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“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.”
~ King Lear
***
n
“Why did I dislike him so much, she asked herself? Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all.”n
~ Dina, A Fine Balance
n Lear’s Patchwork Quiltn
A Fine Balance is a true modern epic, built on the ordinary. If one could read only one book about India, this would make a very good choice. On city, one village, one town, three families - this is the tight canvas in which Mistry paints, or rather, is the quilt that he weaves. They fit together to form a Persian carpet that captures within it an entire country’s desolation. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, Mistry creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state, at once unsettling, pitiful, and maddening in its clarity.
Never dramatic, never superfluous, the details keep getting added to the quilt, no stray piece left untended, every discarded cloth-piece added and stitched in with exquisite care. Mistry’s quilt is perhaps among the greatest novels composed on modern India, at least in terms of sheer ambition of the construction and the constrained canvas in which it is accomplished.
Every anguish, spread across four generations, every tumult and gasp of a country is squeezed into the harrowing tales of a few poignantly realized figures. Indeed, the whole drama is almost Shakespearean in scope - with distinct echoes of King Lear in it - in the pride and distance of each character; in their imaginary walls, which crumple with closeness.
Lear’s Storm, Writ Larger
Mistry is often compared to Dickens, the archetypal author of the Uncaring State. For me, the comparison that kept forcing itself was with Shakespeare. As I mentioned above, I could hear distinct echoes of King Lear as I was reading this magnificent book. However, I was not sure if I was reading this into Mistry since I had just gone very deep into Lear (in which I was reading too much of Plato, to be honest). I did not trust myself and decided to investigate - and I found (to my relief) that Mistry loves King Lear - he had even made an entire novel out of it (not this one, but ‘Family Matters’). It thus turned out to be a very lucky coincidence that I read King Lear almost in parallel with Mistry.
In any case, I now feel justified in elaborating on this theme - on the logic that a possibility of a King Lear influence having contributed to 'A Fine Balance' cannot be discounted.
I have to confess that once I made this discovery, I became overzealous and did make an attempt to draw the plot of King Lear directly into Mistry’s novel, but Mistry is too much the master for that. I tried to connect the abiding theme of love in both, trying to imagine Dina as an abandoned Cordelia. I tried to think of Maneck as a proxy-Edgar, one who was spared tragedy - but only the obvious hard-hitting ones that we dignify by the word ‘tragedy’, not the creeping disenchantment with life that can be even more cruel. I tried to deconstruct and see if the intermixing story lines of Fine Balance serve the same function as in Lear, the two story lines, the two tragedies mixed into one, joining to form a single base line to the symphony, echoing and reaching the same notes - a ritornello, of sorts. None of this worked satisfactorily.
Eventually, my reconciliation is that Mistry has set his novel in an in-between place - between the lunacy of self-inflicting suffering and the self-wrought tragedy of the end, of Lear. Instead, this epic unfolds in the forest, in the storm, the characters thrown into it directly, with no semblance of a ‘why’ or a question of ‘deserving’ anything. Unlike the Shakespearean tragedy, where there is at least an apparent causation for the tragedies that befall each, the condition of the storm, of wild uncaring nature is the default here. All are equal in this world, the same storm lashes them all.
One of the major themes in King Lear is the path to understanding (and salvation), forged in the wild under this wild buffeting of nature’s storms - where the ships of varying fates are lashed against each other, making them realize the ‘equality of pathetic mortals’, the only salvation allowed to them to be extracted from the whole tragedy.
n
“You know—things falling apart, centre not holding, anarchy loosed upon the world, and all that sort of thing.”n
In Mistry’s world too, the blind force of the Government and the ‘Emergency’ looms large and ominous in the background - affecting these characters, with no personal enmity or malicious intent - almost like a primal force of nature, grabbing, destroying or sparing the lives and joys of the actors - just like wild nature in King Lear.
Mistry also works in a lot of political criticism of the Indian political system. Let us pick a phrase from Mistry to summarize this: A house with suicidal tendencies. The path seems inexorable. Once tyranny makes an entrance, it allows the government to become more and more authoritative, insensitive, even casual in how they treat human lives (and dreams), without any real conscious intent - like the blind pagan gods of Shakespeare. Thus, maybe a step beyond nature then - as powerful, all-pervading and unreadable as the Gods themselves.
It makes one wonder how unreasonably powerful our modern governments are - capable of reaching in and snuffing out even the minutest blooms of happiness, at random. Isn’t it scary to have such gods amongst us?
n
“Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn’t He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He was managing a corporation, the things He allowed to happen …”n
Set against this blind force, the characters of Mistry too blunder blindly through the vast forces of ‘nature’ in search of some reconciliation - their lives too seem to present glimmers of hope until the next wild gust, or random malice, sweeps it away - but finding each other, giving what support they can, realizing that the straws are all that matters to the drowning man, finding what little joys they can in the occasional beauty of their fraying tapestry of a quilt.
n
“But how firm to stand, how much to bend? Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness. She could draw it on this side, but they might see it on that side.”n
If you think about it, that is almost a primal question for a civilized society… From asking a question like that to reaching a point in which the line is erased altogether, at least when seen, at a certain angle, from both sides - that is the only trajectory that deserves the name “progress”. Emergency is an almost comical word, but it is poignant since, as Mistry shows, most stumble from one Emergency to the next, uncomprehending. Some may escape the blindness and see each other, but perhaps only in the minds of visionary authors.
All this parallels the distinct evolutionary trajectory of the characters in King Lear too, as the Kings and Nobles realize that underneath their garbs, the thin veneer of civilization, we are all equal. And when fates and ‘higher powers’ tear us apart and smite us with lightening, the poor and the rich can see each other, and their equality, in that fateful flash.
The Finely Balanced
So we come back to this: Indeed, the whole drama is almost Shakespearean in scope - with distinct echoes of King Lear in it - in the pride and distance of each character; in their imaginary walls, which crumple with closeness.
The real fine balance, the real circus act, is the flimsily constructed wall that balances so finely between people, between families, between castes, between classes, between societies - but it cannot stand up to personal acquaintance. Which is why we use emotions of fear and disgust to prop it up.
This wall, a mere figment of imagination, is made up of stories, fictional ones - the moment it encounters real stories, it tumbles down. Authors like Mistry are the modern equivalents of the quixotic hero, trying to crumple these walls, reaching across thousands of miles, through the pages of a book.
Of course, we can see in figures like Nusswan those people who manage to keep the walls of fine balance erected throughout their lives - we see in them ourselves. Can we dare to see ourselves in Nusswan? In a character like Maneck we can see someone who was perhaps lucky to escape childhood without erecting them. In the other poor souls who haunt the book, we see the ones on the other side of our well-tended walls. Then, in Dina we can see the ones who do break free of these finely balanced walls. And we might even aspire to their tragedy - so that we can be free of these walls too.
That is the power of a work like this - it makes us crave even for tragedy, if only to let us escape our self-constructed prisons! How powerful is that?
