Perfect equilibrium. Review on Fine Balance, A - Rohinton Mistry

Just when you think good literature is a thing of the past, along comes a book that shakes the very foundations of that thought. A Fine Balance is a book that makes us feel just that. A generous peek into the lives of four ordinary lives so intricately intertwined and interwoven with each other to fashion a magnificent union of words and lives. It is the story of four very ordinary people thrust together out of necessity. How their insecurities turn to a bond that is more than friendship and more than love.

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The Characters

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Dina Dalal

A fiercely independent widow, Dina is in need of an alternate means of income to pay her board. When her old school friend, Aban Kohlah, sends her son to the city to earn a diploma, she grudgingly accepts the opportunity to house him till the end of his course. Through a fortunate contact of her hairdresser friend, Zenobia, Dina also accepts orders from an export company to make bulk garments. In order to do this, she hires out two tailors who commence work from the back room of her apartment. Thus, she fends of the rent-collector and the landlords evictors for a while longer.

Ishvar and Omprakash Darji

This uncle and nephew tailor duo grew up in the shadow of the post-partition era where they escape the stamp of their low caste cobbler profession for the higher calling of tailoring. Their caste followed them wherever they went. These honest and hard-working tailors sought the dusty roads of the city by the sea to seek employment and mend their fraying fortunes thereby escaping the caste violence rapidly following them into the town. After the hardships of a heartless city, they not only make strange acquaintances but also find themselves in the employ of Dina Dalal.

Maneck Kohlah

Maneck is rudely uprooted from his idyllic mountain home and sent to the city to earn a diploma and make a better life for himself. Ragging and dissension in the Student Union begin to make life in the hostel not only unbearable but also fraught with peril. Maneck seizes the opportunity to live as a paying guest with his mothers school friend, Dina Dalal.

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The story's essence

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The lives of these four people at first refuse to blend and creates unwanted emotions of fear, hate, suspicion, anger and frustration.

Dina suspects the tailors intentions and doubts their every move. She thinks the tailors will one day find her export company and steal the job from the company directly and she will be struck out as the middleman and send her hurtling into the awaiting arms of her overly-attentive brother.

Ishvar and Om are the opposites. Ishvar is docile and wise, due to his sufferings as a child in a downtrodden village. He is in constant battle with his nephew and Dina to keep her in their favor and Om from antagonizing Dina too far. His dream is to earn enough money in the city and return to his mentor, Ashraf Chacha, to open his own shop. He also dreams of seeing his nephew married and settle down in the arms of family and marital bliss.

Om is the young lad with a fire burning in him. The fire was set alight by the landlord of his native village when he decided that the cobbler family had no more right to live than they had voting rights. He destroyed the family in the funeral pyre of their own home. Om carried the burning desire for vengeance, which rekindles itself when he returns to his tailoring town for his impending marriage.

Maneck finds fraternal companionship with Om. Within his mind, he battles the issues of life; its fairness and inequality; its injustices and imbalances. He is the mediator between Dina and Om and Ishvar and brings them together to create a healthy banter and communal feeling between them all.

Ishvar and Om are the main receptors of suffering with the annihilation of their entire family and their persecution by the executors of the Emergency rule. The cruelty they suffer is endless and yet Ishvar is the anchor of the duo and maintains their sense of humor through each trial. Their friendship with Rajaram the hair-collector and Shankar the limbless beggar gradually seep into the lives of the people they live with.

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The End

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Maneck was always right; everything ends badly. When the tailors take up residence on Dina’s verandah, everything begins to not only fall into place but also runs as smoothly as well-oiled machinery. When they are threatened by the landlord, Beggarmaster comes into the picture and protects them for half the price he takes for looking after his beggars. Just when one thinks all will be fine in this picture, something so tragic happens that it leaves you with a feeling of abject desolation. Just when you may think there may a glimmer of hope and a chance for justice, that bubble is quickly dispelled in the next chapter.

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The Author and the book

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Rohinton Mistrys language is smooth and flowing with just enough swanky words to make you run to the dictionary but not too many to keep you rifling endlessly for the meaning of words. Each incident is important to store away in your memory capsule because at some later point, it will emerge and tickle your brain cells. There’s no point trying to skim quickly over the lines in an effort to get to the next page, overleaf you will find something that will not make sense and send you scurrying to the previous page to scrutinize more carefully what you just skimmed over a minute ago. His mastery at creating and ultimately putting all these pieces together is amazing.

The story is woven so perfectly around the year 1975 that it could very well be a true story. The forced sterilizations in exchange for transistor radios, the goonda-raj of the upper castes trying to regain their days of former glory and oppression, the Prime Ministers supplications for the beautification of the city, the corruption of the government; all are intermingled in a manner that transports you to the city of that time not so long ago and down the streets where the professional beggars beg for alms and cling to their little joys. Where a traveling street performer loses his source of daily bread and his sanity. Murder, sex, melodrama, love, humor; its all here in each of its verbose 600 odd pages.

One would say, if only he hadn't done this and if only that had not happened. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. This book is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages and yearning for more. The epilogue leaves you bereft and leaves you wondering and envisioning further and further into the characters lives.

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My view

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Since the book is mainly on three characters in the profession of tailors, a reference may be made to a counterpane constructed from a number of pieces of different fabric. Each piece is symbolic of a significant moment in these four lives, some good and some bad. It is not possible to take out the bad and leave the good because then we are left with a hole in the coverlet, thereby rendering it incomplete. Similarly our lives are incomplete without a little pathos in it; it's what makes our lives vibrant and meaningful.