The lockdown has give me and the whole reading community out there a chance to get cracking on that TBR pile that has started towering over us. And I decided to pick up a highly recommended title – A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
Today, I sit at my desk, chills running down my spine, unable to shake the grief that’s welled up inside me since I finished the last page. A Fine Balance is not a story for the light-hearted. It’s soul-crushing, gut-wrenching and outright depressing.
The story weaves in and out of three livelihoods – A moderately well off Parsi family where Dina grows up and faces every manner of sexism that comes with a backward Indian society both pre and post independence. After suffering great losses, she struggles to make it on her own, moving from what seems like the last resort only to get gunned down further. Dina tries to sustain herself in an apartment, constantly harassed my the property-owner and in doing so meets Maneck who rents out a room and a couple of Tailors – Om and Ishwar who she employs as tailors and acts as a middle-man delivering dresses.
Maneck’s story is perhaps the least gory of these three. Having grown up in the hilly mountains, he has had a great childhood until he was sent of to boarding school and then a college hostel where loneliness and, possible physical and mental trauma forced him to rent a room with Dina. He tried repeatedly to fit in but the only friend he felt some sort of connection to has been missing for months.
Shankar and his nephew Om’s story is perhaps the most checkered with crimson and well, crimson again. They hail from low caste families who branched out from their livelihood of being cobblers to becoming tailors. Mistry talks of three generations of their family here – before and after the war. He describes horrible acts of prejudice, mutilation and inhuman torture being inflicted by upper castes. Long story short, apart from Ishwar and Om, three generations were destroyed.
These three stories come together and in an India during the Emergency, they struggle to cling to their lives. In vivid detail, Mistry writes of individual livelihoods impacted, down to the last dime and to keep us from completely going insane, sprinkles some joy amidst the sort-of-family the four of them have formed. But right when you hope for good tidings, he blatantly snuffs out any possibility of it with brilliantly honest work.
Read the book if you can give up some of your tears in exchange for a phenomenal storyline and truths you need to hear. I’d definitely rate this a 5/5.
Faltering on cloud nine. 