A Fine Balance: A Review

‘A Fine Balance’ is the first book of Rohinton Mistry’s that I read. The blurb itself, promising a saga of the life and times during the Emergency in India, served as reason enough for me to try out this author whose works had hitherto been unknown to me. Set in one of the more turbulent epochs of post-independent India-the 1970’s-the very choice of time therefore, held the promise of holding me in complete enthrallment. For someone like me, who had so far had only vague ideas about the period of Emergency, construed from incomplete snippets-oral, pictorial or literary-the book proved to be an enriching experience, not least because of its empirically informative character. Sewn together through the experiences of the four main protagonists-Dina Dalal, Manek Kohlah, Ishwar Darji and Omprakash Darji-the book tells the story of their widely disparate lives at the crossroads of the emergency. How the lives of such vastly different people come to collide, converge and then diverge in ways unimaginable, is narrated with the tender pathos of someone who necessarily was a witness, and in many ways, a victim of the times: A time that made him a sufferer not solely because of the reign of terror and abject anarchy that the state of internal emergency had unleashed, but also, far more poignantly, for his deep yearning for times gone by-times both utopic and idyllic. Mistry’s lament for this slippery thing called time and its relapsing into that illusive thing called memory, recurs like a refrain at intervals throughout the book, and I have to say that these are the portions that make for some of the most beautifully crafted words in the book, making of it a work of literature par excellence.

While towards the first half of the book, the mode of sliding into the histories of the four main characters back from the moment we first encounter them individually, becomes a tad tedious and predictable, the novel picks up pace from the time their lives get intertwined and they begin their journeys together. This however cannot take away from the fact that these make for some of the most compelling accounts of the contemporary socio-political fabric of India; from the miseries and brutalities of rural landscapes steeped deep in the muddle of caste-violence; to the world of the anglicized Parsis in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay; to the tale of their counterparts spread over more serene hilly backdrops, trying to come to terms with the departure of the British and the unfamiliar Congress-icized nation; the range that Mistry covers so faithfully, so painstakingly, proves his meticulous research tempered only by the warmth of a master wordsmith.

I must confess that various points in the book, especially when all four begin to live under one roof, and the circumstances that lead to it, seemed a little too naïve and unduly optimistic to be happening in real life. Especially the manner in which the tailors come to become integral kegs in the routine running of the house, functioning with the smoothness of their well-oiled sewing machines, doing nothing to disturb the rhythmic humdrum of the daily functioning, seemed tailor-made (no pun intended) for cinematic adaptation-the ones that were specially made to preach communal and racial amity in disturbing times. The characters of Shankar the beggar, his friendship with the tailors: the do-gooder goon called Beggarmaster; Ibrahim-the good at heart rent collector, all came across similarly as too good to be true.

As the narrative progressed however, I began to realize how wrong I was. The turn of events from the moment the four part ways (temporarily, for the reader), could not have been more bleak, washing away all gleams of hope and retribution that infact constituted the staple of mainstream cinema. I have a feeling, that the feel-good quotient had been consciously heightened and deliberately exaggerated in the previous parts, so as to make the bathos be felt with accentuated grief, with a cringing sting that haunted me long after Dina Dalal had returned to prepare dinner for the day. As a run-up to the bleak climax, the “optimism” I had hastily misconstrued as naïveté, proved to be just the right foil in the creation of a “fine balance”-as rooted in reality as possibly could be.

Street-Lighter

Everyday I would see the girl standing at her window, smoking. Because of the distance between us, all that the street-lamp allowed me to see was her silhouette, that laid bare a thinnish body, unruly curls and thin streams of smoke rising up.

Exactly ten minutes into her second cigarette, a car would appear into the lane that lay between her window and mine, and then turn in her direction: Only the hands of a man could be seen, as he waved out to the girl in his orange full-sleeves.

Tonight, just as she stubbed her second cigarette out, the lights of the car flashed near the far end of our lane; there it stopped longer than usual, and slowly swerved right-in the direction of my window.

I froze.

I looked up for the girl.
There she stood, snugly latched on to the orange full-sleeved arms of a man, both looking back at me with puzzled concern. As I kept squinting harder to figure the face of the man out, the cigarette-smoke from between my fingers kept clouding my vision more and more...

Cry City

There's no place in the city where one can go and cry in peace. Pee in peace, fornicate too, maybe...but cry...?

No place.