A moving portrayal of the lives of four people who were caught up in the brutal, sweeping policies of 1970s India during the State of Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi.

Dina, a 40-ish widow, is determined to be an independent woman in a society where women cannot and do not have a say; Ishvar and his nephew Om are from the untouchables but, through immense courage and determination on the part of his father/grandfather, have managed to escape the bondage of caste and become tailors in the city; Maneck is a sensitive boy from a well-to-do family in a mountain town who needed to train for a career because the family business was declining. They are brought together when Dina decides to hire the tailors, and to let a room in order to support herself financially. They are first suspicious of and then eventually adjust to each other, become friends and even live together convivially. There is a brief respite from the despair each has previously known, life is still a daily struggle but it is less difficult, and happiness seems to be within reach.

The chaos of political events unleashed by the State of Emergency reach them and their lives start moving beyond their control quickly and insanely. Rampant corruption, harassment and violence, fear and terror started to rule, sparing nobody. The government imposes drastic, brutal policies in the name of political stability and economic development, policies such as forced eviction which left thousands homeless, forced labor in big infrastructure projects, and forced sterilization. Our friends go from bad to worse, and from then it was just from one misfortune to another. There were points along the story where I just wished Ishvar and Om to die – that would have been kinder to them. Yet they survive. And I think, indeed, why should I, the reader, be spared the inconvenient truth that in real life, many of the poor and destitute had actually gone through and survived the viciousness of that period in their history? Mistry pushes us, relentlessly, beyond our comfort zones.

I call this novel a story with a heart. The author writes with sympathy, without being sentimental. We recognize the characters -- they dream, they despair, they laugh, they hope, they feel pain, they get angry, they get jealous, they find change difficult but eventually accept their fates, they don't trust politicians. Mistry writes of big, serious themes and of small, ordinary lives. The novel raises sensitive issues of class conflict, ethnic conflict, gender, dispossession, and political repression, and how invariably the first ones to get sucked up in the vortex are the weak, the small, the powerless, the defenseless, the disenfranchised. He describes with vivid and realistic imagery the cruel and hard life of the untouchables in rural India, the squalid poverty of the shantytowns and the homeless in the streets of the city, the pervading cultural myopia, and the brutality of an oppressive regime.

The story is tragic, monumentally tragic even. Adversities came in waves, and while circumstances could have easily crushed or corrupted them, these four friends were never pathetic, were never wretched in their souls. The balance between hope and despair is very fine indeed. A big novel that at another time (and another place) might have been banned for tackling potentially inflammatory issues.

Highly recommended. ( )

The five characters of A Fine Balance, converge in a crowded apartment in a nameless Indian city, face a variety of horrors-a lingering, repressive caste system, the corrupt and callous government of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, the heartlessness of unchecked capitalism, and an environment that is both unhealthy and demoralizing. A moving tragedy. ( )

Beautifully written and ingenuously plotted, but unflinching in depiction of poverty, communal violence, and corruption in 1970s India. And it's long. The ending didn't satisfy me either. "A Fine Balance" was Mistry's second novel, and a Booker Prize nominee, and it does make me interested in read other works by this author. ( )

This novel - epic in length - tells the story of four people in Mumbai, India who come together during The Emergency of the mid-1970's. They are:

• Dina Dalal - a young widow who takes up clothing manufacture to maintain her independence from her controlling brother.


• Ishvar Darji - a kindly tailor from a low caste background who comes to Mumbai to work for Dina.


• Omprakash - Ishvar's more unruly nephew who works with him as a tailor.


• Maneck - a young man from a mountain village studying at the university and staying with Dina as a paying guest.

In the first part of A Fine Balance, Mistry tells the life stories of each of these characters which actually could be four gripping novellas in their own right. Then the story is told of how they all come together under one roof and after a rocky start forming a friendship.

This novel is marked by stark descriptions of poverty and injustice in India which Mistry none-too-subtly lays at feet of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's corrupt regime. This novel does not have a happy ending, but there is joy and love in the brief time of friendship of the principal characters that shows that their is some hope in the most dire of circumstances. ( )

When I first started this book, I thought it was going to another one of those multi-generational epics set in a particular time period, which seems to be a popular theme among current Indian writers of every generation. Instead, what I found and was totally absorbed by, was a massive, detailed, and utterly fascinating story of the lives of four people who have been thrown together by the exigencies of the time--the 70s and 80s under the tyrannical, corrupt, reign of terror of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, who was the then-Prime Minister.

Dina Dalal is a 30 year old widow in an unnamed city by the sea (most likely Bombay) struggling to preserve her independence with a small piece-work business making women’s dresses. With failing eyesight, she hires two tailors, Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash Darji; in addition she rents space to Maneck Kohlah, a university student from the mountains of India’s north. By accident and force of circumstance, all four wind up living together in Dina’s tiny apartment during a period of terrorist activity on the part of the police under Gandhi’s Emergency Act. Despite their best efforts, Ishvar and Om are caught up in caste and religious violence, police raids, and Maneck discovers the perils of opposition to the regime’s policies.

The story is a wonderful combination of the love that eventually arises among these four very unlikely friends and the description of the brutality, corruption and cynicism that infected every part of Indian life during Indira Gandhi’s despotism. But it is also an exploration of the unlikely ways that people are connected, many times through total strangers met by “happenstance”. It is an evocation of the concept of Indra’s Net, a Buddhist concept of the infinite interconnectedness of all existence, symbolized by a net at whose nodes are jewels; pluck just one thread of the net, and all the jewels vibrate.

This is a beautifully written book, fascinating in its description of everyday lives both in a large city and in villages, of relationships between and among ordinary people, and the terrors of political and civil oppression. Nothing is romanticized--not the lives of the people or the people themselves, yet the characters are completely empathetic, despite their flaws.

Don’t miss this one. ( )