A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Well, I have finished this gargantuan novel, and I must admit that I wish I had not embarked on it. It made me sad.
A Fine Balance is the story of four unlikely intertwined lives in Bombay. There’s Dina, a Parsee lady whose doting father dies, leaving her at the mercy of her brother, Nusswan, who get the house, money and power. There are suggestions of sexual abuse. Dina makes an unlikely “love marriage” which gives her the few happy years of her life. Her husband dies while crossing the road to buy icecream for Nusswan’s visiting children
Her school friend entrusts her beloved son Manceck to Dina, while he is in college in Bombay. Meanwhile, two “untouchable” tailors escape the violence and bullying of their village, the casual and traumatic murders of those who do not vote as the landlords tell them to, by coming to Bombay. There their hope drains away. They are evicted, the slums they sheltered in are destroyed.
Dina attempts to keep afloat in her rent-controlled apartment by signing up to produce clothes for a school friend who has an import-export business. She hires these tailors. When their houses are destroyed, they stay permanently. However, on a late evening trip, they are rounded up by the police and forcibly sterilized to keep to official quotas set by Indira Gandhi who attempted to foist Chinese style population control on India’s unruly population with results that are still the stuff of nightmare.
They return to Dina who has now lost her contract. Her lodger’s friend, Avinash who attempted to rally college students against police repressions is arrested and dies in custody. The four of them hole up together for a while. Dina’s landlord attempts to evict her, and with the help of “goondas” (India’s equivalent of the mafia) succeeds.
The novel ends with Maneck returning from the Gulf. He visits Dina who lives with her brother. She is nearly blind and is pretty much their servant. Her sister-in-law gallivants around town, while Dina does the housework. “Since you are here, why keep a servant?” her brother asks. Dina escapes from her grief in mindless domestic work for her brother. The tailors are now beggars. Avinash’s family is crushed, living with regrets,
Dina gently reproaches him for not having written. Crushed by all the sadness he sees, he steps into the path of a train.
I suppose it is a story of the invincible human spirit surviving against all odds, but I find it very sad and depressing. Life is about so much more than survival.
I long for some redeeming vision, some faith, some sense of purpose, some vision of life beyond survival. It is a very sad and depressing novel. It does paint an accurate picture of an era in India’s history which I remember well, though I was a teenager at the time. However, it was a sad and tragic era–like this book
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Hi Cassandra, Good point. I suppose I didn't realize how reading the book could help you see beggars, for instance, and realize that they had a back story, which brought them to this. It was good in "humanizing" the very poor. I did, however, find it unbearably painful.
Personally I loved the book, even in its gloom.I think Mistry intended for it to be as heart wrenching as it was.
I studied the book in college and out of the 27 novels that were in the syllabus, this was one book that really stood out & we all really connected to and one that taught us so much about life in general. I wouldn't even be exaggerating if I said that it brought us as a class together. Studying the book was an emotional roller coaster. And it was strange how since reading it, we'd all see Oms, Ishvars and Shankars on a day to day basis.