A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A gem of a book.
It explores a slice of India’s history – from the imposition of the horrific Emergency, in the name of maintaining security, to the equally reprehensible Sikh riots – both the handiwork of Indira Gandhi and her Congress party - which is deservedly visibly dissipating into insignificance at present. Here is how the perpetrator-in-chief of the Emergency is described

It was a quintessential specimen of the face that was proliferating on posters throughout the city. Her cheeks were executed in the lurid pink of cinema posters. Other aspects of the portrait had suffered greater infelicities. Her eyes evoked the discomfort of a violent itch somewhere upon the ministerial corpus, begging to be scratched. The artist’s ambition of a benignant smile had also gone awry – a cross between a sneer and the vinegary sternness of a drill-mistress had crept across the mouth. And that familiar swatch of white hair over her forehead, imposing amid the black, had plopped across the scalp like the strategic droppings of a very large bird.

The book explores the excesses committed by a sycophantic bureaucracy and police during this dismal period: like forcible sterilizations (almost genocidal in intensity), relocation of beggars and other ‘undesirables’ to labour camps, in the guise of beautification of cities (echoes of Nazi pogroms), deification of the Nehru/Gandhi family (sadly persisting till the present day)

‘Oh, we are twice blessed today in this meeting!’ the man sang into the microphone. The Prime Minister on the stage with us, and her son in the sky above us! What more could we ask for!’…When the slogan coined by a Congress obsequious toady proclaimed “Indira is India and India is Indira” ‘Yes my brothers and sisters, Mother India sits on the stage with us, and the Son of India shines from the sky upon us. The glorious present, here, now, and the golden future, up there, waiting to descend and embrace our lives! What a blessed nation we are!’

The societal sanction of exploitation of the so-called lower castes by the higher castes and the stark brutality of the punishments is portrayed scrupulously. There are charlatans of various hues, snake-oil vendors, erstwhile murderers turned into ‘godmen’ etc. There are detailed accounts of the beggar industry – beggaring belief

Also, Beggarmaster has to very imaginative. If all beggars have the same injury, public gets used to it and feels no pity. Public likes to see variety. Some wounds are so common, they don’t work anymore. For example, putting out a baby’s eyes will not automatically earn money. Blind beggars are everywhere. But blind with eyeballs missing, face showing empty sockets, plus nose chopped off – now anyone will give money for that. A big growth on the neck or face, oozing yellow pus. That works well.

The unrelenting and grinding poverty does start to grate on the nerves, but then that is the harsh reality of millions of the underprivileged, while we derive vicarious pleasure reading all about it – unfortunately! It deserves to be re-read.

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