The tailors are Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, who defied the expectations of their caste to become successful tailors, only to have to flee first from anti-Muslim violence that targeted their friend and employer, and then violence that targeted their own family. He saw it in the chicken wire on the broken windowpanes, in the blackened kitchen wall and ceiling, in the flaking plaster, in the repairs on her blouse collar and sleeves.” Everywhere there was evidence of her struggle to stay ahead of squalor, to mitigate with neatness and order the shabbiness of poverty. After years of working as a seamstress to make ends meet, her eyesight is now failing and she must turn to two new sources of income: taking in a tenant and subcontracting sewing work to tailors she can supervise. She is brittle and judgmental, but this is often a facade to hide her fear of losing the life she has. He also takes the time to give thorough backgrounds for our four leads before the main narrative gets going.įirst we have Dina, a Parsi woman who was widowed young and has struggled to maintain a life independent of her controlling older brother. Mistry does a wonderful job of giving all the characters complex backgrounds and motivations, so that time after time, someone who is introduced as an annoyance or outright villain becomes a sympathetic character, even someone to root for. In an unnamed Indian city on the coast, four people are thrown together, their lives increasingly integrated as political unrest leads to restricted freedoms in the form of the Emergency. After tearing through books in the first half of January, I decided it was a good time for a big book and Rohinton Mistry’s epic A Fine Balance certainly fit that bill.Ī Fine Balance is epic in scope, but the bulk of it takes place in one single year: mid-1975 to 1976.
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