Quotes of the Day

For some readers, the final 200 pages of two-time Booker Prize nominee Rohinton Mistry's 1995 novel A Fine Balance were an out-of-body reading experience. You forgot the day of the week. You forgot where you were. Interruptions were waved off impatiently. The only sound that registered was the breaking of your heart. As one harrowing scene followed another, you silently pleaded with the author to spare his characters. They had already suffered so much. They deserved even an Indian long shot at happiness.

It was not to be, for balance had been lost, both in the Bombay of Indira Gandhi's 1975 Emergency and in Mistry's fearsome vision of the city where he was born and raised. When a novelist of his caliber despairs at human cruelty, the results are often annihilating.

At the center of Mistry's fine new novel Family Matters (Faber and Faber; 487 pages) is Nariman Vakeel, a 79-year-old Parsi widower besieged equally by Parkinson's disease and his middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal. Nariman is also haunted by memories of the real love of his life, a Catholic Goan whom he did not marry in deference to the "marriage arrangers, the wilful manufacturers of misery," a failure of courage that resulted in scandal and tragedy. His joyless family resides in a spacious apartment in Bombay's Chateau Felicity.

When Nariman fractures an ankle, Coomy, a miserable woman who blames him for her mother's death, banishes her stepfather from his own house on the pretext that she cannot care for him. Like King Lear, the elderly patriarch is forced to seek the generosity of his progeny. Luckily for him, his youngest daughter, a kind soul named Roxana, welcomes her parent, despite the fact that she dwells in a tiny tenement in Pleasant Villa with her husband and two sons.

Much of the story is devoted to Nariman's confinement and its effects on his daughter's once contented family. Medical costs take food off the table. One of the sons must sleep on the balcony. Then there are the realities of bodily decrepitude. Bowel movements and bedpans, stinks and sores become not only a helpless old man's cross to bear but a burden for those who love him most.

Family members grapple with their own revulsion and bafflement at what Nariman and they must endure. To do so, the novel suggests, is to fully engage with your own humanity. In the hospital, Nariman, pondering an older orderly, wonders if "collecting feces and urine from the beds of the lame and the halt and the diseased" might be the "necessary conditions" for achieving enlightenment. Watching her youngest boy feed his grandfather, Roxana decides she is "witnessing something almost sacred."

This is extraordinary writing—tender and wise, stripped of the inessential. Its power rivals those apocalyptic scenes in A Fine Balance and is all the more impressive, given the intimate scale. Family Matters needs to stray no further than the Vakeel clan and their apartments to find actors and stage for an affecting drama.

Still, Mistry isn't at peace with his critics or with his beleaguered Bombay. "This nation specializes in turning honest people into crooks," Roxana's husband, Yezad, complains. There's a muted optimism at the novel's end. "Aren't you happy?" Roxana asks her youngest son. "Yes," he answers. "I'm happy." Family matters can be difficult, and Mistry certainly doesn't shy away from showing, in all their roughness, the real truths about them—but here, at least, things don't have to end in heartbreak.

• CHARLES FORAN
• Mistry's new novel on a patriarch's decline