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.

A Fine Balance is epic in scope, but the bulk of it takes place in one single year: mid-1975 to 1976. 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.

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. He also takes the time to give thorough backgrounds for our four leads before the main narrative gets going.

First we have Dina, a Parsi woman who was widowed young and has struggled to maintain a life independent of her controlling older brother. She is brittle and judgmental, but this is often a facade to hide her fear of losing the life she has. 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.

“But for Dina Aunty this was home. Everywhere there was evidence of her struggle to stay ahead of squalor, to mitigate with neatness and order the shabbiness of poverty. 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.”

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. They have experienced so much loss. Their existence is precarious, often falling through the wide cracks of state provision for the poor. But they are skilled at their work, if they can just get enough of it to survive.

Finally, there’s Maneck, a student from a small Himalayan town who was shocked and appalled by the state of the student housing in the city and made a deal with his parents that he will only complete his university course if better lodging can be found. Though his life has been comfortable thus far, his family is not rich, so they leap at the news that a good Parsi woman has a cheap room to rent. Maneck is at times both the most relatable and the most frustrating character. He quickly befriends the tailors and berates Dina for treating them as beneath her. He has ambitions to improve his father’s shop and soda business, and longs to go home to his beloved mountains. But he is really bad at articulating his thoughts and feelings to an extent that has poisoned his relationship with his father. He is almost certainly suffering from depression, though that is never said outright.

“ ‘But we don’t want to stay too long.’

‘Nobody does,’ said Rajaram. ‘Who wants to live like this?’ His hand moved in a tired semicircle, taking in the squalid hutments, the ragged field, the huge slum across the road wearing its malodorous crown of cooking smoke and industrial effluvium. ‘But sometimes people have no choice. Sometimes the city grabs you, sinks its claws into you, and refuses to let go.’ “

Mistry clearly has no love for Indira Gandhi and the bulk of this novel is a savage satire of her rule and in particular the Emergency. That said, is it satire or is Mistry simply picking out details of what really happened that seem so bizarre, cruel and pointless as to be almost funny? I don’t know the true history well enough to be sure, but I can certainly believe that slums were destroyed without alternative housing being provided, closely followed by criminalising homelessness. I can believe that thousands of homeless or slum dwellers were rounded up and taken to work at labour camps, with no consideration given to the many of those who already had jobs, or were not physically capable of the work. So could it also be true that thousands were rounded up and taken to the prime minister’s political rallies so that she appeared popular, again ignoring the pleas of those who had jobs that they would be fired for not going to work that day? Certainly, some of the most shocking scenes in the book, about the mass sterilisation efforts that went from a corrupt incentivisation programme to a mandatory surgery enforced by withholding wages or even rounding people up en masse, are apparently entirely true (and heavily encouraged by Western countries threatening to withhold aid money from India).

The novel alternates awful things happening with periods where everything seems to be working out, and I really wasn’t sure throughout on which note it would end. Certainly, through each period where our four main characters are all getting along, I was waiting for the fall. That doesn’t take away from the sweetness of Maneck and Omprakesh becoming good friends as being the same age trumps their very different backgrounds. Or the relief of Dina’s gradual discovery that the tailors don’t want to fleece her, that she can rely on them and even enjoy their company. But it made each fall tougher to take.

“Please always remember, the secret of survival is to embrace change, and to adapt…You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.”

This really is a wonderful book filled with the details of life’s ups and downs. I just had a couple of small quibbles. One is Maneck and Om’s lechery, which is treated as a “boys will be boys” funny joke rather than disturbing and sexist. And in a similar vein, Dina’s fears are sometimes treated as unreasonable, without due consideration to the fact that she is a woman living alone who has been forced to take strange men into her home.

There are also some minor characters who are just outright weird and creepy, with no back story to illuminate why they are that way. Whenever they came up in the narrative I cringed a little and it took some time for me to see that they are part of the book’s lesson. Poverty and homelessness don’t just lead to people who are starving and sick, they also have profound psychological effects. People who are desperate may do terrible things to survive. People on the very bottom rung of society may experience and witness awful things, things will never forget or recover from.

I am glad to have read this, but it was an emotional ride that took time to recover from.

First published 1995 by McClelland and Stewart.