
Celina Baljeet Basra is a writer, curator and art historian who has lived in Berlin since 2006. She’s a founder of the curatorial collective The Department of Love, and has been awarded a range of residencies and research stipends. Last year, she arrived impressively in the world of fiction by publishing her debut novel Happy to widespread acclaim.
This beautiful, innovative, thought-provoking novel takes on the urgent social theme of migrant labour in contemporary Europe. It follows its sensitive, film-loving protagonist Happy from post-agricultural Punjab to the kitchens and vegetable farms of Italy. To narrate his journey, Basra adopts a radically fragmented structure that includes fictional interviews, cover letters, monologues delivered by vegetables and other inanimate objects, and various scenes totally imagined by Happy. We sat down with Basra to discuss her novel, which celebrated its paperback release last month.
Let’s start at the beginning. Where did your protagonist, Happy, come from?
Happy is a young Punjabi who comes to Italy for work undocumented. He ends up working in the back of a restaurant kitchen and then on a radish farm. The people and workplaces he encounters there comprise the main part of the book, but we also encounter Happy beforehand – so we see his life in Punjab, his family and his former workplace, an amusement park. It’s a novel about work, and about migration, and about the specific community of Punjabis in Italy, which has been significant since the 1990s.
What got me interested in the subject was a personal story. In my extended family on my father’s side, there were quite a few friends and uncles who went to Italy for work. The story that sparked Happy – which I started thinking about some 20 years ago, at age 16 – was when an uncle of mine who worked as a shepherd in Italy died, and the exact causes were never determined. My father had to go and retrieve the body.
Maybe everyone has incidents in their childhood where something happens and you could never get to the bottom of it. An entry point emerged, for me, through art. I worked as a curator, I worked with artists in Berlin, and I studied art history, so I encountered projects that looked at this specific community of Sikhs working in the Italian food industry. Then I started to learn more and more. It has been percolating for a while.
“Before I came to Europe,” Happy tells us, “I dreamt of Europe.” What are Happy’s dreams, and what sort of reality does he find instead?
Happy doesn’t only dream of Europe – he encounters a figure, a protagonist by the name of Europe, who I always thought of as the European HR manager. She used to have a lot of power, but doesn’t have as much now, and so she’s struggling with her self-image. And it’s she that extends this invitation to Happy. At the core of the book lies the firm belief in human mobility as a social right. We think we know why people come to Europe, even if the motivations are manifold.
Some come to Europe fleeing from an immediate threat to their lives, seeking security and peace. Others might be facing dreary working conditions in their local communities, like the dying farming industry of northern India, in Happy’s case. And then there are these agents who offer the promise of a better life, more money, money to send back to your family. For Happy, it’s also about self-actualisation. He wants to be an artist; he wants to write and act and do all of these things he sees happening elsewhere in Europe.
I too strongly argue for escapism, if it means you can survive.
Why did you choose this particular form for the novel? It might have been easier to write about migrant labour using conventional bleak social realism – rather than, you know, a fragmentary structure with monologues by radishes and references to French New Wave cinema…
I know. For a long time, I tried to write that other novel. I tried out different voices; I tried darker, more elegiac styles, especially when I was younger, depending on what I was reading at the time. And I have all these old drafts saved on my hard drive. I only found my way into this novel after I quit my full-time job.
I rather quickly came up with the novel’s prologue, which is a letter of application for some other job written by Happy from the radish farm he works at. From then on, it came fast and furious.I felt that I’d found a solution for the issues I had been grappling with – how to write a story that might have happened close to me but that isn’t mine to tell – by writing in this scattered way, because I think some stories can best be told in a scattered way.
Happy never gives the impression that this is the one single truth about Punjabi migration to Italy; it’s just one of many. The character Happy arrived with that letter of application. And I chose this format because I was interested in how we advertise ourselves, how we lie and how we fabricate – we all do it all the time. What came next, before anything else, was the voices of the objects. It felt a bit like unpacking Happy’s bag, which he takes with him and contains all his most essential items. A kind of strange archive.

Happy has a lively imagination and a deep urge to narrate – not just in that letter, but he works on screenplays, makes videos and gives interviews to fantasy television crews. The world of work, by contrast, seeks to dehumanise him at every turn…
Yes, for sure. People might look at Happy and say he’s delusional. And he doesn’t look at the reality that surrounds him – he makes a case for escapism over and over again, a case for painting reality the way that he sees it. I too strongly argue for escapism, if it means you can survive. You can get told as a child that you read too much, that you’re not living in the real world – but if that’s your coping mechanism, that’s okay!
But there comes a moment when Happy hits his breaking point, at the radish farm. We can all relate to that, I think, where if you try to work creatively but then you work at your day job too much, you are not quite able to create anymore. For Happy, it’s particularly bleak because he has no space or time for himself. And there is a moment when he can’t keep believing that things will come good if you are being good yourself.
Happy’s favourite filmmaker is Jean-Luc Godard, who once quipped that “politics is a travelling shot”. Are the novel’s references to him just a curious thing about Happy, or are they a clue to your aesthetic project? One might say the novel, like a Godard film, is full of jump-cuts, intertextual referentiality…
Of course, it’s all over the novel (laughs). And also Godard’s interest in work! There are so many things about Godard that spoke to me, that speak to Happy, that speak to anyone who might not have that much material at hand but who still wants to create with it. And I thought this was maybe a universal thought, how these things just fall into our laps when we are young and impressionable – we find a certain book or movie and it becomes out whole identity, but it can all be so accidental and random.
For me, when I was young, it was just whatever I found in my grandmother’s attic or at the public library. Then you become obsessed with it. And you say, “This is how art is supposed to be!” You know nothing, but you think you know everything. That’s also beautiful.
If I buy this radish at Lidl, something connects me to the worker who harvested it with his hands.
How did you research the migrant labour storyline?
There were a few sides to that. I had that personal experience and the stories in my family. And then, when I came to Berlin to study art history, I saw a lot of research and working methods that artists were using to talk about food justice. There are a lot of articles you can read, especially about Sikhs in northern Italy, and there are lots of statistics.
But it’s so closed-off and opaque – and actually dangerous, because of the mafia – that you can’t enter these places yourself without the appropriate skill set. So I tried to tap into the knowledge of people who had. I learned that while there are all these different substructures determining that, say, Nepali people are in the kitchens and Romanian workers get assigned to the radish farms, one constant is that Italy’s Grana Padano industry is almost entirely worked by Sikhs.
Like the German asparagus harvest, it’s absolutely dependent on foreign labour – and a lot of Sikhs have experience working with cows. So patterns like these emerged. One nice thing was when I learned about a cooperative of farmers from Mali who had escaped these exploitative working conditions and started their own thing, selling to markets in Rome. It’s not really possible to leave these structures, but somehow they had.
One phrase that gets repeated in the novel is, “Imagine if this was contagious.” What does that mean here – is it a slogan about human interconnectivity, or a plea for how political literature can make people’s experiences cross-infect each other?
I love your interpretations, because I think both are true. We can, of course, think about the immediate political context where it first arises in the novel – the uprising being planned by one of Happy’s coworkers. But then of course there’s the visceral connectivity. The radish we get on our artisanal sandwiches at nice Berlin bakeries actually connects us all: it’s not just something we put in our apartment, it’s something that we eat, we ingest, we gain power from.
And that’s why it’s so important that all these objects can speak in this novel – and also the food, and the tree, and all of the things that we touch and that touch us, things that carry something, maybe a memory. This is a binding factor. If I buy this radish at Lidl, something connects me to the worker who harvested it with his hands. Imagine if this was contagious!
What are you going to publish next?
I’m working on a second novel and a collection of short stories. The novel will quite heavily feature Berlin, this place where I’ve lived for so long.
- Happy is available now in paperback from Astra House (US) and Hachette (UK).