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Coomy, meanwhile, resents having to care for the stepfather she blames for her dead mother's unhappiness. In their determination to prolong the stay of Nariman interminably, Jal and Coomy resort to desperate measures. The stricken household has a foil in "Pleasant Villa", where Nariman's daughter, Roxana, lives with her husband, Yezad, and their sons, Murad and Jehangir. When Nariman breaks his leg, Coomy and Jal conspire to shift their bedridden stepfather from their seven-room apartment to Roxana's cramped flat. He welcomes the move from a home "empty as a Himalayan cave". As he says: "Can care and concern be made compulsory? Either it resides in the heart, or nowhere." Being a Rohinton Mistry book, this sets in motion further and often-unexpected developments. Much of the novel charts family conflicts over caring for Nariman: the cost of medicine; lack of space and privacy; the daily routine of bedpans and urinals, sponge baths and bedsores. When Nariman's needs cause friction between Roxana and her husband, she reminds him of Gandhi's teachings, "that there was nothing nobler than the service of the weak, the old, the unfortunate". Stealthily, even movingly, Mistry reveals small triumphs of humanity over distaste, minute shifts that signal leaps of compassion. As Roxana watches her nine-year-old son feeding his grandfather, the boy wiping a stray grain of rice from the 80-year-old's lips, "she felt she was witnessing something almost sacred".
But as the perspective shifts between family members, there is sympathy for the disgust, pity, anger and disorientation of Coomy and Jal at the "excretions and secretions of their stepfather's body", described in insistent detail, from the fetid smells pervading living quarters, to "little gobs of mucus" floating in Nariman's washbowl. It is stressed that all human beings become "candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception".Readers familiar with Mistry will also be familiar with the subplots untying in parallel and affecting the lives of the characters. There are parallel struggles against temptation for Yezad, with mafia-run gambling and "black money" deals, and his son Jehangir, who takes bribes as "homework monitor" to help his parents.The "sleeping snake" of the Hindu fundamentalist Shiv Sena fuels a subplot involving Yezad's employer, a Punjabi shop owner who insists all faiths be celebrated in his shop. The novel is not least a lament for Bombay (or Mumbai), a "miracle of tolerance" threatened by "goonda raj and mafia dons".
Sectarian intolerance finds an echo in orthodox Parsis' obsession with purity, fearing "extinction" through intermarriage or migration. The novel both affirms Zoroastrian ritual and derides bigotry. Though the sceptic Yezad returns to the fold, his insistence that his sons marry Parsis, threatens to replicate Nariman's tragedy. Yet while his family is baffled by this "non-stop praying stranger", the reader is aware that Yezad's fundamentalism is born of guilt - yet another response to a corrupting world. Mistry's aim is to dignify the local and mundane.Yezad finds his son's addiction to Enid Blyton malicious: "it encouraged children to grow up without attachment to the place where they belonged". Were they to taste the muffins and kippers they crave, they would better appreciate their mother's "curry-rice and khichri-saag and pumpkin buryani and dhansak". The result can veer towards sentimentality or didacticism, and Jehangir's child's-eye view is occasionally cloying. Yet the novel steers clear of closure with a far from harmonious epilogue. With deceptive simplicity, Mistry draws his fine balance between scepticism and affirmation, faith and bigotry, family nurture and control.His pared-down language has an almost Spartan plainness, yielding illuminating epiphanies amid the dirt and stench. Mistry remains a relentless critic of religious racism and intolerance, rife in India as everywhere else in the world and more topical today than ever. A previously unfamiliar, and very amusing and welcome, addition is his open criticism of the unhealthy influences of Western consumerist culture, and the often na�ve, even blinkered views of Western intellectuals. Again, Mistry proves himself as a masterful chronicler of the precarious life of the middle classes in India, skillfully treading the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality. Personally my favourite remains Such a Long Journey, but there can be no doubt that the waiting is over, and it was worth it.
Review: Nilanjana Kar
Design: Suparna Sengupta
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