A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: book review

Set amid India’s 1975 state of emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution in order to maintain power following a scandal, A Fine Balance is not a political diatribe. Rather, it is a compelling novel of four characters; a widow who refuses her brother’s pleas to remarry, a young student, and two tailors, who are forced by their impoverished circumstance to share a cramped apartment amid societal taboos.

They live a cruel life of death, despair, financial troubles, squalor and injustice. Dina, stubbornly independent supports herself by taking in Maneck to help pay the rent while he studies away from his prosperous family to be an airconditioning technician. Two tailors, Om and Ishvar, leave their low-caste origins to work for her during the day making dresses until the government bulldozes their slum dwelling and they move into Dina’s place.

Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized when they return to their village (again, by decree of the government); and Maneck goes abroad when he is devastated by the murder of an activist classmate. The landlord eventually evicts Dina and she returns to live with her brother. On Maneck’s return nine years later, the tailors remark on his changed behaviour when he ignores them: “When you go so far away, you change. Distance is a difficult thing. We should not blame him.” Over time they have all learned to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair, but it is the tender-hearted Maneck who suffers most.

This is a tragic epic tale of dejection and depression, yet interspersed with the humour of daily life as the characters seek to survive life in urban India.

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