A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
“You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.”
First things first, this book is a literary delicacy. Especially, as compared to Rohinton Mistry’s other book – Such a Long Journey, after reading this book, one feels that Mistry’s storytelling is seriously phenomenal. There is not one instance in this book, when you would feel like skipping pages.
The story traces lives of four characters in a city by the sea (seems to be Mumbai) whose life gets intertwined during the political turmoil of emergency, read late seventies, in this country. People from three different families and backgrounds, come together and stay together more as a family than each individual ever could with their own kin: A young parsi girl, who is a rebel at heart and grows up to be a female whose life remains in a state of perennial turmoil; Two men from the chamaar caste, an uncle and a nephew, who have gone on to make something of themselves besides what their caste allows them though the ill fate catches up with them sooner than later; A young parsi boy whose parents have settled somewhere in a small hill town and who is unwilling to leave his parents and hometown but is forced to do so, so much that coming back doesn’t seem to lure him anymore.
Each character has been given its due space in the book, weaving the story beautifully such that nothing seems superficial or uncalled for. Various social aspects like the caste system in villages, hindu-muslim relationships at grass root level, atrocities committed on Indians during emergency and life in a parsi community have been captured delicately without going overboard. Author also toys with various human emotions like the changing preferences while growing up, feeling of never letting something go while all the same being unable to understand someone else’s unrelenting behavior, strength in characters which come in one’s way to a happy life and many more.
To conclude, it’s a beautiful book with a touching story. One you wouldn’t be able to keep down without reading it through to the end.
Some more nice quotes from the book:
“You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them…You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.’ … ‘In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”
“But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.”
“ Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.”
“The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.“
Happy Reading.
