A Fine Balance
Set during Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1975-77), Mistry's novel follows four people whose lives converge in a Bombay apartment. Its scope and moral weight rival Dickens. Almost unbearable and almost unbearably good. Readers describe it as "the book that broke me and made me a better person," which for once is not an exaggeration.
Every available catastrophe lands on the same four people. Riots, slum demolition, forced sterilization, caste violence, arriving on schedule: "if a riot, they'll be caught up in it," one reader observes, filing the book as "a list of all the bad things about life under Mrs Ghandi." That is the structural complaint too, since "the book lacks two fundamental necessaries. Firstly, there is no plot," only a descent, and "the characters are no more than puppets" marched through a curated tour of injustice. "There is no glimmer of hope," and any warmth introduced gets revoked soon enough that readers stop trusting it. The sterilization-camp material tips into shock for several. Many quit at the halfway mark.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
