The two novellas in Shivani Sivagurunathan’s What Has Happened to Harry Pillai? take place on the fictional Coal Island in Malaysia, a setting she has used previously in a couple of other books going back a decade. Much lurks under the surface of this seemingly idyllic locale. In this latest book, each novella takes on the theme of loneliness and reinvention.
The second novella, which gives its name to the book, is a series of chapters told in alternating points of view, including that of Harry Pillai’s adult triplet daughters. Harry, originally from Sri Lanka, came to Malaysia to find happiness and fulfillment after his father died in an accident. Harry’s mother was left a widow with eleven children. But his mother could not care for her children and young Harry was sent to live with a number of different relatives. At the age of thirty, Harry married a sixteen year-old who, a year later, gave birth to triplet daughters and Harry moved the family to Coal Island. As Harry recounts, first referring to his wife and then his daughters:
Even though she seemed to like the city, she didn’t say anything when I saw it was time for us to get out of KL and land on an island. I just knew you girls were destined to live here. It’s the perfect place to get away from the rubbish and hypocrisy of the city. I will never let my girls turn into plastic dolls.
But he more or less kept them prisoners in their home, thinking to protect them from the ills of society that lurked beyond. His wife ends up locking herself in a room, not to leave for several years. As narrated by the daughter Sally, the most spiritual of the triplets:
For years now, I have been telling my sisters in so many ways that they need to be free, that Mother is our real hero. But my sisters are too dumb. Maybe that’s why Mother chose me to speak to on the day of her migration to the room by the kitchen toilet. Quietly, Mother had told me, “I will still be here but I also won’t be here. The madman is trying to take even my breathing. He is your father so you are tied to him by blood. I don’t owe him anything.”
The other sisters, Betty and Penny, date unsavory men behind their controlling father’s back, while Sally finds acceptance with a tribal family in the jungle. For all his attempts to give his family and himself a better life on the island, Harry remains as lonely as ever.

This same loneliness resonates in “Master Your Life”, the first novella, which consists of one long chapter that centers around a woman named Debbie Chow, also seeking a cure for her loneliness. She joins a cult on the island. Her late father was the architect of the house occupied by the cult leader and his six closest disciples.
It won’t exactly be gleaming, but it will beckon you in some way. It may very well be the words Master Your Life that sit like red candles on a birthday cake on top of the low single-storey sage-green building. Or perhaps, it will be the building itself, designed by a gifted and tragic architect, Forester Chow, and commissioned by one Sujan Rao who appeared on the island in 1983 on an afternoon slick with white light, a million US dollars his first deposit at the BB Bank in town the clerk later announced. Within a couple of days into his arrival, Sujan Rao had asked a nodding Forester Chow for “An establishment, you understand Mr. Chow? A man reaches a point in his life when he must manifest his realisations and share them with the world.”
Forester later takes his own life and leaves behind his daughter, Debbie. But tragedy will strike twice and Debbie’s son takes his own life—also drowning just as his grandfather had—when he’s twenty-five years old. Debbie is all alone, without parents, her son, or Desmond, the father of her son who left her twenty-five years earlier because he didn’t want to be a father. But when Desmond returns to Coal Island as a follower of Master Your Life, Debbie follows and hopes to find new meaning in her life. As in the other novella, happiness at Master Your Life is an illusion.
You must be logged in to post a comment.