. He earned their respect. He treated them equally respectfully, rewarded them with an honest friendship, shook hands with everybody and with true commitment. He remembered all their faces and always took time to talk and share stories, the notorious Tamil head-wiggle coming by now quite naturally, as a sign of honest respect. He had understood that in this world the relationship came first, then perhaps the business.

What makes daily life challenging for a Westerner in Chennai is that on arrival, you have no such relationships. You are not a family friend of a shop owner, and no one announces your arrival and recommends you as a trustworthy person. People will not necessarily tend to you just for walking into a random shop. He respected that logic, took the time to build relationships, and had the rare talent to see them in a different way than most Western people did. Acknowledged them for who they were, respected all their crafts and talents without any condescendence. When his FOSSIL watch stopped running one day, we went to that dark and dirty street stall that was apparently the horlogère of our quarter. All the spare parts of all sorts of clocks were flying around in his stall, tiny screws and cogs assorted in piles and in a back corner a table with a dim lamp and magnifying glass to put the pieces together. Every other Westerner I knew would never have entrusted his watch to such a place. At the most, they would have taken a picture to show their friends. But he did; he was talking to a craftsman of honour that would not let a neighbour down. And if the man had no such honour in him until yesterday, he now was burning not to disappoint the man. We picked up the watch the next day in perfect shape, the old man beaming with pride.

Ryan also entered into a week-long discussion with the guy on the pavement in our street who sold boxes of pirated DVDs. He explained to him how he could make considerably more money with a rental system. He finally got him to start it and benefitted by being able to watch a different movie every night. He did not just see a sleazy copyright infringer but the talented future businessman that started off with some poor DVDs.

For dinner after work, we regularly ate at a stand on the corner where the rickshaw drivers picked up their meals. Lonely Planet highly discouraged eating at such places but Ryan simply figured they had the best naan bread and passed on the compliment to the chef. He never worried that those blisters on his hand might be something contagious or was repulsed by his unbelievably dirty clothes. And we were treated like his best customers; never would we get a bad piece. Ryan was not a light-hearted idiot or trying to prove a point, he simply knew what he was doing and saw what he saw. Unaware of how rare this attitude was over here, and of how it was as fascinating for me as it was for them.

*

The best chance to meet other expats was at evening receptions at the different chambers, embassies, the Goethe Institut or Alliance Française. Compared to its population of about 13 million people, Chennai hosted only a handful of foreigners. It was always the same crowd gathering, and those receptions were all the social life these people had during their stay. Most of these evenings passed by with an endless series of complaints about the dirt in the streets, how badly organised everything was, how dangerous the traffic was, how difficult it was to get good food without falling sick, how strange the people were, especially in the shops, and how this meant that it would take a long time for India to catch up with China in terms of infrastructure, and so forth. Most of them were quite tired of the city, not to say completely exhausted and counting their days to go home.

Ryan stayed away from all such events. He found them more exhausting than the whole of India put together. All these people, appreciating so little what he so dearly loved. And so did I after a few weeks. I did not need their company. I had Ryan to make this place home.

While everybody loved Ryan, Ryan only loved his wife, Kate. In just the way a wife should be loved. He thought of her often during the day. When he saw exciting or beautiful things, one of his first comments would be: ‘I have to tell Kate about this…’

He spoke highly about her in front of everyone, never took off his ring, and often skipped parties or outings because he had a Skype date with her. And I didn’t mind. I was happy the way it was. I had left quite a mess at home and wanted India to be a happy place for me; I wanted peace under my own roof. No silly temptations, cheating husbands, sex leading to nowhere but heartbreak and tears. And he was the finest guy for that. He was above temptation. In the first days, when I had just discovered what a great asset he was in establishing connections with local groceries or providers of gallons of drinking water, I suggested he could tell these people that I was his wife. The idea being that they would treat me like a queen ever after, not wanting to fall into disgrace with him. But the answer was no, an immediate and clear no. For a moment, I was even scared I might now have fallen into disgrace, having suggested using the holy institution of marriage for my own shallow shopping purposes.

But although he radiated a confidence that suggested he did not need anybody in this world, he did seem to enjoy my company. He never said so, but over the next weeks we became inseparable. We went on exploration tours together each weekend; we explored all the quarters of Chennai by foot as far as the traffic would allow, from rich neighbourhoods to poor. Ryan had the talent to cross even the wildest six-lane street, with traffic for twelve, and I would hold on to his shirt and follow blindly, like a little duckling follows his mother. His nature allowed us to dive into slums and feel safe between the huts, surrounded by dogs, goats and crowds of little children who were dying to see the pictures on our camera. We followed a river that carried so much colourful foam from a nearby factory that one could not see to the other side; we survived a stampede at a saree sale in T-Nagar, and sneaked into a Tamil wedding reception, only to see what it is like.

Whenever we needed a break from the city hustle, we bought a day pass for one of the beach resorts off the borders of Chennai. The pool at the beach club was basically the only chance to get some exercise; sports were not really happening in Chennai. There might be cultural reasons, but the climate was certainly not encouraging either. We had landed in the hottest season of the year and 40 degrees by day and 37 degrees by night were nothing noteworthy. And, of course, Ryan loved to exercise. That body was a gift from the gods, but it was no miracle either.

During the week, after dinner, we often sat on our terrace under the crowns of the garden’s palm trees and talked and talked about everything and nothing. We sat for hours, even if the night was of a sticky, humid kind, and full of mosquitos. We surrounded our two chairs with a circle of anti-mosquito candles and placed one next to our feet, simply not to be eaten alive. The terrace had an ancient vibe, with its Romanesque figures flanking the railing and the uneven stone tiles full of cracks. Wildlife was growing out of them. In one corner it even had a little tree, and no one cared that its roots cracked the tiles. Its dimensions were of a regal generosity; only a small corner of it was taken by our chairs and the candles. A truly beautiful place, for me, in a truly Indian way. Everything here carried its mortality on its face, reminding us that life never stops turning, that nothing lasts forever, but nevertheless, there is true beauty in every corner, reminding you why it is also worth it. The terrace became my favourite spot in town. If I travel through my memories, to this day it is one of my favourite spots in the world.

Work was scarce and the nights were long, so we had all the time in the world to discuss politics, books, philosophy and ask each other endless questions about our lives. And I was reminded that this is what real luxury is all about. Having the time to tell someone dear all there is to your life and to listen to all there is to his. Usually, you can only do that when you’re a kid on a sleepover, or on a summer break at high school, or perhaps as a student. People say you don’t make any true friends after thirty. I guess the only reason for that is that most people don’t have the time after thirty. But we did. I learnt what it is like for a little boy of ten when his parents divorce after endless fights. I also learnt how it can be possible to still believe in love and have a good relationship with both parents many years later. And how a wife and a true friend can become the backbone of an entire life. I also talked about my break-up, the whole story from beginning to end. And, listening to myself, even I found it was finally wearing out. It sounded so boring and pointless, whining for an unhappy past to come back, not worthy to fill the air between us on a terrace night.

And another thing we learnt at night: sleeping is all about air conditioning and air conditioning is all about stable power supply. The latter we clearly did not have. Back home, I used to think that people complaining about not sleeping well because of the summer heat were real fuss-makers. You don’t feel like jogging because of the heat, okay, I can see that. You don’t feel like cooking because of the heat, also okay. But sleeping? Please. Here, I learnt that above a certain temperature, the human body simply refuses to power down. It was an old building; the walls were not insulated or anything. After a power cut, with the air conditioning off, the temperature rose relentlessly. After a few minutes, we were both awake. We had figured out that the coolest part of the flat during these emergencies was the back of the kitchen. The kitchen had a back part made up entirely of tile and designed to hang laundry. On the ground, the tiles always seemed close to being cool. Every other night, when a power cut had woken us from our sleep, we would sit there on the ground with a candle and two bottles of beer between us, having surrendered to our fate, waiting for the air conditioning to come back on. From those countless nights, I remember in particular this one and I am sure he does as well:

We were sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning against the wall, too sleepy to talk at 3 am. He sat with his bare back against the tiles, and I was wearing a black top and shorts, covering up only as much skin as necessary. My shoulders made a kissing sound