Although the suffering within it should be unbearable to observe, the reading experience is in fact strangely joyful. Yet occasionally a book rekindles our affection for the human race, and A Fine Balance is one. Forster's India, the Raj of King George V, where Britons and Indians hovered awkwardly on either side of an unbridgeable gap, has given way to the "Goonda Raj" of Indira Gandhi, where Hindus are separated from Muslims, and Parsis from Sikhs, and the immemorial laws of caste facilitate the brutal exploitation of the helpless by the powerful as the corrupt government leads the way.Ī lot of nonsense has been written by literary critics, and others, about "the human spirit," tempting one to point out that the human spirit has always been remarkable more for greed and rapacity than for the exalted qualities the term usually celebrates. The Literary Review, with some justice, called A Fine Balance" the India novel, the novel readers have been waiting for since E. It earned comparisons with the work of Dickens and Tolstoy. Coming on the heels of these two lovely but essentially regional books, A Fine Balance (1995) was a surprise: panoramic, intensely dramatic, bursting out of the bounds Mistry had previously set for himself. Swimming Lessons and Such a Long Journey were the work of a miniaturist, tightly contained within one claustrophobic community. His second, Such a Long Journey (1991), remained anchored in the world of his earlier stories, that of petit bourgeois Parsi families who struggle, sometimes desperately, to hold on to precarious livelihoods and dwindling status in decaying Bombay apartment blocks, and who dream of emigrating to Canada-"not just the land of milk and honey," as one of Mistry's characters, fed up with Bombay's foul aromas, puts it, but "also the land of deodorant and toiletry." Narayan, or at least identifiable as part of the same gentle fictional tradition.
His first book, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories From Firozsha Baag(1987), was a wryly humorous series of interlocking tales rather in the manner of his countryman R.
Mistry is not prolific, but his development has been swift and steady. The fifty-year-old Toronto resident, originally from Bombay, has long been recognized as one of the best Indian writers he ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive. Rohinton Mistry is not a household name, but it should be.
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