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 i

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.

Even though Mistry seldom goes back to India literally these days, he does persist in taking literary journeys. Asked if this dependence on memory rather than reality causes problems in his fictional re-creation of India, Mistry explained: "Some people might say it's arrogant of me not to live there and assume that I know everything from a visit every five or six years. But I'm confident that I do know. It's memory. Well- I suppose that when one says memory, it's memory plus imagination, which creates a new memory. When I don't have that, I will not write about it. I have promised myself that" (Smith, 65).

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.

Mistry bristles when accused of not reporting Bombay accurately. In a newspaper article that appears on the Internet, which unfortunately provides neither a date nor a source, Mistry replies to criticism leveled by Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist writer, during a BBC-TV panel discussion before the 1996 Booker Prize award ceremony. A Fine Balance, which had just received the Commonwealth Writers Best Book prize, had made the six-book shortlist for the Booker Prize; but that did not impress Greer, who grimaced and said: "I hate this book. I absolutely hate it. . . . I just don't recognize this dismal, dreary city. It's a Canadian book about India. What could be worse? What could be more terrible?" She went on to explain that she had spent four months teaching in a Bombay women's college and she had not witnessed the squalor and misery that Mistry's novel recounts, adding that the city "was so much less terrible than I had feared." In reply to Greer's criticism, Mistry retorted: "She wants to say that those four months teaching the daughters of high society put her in a better position to judge India than I am in, having grown up there and spent 23 years before emigrating? . . . If she wanted to make the case that she did not like the book there were far better ways to do it than to say something so, so . . . I said asinine already? So brainless, really." I would defend Mistry, because I have been to Bombay a couple of times and find his descriptions on target, just as Anita Desai's were in Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). Both writers catch the city's squalid side, the poverty, disorder, filth and ruin, the chaos, but at the same time engage its immense vitality and diversity.

Handling such a risky subject as religious beliefs and practices, in particular by a member of the Parsi commun

Some topics in this essay:
Fine Balance, Firozsha Baag, Swimming Lessons, Bombay Parsis, Geoff Hancock, Congress Party, Hilary Mantel, East Pakistan, Indira Gandhi's, Goriot Holding, fine balance, firozsha baag, parsi community, east pakistan, swimming lessons, mistry's fiction, booker prize, tales firozsha baag, shortlist booker, immigrant experience, born india, gandhi congress party, shortlist booker prize, indira gandhi congress, people east pakistan,