Last January, I re-read Rohington Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Two days ago, I thought of it again. Set in post-partition India, and spanning till 1984, the book is about four distinct characters. Dina Dalal is a Parsi widow with a bright future who becomes a victim of her own circumstances and spends most of her life fighting them. Ishwar Darzi and Omprakash Darzi are two Chamaar tailors who escape the wretchedness of prejudice against their caste and try to find livelihood in Mumbai. And Manek Kohlah is a sheltered student who ends up as Dina Dalal’s paying guest because of brutal ragging in his hostel at a Mumbai college.
The book starts in pre-Partition India and traces the events up to 1984, with most of the narrative taking place during the Emergency. The unnamed “Prime Minister” and the State despotism of the age are always omnipresent. For many of us who were born years later, the Emergency period is a blot on India’s otherwise unblemished democratic record. We have heard the stories of its impact and read the initiatives that converted a democratically elected machinery into an authoritarian regime, crushing the private life and freedoms of citizens. But this book humanises that age and reveals its impact on the lowest common denominator, the ordinary individual, with little to do with politics or power, who is simply trying to survive and get on with her days.
Mistry portrays a dystopian country – with aborted rights and freedoms, forced labour camps, razed shantytowns and slums, barbaric beautification programmes, family planning centres, numbered vasectomies and thoughtless amputations – and those who are impacted on a daily basis by the Emergency. On the peripheries of this is the rise of religious chauvinism, regional and sectarian sentiment, majoritarian agendas and communal riots.
The one aspect of the book that displays the sheer genius on Mistry’s part is his depiction of the relationship between the four unlikely protagonists, and its soft evolution into an unlikely, often strange, friendship. You want each of these characters, soiled in their own misery and in the seediness of their times, to find comfort in each other’s company – and they so often do. The rich backstories of each character is explored to describe how they emerge as the people they are. Mistry balances the squalor of the times, with the humanity of his characters and their relationships. A character explains, “You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” He paused, considering what he had just said. ‘Yes’, he repeated. “In the end, it’s all a question of balance”.
A Fine Balance reminded me of many other books that I have read and loved. There were bits that reminded me of Katherine Boo’s non-fiction Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about the slum-dwellers in an aanganwaadi in Dharaavi, especially about the brutalities of ordinary daily life for a particular class in India. There are themes that made me think of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, especially the way in which it explicitly comments on the politics and ideologies, through the characters and their life. I found myself comparing it to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, in its panoramic depiction of multitudinous Indian identities and diverse perspectives at a particular point in History. And most of all, to Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram, in terms of its gritty depiction of Mumbai, replete with its crimes and grime, and in the relationships that form and evolve between otherwise incompatible characters. Like all of these, A Fine Balance depicts the flux between idealism and realism, hope and pessimism and, mostly, the unabashed inconsistency of time. Yet, it is markedly distinguishable from each because it maps a defined period in India, palpable in recent memory.
Fiction can be rewarding and equally depressing at times. While it can provide one with the illusion of escapism, it can create worlds far more reprehensible than reality. However, when fiction mirrors reality so accurately that it becomes hard to distinguish between the two, its impact on a reader is unique. Mistry is exceptional in narrating the most disturbing scenes of violence and grime, without any overly dramatic effect. He is as casual in his descriptions of the tragedies and ironies of India as we are in consuming them daily on our television screens and newspaper headlines. The anaesthetised nonchalance of some characters within the pages of fiction – their pragmatism for things as they are – portends to mirror the apathy of the reader, to the reality surrounding her.
Earlier this week, an individual belonging to a particular religion was lynched to death because he was suspected to have eaten something held sacred by individuals of another religion. Another city saw communal riots and curfews because, again, a piece of meat was found in a sacred place of worship. While perusing through my social media timeline, filled with dissections of important speeches in foreign countries, launch of digital initiatives, election coverage, murders and meat politics, acerbic rhetoric and so many other whatnots, I was suddenly reminded of A Fine Balance. And this was not because of its plot or its characters but because the book disturbed me in a manner few (especially fiction) have.
Maybe that’s because it is a piece of literary fiction written two decades ago but with much relevance to today’s reality. Because the distortions of the Emergency days, the deformation of a country – replete with cruel caste prejudices, religious fragmentation, political decay, fundamentalism, state despotism, institutional failures, poverty, public apathy – and its impact on individual (and uncounted) lives still casually exists and throbs all across, at different levels. As a country, if we fail to balance any one aspect of our national identity with the other, or even our aspirations – be it economic growth, infrastructural development, pluralism, or upholding republican ideals – we can tilt far on to one extreme, fall on our faces and effortlessly descend into chaos, as individuals and as a civilisation.
Sarah Farooqui runs the Takshashila Institution’s flagship course, the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP). She is also the Editor of Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review.
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Sarah discusses fiction & non-fiction writing on her blog - The Bookend, a part of Business Standard's platform, Punditry.
She tweets as @sarahfarooqui20