DOWN AND REALLY OUT

By Pico Iyer

At the heart of Rohinton Mistry's monumental new novel lie questions as essential as breathing. How can hope and dignity be maintained in the face of daily atrocity? And atrocity that comes not with the sudden violence of a Holocaust but in a steady, relentless drip-drip-drip of degradation and disappointment. What is the price of forbearance in the challenging of injustice, and when does stoicism turn into fatalism? Cities like Bombay are routinely given tags like "City of Hope" or "City of Dreadful Night"; Mistry digs beneath the comfort of such abstractions to a level of complexity where murderers command our sympathy and philanthropists live off beggars. The fine balance that gives the title to his book asks us, unforgettably, where we draw the line "between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness."

Mistry, a Bombay-born Zoroastrian, or Parsi, who moved to Toronto in 1975, has long distinguished himself as a rigorous humanitarian who can re-create from afar every last rending detail of his clamorous hometown. His books are living rooms that open up onto whole worlds. And with characteristic deliberation, he has steadily moved from a first collection of stories (Swimming Lessons) to a prizewinning mid-length novel (Such a Long Journey) to this new epic, which is worthy of the 19th century masters of tragic realism, from Hardy to Balzac. In response, perhaps, to a world that has "a phobia about anything in slow motion," it restores the old-fashioned virtues of attention and compassion.

As a testament to patience, A Fine Balance (Knopf; 603 pages; $26) is also a test of it: its first 250 pages merely introduce the four main characters and the sorrows of their pasts. Dina is a Parsi widow in her early 40s who runs a small apartment in Bombay; Maneck is a student from the mountains who takes a room with her; and Ishvar and Om are two village tailors, uncle and nephew, who long to pull themselves up from their Untouchable status. All four, with their habits of impatience and loss, hopefulness and resignation, find their lives intertwined when Indira Gandhi announces her State of Emergency--her absolute rule--in 1975.

As in his earlier books, Mistry evokes every distinctive smell and sound of Bombay's streets, from a train that "shivered down its long steel spine" to the savory cadences of the locals' language--"The thing is, they are always playing bad mischief." His characters respond to the savageries of government and fate alike with a jokey warmth: "For politicians, passing laws is like passing water. It all ends down the drain." And in a level, pitying tone, far from the "bombast and rhetoric [that] infected the nation," he shows us how to load a dead buffalo onto a cart, how to collect "the fruit of the myrobalan tree to tan hide," how to beg. But what really distinguishes his book is that he gives faces and voices to the suffering and takes us into the lives and huts of dirt-poor souls we usually regard only with pity or suspicion. He explains how a cripple moves and how men live by collecting hair; why professional beggars look down on those who blind themselves, and how the legless help the hopeless. And through this scrupulous exactitude, he makes real horrors that are the stuff of nightmares: Untouchables being forced to eat excrement, being hanged from trees, and having molten lead poured into their ears; women having acid thrown in their faces; slum dwellers being bused into the countryside and forcibly emasculated.

As the book progresses, we begin to see that the central metaphors--of stitching together quilts, making clothes out of patches; of extended games of wits over the chessboard that end without a winner; and of cutting the very life force out of human beings--are as meticulous as everything else here. And the Emergency is only a dramatic metaphor for a world in which "living each day is to face one emergency or another." But Mistry has too subtle a grasp of truth for resolutions of any kind: even the innocent here support their oppressors, and even the bullies have families and cares of their own. The only villains are governments, businesses and any "isms" that would sacrifice humanity to some lifeless end.

Inevitably, Mistry's tight focus--and heroic canvas--will be compared with Vikram Seth's 1,400-page Indian epic, A Suitable Boy. Though Mistry does not have Seth's sparkle and charm, he substitutes a depth and penetration that draw blood. And where Salman Rushdie's recent Moor's Last Sigh was an endlessly inventive attack on sectarianism, Mistry shows us how such divisions play out on the streets and in the heart. The field of candidates for the title of Great Indian Novelist is as crowded these days as for its American equivalent, but few have caught the real sorrow and inexplicable strength of India, the unaccountable crookedness and sweetness, as well as Mistry. And no reader who finishes his book will look at the poor--in any street--in quite the same way again.

--By Pico Iyer