A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is a heartbreakingly sad.  It’s an absolutely wonderful book.  It’s around 600 pages long and a good deal of that is filled with misery and yet, it’s a delight to read.  I think it must be a cultural thing because I’ve noticed it in multiple works of Salman Rushdie as well as Arundhati Roy’s The God of SmallThings, but Rohinton Mistry tells a story that winds its way through various deviations and distractions without ever seeming extraneous.  It must have been a nightmare to edit; I’m pretty sure at least a third of the novel is completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but it’s such a joy to read. 

The book is about four people living in and around Bombay predominantly during the 1970s.  First, there is Dina Dalal widow, small business owner and surrogate aunt to her lodger Maneck Kohlah, student of air conditioning and refrigeration (don’t worry, that fascinating subject is not really dwelt on in the book).  Dina’s two employees, uncle and nephew duo Ishvar and Omprakash Darji who are tailors looking to raise funds to return to their village, round off the foursome.  The book’s simply about how the relationships between the group shift and grow.  It doesn’t sound interesting, but it is.  It’s one of those stories in which a happy ending is within touching distance and then is irreparably broken because of one decision and, chiefly, circumstance.  Even though it’s pretty obvious that something bad is going to happen when everyone’s happy in a book and you’re only two thirds of the way through, it can still be just awful when that bad thing happens. 

As with a lot of previous books, I don’t to give away too much plot because I really want people to just go and read this book and spoilers suck.  I will say, however, that it’s another book that makes me aware of my general ignorance of the history of world politics.  The book’s set during the time Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister and while I know she wasn’t exactly the nice Gandhi and was assassinated for it, I don’t know that much about her.  After she became Prime Minister through rigged elections, India moved into a period known as The Emergency.  While this name reminds me a touch of The Event from the post-apocalyptic sketches on That Mitchell and Webb look, The Emergency was no laughing matter.  It was a 21 month period in which civil liberties were oppressed, forced sterilisation took place and political opponents were either arrested or murdered.  This is the backdrop to the misery of A Fine Balance and while Dina and Maneck initially attempt to ignore the problem, its effects on Ishvar and Omprakash make this impossible.

A Fine Balance is so good because it’s tapestry of experiences and voices.  Mistry splits our time between the four main characters and so our views on the characters and events are forced to shift.  I love books that do that.  It’s too easy to just like a character throughout.  It’s far more fun when they show the complexities of a proper human, or when you as a reader have to question just why you liked that character to begin with.  This is a book about a great tragedy and injustice and, still, it manages to be humorous and show the good side of human nature.  I’m not going to say it’s a particularly hopeful book.  To be frank, by the end it’s mostly fucking grim.  But there is still a small measure of kindness peppered throughout the awfulness and I guess that that’s as good as it gets sometimes.

Next time: micro-novella (aka short story) The Nose by Nikolai Gogol.