A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance, sweeping historical novel by Indian-born Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry. Published in 1995, it was Mistry’s second novel, and it garnered the Giller Prize for best Canadian novel as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

A Fine Balance is set in India in the mid-1970s, during the 21-month period during which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed emergency powers, a time called the Emergency. It focuses on four people whose lives are intertwined in an unnamed coastal city that resembles Mumbai. They include Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, who are of the Chamar caste, one of the Scheduled Castes. They are tailors who leave their small village after the murder of the rest of their family in order to find work. They are hired by the Parsi widow Dina Dalal, who has also been working as a tailor to maintain her independence from her tyrannical older brother but whose eyesight is worsening, making it difficult for her to keep up with the work. Dina is also supplementing her meager income by providing accommodation for her friend’s son, Maneck, who has been sent by his parents to study heating and air conditioning in order to be able to earn a living in changing circumstances.

After about a year, the slum in which Ishvar and Omprakash live is leveled as part of a beautification program, and they are sold to a labor camp. They are able to escape with the help of Beggarmaster, and Dina takes them into her home. However, this causes trouble with her landlord. When Omprakash becomes an adult, he and his uncle return to their village to find a wife for him. In the meantime, Maneck finds good work in Dubai and moves there. Later, Dina is evicted and must move into her brother’s home. In their village, Ishvar and Omprakash are rounded up for forced sterilization, an operation that results in Ishvar’s legs being amputated because of infection and in the castration of Omprakash. The ending of the novel takes place in 1984, when Maneck returns for his father’s funeral and learns from Dina that Ishvar and Omprakash have become beggars.

The epic scale of the novel confronts the ruthless brutality of class and caste as the protagonists are left vulnerable to the vagaries of poverty and discrimination. The novel meticulously recreates Indira Gandhi’s India, and the author uses this context to present a paradoxically humane vision of inhumanity.

Rigorously unsentimental and full of black humor, A Fine Balance takes the reader through a vicious and sometimes carnivalesque world of poverty and utter powerlessness. The novel’s harrowing denouement is as shocking and as distressing as anything in 20th-century literature. Perhaps Mistry’s greatest achievement is his clear-sighted depiction of relentless, impersonal brutality in a story of lives torn apart not by individual weakness but by institutional inequity and the horrors of corrupt power. The genius of the novel lies in its refusal to allow the reader to escape to either pathos or cynicism.