Bhaya Nair, Rukmini

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120 Links & Letters 4, 1997 Reviews reader of postmodernist historiographic itself too seriously to be genuinely sub- metafiction when coming across histori- versive, genuinely threatening for the cal characters in works of fiction. Argua- credibility of the historian's work. In bly, the depth of the reflection on the re- fact, it is its best complement. lationship between history and fiction is greater in the fiction analysed in Telling Sara Martín Alegre Histories, but this is fiction that still takes Universitat Autbnoma de Barcelona Rohinton MISTRY. A Fine Balance. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. 614 pages.* It sometimes seems apt to imagine the history of the Indian subcontinent as a ~alimpsest of' literary forms. First a sub- stantiai layer of myth and epic, then a burning layer of tragedy, then melodra- ma and farce and so forth. Lately, the fu- rious discoveiry of political scandals wit- nessed in India might suggest that it is now an action thriller, Hindi-film style,' which is currently being written out in subcontinental space. Rohinton Mistry's new novel, A Fine Balance, takes us back to the time that many observers of Indi- an history would unhesitatingly identify as that criticdl moment when the compo- sition of this villainous tale of corruption in high places began. The declaration of the Emergency2 exactly twenty years be- fore the publication of Mistry's fictional account was ai blunder of such mammoth proportions that there's little doubt that it will continue to stimulate the imagina- tion of writers for a long while to come. Having said that, however, one wonders whether there is any correlation benveen the fact that the blurb of Mistry's book tells us that he has dived in Canada since 1975)) and the fact that his recall of events stops precisely at that traumatic point in the inception of our symbolic politicai thriller. The task of writers, it has often been said, is to keep memory alive. Were not the holocaust, or colonial repression or the slave trade fictionally redescribed in the public mind from time to time, a numbing amnesia would descend. Na- tions could be condemned in perpetuity to repeat those terrors of history that they had, willy-nilly, forgotten. To  this extent, Mistry, like Rushdie before him, performs commendably in reminding the world of the horrors of the nus- bandi.3 operations, the mowing down of jhuggis.* and those repeated fascist lies that were the stamp of the Emergency. * A longer version of this review was first published as «Bombay's Balzac)) in Biblio, March 1996. Reprinted with permission. 1. The Hindi film, with its characteristic song and dance routines and stereotypical plots, is now being recopised by critics as a distinct cinematic genre. Spawned by the Bombay film industry, which is the largest in the world and humorously known as 'Bollywood', the Hindi filni embodies many aspects of the popular culture of contemporary India. 2. A srate of Emergency was declared in 1975 by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, after she had been indicted for election malpractices by the Allahabad High Court. Almost d i  opposition leaders were jailed and nationwide censorship imposed. Despite these dra- conian measures, however, when a sgeneral election was held in 1977, Indira Gandhi was decisively voted out. The Emergency years: 1975-1977. 3. nusbandi (Hindi): vasectomy. 4. jhuggis (Mindi): small hutments in urban slums. Reviews Links & Letters 4, 1997 121 Yet, for Indian readers of Mistry's novel the situation is com~licated bv the mimics Rushdie's voluminous master- pieces. fact that they, alas, do not need much re- minding. There are still the lies, the idi- ocy, the wanton destruction, the mega- corruption. The Indian present is marked by its continuity with exactly that narrative of the Emergency; the same tawdry action thriller that revs up on the eve of every election, every few years. Farce and trigedy and certain epic capacities of endurance on the part of the Indian populace still underlie al1 political discourse. There's an excellently chosen epigraph from Balzac -about which 1 shall have more to say later- that heads A Fine Bahnce. It declares «this tragedy is not a fiction. Al1 is true». To  which the average Indian reader might want to add -«Al1 is familiar, too- depressingly)). So the question really is, what insights, what surprises, can the six-hundred odd pages of Mistry's novel offer those of his read- ers for whom the bad odour of the Emer- gency has never quite been eliminated since? Now here 1 have to record that, de- spite the reservations expressed above, 1 in fact found myself deeply moved by Mistry's essentially simple story by the time 1 came to the unhurried end of it. Which means, not to put too fine a point on it, that Mistrv's skills as a novelist, his style, was in the end what made his nov- el, for me, worth reading. Mistry covers Rushdiesque ground, but no writer could be stylistically more different. Like Rushdie, Mistry's favourite city appears to be Bombay, the «city by the sea» where the novel's action is -set. As in Rushdie's works, 'thought police' of var- ious revolting kinds called Facilitators, " Motivators and so on march up and down the by-lanes of Mistry's novel stuffing 'beggars' into the backs of trucks, unloading them at work-camps and generally purting the whims of the political panjandrums who rule India in- to practice. Even the length of his novel One finds hard, then, to suppress the thought, altogether unworthy perhaps, that Mistry has written this novel as a sort of anti-Midnightj Children, an anti- magic-realist rewriting of substantially the same theme. It's a safe bet, though, that few would find Mistry's portrayal of political realities as provocative as Rush- die's or want to sue him for libel, even though his critique is, at points, just as harsh and just as open -and the reason for this surely has to do in large part with Mistry's amazingly quietist style. - - In order to approach this crucial matter of Mistry's style -paradoxically so subdued that it could well escape being classified as a style ar all- 1 will attend now to two classic concerns of literary theory. These are, first, the question of tradition and, second, the question of lo- cation. Rushdie, as we know, has exhu- berantly claiméd his descent from a «polyglot family tree» that includes writ- ers as diverse as Melville and Machado de Assis; and while he does not mention Paul Valery, Rushdie might not object too strenuously to seeing himself as part of that self-reflexive French tradition of writerly jouissance in which, as Valery once dedared, every page of literature boldly announces ((1 am a page of litera- ture)). Mistry, however places himself within another French tradition. His gu- ru, as we may surmise from the epigraph to A Fine Balance is the great realist nov- elist, Balzac: and Balzac's declaration on every page of his novels might have been «I am a slice of life)). Telling it as it is or sstriking t rua ,  as Balzac puts it elsewhere, simply requires the writer to stand back and let the story te11 itself without too much 'artful' inter- ference. Life is quite startling enough as it is. Which brings us to the question of location. Where precisely does Mistry stand as he resuscitates the Indian Emer- gency for his readers? One of the great 122 Links & Letters 4, 1997 Reviews strengths of his current novel is that it her life -and the one purely luminous sticks faithfully to characters and settings episode in the novel. After Rustom is -a Parsee ambience and the city of Bom- tragically killed in a smash-and-run acci- bay- that Mistry clearly knows well and dent, it's sadness al1 the way. Always in- remembers even better. Firozsha Baag.5 dependent of spirit, Dina discovers in is still, so to speak, a literary apartment the long run that she cannot live with her block to which Mistry holds the keys. At brother's family, and after some false the same time, Mistry lives in Canada, a starts finally settles down to her 'profes- country which is in fact analytically in- sion' of middleman between Ishvar Darji teresting terrain for a realist writer to oc- and Omprakash and Mrs Gupta. And cupy. For, despite its inner linguistic and Maneck, the friend's good-natured son, cultural tensions, Canada is, as most Ca- learning refrigeration engineering in a nadians themselves remark, a curiously Bombay college, is companion to al1 of low-profile country, off the beaten liter- them, until brutality by brutality, the ary tracks of the Anglo-American world. Emergency smashes up even this precar- Here, then, is a neutral observation post, iously built, inoffensive web of relation- an ideal non-aligned country of the ships. Ishvar and Omprakash gradually mind for the realist writer who can here slip into beggarhood from their proud stand back and achieve that exact per- calling as skilled tailors, the one with a spective -a fine balance. blackened, damaged leg and the other Four characters are observed long and unnaturaily bloated as result of nusbandi lovingly in this novel. They are Dina gone wrong. Dalal, a Parsee woman of spirit, widowed Towards the end of the novel, eight and still beautiful at forty-two; the pair of years on from the Emergency, Maneck tailors, uncle and nephew, Ishvar Darji returns to Bombay, from where he has and Ompralcash who do piece-work tai- been working in Middle East ~refrigerat- loring for Dina, always struggling to sup- ing the desert*. He finds Dina, beautiful ply Mrs. Gupta, the tough 'import-ex- Dina, grown old and grey, but still shar- port' business woman, with multiple ing her flat with the unrecognisable Ish- dresses cut to an exact pattern, on an ex- var and Omprakash. It is an unbearable act date; ancl Maneck Kohlah, the son of shock. Even more shocking for the read- a sch001-friend W ~ O  boards with Dina is hoping against hope that at leSt one her tiny, p o o r l ~  maintained flat. The of these characters will be spared, is that, novel takes us confidently back to Dina's finally, Maneck, the single figure left un- childhood, the e a r l ~  of both her disfigured in the novel, is killed too -in a Parentsy and her subsequent u~bringing senseless train 'accident' of the sort only by her hatef i  but well-meaning brother too familiar on the subcontinent. Or  is it Nusswan. AS soon as she can, inevitably, suicide? ~h~ ambiguous phrasing in Dina break5 awaY, meeting and marrying Mistry's novel seems to indicate the des- her huband Rustom on her own. pair of self-annihilation: «When the first Dina's rhree years with Rustom in compartment had entered the station, he his ill-equipped flat are the happiest in stepped off the platform and onto the 5. Talesjiom Firovha Bagh was Mistry's first collection of short stories. In this volume, pub- lished in 1987, he describes the lives of those typical Parsee characters who populate his later novels. 'Firozsha Bagh' is the name invented by Mistry for the fictional apartment building in Bombay where his characters interact and reveal Parsee culture at its idiosyn- cratic best. 'Parsee', incidentally, is the local word for Persian, i.e. Zoroastrian. Reviews Links & Letters 4, 1997 123 gleaming silver tracks.. . Maneck's last thought was that he still had Avinash's chessmen.~ It's a bleak vision, almost Greek in its vision of the carnage human beings can wreak. As in Greek tragedy, though, the message, 1 think, is emancipatory, al- though the chessgarne itself might be lost by most of Mistry's players. Maneck, young and unblemished must be ((sacri- ficed», yet the fragile companionship of Dina and the tailors somehow survive. They are the novel's battered symbols of hope. Told in this sketchy fashion, the story of Dina and her rag-tag heroes may not amount to much, but the fact is that Mistry tells his story at such a stubbornly unhurried pace and with so much sym- pathy for his central four that you do end up caring. With these four, Mistry ((strikes truen. 1 imagine Balzac would have approved. Naturally, a novel of this size has lots of other peripheral figures, most of whom, apart from Dina's family and her friend Zenobia, belong to the 'teeming' slums and pavements of the big, and def- initely bad, city. Here Mistry is less en- gaging. Rajaram the Hair-seller, the Beg- garmaster, Vasantrao Valmiki, and the Monkeyman seem to have strayed over into Mistry's book from the alleyways of Rushdie's novels. Mistry, however, seems to lack Rushdie's wonderful zest for the bizarre. The portraits of gro- tesques in A Fine Balanceare quite crude- ly drawn and touristy, and it is not ap- parent that Mistry expends on them the same affection or writes of them with the same knowledge as he is able to draw on for his main quartet. However, the odd thing is that Mis- try's scenes even at their most arresting or farcical or sadly erotic never really jolt us, so ordinary is their telling. His telling continually verges almost on the banal, reassuring us that the narrative voice throughout is basically naive, childlike -and thus genuine. Sancta simplicitas! Reading this long novel, not a gasp or a g d a w  once escaped me. 1 simply went along with Mistry's thoroughly unpre- tentious prose. True, once in a while my patience was a little strained, but on bal- ance, I'd rate his laconic narrative quite an achievement. Again, Balzac scores. This is a novel, ultimately, about the complex ecology of exploitation. Al1 the Dinas and the Ishvars and Manecks and Beggarmasters and Zenobias and Mrs. G u ~ t a s  form a com~lex chain of survival in Ghich mutual ne'ed and mutual suspi- cion exist intertwined. Both extreme meanness and astonishing generosity are typical of this eco-system inhabited by most Indians of the middle-classes and the really poor. But when the boot is put in, as it was during the Emergency, by political forces at the top, the whole del- icate balance is destroyed and utter disas- ter results. Farce and tragedy and myth, the underlying narrative layers of the subcontinent, take over once more from the action thiller. Read this book, though, not for its simple ethic but for its age-old storyline. For A Fine Balance, by virtue of some of the qualities I've just discussed, certainly qualifies Mistry as one of the foremost realist writers in English to have emerged (no pun intend- ed) in recent years out of the subconti- nent. Speaking of balances, the theme of that ((fine balance between hope and de- spair» runs, predictably, not just through the metaphors and episodes of the novel but extends to the heft and design of this elegant Faber volume. In spite of its for- midable bulk, A Fine Balance is a joy to hold and behold. The archival cover photograph of an Indian juggling act by Dario Mitidieri, especially, serves as an inspired accompaniment to one of those repeated vignettes or set pieces that 1 sug- gested earlier serve to structure the book's othenvise possibly tedious length. «The childreñ were lifted high above the ground. Their faces disappeared into 124 Links & Letters 4, 1997 Reviews the night beyond the reach of the kitchen lights. The audience gasped. He raised the pole higher ... Then another little toss and the pole was balanced on his thumb.. . » Readers of A Fine Balance may not quite gasp, as does the Monkey-man's audience, at the dexterity of Mistry's per- formance in this novel, but they will, 1 feel sure, find this book a genuine addi- tion to that palimpsest of literary figura- tions, mentioned at the beginning of this review, which describe for us the quite extraordinary dimensions of the Indian subcontinent. Rukmini Bhaya Nair Indian Institute of Technology Shashi DESHPANDE. The Intrusion and Other Stories. Delhi: Penguin India, 1993. 157 pages. Among contemporary Indian women writers in English, Shashi Deshpande stands out as a major name. Although in- itially she began writing short stories, she aiso has to her credit four children's books and six novels. In this collection, she shows once more that the short story is a genre whose technique she masters. The nineteen stories are incisively sketched in a direct and unoretentious style. Her English is simple and natural, devoid of any artifice. The use of the first person narrator gives a ring of authentic- ity to the situations and brings the pro- tagonist closer to the reader. The stories are for the most part woman-centered, women in their different roles of daught- er, mother and wife, who find them- selves enclosed in a tradition-bound male-oriented society and who inevita- bly suffer from loneliness and a sense of guilt and failure. Shashi Deshpande does not define herself as a feminist writer. and she has no intention of becoming the spokeswoman of the predicament of the middle-class Indian woman. Her novels and short-stories portray social re- ality the way it is, without any explicit critica1 clairn on the way it ought to be. Only three of the stories have a mythical background, with characters taken from the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. The other sixteen portray common everyday situations a Hindu woman has to deal with in a society that strictly predefines her roles. Al1 the fe- male characters share a deep feeling of isolation and frustration. However, none of them will put in danger the stability of farnilv unitv. Being an obedient daughter, a devot- ed wife and a caring and loving mother are the three ideals of womanhood in Hindu society. Shashi Deshpande con- fronts the reader with a set of situations in which living up to this ideal is far more imoortant than women's oersonal rights. Becoming a devoted wife means submitting to the wishes of a husband who is, very often, a total stranger for the young bride and who will take her re- gardless of her fears and emotions («The intrusion))). The wife's duty is to fulfil her husband's expectations, allowing herself to be modelled by him, even if it is at the cost of losing her own self and " personality («The stone woman))). A woman who has a successful orofessional career must be willing to give it up in fa- vour of her husband's and this sacrifice is taken as a matter-of-fact («A wall is saf- en)). In such a context, the decision to get on at work implies doubts, remorse and a deep sense of guilt («It was the nightingalen). A Hindu wife may even sacrifice her sexual life if her husband's ideals require it («The first lady))). Mar- riage is presented as a trap, from which a Hindu woman cannot liberate herself without causing the whole system to col- 

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