O 4 A Fine Balance:

Hope and Despair

Rohinton Mistry’s latest novel A Fine Balance deals with a tale

of the turbulent 1970’s in India when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi

declared a state of internal emergency and suspended India’s

Constitution. Mistry does not disguise his anger about the malevolence

of the government and the corruption of its agents, powerful and petty

alike. But of all the fine things about this novel, perhaps the finest is

the way Mistry keeps his storytelling from being submerged by the

political theme. A Fine Balance tells the tale of four innocent persons

snared in the grinding gears of history. And the post-colonial history of

India, like Mistry’s story, is at once brutally simple and delicately

complex, believable and incredible, perverse and humane. The tale is

unfolded through the lives of four main characters: Ishvar Darji, his

nephew Omprakash, their employer Dina Dalai, and her paying guest

Maneck Kohlah. The emergency intrudes into the lives of all these

characters leading to their ultimate destruction. The question that

arises is whether the novel, as its events unfold, maintains a fine

balance between hope and despair or forfeits that balance in the end.

Vinetha Bhatnagar contends that “the end of the novel forfeits that

balance.”1 The novel shows how political changes kindlessly cut

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through the psycho-social fabric of the country where justice is in the

hands of the rich. In the novel, the picture of India - the secret

longings and tensions of the poor and their struggle to construct a new

life for themselves - seems unimportant at first sight.

It is fitting that Mistry opens his novel with a citation from

Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot:

'Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in

your soft arm chair, you will say to yourself:
perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read
this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt
dine well, blaming the author for your own
insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration
and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy
is not a fiction. All is true.2

But if Mistry’s style derives from the past, his concerns are very much

of the immediate present. They are the daily impact of the seething,

sprawling, contradictory, and unpredictable politics of the nation

which he left in 1975 when he moved to Canada. Again, Mistry’s

concerns are not with those at the top of the heap. People of wealth

and influence are seen from a distance, and ironically, by a number of

astute observers. Instead, his interest is in the average people of India

struggling to wrest a basic living and some sort of meaning from a life

that is brutish and hard indeed. And once again, Mistry writes with

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compassion, humour, and humanity, and in the process, he gives us

complex and endearing characters.

The opening scenes of A Fine Balance introduce us to the main

characters and to three very different parts of Mistry’s native India.

The novel revolves round the small apartment of Dina Dalai, the

pivotal character in the novel. She does all she can to wipe a tear from

the eyes of the poor, the helpless and the innocent tailors and to make

a reasonable deal with they which they have been long denied:

“For this job, there will be no customers to

measure,” she explained, “the sewing will be
straight from paper patterns. Each week you have
to make two dozen, three dozen, whatever the
company wants, in the same style”... “The more
dresses you make, the more you earn.”3

We meet Dina Shroff and learn how she became the widow Dina Dalai,

living alone in the city stitching scraps of cloth into a quilt at night

and trying to keep her dignity and independence from her dominating

brother Nuswaan who assumed the role of the head of the family and

legal guardian to Dina after the death of her father, Dr.Shroff.

A Fine Balance maps out how Dina Dalai, the protagonist of the

novel, and the three characters, Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck,

suffer from a sense of rootlessness. The author brings his readers face

to face with the dilemmas of inter-relationship and broken values and

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customs of society. He tries to re-discover the Indian identity by

setting his novel in three different backgrounds. Dina Dalai lives in

the metropolis; Ishvar and Omprakash belong to the village, while

Maneck is from high altitude. A composite picture of India with its

passions, hopelessness, strength, weakness, and beauty pulsates in

the novel on account of the different backgrounds from which the

characters come. A spectrum of values and mindscapes is placed before

the reader.

Dina Dalai decides to take in a boarder and run a tailoring

business. The boarder is Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hillside

town in the shadow of the Himalayas. He was sent by his parents to

study refrigeration and air conditioning maintenance, the trade of the

future in the hot latitudes. And to help her with her fledging business,

Dina Dalai takes two woefully unlucky untouchables as tailors. Ishvar

Darji uncle and his nephew Omprakash emerge from a community of

leather workers that occupies the lowest rung of the ladder in the

oppressive caste system in the village by a river.

The second chapter of A Fine Balance returns to the present and

introduces us to the manager of Au Revoir Exports, Mrs. Gupta’s.

Through Mrs.Gupta approval of Mrs.Gandhi’s actions we are

confronted with the complicity of the Indian business house with the

outrages committed during the period of the 70’s. Dina’s assumption

that the emergency is irrelevant from the point of view of the common
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people turns out to be woefully misguided. As she struggles to eke out

a living for herself, events conspire to strip each character of dignity

and humanity. The acrimony that characterizes the relationship

between Dina and the tailors at the beginning of the novel transforms

itself during the course of the narrative to mutual respect and

compassion.

Dina and Maneck both, like Mistry, are members of the Parsi

faith and are ostensibly outside the Hindu caste system. They are

confronted by their own prejudices and the capriciousness of the

lawless society. But it is the stories of the untouchables, Ishvar and

Omprakash, that provides the moral perspective of A Fine Balance.

Their voyage from a tiny village in a small town to the big city is one

which reveals the real price of abstract social policies. Ishvar and Om

belong to the chamaar caste. The narration is very clear on chammar’s

ways of life. Trifling details like how they skin the carcass, eat meat,

and tan the hide are dealt with great interest, and with touching

subtlety. For example, “And as he mastered the skills — Dukhi’s own

skin became impregnated with the odour that was part of his father’s

smell” (98). The novel highlights specific rural experiences of

frustration and exploitation. Besides narrating certain living

experiences, the author depicts his concern for the neglected regions of

this vast country. It is quite significant that India still lives in its

villages. Mistry portrays both the simplicity of rural life and

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complexities of city life. The shift is remarkable towards an urban and

modern situation. Mistry attempts to understand Indian reality in

terms of his past experience and tradition. Ishvar’s readymade

formula of optimism, “the human face has limited space .... If you fill

your face with laughing there will be no room for crying”4 is very

crucial to the theme and the title of the novel itself.

In the third section of the novel we are confronted with the

question of caste oppression. In the village, Ishvar’s father Dukhi

violates caste restrictions in attempting to make his sons into tailors.

Narayan and his uncle Ishvar were sent by their father to be

apprenticed as tailors with Ashraf. This shows surprising courage to

be and to become in a man who has been socialized into accepting his

position in the caste hierarchy unquestioningly. This is particularly

the most moving section of the novel. A fine sketch of the lives of lower

caste - Indians living in rural India - obtains in the novel. Even the

upper caste women are not exempted from subjecting people to

oppression. We are told that they are indignant at the birth of two

sons to Dukhi:

It was hard for them not to be resentful - the birth

of daughters often brought them beatings from
their husbands and their husbands’ families...
Then they had no choice but to strangle the infant
with her swaddling clothes, poison her, or let her
starve to death. (99-100)

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A Fine Balance is a humane novel. All events and images, divine and

bestial; are brought together skilfully in the depiction of the two

tailors and their lives. Twenty years pass after independence and

nothing changes, Narayan says:

Government passes new laws says no more

untouchability, yet everything is the same. The
upper caste bastards, still treat us worse than
animals.
'Those kinds of things take time to change.’
'More than twenty years have passed since
Independence. How much longer? I want to be able
to drink from the village well, worship in the
temple, walk where I like. (142)

Narayan points out the fact that as a chamaar he is not allowed to

drink water at the village well, worship in the temple confined to the

upper castes, or walk where he likes. When he attempts to assert his

right to vote, he is brutally tortured and then hanged in the village,

women are raped and their huts burnt down. The Thakur decides that

the Dukhi’s family deserves special punishment for crossing their

limits:

“What the ages had put together, Dukhi had dared

to break asunder; he had turned cobblers into
tailors, distorting society’s timeless balance.
Crossing the line of caste had to be punished with
the utmost severity,” said the Thakur. (147)

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For Ishvar the world is no better, and only occasionally worse than he

expects. Young Omprakash is at first outraged by the treatment meted

out to untouchables. It is a trait inherited from his father Dukhi, an

ambitious and capable businessman. Like Rosa Parks refusing to sit in

the back of the bus in the American South in the 1950’s, Dukhi

demands that his rights be respected, that he be able to vote as he

chooses rather than as the local chieftain decrees. For this Dukhi is

tortured and put to death and Omprakash orphaned. It is in the face of

this seemingly never ending loss and injustice that the tailors must

find the 'Fine Balance’ between hope and despair.

Dukhi’s family, along with Narayan corpse, are brunt alive at

the behest of the Thakur. Narayan’s son Omprakash dreams of

revenge but both Ashraf and Ishvar know the results of such dreams

and instead decided to send Om to Bombay along with his uncle

Ishvar. With their move, a new phase starts in the live of Om and

Ishvar. In the city of Gold (Mumbai), it is class, rather than caste, that

oppressed them. They are forced to stay in a Jhopadipattis and are

forced to work as unpaid labourers. Though Mistry’s style of narration

and tone through this section of the novel is slightly jocular, he does

manage to let us see the reality behind the glamour of the Dream City,

Bombay.

In A Fine Balance the satire is often directed at the young

Indians who live on Dina’s goodwill and generosity. Dina blends

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almost imperceptibly with the tone of innocence. At times she makes it

clear that it is not sainthood but eroticism that dwells in the beautiful

eyes of Maneck Kohlah and the two tailors, Om and Ishvar, who are

manifestation of one name, that is, God. All of them have behaved

outrageously in order to enrage and distress Dina. Even in the

prologue itself we learn that Maneck and the two tailors were sitting

in the same compartment of the local train, travelling to the same

destination, that is Dina’s house. As is typical in Indian trains they

start conversing and then realise that they are in search of the same

address. Initially both Ishvar and Omprakash are apprehensive that

Maneck is a rival for the job. However, they become friendly once they

realise that Maneck is not seeking employment with Dina. Ishvar is

initially deferential towards Maneck because of the latter’s class

background. However, Omprakash who is more independent does not

suffer from inferiority complex and soon be friends Maneck. The

months thus spent in Dina’s house helps this friendship bloom and

grow. The plight and suffering of Omprakash gives Maneck a wider

perspective on life and human suffering. Remaining cheerful and

retaining a sense of humour despite adversity are the admirable

qualities that both Ishvar and Omprakash possess.

Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck head for Dina’s house where

they will share their lives for a while. Before their lives are

irretrievably shattered, the two tailors are hired to enable Dina to

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earn a living through selling dresses to the Au Revoir Export Company

of Mrs.Gupta. At first Dina and the tailor Om are apprehensive about

each others’ concern. Om tries to spy on Dina in order to find out about

the export company so that he can directly contact them and get

orders. As the novel advances, circumstances conspire to deny them

their modest aspirations. Thus they discover that there are other

forces at play larger than their individual selves. Each faces an

irrevocable destiny.

The fifth section of the novel deals with the story of Maneck

Kohlah who comes into the household of Dina as a paying guest. His

story is the story of the ecological denudation of the Himalayas

through the forces of 'development’ and the death of the indigenous

enterprise through the entry of multinationals:

But the day soon came when the mountains began

to leave them. It started with roads. Engineers in
sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments
and charted their designs on reams of paper. These
were to be modern roads, they promised roads that
would hum with the swift passage of modern
traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace
scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad
vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials.
(215)

Mr.Kohlah’s increasing sense of loss colours his relationship with his

son who becomes increasingly alienated from his father. Maneck is

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sent to study air conditioning and refrigeration in Bombay and meets

the dynamic student leader, Avinash. Avinash really represents the

voice that is silenced by Mistry’s narrative. For every display of force

there is always a resistance. Resistance is not less heroic in the period

of the emergency than during the course of the freedom struggle.

Heroism is not officially documented, but it nevertheless exists. For a

brief while we are given a glimpse of that aspect of the emergency in

the portrayal of Avinash:

The mood was euphoric. The students fervently

believed their example would inspire universities
across the country to undertake radical reforms
which would complement the grassroots movement
of Jay Prakash Narayan that was rousing the
nation with a call to return to Gandhian principles.
The changes would invigorate all of society,
transform it from a corrupt, moribund creature
into a healthy organism that would with its
heritage of a rich and ancient civilization, and the
wisdom of the Vedas and Upanishads, awaken the
world and lead the way towards enlightenment for
all humanity. (243)

Mistry describes a brief spell of optimism. But his emphasis is

on the experience of Maneck who refuses to get involved in any of such

activities and resents the fact that he has lost the company of his

friends because of his involvement with such work. Maneck is the son

of Dina’s old school friend Mrs.Kohlah. Maneck stays as a boarder in

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Dina’s small apartment and his attempts to forge a humane

relationship with Dina are extremely interesting.

♦

The four main characters in this novel suffer from a sense of

rootlessness. Oppressive caste violence drive Ishvar and Om from

their traditional occupation to learn the skills of tailoring. They are

driven from the rural background to the overcrowded Bombay.

Similarly, Maneck moves from the invigorating atmosphere of his

home in the hills to Bombay but her sense of independence after her

husband’s accidental death keeps her away from her family. So in this

sense all the characters are lonely and struggling for identity and

survival. Social circumstances, loneliness, and a sense of rootlessness

bring them together and forge a bond of understanding. The human

spirit displayed by these four characters of different class background

and ages despite repeated setbacks, upholds Mistry’s subtle political

theme of how the human being can endure and survive with some

dignity despite oppressive circumstances. Ultimately the four main

characters struggle to maintain A Fine Balance in their lives.

The struggle for survival as far as the four characters are

concerned does not have a political angle to it. They all believe that the

word 'emergency’ is a sort of game played by the power centre, and it

would not really affect the ordinary people like them, Ishvar aifl Om.

Hence each in his way tries to connect the surrounding discomfort and

insecurity to their problems. Ishvar Darji, a chamaar by caste and a

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tailor by profession, and his youthful rebellious nephew, Om, come to

the city of Mumbai with the hope of making money and returning to

their village to start afresh. For Dina Dalai, struggling to stand erect

against her brother Nuswaan who feels secure in her dependency on

him, the tailors are God-sent.

Rohinton Mistry paints India’s politics as a surreal menace. In

one memorable chapter, the two tailors are forced to join a crowd of

25,000 in a Bombay slum. As the helicopters hover and speeches go on,

the tailors and their fellow conscripts pass the time under the gaze of

the garish 80 feet cut out of the Prime Minister. Mistry has an ability

to make his characters articulate their own thoughts or popular

versions of the fact:

“See?’ said Rajaram. “I told you it’s going to be a

day in the circus - we have clowns, monkeys,
acrobats, everything.” (263)

However, there is no direct reference to any real political figures

except the scene of the Prime Minister’s speech, after the declaration

of the state of emergency: “lots of lies have been spread about the

emergency which had been declared specially for the people’s benefit...

Whenever the Prime Minister goes, thousands gather from nices

around to see her and hear her. Surely this is the mark of a truly great

leader” (212). For Ishvar and Omprakash the huge cut outs of the

Prime Minister with inspiring slogans for hard work and sincerity are
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mere markers in the confusing labyrinth of the city streets. However,

they realise the implication when they are forcibly bundled away to

the Prime Minister’s meeting to fill in the number with neither the

promised tea nor the free bus ride. Ishvar and Om return thirsty and

tired, “We could have stitched six dresses, thirty rupees lost,” (207)

worries Ishvar. For Dina Bai their absence is the usual sign of

arrogance of the labour class, once their meal is assured.

For the common people the emergency is nothing but “one more

government tamasha” (5). “No consideration for people like us,

Murders, suicide, Naxalite, terrorist killing, police custody, death-

everything ends up delaying the trains” (6). For Dina it is “government

problem - games played by people in power. It does not affect ordinary

people like us” (75). However she is proved wrong as it did affect the

ordinary people in more than one way. The upperclass people are

fascinated by the emergency. For them it is a magic wand, capable of

curing all diseases and decay. The students were euphoric too for

different reasons. They felt that by following Jaya Prakash Narayan,

they could bring in change which would “invigorate all society,

transform it from a corrupt, moribund creature into a healthy

organism” (243). On the stage there is more bowing and scraping when

the Prime Minister approached the cluster of microphones. She

adjusted the white sari that was slipping off her head and continued:

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 There is nothing to worry about just because the
emergency is declared. It is a necessary measure to
fight the forces of evil. It will make thing better for
ordinary peoples. Only the crooks the smugglers,
the black-marketers need to worry for we will soon
put them behind bars. (265)

Om refused to clap. He said his hands were aching. He played his card

and someone near him blurred, mistake, mistake. Om realised his

error, took back the card and played another while the features of the

new twenty-point programme were outlined:

'What we want to do is provide houses for the

people. Enough food, so no one goes hungry. Cloth
at controlled prices. We want to build schools for
our children and hospitals to look after the sick.
Birth control will also available to everyone. And
the government will no longer tolerate a situation
where people increase the population recklessly,
draining the resources that belong to all. We
promise that we will eliminate poverty from our
cities and towns and villages.’ (265)

The second blow is when the tailor’s shack is bulldozed to the ground

as part of the slum evacuation programme. The hutment dwellers

were massed on the road fighting to return to their shacks, their cries

mingling with the sirens of ambulances that couldn’t get through. The

police had lost control for a moment. The residents surged forward,

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gaining the advantage. Then the police rallied and beat them back.

People fell, were trampled, and the ambulances supplemented their

siren skirls with blaring horns while children screamed, terrified at

being separated from their parents. Ishvar says:

'Heartless animals! For the poor there is no justice,

ever! We had next to nothing, now it’s less than
nothing! What is our crime, where are we to go?’
(295)

Ishvar is content that at least their sewing machines are safe at Dina

Bai’s. They stuff all their belongings in the trunk, and sinking under

its weight, go all over the city in search of a place to live in: “Atleast

our sewing machines have a safe home with Dina Bai,” he said to Om,

“that’s our good fortune” (297). Ishvar and Om searched for their

shelter. They decided to sleep in the railway station but the platform

was thick with beggars and itinerants bedding down for the night. The

tailors picked a corner and cleaned it, whisking away the dust with a

newspaper. After midnight, they were awakened by a railway

policeman ticking at the trunk. The policeman said that sleeping on

the platform was prohibited. Later they realised that even to sleep on

the platform they must pay the policeman: “'They have special

permission’ the police man jingled the coins in his pocket” (300). They

decided to leave the trunk with Dina just for that night. But Dina

refused to accommodate even the tailors’ trunks. Maneck is put off by

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her refusal. 'Looks terrible.’ He was not ready to forgive her while the

tailors remained unaccommodated in the night. (305)

The third blow of the emergency in their lives is when Ishvar

and Om are picked up by the police from their rented footpath

dwelling to work as construction workers as part of the city

beautification project. Ishvar’s protests that they are not street

urchins or beggars fall on deaf ears. They are forced into a truck

wherein “underfoot, stray gravel stabbed the human cargo” (326). The

tailors are forced to abandon their work for a number of days for

reasons beyond their control. Maneck tries to calm down the agitated

Dina:

'Ishvar and Om wouldn’t stay absent just like

that,’ said Maneck. 'Something urgent might have
come up.’ 'Rubbish, what could be so urgent that
they cannot take a few minutes to stop by?’
'Maybe they went to see a room for rent or
something, don’t worry. Aunty, they’ll probably be
here tomorrow.’
'Probably? Probably is not good enough. I cannot
probably deliver the dresses and probably pay the
rent. You, without any responsibilities, probably
don’t understand that.’ replied Dina. (333)

That night Dina is too distracted to work on quilt and pieces “sit in a

pile on the sofa hiding their design” (334). Maneck ran back from the

chemist’s shop, frantic. Near the Vishram Vegetarian Hotel he slowed

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down for a quick look inside, hoping that Ishvar and Om might be

sipping their morning tea. He reached the flat, panting and repeated

the night watchman’s account for Dina:

'It’s terrible! He thinks they were mistaken for

beggars - dragged into the police truck - and God
knows where they are now!’ (334)

Dina and Maneck decides to finish the dresses while both of them are

at work. Dina realizes the similarity between Om and Maneck. And

through Maneck she comes to know the long-drawn suffering of Ishvar

and Omprakash, inheritors of caste victimization. She realizes that

She tried to resume eating and then gave up.

'compared to theirs, my life is nothing but comfort
and happiness. And now they are in more trouble. I
hope they come back alright. People keep saying
God is great, God is just, but I’m not sure. (340)

Dina begins to empathize with the tailors, with Maneck giving voice to

her muted sympathy. She offers them her verandah to live in when

they returned to her in a state of shock. Very soon she even shares her

kitchen with them. Om and Maneck are delighted to be living under

the same roof. And Ishvar begins to trust her with bits of their past,

more pieces are joined to the growing story of the tailors. Sailing under

the one flag and getting busy with the quilt making days pass by “as

comforting and liquid as a piece of chiffon” (185) between one finger.

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 Ishvar’s obsession to get his nephew married takes the tailors

back to the village. In the absence of Ishvar and Om Dina buries

herself with the quilt, “straightening a seam, trimming a patch,

adjusting what did not look right to her eye” (509). She hopes to

complete the quilt once the tailors came back. She and Maneck decide

to gift it to Om on his return with a bride.

The final and fatal blow to their lives is an unwarranted police

raid on the market place. Ishvar and Omprakash are forcibly taken to

a sterilization camp at the village. The ultimate indictment of the

internal emergency comes in the description of the Nussbandhi Mela

in the closing chapter of the novel.

Not far from the birth-control booth was a man

selling potions for the treatment of impotency and
infertility. 'The quack is getting a bigger crowd
than the government people,’ said Ishvar. (524)

Mistry aptly describes the callous indifference of the authorities who

are more keen on the idea that “targets have to be achieved within the

budget” (533) rather than human welfare, the uplift of the poor. People

like Thakur Dhamsi thrive there auctioning patients who come to the

clinic, for unless a Government employee produces two or three cases

of sterilization, his salary for the month is held back. The Thakur, the

villain of his family’s ruin, orders another operation on the already

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sterilized Om. Thakur has a special interest in the boy who is

suffering from testicular tumour.

“What kind of life, what kind of country is this,

where we cannot come and go as we please” wails
Ishvar. (540)

The author lucidly shows the involvement of an entrenched

insensitivity in the Bureaucracy, in the demolitions of shacks forced

labour camps, and sterilisation drives. Senior administrators from the

family planning centre warn doctors for not achieving targets.

Operations are conducted with partially sterile equipment due to the

harsh reprimands of bureaucrats who are only interested in targets

and not in human suffering. The euphemism of efficiency and sense of

duty is used to ensure that sterilisation operations are performed even

under unhygienic conditions. The doctors are frightened that “they

would be reported to higher authorities for lack of co-operation,

promotions would be denied, salaries frozen” (533).

Ishvar’s feet, wounded at the beautification project develop

gangrene and his legs get amputated. The group returns to Bombay

with a little trolley fitted with small wheels for Ishvar and a rope for

Omprakash to pull it. For Ishvar and Omprakash, urban renewal or

beautification means that their slum shanty, their only shelters, is

razed. Political rallies means being strong armed onto a bus and

driven into the countryside to witness politicians congratulating

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themselves. And population control means the threat of forced

sterilization.

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is a study of human

relationships in a world permeated by and predicated upon cruelty

and abused power. The first part of the novel deals with the kind of

power locatable. The second half depicts instances of violence.

Power in A Fine Balance is mainly of five types: exploitative,

manipulative, competitive, nutrient and interactive.5 These powers

are clearly distinguishable. More often, they modulate into each

other, as we notice in the course of our analysis. Exploitative power is

very common in the novel. This form of power is always associated

with force in A Fine Balance. The sway of the upper caste Thakur in

Dukhi’s village is a good example. Thakur indulges in a continuous

caste war against the 'untouchables’ of the village. He actively

participates in the activities of killing beatings, torture, rape, and so

on. The killing of Narayan is notable for the raw savagery with which

it was perpetuated.

The Monkey Man tortures his animals, the two Monkeys Laila,

Majnoo, and the dog Tikka. The sick animals perform antics to

entertain people under the perpetual threat of beatings from their

master. After the death of the animals, the monkey man substitutes

two children, thus extending cruelty into the human domain. The

beggarmaster, a Fagin-like character, leads a team of mutilated

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beggars. They have to surrender their earnings to him. In one way he

leads the life of a parasite.

The landlord who harasses Dina Dalai never appear in person.

His power is embodied in the Thugs and rent collector who terrorise

the tenants. This power manifests itself as violence when they beat up

Ishvar, Omprakash, Maneck and resort to vandalism. Dina and the

tailors make veiled references to their own fate if their 'protector’ is

not paid on time. The Thakur offers poor wages to the lower caste

villagers. When the workers demand their due wages, they are

threatened with violence. The landlord of course collects rent from his

terrorised tenants. Thus an epistemic power precedes the

manifestation of exploitative power.6 For Thakur’s exploitation follows

an individual’s understanding of the conditions of the lower castes:

their poverty, ignorance, and ill health.

If exploitative power depends on violence, manipulative power

occurs more covertly. As Rollo May argues,7 this power is originally

invited by the person’s own desperation or anxiety. This power is over

another person. In A Fine Balance a character like Nuswaan assumes

this power. Nuswaan runs the Shroff household after his father’s

death. From then onwards he controls the other members of the

family. Dina’s young age and their mother’s approaching senility

makes for their total dependence upon Nuswaan. He therefore

regulates Dina’s money, dresses, education and even friendship. Later

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this power is used to induce Dina into marriage. Nuswaan’s monetary

assistance helps him retain his hold over her.

Dina herself is not beyond manipulative move when Ishvar and

Omprakash are desperate for jobs. Dina hires them to sew for her at a

meagre wage. She is careful not to give them undue importance. Even

though they sustain her own existence, Dina does not allow the two to

know her suppliers and the Au Revoir Export Company.

The third kind of power is competitive power. This power can

also produce a healthy rivalry between people, thus improving

productivity. Dina Dalai’s attempts to squeeze out profits from her

small venture are regulated by the constant threat from other similar

businessmen. Government officials in A Fine Balance compete with

each other to perform more family planning operations, for their

promotions, salaries, and even jobs are at stake. Hence they vie with

each other in the programme.

The fourth category of power Rollo May distinguishes is

nutrient power. This power generally manifests itself as paternalism.

Nutrient power is also embedded alongside other kinds of power. For

instance, Dina’s brother Nuswaan, in spite of his bullying and

manipulation, obviously cares for her. He frequently helps her out of

difficulty. He is concerned for her safety and health, her lonely life and

future. In turn Dina’s awareness of her brother’s sarcastic tongue and

inherent selfishness is tempered by her knowledge of his affection.

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 Dina is not merely an exploitative employer to Ishvar and

Omprakash. She is protective and caring on occasions. When

Omprakash develops a painful arm, she herself rubs an ointment

much to the surprise of the two men. Later she allows them to stay in

her tiny flat to protect them from police atrocities. When the novel

concludes, Dina even risks Nuswaan’s wrath. Feeding the two, she

wonders how long her good deeds can go on.

Integrative power is the final category. Here opposites - thesis

and antithesis - may come together in synthesis in May’s terms as

“power with the other” (110). In Mistry’s novel, this synthesis occurs

among the marginalised and the exploited. This group forges its own

power links. For example, Narayan and two other lower caste villagers

rebel against the Thakur. They oppose them during election time.

Dina and the tailors barely manage to keep poverty away by their

unity. The doctors are also an exploited lot, since Government policy

forces them into unethical practices.

Rohinton Mistry’s novel is tragic in that this integrative power

is never successful in its manifestation. The rebel lower caste villagers

are tortured and murdered. The landlord manages to evict Dina. The

victims of the forced sterilisation programme do not get justice. Here

we reiterate our reading of Mistry that the system prevents and

prohibits validation of any integration move by individuals. Mistry

demonstrates this failure of the system in the character of the

facilitator.

Violence in A Fine Balance also occurs in the form of positive

aggression. Positive aggression occurs when individuals act across

barriers and form relationships. This is also, as noted before, a

manifestation of integrative power. When, for instance, Dina and the

tailors forge a common front, they ignore caste, class,

employer/employee barriers. This integration occurs in an aggression

against the threat to their existence in the form of the landlord.

However, these bonds of positive aggression are temporal. They occur

at times of crises and seldom last. This is probably the essential

tragedy in A Fine Balance. Mistry thus depicts courage and simplicity

pitted against institutional might.

In Mistry’s writings, there is a strong sense of how easy it is to

come down in the world. Many of his characters have suffered a

dislocation. There is a philosophical proofreader who has become

allergic to printer’s ink, and a hair collector who believes that his

trade is possible because foreign women enjoy wearing other people’s

hair.

But the book as a whole is less comedy that it is an indictment.

The reading is often harrowing. Mistry’s strategy of moving back and

forth in time and giving his characters a variety of histories permits

him to cut a wide swath through the Indian experience. But it is the
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callousness and corruption of Indira Gandhi’s emergency era that is at

the centre of the story. Beggars are swept from the streets in the

interest of civic beautification and taken to slave labour camps. In the

name of population control, villages are denied their rights, farmers

are refused fertilizer, and ration cards are withheld.

While all this goes on, the comfortable in society go around

averring that “there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures” and

the Prime Minister proclaims that “the need of the hour is discipline”

(330).

One of the qualities of A Fine Balance is that there is a

dependence upon narrative than dramatic presentation. There is also

for the readers a certain frustration in finding the forward motion of

the story checked again and again by a pile up of flashbacks.

Towards the end of the novel, Dina Dalai loses her prized

independence and has to seek shelter in the patriarchal protection of

her brother Nuswaan. Dina, back at her brother’s covers herself with

the unfinished quilt, recollects the events and experiences concealed in

rightly knit patches. However frightened of thinking aloud of the past,

she decides to lock it away.

'I used to. But now I prefer to think that God is a

giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of
designs. And the quilt is grown so big and
confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the
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 squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well
together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So
he has abandoned it.’ (340)

There are the remarks of Maneck in one of his conversations with

Dina. Dina succumbs to her fate and ends up as an unpaid and

glorified servant of the Nuswaan household. Omprakash is castrated

in an act symbolic of the impotency of the general populace of India

during the authoritarian regime perpetrated during the emergency.

Ishvar is crippled by the loss of both his legs and is reduced to begging

for a living. And, Maneck, the boy from the Himalayas, throws himself

in front of a moving train in irregular parody of the reported death

sequence of his friend, Avinash. Avinash mysteriously disappears.

Maneck only makes a half-hearted attempt to find him. This

mysterious disappearance of Avinash raises the question of the

narrative logic of Mistry’s novel: that everything ends badly. Avinash

seems to have been introduced only to affirm this philosophy. Ishvar

and Omprakash return to their native place only to be further

humiliated.

Ishvar and Omprakash and Dina who successfully strike a fine

balance both within and without go on to live while Maneck reduces

himself to a “fallen corncob across the tracks.” As Ishvar Darjee puts

it, “stories of suffering are no fun when we are the main characters”

(383). Dina, by living apart, rejects Nuswaan’s hold. Maneck asserts

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himself by altering the shop’s arrangements. Narayan becomes a tailor

and thus occupies a space allocated to another caste.

The novel’s title comes from Yeats “You have to maintain a fine

balance between hope and despair”. And sometimes we feel this is

simply too much The title of the novel is suggestive in more than one

sense. Towards the fag end of the novel, Mr.Valmik exclaims there is

always hope - hope enough to balance our despair or we would be lost”

(503). If the characters drive a fine balance between “hope and

despair” circumstances tilt it in favour of despair alone. In Lawrentian

terms, Mistry’s novel deals with an “essentially tragic age”.

The overlapping stories in this novel are neatly interwoven.

Rohinton Mistry uses memory and imagination to depict a turbulent

period in Indian history. The author claims that his novels are not

'researched’ in the formal sense of the word but that he relies on

articles from newspapers, magazines and chats with people from India

to collect his material. However, as Mistry admits, all these details

get shaped by his memory and imagination. Though Mistry claims

that he is a casual researcher, yet his novel A Fine Balance is weighed

down by gory details of the horrors of internal emergency.

Commenting on the themes and issues of this novel, the author says,

“the way the main characters, the tailors Ishvar and Omprakash,

endure suggest that dignity is inherent in the heroic manner in which

they strive to survive and perhaps in their insuppressible sense of

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humour.”8 The human endurance of the suffering tailors and others

like them who faced the horrors of eviction, sterilization, forced labour,

and police brutality is one of the hallmarks of the novel. It shows how

the underprivileged survive and also the author’s concern at the plight

of the poor and the exploited.

The ending of the novel is surprising and unconventional.

Maneck, the brooding Parsi young man, is upset at the alienation from

his family. His sorrows increase when he visits Bombay and finds that

Dina has been evicted from her house, has lost her struggle for

independence and stays with her brother. Walking away from Dina’s

house it is perturbing to see Ishvar and Omprakash handicapped and

leading lives as beggars. The culmination of these series of staggering

events is that it drives home a lesson of extreme despair and shows

how the sensitive Maneck loses in the struggle to maintain a fine

balance between hope and despair. Rohinton Mistry emerges as the

foremost Parsi political novelist for his consistent depiction of ideology

and politics in his novels.

Various episodes in the novel reveal Mistry’s sympathy for the

oppressed and antipathy to authoritarian, oppressive practices during

the two year period of internal emergency. During the course of the

narrative, Mistry gives some revealing political insights. The change

in the aspirations of the lower castes, the attempts by the upper castes

to preserve the old order are all aptly delineated. A major instance is
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the violence perpetuated by Thakur Dharmsi and his action against

Narayan’s family during the week of parliamentary elections. The

generation gap is shown in the aspirations of the lower castes.

Narayan’s father tells his son, “you changed from chamaar to tailor, be

satisfied with that" (143).

However, Narayan who is educated wants to exercise his rights.

He wants to actually vote in the elections and not let the “blank ballots

were filled by the landlord’s men” (144). Mistry expresses clearly his

views on the cynical manipulation of elections in rural India. A

shrewdly chosen quotation from Balzac used as the novel’s epigraph

advises us against assuming that the author has indulged in “wild

exaggeration and flights of fancy” offering the cold reassurance that

“this tragedy is not a fiction, all is true”. But any inclination to turn

away from the most repellant truths seems to be shared by the

beleaguered Indian citizens who populate Mistry’s fiction.

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REFERENCES

1. Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar, “'And everything ends badly’: A

Reading of A Fine Balance,” The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry, ed.,
Jaydipsingh Dodiya (New Delhi: Prestige, 1998) 102.
2. Honore de Balzac, Le Pere Goriot, qtd. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine
Balance (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
*

3. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (London: Faber and Faber,

1996) 9. Subsequent references are to this edition.
4. Nilashah, “A Critical Appraisal of A Fine Balance”: The Fiction
of Rohinton Mistry, ed., Jaydipsingh Dodiya (New Delhi: 1998)
117.
5. This categorisation has been adopted from Rollo May’s
exposition in her seminal work Power and Innocence: A Search
for the Sources of Violence (New York: Norton 1972).

6. The term has been used by Peter Morris in Power, A

Philosophical Analysis (Maekester: Manchester UP, 1972).
Similar arguments regarding the quotation of knowledge and
power have been forwarded by Michael Foueault and Edward
W. said.
7. Rollo May, Power and Innocence (New York, 1972), pp.l0-15.

8. Novy Kapadia, “The Politics of Survival and Domination in A

Fine Balance”: A Reading of A Fine Balance, The Fiction of
Rohinton Mistry, ed., Jaydipsingh Dodiya (New Delhi: Prestige,
1998) 127.

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