Daily Times

A Fine Balance

By Rohinton Mistry

McClelland and Stewart; Pp 614

“Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself, perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured, this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.” — Honore de Balzac, Le Pere Goriot.

Yet, words written centuries ago by Balzac echo true when read in the context with this book. The same emotion leaves you reeling at the end of Mistry’s story. He takes you into his world with an ingenuity that is unrelenting, notwithstanding its effect on you. The many awards for almost all his books (Such a Long Journey, Family Matters) bear testimony to his wholehearted acceptance by not merely his readers but also his reviewers. A Fine Balance is a composite of all he observed, witnessed, experienced, loved, loathed and witnessed second-hand in India in the 1950s going into the 1970s. The mighty India — his motherland — seems to both fascinate and repulse him, providing him with an expansive, larger than life, magnificent canvas, where the colours are provided through the lives of the ordinary man. Mistry with his master strokes connects the lives of four individuals, creating a whole which is so fragmented and discoloured by the reality — of the characters playing guest roles, of events tearing their lives apart, of the ties of friendship and brotherhood, of the beauty of small good deeds, of the enormity of human baseness — that is both heartbreakingly moving and mind-bogglingly horrific. It is not sensationalism. In fact, he just describes. He is deadpan most of the time; the lives of his characters unfold their own tragedies, sucking you in. They just live and he just tells you how it is. The words he uses are not there to strengthen his narration, they are just there to act as props to his sense-defying, seemingly improbable but unvarnished renderings of events which make Dina, Maneck, Ishvar and Om — the four protagonists — come straight out of a Greek tragedy where the manipulating gods play games on their beings and where someone always seems to be orchestrating the motions of ordinary mortals. Unfalteringly, Mistry maintains his tautness of description with utmost simplicity, thus becoming a genius minimalist. The great is painted with the mundane.

It is a story of the untouchables in some godforsaken village by a river somewhere in India. There is the eternal chain of caste where misdeeds are miniscule but the retribution instant and inhumanly exaggerated. The ethos of the caste system defiles the lives of the poor Shudras relentlessly, mercilessly and endlessly. The order of the universe depended on the proper segregation of castes, the negation of which would unleash the darkness of Kalyug on the living. The Brahmins believing and practising this primitive and unnatural branch of Hinduism leaves no stone unturned to makes the lives of the already wretched a testament of hell on earth. The empty promises of the ruling party Congress that all caste prejudices permeating the thoughts, words and deeds would be expunged seem comical: the age-old customs defy the transient power of governments that come and go; the policies fail; the Brahmin torture and even slay; the untouchable suffers the stigma of his insignificance; and the perfect cosmic order reigns supreme.

It is the story of innumerable faceless people who form the ugly underbelly of Mumbai — the homeless, the pavement dwellers, the jobless, the beggars, the limbless, the prostitutes, the dipsomaniacs, the crazy, the criminals, the hopeless, and the spiritually comatose. They are brutally crushed time and again, yet they keep mushrooming, as if the city is their daemon and no exorcism would ever free their possessed existence of their fates.

It is a story of a corrupt government where the ruler is deemed guilty of electoral malpractice, yet she — the ‘great’ lady in white — stands defiant. The opposition is jailed, the voices of dissent are silenced and the newspapers are censored. The protestors are bullied and the conscientious are labelled traitors. The government imposes an Emergency, thus legitimising its wrongs and turning the entire system of accountability on its head.

It is a story of government policies somersaulting into a blind abyss because of the licence to ‘kill’ given to the unworthy. The government officials torture and weaken the already emaciated lives of the poor. To carry out the beautification of Mumbai, where the major part of the story takes place, thousands of people are literally bulldozed out of their dilapidated shacks and skimpy tents. Millions of people who flock to the big city by the sea, hypnotised by the lures of the urban success stories fail to take one simple fact into account: the ranks of the unemployed always exponentially outnumber the jobs. They keep coming while the geography remains unaltered. Slums crop up everywhere thus ‘polluting’ the beauty of the city.

It is the story of India’s common man learning the great joys of family planning forcibly, without mercy. Some are given a little monetary or other compensation, but most of them are made to give up their ability to procreate. While the rich goes unaffected by the policy, the ordinary person is given no choice. The scant medical attention given to them is barbaric, and the countless lives annihilated through sterilisation merely become worthless statistics for the officials in charge.

Ultimately, it is the story of the inevitability of events and the permanence of change. It is also the story of the unbreakable human spirit, the invincible soul, the beauty of emotions, the splendor of love, the ties of blood, the common threads of humanity, the bonds of friendship, and the will to survive. The characters live their lives in the backdrop of bleakness. Their lives are so devoid of life that at times it seems miraculous how they go on living. For some, the enormity of the tragedy denotes the suspension of belief in the good, in the better tomorrow. The macabre truth is unbearable to them and they crumble. The whimsical and fragile act of balance remains unattainable to them, and they silently, and sometimes noisily, perish. Yet, others defying all accepted logic, master the art of a fine balance — between pain and happiness, despair and hope, light and darkness, escapism and pragmatism, life and death — and survive.

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com