A fine Balance

The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed Indian city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency. The days that follow bring new forms of degradation and misery to vie with resilience and stubborn hope in the daily lives of the people, four of whom are compelled by a housing shortage to share one cramped apartment. They are an unlikely quartet; Dina Dalal, a seamstress in her early forties and a widow for almost twenty years who, determined not to remarry or rely on her brother's grudging charity, has forged a fragile independence for herself. Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hill-station near the Himalayas, sadly, uprooted from his beloved home by his parents' well-intentioned desire that he attend college in the city. Ishvar Darji, an impossible optimist, and his recalcitrant teenage nephew, Omprakash, tailors who have fled a legacy of unfathomably brutal caste violence in their small inland village.

With no common background and only the most impersonal threads of common need, these four find their lives becoming unexpectedly but inextricably entwined, their growing trust, humor, and affectionate interdependence establishing a bulwark against the hardships and torturous machinations of daily life under the Emergency, holding them together, finally, for both better and worse.

Reaching back in time to trace their stories - from their individual pasts into their shared present - the novel moves through an extraordinarily volatile stretch of years, from the chaotic aftermath of the Partition in 1947 to the stage political rallies of the Emergency. Its broad narrative sweep takes us from the Pakistani border, with its vast expanses of mountain and valley, to the city, where the only vastness is in the number of people in the streets and alleyways, and in and out of the lives of an unforgettable community of characters: Rajaram, the hair-collector; Shankar, the legless beggar; Beggarmaster, teh dealer in human lives; Mr. Valmik, the proofreader allergic to printing in; Kesar, the police sergeant allergic to conventional notions of justice and law.

"Let me tell you a secret," Mr. Valmik says to Maneck. "There is no such thing as an uninteresting live." And, certainly, this is true of the lives that unfold across the pages of this luminous novel: lavish in sensual detail, rich in both political and emotional resonance. The work of a master storyteller, A Fine Balance gives us a deeply compassionate exploration - both moving and humorous - of the fragility and abiding strength of the human spirit put to extraordinary test. (front flap)