We talk about fast paced life, where you are left with small packages of time sandwiched between our office and home. What majority of us read are your office files, both hard and soft! ’A Fine Balance’ is a thick book by these standards.
This is the first time I read any of Rohinton Mistry’s books. A great honour for an author to be short listed for the booker prize for the third time.
Mistry takes the readers through the lives of various characters in India, may be I should say typical of only India. The characters, quite a few, are linked at various points in the novel. Many of them come back again and again. The background is the latter half of seventies when the government declared ‘The State of Internal Emergency’. Personally I was too young at that time to give some comments on the state of affairs at that point of time. However from those narrations of others and commentaries in books I didn’t expect a story which mixes the Mills and Boons and Ken Follet thrillers. A Fine balance tells you the story of many characters – two ‘chamars’ who became ‘darjis’, a young boy from a decent family who comes to the big city for studies, his parents, a widow trying to keep up with life, a beggar-master, a hair collector, lots of beggars etc. Mistry with his compelling narration weaves the story around his characters keeping a good eye on the contemporary political and social situation. Majority of the story happens in the big city. As Times Literary Supplement puts it ‘The novel works wonderfully well and is a distinguished addition to the mythologizing of Bombay’(But does the author mention anywhere that it’s Bombay? )
The novel is a collection of stories, stories inside stories - all interlaced. The novel captures the morbid pictures of the ‘dark’ period of scuttling of human rights. The infamous ‘nussbandi scheme’, the red-tapism, bribery, human gods – Mistry touches them all.
The author’s grip over the characters is terrific and the way he portrays them in the social milieu of India is truly commendable. Each of them has a story to tell. Even the beggars. Almost all of them are products of the social, cultural, economical imbalance that was (or is?) India. However he takes special care to bring out the niceties in the seemingly-vicious characters you find around you. The way they try to make the fine balance in their lives is commendable.
I could not help making an observation on the pattern of English writing on India. Earlier it was our rich mythology, snake charmers etc which came live in the pages of English-India novels written with the English speaking readers in mind. In A Fine Balance I see the focus changing to the socio-economical-political maladies.
Another thing, which got my attention, is the usage of many vernacular dialogues. Many Hindi words without any hint for what it means. I wonder how this prose can appeal to a westerner who might be amazed with the idiosyncrasies of India but lost in the local words, especially the Hindi gaalis !
Is there an India beyond the snake charmers? Mahouts? Bribery, red-tapism, etc ? Please… some one write about the ‘Incredible India’ !! May not be necessarily the comfy stories in Bollywood, but simple stories which portend some optimism at least! Or else I fear the we give our foreign readers a wrong perspective. As one of the reviewers else where pointed out ‘….(A Fine balance) is almost unbearably depressing as the country itself.’
Is India so depressing?