© 2018 JETIR October 2018, Volume 5, Issue 10 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162)

Rohinton Mistry‟s “A Fine Balance: Quest, Hope and Despair”

Bhawna Sharma Dr. Ashwani Rana Research Scholar, AP& Research Guide, CT University, Ludhiana. CT University, Ludhiana.

Abstract: Rohinton Mistry is provoked by the atrocities continued against the downtrodden and suffered people. Rohinton Mistry strives hard to reform the society by exposing various problems of the society. In short, Mistry desires peace to prevail in the society by understanding the various problems of the individuals. In Mistry’s novels, there is a nostalgia of the political and social disorder of India’s postcolonial experience. He is one of the writers who "create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indians of the mind"1. Ambition and dreams of his protagonists are tied with hope and despair about the life of the modern world. Mistry shows the basic ambivalence of common men, as a realist and humanist through his works. Rohinton Mistry’s novels reflect interest in the importance of personal and cultural identity. It is obvious that Mistry has well depicted his deep attachment and nostalgia for his homeland. The social and cultural nostalgia helped him to create a sense of loss. He recognizes the consequence of religion and rite in the construction of human identity. Mistry’s fiction can be read within this framework as the quandary of an individual as he/she seeks to cope with the contradictions of the past and the present, community and self, family and community.

Rohinton Mistry reveals the social problems as a social novelist in the pantheon of writers such asAnand, Charles Dickens, Salman Rushide, ChamanNahal, Thomas Hardy, etc. Mistry’s characters grow in self-knowledge and fight against an aggressive social environment to create a new world and freedom. Rohinton Mistry’s protagonists are young and middle age people. His novels deal with major Indian social problems and imbalances of Indian society where the protagonists themselves are the suppressed ones. Especially, the middle classes and underdogs are affected by emergency and society.It is fitting that Mistry opens his novel with a citation from Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot: 'Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft arm chair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.2

A Fine Balance is a richly woven novel interweaving the slums of Bombay with the middle- class Parsi lifestyle. The novel also illustrates the deeper insight of political, nativity and struggle of common people. It focuses on the deep structure of the individual’s existences of human life. A Fine Balance is taken up for analyzing the human sufferings in which Rohinton Mistry ultimately gives a space of endless sufferings of the individuals.

Keywords- provoked Atrocities, Quest, postcolonial, despair.

QUEST FOR IDENTITY The search for identity is processed by a team of four major characters from different background mingle with each other as a joint force, they want to prove their self-identity in the society. Dina Dalal, the protagonist of the novel suffers at her younger age of the death of her parents in succession. She is guarded by her brother who wants to protect her as a bird in a cage. By nature, Dina is a lover of humour and independent existence. She cannot find comfort in her brother‟s custody. She is forced to marry a rich gentleman but she prefers to marry a compounder namely Rustom Dalal. Before being settled in her marriage life, Dina loses her husband in an accident. The Emergency of 1975 shatters all her hopes and she is pushed again to her brother‟s concern. Thus Dina‟s identity fades away in the society as an independent woman.

Dina fights for her independence and individuality but she faces the continuous failures and threats by society. Finally she loses her flat and forced to her brother‟s home as a servant. At this stage the feminist may argue that by creating the event of Dina Dalal‟s coming back to her brother‟s house, Mistry does some injustice to her. It shows that it is difficult for a woman to live independently without any sort of male- protection. Even Beggarmaster‟s protection helped her to live safely for a few more years. But here the fact is that Dina Dalal, like other three protagonists, is disturbed considerably because of the prevailing political situation, National Emergency proclaimed by the Government of India. That is why she loses her freedom.

After Mrs. Shoroff‟s (Dina‟s mother)death, despite of her keen desire to pursue her education, Dina is not allowed even to matriculate. Nusswan, her brother, tries to impose his will on and suggests to her that she could marry a person of his choice, but Dina protests and asserts her individuality. She marries Rustom Dalal, whom she loves intensely. Dina is the symbol of the “new woman” who refuses to be acquiescent and

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© 2018 JETIR October 2018, Volume 5, Issue 10 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) submissive and does not accept the stereotypical feminine role assigned to her. Even on that cruel night, when her husband dies, she behaves in a very dignified manner.

Dina tries to rebuild her life, she refuses to buckle under pressure and resolves to rebuild her life without being economically dependent on a man. Dina Dalal, whose fortunes the readers follow in the first part of the book, hopes to live as an independent woman after her husband‟s early death, managing a small tailoring business and maintaining her own apartment. She fetches two tailors, Ishvar and Om and starts working for Au Revoir Exports. She embodies the woman who is far ahead of her times, she is completely independent and free thinking. Greedy landlords, a mean and ignoble brother who never cared for her because of his hypocritical ideals and only bullied and used her, and sheer misfortune robs her of this modest dream after years of struggle. After the early demise of her husband, Dina tries to regain her foothold on life but indeed, the road towards independence and self-reliance proves bumpy and full of obstructions.

HOPE AND DESPAIR Rohinton Mistry‟s protagonists are the recurrent victims that doomed to bear the burden of their country‟s chequered history. Mistry avoids the bitterness of satire since he projects a sympathetic view of the predicament of his characters. Still, his writings perceive loneliness and alienation that is reflective in way of the psyche in a strange land and society. A Fine Balance, the novel routes through a series of political events on various issues such as corruption in high places, minority complexes and fragmentation of the social order. However, this novel is not merely a political novel. The author succeeds in interweaving national history with the personal life of the protagonists. The main action of the novel is set in a city by the sea, apparently Bombay and it takes place during the emergency of 1975. In A Fine Balance, Mistry portrays atrocities committed on two untouchables from a village and suffering of the poor characters from Parsi community. Mistry uses four main characters a woman and three men, and a handful of extraordinary minor ones. Each of the four protagonists has their own story and the characters begin to live together under one roof in the city. The novel is about sufferings and pains of the poor people and individuals. The novel focuses another sight into rural India provided by Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash who struggle to exist in this world. Mistry writes about conflict at an individual level as well as at a larger level, Mistry is committed towards his cultural roots that provide him infinite inspirational material for his fiction and with great sensitivity and truthfulness he renders the tales of protagonists from Parsi community caught in their beliefs, lifestyles and peculiar situations. Mistry attempts to understand Indian reality in terms of his past experience and tradition. Ishvar‟s readymade formula of optimism, “the human face has limited space .... If you fill your face with laughing there will be no room for crying”3 is very crucial to the theme and the title of the novel itself.

.The life of Maneck, Dina and the tailors Ishvar and Omprakash get interconnected under one roof. In A Fine Balance, the tailors Ishvar and Omprakash are also at the same house in Bombay due to caste violence in their village The four main characters of this novel suffer from a sense of rootlessness. Caste violence has driven in Ishvar and Omprakash life that forces them from a rural background to overcrowded Bombay for better life. Similarly, Maneck also moves from his home in the hills to Bombay for his higher education. His family lost its wealth and trade during the partition of India. Dina has grown up in Bombay but her sense of independence after her husband‟s accidental death that keeps her away from her family. So, in a sense of all the four main characters are lonely and struggling for their identity and individuality, and their shifts towards hopes and disappointments in life. Social circumstances and loneliness bring them together to understand as they struggle to survive.

The author implies at various levels of existence and struggle of common man. As a political and historical novel, Mistry sets the life of protagonists with the historical moment of modern India. In fact, Mistry observes India as a country with unclear problems that are not helpful to an individual‟s ambitions. Therefore, their struggle for survival, poverty and exploitation are basic concerns of the novel. Their destiny keep them together learn to understand and appreciate the compulsion and aspiration of the other.

Mistry often sets history and fiction to create a broad view of life of individuals‟ struggles and of focus in existence. The two untouchables have to endure the atrocities of the high class people and political power and their future becomes miserable. Due to economic and social reasons are displaced them from their familiar world. Even after, they become fully qualified tailors and return to their village and they are deeply conscious of their own roots in the society. After their entire family is cruelly murdered by village lords and they decide to immigrate to Bombay for the survival,like other facts thousands and thousands migrants are coming to the cities because of bad times in their native places.

Their life in Bombay is contrary to their expectations that symbolize the anguish, pain and anxiety of people cut off from their native villages. Like roamers, they move from their slum to the railway platform, then to the entrance of a chemist‟s shop where they are mistaken for beggars. The police compelled them to slog as laborers and finally released from that hell by the Beggar master. They are caught in an unavoidable dilemma between their native village and Bombay. In Mistry‟s diasporic writing the overwhelming question that thoroughly occurs is - where does one belong? The answer to this question seems to get expression in the previous three works of Mistry, but as time passes it no longer remains important “as to where does one belong but how does one belong”4They throw out from their native because it holds no promise or hope to survive. In Bombay, again they have failed and struggled to survive and stay on as trivial men. The tailors were born into a family of untouchables who have risen in the world and become beggars in the end of their life.

Another aspect of despair is displayed in Mistry„s novel is a fine documentation of the human dimensions of the Emergency. Mistry could have made the tailors inhabitants of the city who suffer from such torture. But bringing in people from the village allows him to document new areas of the varied sub - continental social reality-poverty prejudice and caste oppression in the villages, inter-communal harmony or its obverse and the terrible predicament of honest hard-working villagers who become a mass of statistics in the city. The two tailors, who represent common humanity as they endure the consequences of all the political measures decided in the higher echelons of power, are Om and Ishvar Darji, Chamaars-turned-tailors from the countryside. Once in the city, Om and Ishvar can only join the masses looking for jobs and shelter. When they JETIR1810267 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org 450

© 2018 JETIR October 2018, Volume 5, Issue 10 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) initially have to sleep under the awning of the shop of Ashraf Chacha„s suspicious friend, Nawaz, they think it is but a temporary measure. Soon, they find out that this temporary measure will last for three months, for jobs are not easy to come by. Their next stop is the slum quarter where they encounter for the first time the horrendous experience of the poor city migrant. A poor shack is sublet to them by an agent manipulating state lands, where illegal shacks are erected and rented out to the desperate. This is hardly any comfort but it ensures a roof over the head. In the slum area, Om and Ishvar have to interact with a curious group of people. It is here that they experience water shortage, the dire poverty of those even worse off than them, like the Monkey-man who cannot leave his animals alone for fear they will devour each other out of hunger, and the poor battered woman with five children to feed. How the human rights of poor people are trampled upon, which lead to a complete state of despair for common people is graphically shown in the novel A Fine Balance. The tailors Om and Ishvar, along with other inhabitants of their hutment colony, are forcibly taken to the rally with the promise of payment of five rupees and tea and snacks, to swell the crowd at the rally. As Raja Ram remarks, “Much easier to get them [crowd] wholesale in the city jhopad patties…I told you it‟s going to be a day at the circus. We have clowns, monkeys, acrobats, everything.”5 All the leaders at the rally and even the Prime Minister deliver speeches about how they were working for the benefit of common people. Ironically, it is the common people like tailors and their neighbors, who have to return hungry without any tea and snacks, and fully exhausted, having lost whole of their earning day at the rally. A few days later, after returning from work tailors are astonished to find their colony being flattened by the bulldozers. With great difficulty they are able to retrieve some of their belongings in their old trunk. The authorities informs them that it‟s a new Emergency law. If shacks are illegal they can remove them. The new law says the city must be made beautiful. With no place to sleep, they go to the railway platform but here too they are denied sleeping space without bribing the policeman on duty. Ironically, the city is full of the Prime Minister‟s hoardings with slogans like: „The city belongs to you!‟ „Keep it beautiful!‟And „The nation is on move!‟6

CONCLUSION A Fine Balance is an absorbing and moving text about life of common, vulnerable people who scuttle about on this globe and whose lives are caught in the vicious cycle of poverty. The novel depicts the picture of the present-day India, shows the sufferings of the outcasts and innocents trying to survive in a cruel and hostile world and grapples with the question of how to live in the face of death and despair. The poor who are the main characters in this novel are also maimed, mutilated, poisoned, homeless and hopeless. „ Even the criticism of society must be carried out within society. Even planning of society must be carried out within society. Even the description of society must be carried out within society. And all this occurs as the criticism of a society which criticizes itself, as the planning of society which plans itself and always reacts to what happens, and as the description of a society which describes itself.‟7 Mistry proposes a world in which nothing can really change or improve the condition of the poor and the deprived. The society is a place only for the rich, the corrupt, the oppressive and the unscrupulous.

REFERENCES: 1.Rushdie Salman: Imaginary Homelads, Granta Books, London, 1991. Print.p-10 2.Honore de Balzac, Le Pere Goriot, qtd. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). 3. Nilashah, “A Critical Appraisal of A Fine Balance”: The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry, ed., JaydipsinghDodiya (New Delhi: 1998) p-117. 4.Birbal Singh, Frank “Series Editor‟s Preface”, Jasbir Jain, Neil Bissoondath: Indo-Caribbean-Canadian Diaspora, Jaipur: Rawat Publications. 2005.p-10 5.Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 161. 6.ibid, p- 303. 7. Luhman,Niklas “The Representation of Society Within Society”, Political Theory in the Welfare State, trans. John BednarzJr, Berlin : Walter de Gruyter. 1990. P-17

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