Book Reviews - Contemporary Fiction

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Review of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
Mistry has been lauded as a master storyteller who belongs among the 19th century greats. The American media is completely enamored with his writing calling it Dic*kensian (the forum censor thought I was swearing when I typed the author's last name, ha). Mistry does create endearing characters that gain an intimate resonance from the careful details of their longings, motives, actions and the circumstances surrounding their everyday struggles. The intertwining stories of a middle-aged Parsi widow, a college youth who’s the widow’s paying guest, and two tailors who work for the widow form the core of the novel. There are plenty of secondary characters that aid and obstruct the lives of the four main characters. The Emergency period under Indhira Gandhi’s reign and the fascist power wielded by the MISA act are the real villains in this novel. Mistry is best when personalizing the political or social edicts through his characters. This was the remarkable beauty of his earlier novel, “Such a Long Journey”.

But in “A Fine Balance”, Mistry elaborates the catastrophic reach of injustice in every corner that the reader feels like a participant in an ill-fated, masochistic video game. While the political and social corruptions are endemic to any Indian novel’s concerns, Mistry’s agenda of contempt is so unforgiving and deep-seated that his characters risk incredulity in their epic suffering. Other than catching the plague or being stoned to death, almost every other calamity is accounted for by the characters: fatal accidents, gruesome suicides, castration, forced vasectomies, hanging, lynching, slave labor, starvation, broken limbs, not to mention the lighter fare of bribes, extortion and forced abeyance on the victims. The narration barely lets up before delivering the next heartbreak. Every lucky break afforded a character is a harbinger of a future calamity that the title’s balance becomes ironic. There is no balance of joy and pain here, only a relentless parade of misery.

The Emergency period was a dark era in India’s history when the authorities were empowered with a fascist law. Historically the lower castes, and poor have suffered unthinkable atrocities under the hands of power in India. But these realities still need to be rendered in a way that doesn’t lean on melodrama which ultimately sells short the real suffering endured by many.