Rohinton Mistry's

A fine balance

biographical information

character information

plot summary

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After her father died when she was young, Dina Shroff was raised by her strict brother

Nusswan. One night at the cinema, she met Rustom Dalal, and after a couple weeks,

the two fell in love and got married. On their third anniversary, however, Rustom has

a bicycle accident and is killed, leaving Dina alone. After Rustom's aunt teaches Dina

sewing, Dina pays her rent by being a tailor. However, her eyes begin to deteriorate,

so she is forced to find another means of income. Her friend, Zenobia, finds a border

to rent out one of the rooms in Dina's flat and also introduces Dina to Mrs. Gupta, who

offers her tailoring piece work if she can employ two tailors.

Originally from a family of cobblers, Ishvar and his brother, Narayan, are sent by their

father to Ashraf Chacha to become apprentice tailors. Once they had finished their

apprentiship, Narayan returns to his village, marries and starts up a successful tailoring

business. His wife gives birth to a son, Omprakesh, and when he is of age, he is sent to

Ashraf to also learn to be a tailor. During an election, Narayan, being of a lower caste,

decides that he would like to have his own vote rather than having the upper caste

members vote for him. For holding this opinion, he is tortured and killed, and his

family burnt alive in their hut. Only Ishvar and Om survived because they were with

Ashraf. The pair remained at the tailor shop until business started to slow down, and

then they headed into the city to look for work. After six months of living on Nawaz's

balcony, they finally found work with Dina Dalal, who needed two tailors. On the way

to her flat, they met Maneck Kolah, who was going to be her border, and they all three

immediately became friends. Now employed, they rented a small hut from a slumlord.

Unfamiliar with the conditions, they were shown the ropes by Rajaram, who also

became a good friend.

Originally from the picturesque mountains, Maneck was sent to college to study

refrigeration and air conditioning by his father. After experiencing abuse at the hands

of some rowdy students at the college hostel, he told his father that he could not return

to the school, so his mother found someone who needed a boarder, and so it was

arranged that Maneck would live with Dina Dalal and attend college in the city.

Meanwhile, the political landscape was changing. After winning the election, the

Prime Minister was accused, and found guilty of, electoral fraud. To avoid being

thrown out of Parliament, she declared a state of emergency and threw her accusers in

jail. The press was censored and laws were passed that gave uncontrollable power to

the authorities. Compulsory sterilisation was put in place and beautification laws saw

slums flattened and beggars taken off the streets.

The tailors began working with Dina Dalal, who was initially a strict employer. They

had their tea down at the Vishram Vegetarian Restaurant, where they quickly became

regulars. Once Maneck moved in, he also joined the tailors for their tea at the Vishram

and the three quickly became good friends. One day before they had left for work, a

fleet of buses assembled outside their colony. They were all forced onto the buses and

taken to a big meeting where the Prime Minister was speaking. While Dina was angry

that they hadn't shown up for work that day, she was glad they got back safely after

the meeting.

After finishing up another day at work, the tailors returned home to find their colony

being demolished--under the laws of the Emergency order, slums such as theirs were

illegal. They gathered what belongings they could and slept on the railway station for

the night. The next day, they made an arrangement with the nightwatchman at an

all-night chemist to sleep in the doorway, leaving their trunk with their belongings at

Dina's house. However, while they were sleeping, policemen and trucks raided the

street, packed all the beggars, including the tailors, into the truck and drove them to an

irrigation project, where they were told they would work for food and board. On the

way there, the tailors became friendly with a beggar named Shankar, who had lived on

the street his whole life. While at the project, the tailors had a hard time adjusting to

the nature of the work and would often fall ill and injure themselves. Shankar, with no

legs, was unable to work in the fields so would wait on the patients, particularly the

tailors. Their rescue came in the form of Beggarmaster, Shankar's boss, who bought

the crippled and injured back from the project manager, and as a favour to Shankar,

and also for a price, the manager also bought back the tailors,. He returned them to

Dina's flat, where he would pick up his monthly fee for having saved them.

While the tailors were gone, Dina had been at a loss as to what to do, so Maneck had

helped her finish the last order that they had started. When they returned, she was so

determined she would not lose them again that she offered to allow them to stay on her

veranda. As the weeks passed, they developed a comfortable routine and even ate their

daily meals together; it was almost as if they were a family. That is until one night

when there was a knock on the door, and Ibrahim, the rent collector, gave them a final

notice because Dina was not supposed to be running a business out of her home. Dina

ignored this notice, and a few weeks later, Ibrahim again knocked on the door, this

time with two goondas, who destroyed most of her belongings in the flat. They had

forty-eight hours to vacate. They told this story to Beggarmaster, who came to collect

his fee the next day, and who assured them that as long as he was paying them, there

would no trouble from the landlord.

By this time, Ishvar was beginning to think about finding a wife for Om, and Maneck's

final exams were approaching. After making some inquiries, Ishvar discovered that

there were four potential families and organised a trip back to his village for the

wedding. Dina agreed to let Om's new wife sleep on the veranda also. A few days after

the tailors had left, Beggarmaster arrived with the bad news that Shankar, who he had

recently discovered was his brother, had been killed. Dina and Maneck went to the

funeral in place of the tailors. A few days later, Maneck returned home to the

mountains for the holidays, and Dina was again alone in the flat.

Back in Ishvar's village, they reunited with Ashraf, their teacher and were saddened to

hear that his wife had died. While they were shopping in the market place, they came

across Thakur Dharamsi, who was responsible for the death of their family, and

unable to contain himself, Om spat at him. Later that day, while shopping, garbage

trucks and policemen swarmed the square, taking people at random. In the scuffle, a

policeman hit Ashraf in the head and left him to die while the policeman forced Ishvar

and Om onto the trucks. They were taken to a sterilisation camp just outside the city,

and were forced to have the operation. While resting in the recovery tent, the Thakur

came around to inspect the premises, and seeing Om, ordered that he be castrated. The

doctors had no choice but to oblige.

It took a few weeks for Om to recover from this, but once he did, his uncle began to

get ill, his legs swelling up and turning black. Sick with blood poisoning, his legs had

to be amputated, and he, like Shankar had to learn to get around on a rolling platform

made for him by Ashraf's relatives. The tailors decided to return to the city.

Meanwhile, Dina had received a letter from Maneck saying that he had been offered a

job in the Gulf and would not be returning to the city. When the tailors did not return,

she was forced return the sewing machines. One day a badly injured man knocked on

her door and asked for the tailors because he was a previous acquaintance of theirs.

When she said that they were not there, he asked if she knew Beggarmaster, and she

told the injured man when was the day and time that she next expected a visit from

him. When Beggarmaster did not show up, she became suspicious and received a visit

from Ibrahim, who was no longer working for the landlord. Ibrahim told her that the

injured man had murdered Beggarmaster and that Dina was no longer safe from the

landlord. Ibrahim advised Dina to seek legal help. She went to the courthouse to

arrange this, but eventually was forced from her apartment by the same goondas, who

moved her furniture onto the street. Dina had no choice but to go back and live with

her brother.

Eight years later, Maneck returned from the Gulf for his father's funeral, arriving in

the middle of riots where Sikh's were being slaughtered. The riots had been provoked

by the murder of the Prime Minister by her Sikh guards. After cremating his father,

Maneck became very depressed about what had been happening in his country since

he had left. He returned to the city to visit Dina and the tailors, and after tracking her

down at her brother's place, learned what had happened since he had left. As he left

Dina's brother's house, he passed the tailors, now beggars, in the street, but could not

bring himself to talk to them. It all became too much for him, and he ended his life by

jumping in front of a train. Meanwhile, the tailors made their regular visit to Dina's

kitchen, and she fed them, hurrying them along because her sister-in-law would be

home early.