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June 9, 2002
REVIEWS: More than family matters
To begin with, it is important to locate Rohinton Mistry in his literary context. Is he, as has been suggested, a Canadian writer whose works are mainly about India, and specifically about Mumbai, where he spent the first 25 odd years of his life?‘ Or, is he part of the generation of subcontinental writers who came out of the woodwork, so to speak, once Salman Rushdie had flung open the gates of the close club of English writing in the early 1980s and announced in no uncertain terms that new voices would now be heard.
This distinction is not wholly irrelevant. It helps us evaluate Mistry’s work, not only in the context of literary genres and styles, but also to understand the tone and inflection of the voice. Superficially, Mistry is an expatriate, and relies on memory and a bit of research to write about India, a land he left a long time ago.
In Mistry’s latest, Family matters, the action takes place in the backdrop of growing threats to Mumbai’s cosmopolitan character, which is almost wholly blamed on the Shiv Sena, the party of Hindu chauvinism. Mistry sticks to the straight and narrow. His is a world of simple folk, bogged down in their petty, mundane problems, coping with life’s vicissitudes with a bit of humour, some good natured grumbling and occasionally with ill-grace. His novels and short stories have been peopled with what could be called “ordinary people”.
Yet, there is no denying that the milieu of Family matters is very middle-class, Parsi middle-class, to be exact. The protagonists are people getting by on modest incomes and have very modest ambitions, if not worldviews. Their problems are not unique, and their reactions are not very extraordinary either.
Mistry’s protagonist is Yezad Chenoy, a Parsi who has a dead end job in a sports good store and is generally the happy-go- lucky sort, who has drifted through life. He is content on the whole with his mediocre life, living in a small apartment given by his father-in-law along with his loving wife and two growing sons.
Life changes for Yezad when his wife Roxana’s father, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is moved to their humble flat after he breaks a leg during an evening walk. Roxana’s step siblings, Coomi and Jal, both well into their middle-age, cannot cope with their disabled stepfather any more and execute a neat strategy to dump him on the Chenoys.
The bedridden old man Nariman has his own ghosts to grapple with. He had, at the ripe old age of forty, been “forced” by a domineering father to jettison his Christian girlfriend of many years and marry a suitable Parsi widow in the name of maintaining the purity of the bloodline, a recurring theme in Parsi life. The jilted girl Lucy, could not take it and gradually went crazy, which Nariman blames on himself. On his bed, unable to walk around and a burden on his daughter’s family, Nariman lapses into sad memories of his life.
Around him meanwhile, the Chenoy world is also shaken, not merely by this invasion of privacy but also the impact it has on the family’s finances. Yezad tries all kinds of tricks to boost his income, even indulging in illegal match betting. This is naturally meant as an allegory to the larger social corruption in India.
In the backdrop, Mumbai is changing too, literally. The change of name — it was Bombay before — has affected many hard-core Bombayites who have seen it as the final blow to the city’s dying cosmopolitan character. It is now a haven for the worst kind of lumpen elements, who run protectionist rackets in the name of politics and where decency and honesty have no value. The forces of darkness, in the shape of those who want to impose their sectarianism, are taking over and today’s Mumbai has turned from a melting pot into a boiling cauldron of crime, squalor and most of all religious and linguistic extremism. The old, refined world is dying.
But what most people tend to forget or ignore is that Mumbai is no stranger to parochialism and ghettoization which was present, albeit benignly even in that halcyon past. Indeed, it could be said that the Parsis, and this includes the characters of Family matters, personify that insularity, living as they do in all-Parsi enclaves and mixing socially most of the times with only other Parsis.
Part of it can be explained by the problem most expatriate writers face, of trying to build a modern environment from vaguely remembered details.
But even the significant markers, meant to illustrate Mumbai’s decline, are constructed out of newspaper headlines and intermittent gossip picked up during occasional encounters with back home. Quite simply, Mistry has lost touch with India and this is a problem for anyone writing a novel about modern India, in which socio-political changes are an important ingredient. Like his main protagonist Yezad, who looks at old photographs of the street where he grew up and wistfully remembers a simpler time, Mistry too is in a time-warp, which would not have mattered had the story not been about Mumbai today. Throughout the novel one cannot get rid of the suspicion that it has been written for that category of (largely North American) reader who falls somewhere in between the buyer of pulpy best- sellers and highbrow literature that can prove to be too complex. The reader who wants just the right whiff of exotica but nothing that is too remote. A story about a dysfunctional family, with the right amount of heartwarming sentimentality that is not cloying but yet is stated upfront. And then of course there are the references to Parsi customs and traditions, which is bound to gladden the multiculturalists.
Not that this middlebrow approach is any way objectionable; and Mistry has the capacity to imbue the minor characters with quirks and tics that make them quite believable and even amusing. But the ability to paint the grander themes eludes him and regrettably, that is what he has set out to do. And tragically, not only is the setting middle-class, the approach suffers from being middle-class too; his view of Mumbai and India is decidedly bourgeois, one which looks for constants and is sullenly resistant to change.
Mistry is venerated in North America, especially in Canada, where his reputation (and sales) shot up after Oprah Winfrey endorsed his last book. For the multiculturalists, Mistry is a godsend, an author from a distant land who is able to paint a picture which is easily accessible and not too taxing. He has even been compared to Dickens. But his humanism is facile, and his weltanschauung even more so; he will have to leave the familiar world of quirky Parsis behind to really carve out a lasting place in English literature for himself.
Family matters
By Rohinton Mistry
Faber & Faber
ISBN 0571194273
487pp. £10.99
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