I wrote this review for Goodreads, and thought should share it here as well. It's a long ass review for a long ass book, and hopefully comes somewhere close to doing justice to it.
Review
Can one truly do justice to reviewing a book when the task is tantamount to reviewing life itself? I’m not sure, but let me open with the analogy below:
A Fine Balance is a knife buried in the heart of the reader. It starts twisting slowly to begin with. The pain is tolerable, even enjoyable in a masochistic way, until a certain point in the book, after which it starts to become uncomfortable, and then some more. Just then, the knife unwinds a bit, to let the reader relax. And just as he relaxes, it twists again. This cycle of extended periods of twisting of the knife punctuated by brief unwinding continues for a long, long time. Once the reader begins to think that the pain is intense but bearable and predictable, the knife is rapidly pulled out of the heart and replaced by a machete, using which the entire body is stabbed, slashed, cut, and eventually decapitated.
The analogy should make it amply clear that this book isn’t for the happy-go-lucky type at all, but let me come back to that in a while.
Sometimes, it seems impossible that a single human being was capable of writing this book. I mean, does Mistry suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder, or does he possess psychic powers, which have allowed him to simultaneously live the life of an urbane Parsi widow, a disabled beggar, a troubled teenager, a lower caste rural cobbler, a traditional Indian middle class mother, a still more traditional Indian middle class father, and so on and so forth? Moreover, how does he understand so intricately – and put on paper in an equally evocative way – the relationships between each of these very different and complicated characters?
Maybe I’m biased because the depiction of Maneck’s – the troubled teenager – relationship with his parents, and especially his mother, is almost a mirror image of my own relationship with my parents. Perhaps for the first time the book allowed me to understand how my mother sees our relationship from her perspective – and it broke my heart.
Some of the criticism aimed at the length of book is admissible, and there’s little doubt it could have been 100-120 pages shorter. However, the deeply descriptive 603 page tomb means the idiosyncrasies of each and every character are hardly read as such. Instead, they seem like the swaying top branches of a tall tree whose roots are buried firmly in the beginnings of the book.
Now, back to the analogy I made at the beginning. Never have I ever winced, grimaced, squirmed, writhed and twisted the way I did reading the matter-of-fact descriptions of destitution in this book. This would probably be far truer of an Indian reader than a foreign one because all Indians capable of buying and reading this book have developed within them an autopilot mechanism which helps them consistently ignore the shocking tragedy that is the lives of a majority of their fellow citizens, who live all around them. A Fine Balance relentlessly breaks down and destroys that autopilot. A few examples:
When Om – one of the four major characters and a rural low caste orphan struggling to make ends meet in Mumbai – has a lucky escape after a bicycle accident and gets Rupees 50 from the rich driver who almost crushed him, a passer-by says to him: “Never get up so fast. Always stay down and make some moaning-groaning noise. Cry for doctor, cry for ambulance, scream, shout, anything. In this type of case, you can pull at least two hundred rupees.” He spoke like a professional; his twisted elbow hung at his side like a qualification.
When Om throws away the last piece of a sugarcane without sucking it dry: A street urchin shooed away the gull and snatched the prize. She took it to the juice stall and washed off the sand in the bucket where the men were rinsing dirty glasses.
When Shankar, whose all four limbs were severed as a child – described as professional modifications elsewhere in the book – to make him an outstanding beggar, is in the process of retying the soiled bandages on his arms: The palms revealed he scratched them by rubbing against the tailors’ bedding. The sackcloth’s delicious roughness relived the itch. Then he began retying the bandages, the arduous process of neck and jaw in reverse. Om moved his own head in sympathy – up, down, and around, carefully, yes, around again – stopping when, feeling a little foolish, he realised what he was doing.
Here’s Shankar remembering his childhood as a beggar: “A child, a sucking cripple, earns a lot of money from the public. There were so many different breasts I drank milk from during those years”.
There are tens of such passages I could quote, but I will stop here. Mind you, this is far less horrifying than the sheer tragedy that ultimately befalls each and every character of the book, but I’ve avoided those examples to steer clear of spoilers. The point is, this book will break you down, make you beg for mercy till you stop begging out of sheer hopelessness. There is no reprieve, and there’s hardly “a fine balance between hope and despair”
