Valmik, a proofreader who weeps copiously due to an allergy to printing ink Farokh Kohlah, Maneck's melancholy father, marooned in the past, less and less able to accept the world as it must be. Mistry gives us an unforgettable community of characters, among them Nusswan, a successful businessman and Dina's tyrannical yet well-meaning older brother Rajaram, the hair-collector, who befriends the two tailors Beggarmaster, who wheels and deals in human lives the Potency Peddler, who hawks his wares on market day Shanti, the young woman who inhabits Omprakash's most heated fantasies Mr. This stunning portrayal of a country undergoing change is alive with enduring images a shopkeeper gazing out over a landscape, once-beloved, now transformed by the smoke of squatters' cooking fires a helicopter bomarding a political rally with rose petals while the Prime Minister's son floats past in a hot-air balloon men and women being transported in open trucks to a sterilization clinic four people tenderly piecing together their history in the squares of a quilt. The narrative reaches back in time to follow the stories of these four people - the lives they began with, the places they left behind. There is Dina Dalal, a widow who makes a difficult living as a seamstress, determined not to remarry or rely on her brother's charity Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hillstation near the Himalays, uprooted from home by his parents' wish to send him to college in the city and Ishvar and his nephew, Omprakash, tailors by trade, who fleeing caste violence, leave their village in the interiour to find employment. Large in scope, the narrative focuses on four unlikely people who come together in a flat in the city soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency.' Through days of bleakness and hope, their lives become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen. Set in India in the mid-1970s, A Fine Balance is a richly textured novel which sweeps the reader up into its special world. A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's eagerly awaited second novel and follows his critically acclaimed Such a Long Journey, the book that won three prestigious literary awards in 1991.

A fine balance maneck