Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance

My friend Cora decided to cease her ownership of the book and gave it to me after an abysmal Sociology lecture about the caste system. "Ugh...take it, I can't have it, it's too depressing for me, I just can't..." she then wandered off complaining about how much she hated the professor and sociology in general. Holding the book in my hand, I realized she quit after about one third into the book. I wondered what it was that set off such a vehement rejection. Was it because the book belongs to Oprah's book club and Cora was being a hater of anything mainstream? Obviously, I had no idea what was in store for me in those 600 pages.

The book depicts how destiny brings four people of very different background into each other's life. Set in the time of political and social chaos, the novel weaves the life fibers of Dina, a widow of wealthy background to those of Maneck, a young student, and Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, two tailors who work for Dina's secret sewing shop for an export clothing company. I guess I won't present a synopsis of the novel as you can find that easily on Wikipedia. I'm more interested in telling you why Cora abandoned it in the first place.


When Cora quit, there have been essentially many incidences of sexual molestation including rape, a fatal accident, many innocent people were violently mutilated, burned, and murdered out of hatred, and countless abuse and injustice that made me feel nauseating and trembling with anger. The more I read, the more I felt like a friend of the characters who helplessly witnesses their lives unfolding. Never before have I prayed for a happy ending and happiness for these fictional yet larger-than-life characters. The realism of the novel works magnificently on my senses. I could taste the superb chapati that Om makes, hear the rain falling down on Dina's first date, smell the nasty stench of the hostel Maneck has to stay in before moving to Dina's apartment, and feel the stabbing emotional and physical pain they experience.

By the time the novel ends, there is almost nothing left but despair, like Maneck's calamitous saying "Everything ends badly." There are many memorial scenes in the novel, but one particular instance stands out to symbolically represent the grotesque nature of injustice. It's the funeral procession of Shankar, a beggar whose humanity is more than made up for his horrible deformation. Together with the four main characters, Shankar brings out the goodness that is heavily thwarted by the evil of indifference and hatred. Having no legs and fingers, he is the only one to move around on a makeshift rolling platform in order to comfort the emancipated and injured forced laborers including Ishavar - victims of an absurd governmental policy.  His untimely death foreshadows a gloomy future to our protagonists, yet at that time of reading I kept on denying and hoping for the best. The absurd and nightmarish procession is quoted below:

... The slowest-moving procession ever to wind its way through city streets started towards the cremation grounds just after four. The great number of cripples kept it at a snail's pace. The deformities of some ad atrophied their bodies, reducing them to a frog-like squat: they swung along using their arms as levers. A few could only manage the sideways shuffle of a crab. Others, doubled over, crawled forward on their hands and feet, their behinds raised in the air like camels' humps...

Everything happens for a reason. What comes to you in a seemingly random manner is of great influence to your life as other more memorial circumstances. Ishvar and Om probably never expect that their random throwing coins into Shankar's tin can as they pass by him on the way back from work would eventually change their lives, just to name one of various non-mindful, almost accidental instances that result in radically unexpected consequences in the novel.

I laughed here and there once in a while, but what balance is there if a lingering sadness refuses to leave you after finishing the book? Is there a tiniest flickering of hope left after so many dreams destroyed and so much evil done? Amidst the utter despair, what remains in my mind most beautifully is the human kindness that our protagonists possess and experience. Only when we are in misery do we treasure how much it means to be happy. Even though the ending is not how I want it to be, there is laughter. Referring to Ishvar and Om as "those two", we see that:

...Dina shut the door, shaking her head. Those two made her laugh every day. Like Maneck used to, once...

The ephemeral nature of happiness is a double-edged sword, we may cling onto it to move forward amidst suffering or succumb in its void. Even though the novel is unbearable for its lack of redemption, as long as there is humanity, there is hope. Humanity is hope in itself.

Cora should have been more patient.