Book Review: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry

I just finished reading "A Fine Balance", by Rohinton Mistry. This book was recommended to me by Minu, who I met while I was living in Canada. She was the administrator of the community center of our condo complex, where I was renting at, and she commented that this was a great book that she simply could not put down. I agree with her assessment, but it is certainly one of the most heart-rending books that I have read in my life.

I would like to say that it is one of the best books that I have read in a long time, but it has left me with revelations, conflicted emotions, and a rather considerable dose of reality. Oh, before you go much further, I should warn you that this entry will reveal some details about the book, and discuss some aspects of it. If you haven't read the book yet and are planning to, reading this blog entry would be a very bad thing. You have been warned!

Indians - before we left its shores as expatriates - have long bemoaned the putrid state of the Indian union; the caste system, blind subservience to religion, callousness and unchecked authority of government officials, the plight of the poor, the hold of corruption and land grabbers on the masses, the non-existent infrastructure, the wasted tax revenues, the inept administration, the bulging wallets of politicians even as essential services are affected, the complete apathy of most people to the problems that pervade Indian society today... I could go on and on. During our periodic visits to our friends in Seattle, we held passionate discussions, where ideas were bandied back and forth about what needs to be done to fix India's "problems", if you will. These discussions would go well into the wee hours of the morning, fuelled by passion and lots of Starbucks coffee.

As a child, I heard numerous different accounts about India's "Emergency" period, as my parents and others called it. My impressions of the era were mostly good, with my lower-middle-class parents opining that it was a good thing for the country; things ran like "clockwork" as people were scared of the government. VERY scared. There were also some small problems, like "mass sterilizations" and other minor issues, my parents said - from the comfort of their lower-middle class existence - but for the most part it held the country in its vice like grip, and "improved" the domestic situation. Surely that was a good thing?! Especially in a country bent upon retaining old - and mostly idiotic - ways of doing things; a country driven complacent by the lack of any enforcement. What other way was possibly there to restore integrity than good old-fashioned fear? I thought that "Emergency" and "MISA" were useful tools in the hands of the government to restore some semblance of order and discipline. Anything, it seemed like, to change the status quo.

I held onto this opinion with great passion. India's bad side - that is so much at the fore today - took a backseat at that time under the pressures of a government bent upon imposing its will and vision upon the people, I'd heard. I was 3 years old when "Emergency" started, and was about 5 when it was lifted, so I didn't have a chance to observe and document first hand, but I was around plenty of people, who were able to give me the lower-middle-class and middle-class perspective on it.

In these Seattle discussions, I have long propounded my theory that imposing Emergency on the country would help us commoners deal with the "atrocities" perpetrated against us by the usual suspects: those in the bureaucracy, politicians, goondas, and the high-castes - though I was born into a high-cast myself. A few incidents in my life had helped me arrived to that conclusion. My mother would not have had to pay a portion of her retirement benefits to the very clerks who were tasked with processing her papers. My mother who hadn't received one paisa in bribes was forced to shell out her hard earned money to get what was rightfully hers. One clerk threatened her that "those papers will vanish!", if she didn't pay up. My father needn't have bribed the policeman (Rs. 50) to sign off on the security clearance for our passport applications. The list is endless and it would take all day. Recommended reading however, are India in Slow Motion by Mark Tully, and Everybody loves a good Drought by P. Sainath).

My opinion that strong medicine was needed was bolstered by the numerous accounts of vicious attacks on people who chose to speak their minds against the bad elements of Indian society. Acid would get thrown in their faces, they would commit "suicide" in lockups, become "floaters" in the rivers of the nation, their bodies tortured and mutilated. The Police instead of investigating these crimes would often be the very perpetrators of these gruesome acts. So, there is great reticence among the Indian public to speak out against the iniquities that surround them. As long as it does not affect them, they are content to turn a blind eye. This is pitiful. Unless people question injustices - perceived or otherwise - the perpetrators go scot-free, their acts pardoned by the indifference of a society reluctant to get involved in anything that might involve risk.

I surmised that if there was no fear of retribution, people would speak their minds; and Emergency would provide that. I had no need to worry about being arrested for spouting off my mouth against India's inane, greedy and corrupt politicians, and then become part of the "custodial death" statistics. Accountability would be important and everybody would know right from wrong and do the "right" thing at all times: Politicians, Police, bureaucrats, everybody. I viewed Emergency as the panacea to all of India's ills.

Which brings us - finally! you say - to the reason I am writing this entry. This book completely destroys that vision of "it was a good thing for our country". Utterly, without any resemblance to its former self. The ghastly truths, one half forgotten and another half ignored, are brought to the fore using several powerful and rich characters: Dina Dalal, Ishvar, Om, Narayan, the Beggarmaster and Shankar. No word is wasted, nothing is superfluous. It conveys very elaborately the ills of a government running amuck with power, and how it affected the everyday poor. The poor are the ones who pay the price for the whims and fancies of the people in power, however benevolent their "aims" may have been. It made me realize that the cessation of democracy in our country and the suspension of the fundamental rights of its citizens leads to the same problems that electing corrupt politicians to powers creates. My utopian vision of a honest leader bent on improving the plight of the nation was nothing but that: Utopian. My opinion of Indira Gandhi plummeted to hitherto unexplored depths, as I realized through this work, the magnitude of her abuse of power, and the hare-brained schemes that she unleashed on the public. Her son Sanjay Gandhi was responsible for the mass sterilizations of a lot of people, and it is a well-known fact that some citizens distributed sweets on the streets when he died - rather suspiciously - in a plane crash.

Not limiting itself to painting a picture of the emergency, the book also brilliantly illustrates the perils of the low-castes by showcasing the way they are treated by the upper-castes, by the likes of the "just" Thakur Dharamsi. The way the upper-castes treat the lower-castes was very realistic and a damning portrait of those following untouchability, a moribund tradition of segregating people (and their shadows) based on their caste. I was very ashamed to be born into the higher castes as I was reading this book. I now know why the Dravidian parties in South India want to keep the upper castes under their thumb and not give them much room for progress. If somebody dominated you for thousands of years, and you suddenly came to power, you would do the same thing to your oppressors.

Ishvar and Om suffer in many ways as a result of their caste and their financial status. The poor tailors, who sleep in the streets and signify what most of the urban poor go through, are poster children for the kinds of problems that face such people. They live in a shack (Jhopadpatti) rented from the very person who is tasked to keep the lands clean, and are then chucked out of their accommodation by their landlord. This forces them to sleep on the streets, where they are mistaken for homeless people and taken to a forced labour camp, where they are severely ill-treated, and have to escape using the grace of a Beggarmaster, a local thug who makes them fork over a portion of their pay as compensation for his services. A very fine illustration of the way poor people are used by those in power.

The cast of characters is very rich and captures the wide variety of cultures that one encounters in India. Dina Dalal, the Parsi widow trying to eke out a living - without the auspices of her idiot brother - defines the way the middle-class considers the problems of the poor. She suspects them (the tailors) of trying to cheat her at every turn, and every time they vanish, she starts worrying not about what might have happened to them, but to what might happen to her business. Her insecurity and lack of trust in the poor are traits widespread in India.

Maneck Kohlah, a Parsi arriving at the city to earn an education, and staying as a paying guest at Dina Dalal's little flat is a very refreshing character, not burdened by the ego of a high-caste or possessing a disdain for those less fortunate than he. I found a lot of myself in Maneck Kohlah, though I completely disagree with Mr. Mistry's treatment of Maneck's character at the end. The book completely rips your heart out, but rest assured that the incidents recounted in the book, are highly realistic. One only has to read the daily papers in India to understand the levels to which India's have-nots suffer.

Beggarmaster, the guy who takes perfectly normal children, subjects them to "professional modifications", and then finds spots for them to beg, is one truly macabre illustration of India's vermin. I was riding a bus when I read that line and gasped so loudly that the people next to me looked at me funny. When I was a little kid, my parents kept a constant eye on me, warning me to not wander off or some kidnapper would take me, blind me, cut off my hands, and make me beg for money. So, I completely understood the motivations of this character, though I was constantly dreaming up ways I would kill such a person if I ever encountered one. These people are truly the scum of the earth (Even Republicans don't come close! ;)). A lot of people in India do completely unfathomable things to get ahead and make a living, but the likes of Beggarmaster do not deserve to live.

This book is a very damning account of the period surrounding India's Independence and the problems created by Indira Gandhi's notorious declaration of Emergency in 1975, but it's cast of characters is quite rich. By reading this book, I realized that I had been very naive; I had completely ignored the abuse potential of uncontrolled raw power in the hands of the unscrupulous. India's problems, it looks like, certainly needs something a bit less drastic than Emergency. Its citizens need a strong dose of Integrity.