Seeking and Maintaining Balance: Rohinton Mistry

Abstract: Balance is an important quality in the fiction of Rohinton Mistry, as suggested by the title of his second novel, 'A Fine Balance.' Mistry was born in India, a member of the Parsi community, and immigrated to Canada in 1975. Mistry's short story collection 'Tales from Firozsha Baag' and his two novels, 'Such a Long Journey' and 'A FIne Balance' focus on the Parsi community in India rather than on the immigrant experience. The Parsis and India become metaphors for the human experience in Mistry's fiction.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Oklahoma

The title of Rohinton Mistry's second novel, A Fine Balance, suggests a worthwhile way to explore his fiction. Even Mistry's biography constitutes a kind of balancing act. Born in India in 1952, he grew up in Bombay and received a degree from the University of Bombay in mathematics and economics. In 1975 he immigrated to Canada, working in a bank to support himself while studying English and philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he received a second bachelor's degree in 1984. Although an immigrant, an outsider in Canadian society, Mistry already understood this condition, for in I

This summary merely skims over the agony these haunting characters endure: humiliation in every form possible, torment in a government-run work camp, torture, violation of human decency, bitter disappointment and disillusionment-to list but a few trials. Neither does it do justice to the variety of supporting characters: ranging from Dina's bigoted brother, who represents a particular social class in India; to the Beggarmaster, who shares the secrets of street life; to the mysterious proofreader, who serves as the novel's philosopher. A summary also fails to capture the flawless rendering of the Indian scene, especially Bombay. One reviewer calls the novel "a distinguished addition to the mythologizing of Bombay" (Gurnah, 22).

While some readers interpreted the collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," as a forerunner to future fiction about the immigrant experience, their expectations fell short when Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, appeared in 1991. This complex tale of corruption during Indira Gandhi's years in office returns once more to the Bombay Parsi community. For a debut novel, it brought the author rare attention, first as a winner of the Governor-General's Award of Canada and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, then as an entry on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. He published his second novel, A Fine Balance, in 1995. It again reached the shortlist for the Booker Prize and received various awards. Like its predecessor, A Fine Balance treats India both kindly and harshly. Set in the mid-1970s during Mrs. Gandhi's declaration of a state of internal emergency, the book turns first toward the Parsi community in an unidentified city by the sea that resembles Bombay, but its plot opens up to embrace other characters and to expand the settings.

Such a Long Journey. "But where?" Gustad Noble, the novel's central character, asks. "Where does not matter, sir," is the reply. "In a world where roadside latrines become temples and shrines, and temples and shrines become dust and ruin, does it matter where?" (338). Where and why serve as the motifs of Such a Long Journey, a novel about how public corruption in all its guises seeps into every crevice of experience and leaves the individual along with his community defenseless and despairing.

Some of the satire directed toward Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party turns less than subtle. As well, the chaotic political, social, and economic conditions in India receive treatment tinged with bitterness. At times the censure is stated directly and is less effective-in fact mars the text-than when the ideas issue from the action and the dialogue in a natural way. Most often, though, the social message blends into the narrative structure. Of course, reading the novel nearly thirty years after these historical events and after so many other such events have taken place around the world allows us instinctively to put them into perspective, to repeat with Gustad, "Lot of meanness and sadness in the world."

Just as he did in Such a Long Journey, Mistry spends time in this novel castigating Indira Gandhi and her cohorts. One passage draws a brutal picture of the prime minister addressing a rally and incorporates the shallowness, emptiness, delusion, and self-serving attitudes Mistry sees as characterizing both Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress Party, which had ruled India almost continuously since independence. Even Mrs. Gandhi's ordering of the attack on the Sikhs' Golden Temple plays a prominent role. Although such forays into open condemnation are potent, the novel is at its best when the fictionalized facts of the characters' lives speak for themselves.

Broad in its range, powerful in its execution, numbing in its reality, A Fine Balance asks what Hilary Mantel calls an "age-old" question: "In the face of the world's beauty, in the face of the self-evident fact of altruism, how can atrocious conduct occur, how can hideous beliefs survive? The question is age-old, an

Some topics in this essay:
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