Rohinton Mistry: Family Matters

By MARGIE THOMSON

There is much sadness and conflict in Mistry's latest novel, which like his two previous ones is set in Bombay's Parsi community, yet it's the grace and humanity of the story and its telling that stay with you, as heady as incense.

Mistry, Bombay-born but a resident of Canada for the past 25 years, is a wonderful writer, and those who have eagerly awaited his next book after loving Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance will not be disappointed by Family Matters. Both his earlier novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, with A Fine Balance also winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize and becoming an Oprah Winfrey book of the month, necessitating an extra 700,000 print run.

This latest story opens on the 79th birthday of Nariman Vakeel, a retired English professor now in the grip of Parkinson's disease. He's thus losing control of his body, but not his mind or his desire for the world. He lives in a large (by Bombay standards) seven-room apartment in the Chateau Felicity with his unmarried stepson and stepdaughter: passive Jal who fiddles with his ineffective hearing aid and appears much older than his roughly 40 years; and Coomy, a powerhouse of anger and resentment.

Coomy in particular has never forgiven Nariman for his treatment of their mother. It was an arranged marriage designed to get Nariman away from his beloved Lucy, a Catholic whom he was forbidden by his religious, Parsi parents from marrying. In the end, however, Nariman's dutiful acquiescence destroyed the lives of both women and left a legacy of bitterness, the fruit of which the increasingly helpless invalid is about to reap.

Insisting on his daily walk despite Coomy's strong feelings against such risk-taking, Nariman falls into an open drain and breaks his leg. He can no longer do anything for himself, and Coomy's selfishness and revulsion at his bodily needs now become a potent force.

She throws him out of the house that he has lived in all his life but which, out of guilt, he had put into Jal and Coomy's name some years before. Reluctantly supported by Jal, Coomy dispenses with their responsibilities by calling an ambulance and depositing Nariman, unannounced, in the tiny two-bedroom apartment of his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two sons - just for three weeks, she assures with false cheer.

Later, one of the characters invokes Gandhi: "She said perhaps he should try to remember the teachings of Gandhiji, that there was nothing nobler than the service of the weak, the old, the unfortunate." Certainly, under Mistry's guidance, the care of Nariman becomes a litmus test for each character's humanity. Nariman wonders quietly: "Can care and concern be made compulsory? Either it resides in the heart or nowhere."

Luckily for Nariman, Roxana's humanity is perfectly intact. Kind, generous and patient, she worries only about the needs of others. Of course she will look after her father - even though the added pressure, as we quickly see, will almost destroy her family, both financially and morally.

Yezad, on the other hand, is a more complex, conflicted character: while he has a charming, jokey side, he is often short-tempered and always hard-line. Having said from the beginning that he will not help his wife with his father-in-law's care, he is true to his word, despite his paradoxical worry over Roxana's diminishing health. Tragically, he desires joy but fails to see the simple things he must do to earn it. Yezad, of course, has the family's finances to worry about, and works hard every day at the sporting goods store of which he is manager. With the added burden of Nariman, he no longer earns enough to make ends meet and turns to the precarious fantasy of black-market gambling.

Meanwhile his sons Murad and Jehangir are taking on burdens of their own to try to help solve the family's troubles.

Tension escalates. Coomy's wickedness becomes ever-more extreme as she machinates to ensure Nariman will never return to his home. Yezad's attempts to manipulate his boss into giving him a desperately needed pay rise have disastrous consequences. Morality is wrestled with by all characters (other than Roxana, who is incapable of anything other than a moral path) and sometimes gains the upper hand, sometimes not; natural justice dispenses its just deserts, although sometimes it seems to be turning a blind eye.

The story takes a slow, languorous pace, looking at the troubled family from first one viewpoint, then another, and it comes to seem that the whole of India can be seen in this one tiny apartment, and that truth itself is located not in the beautiful temples where people most commonly seek it, but in the lives of ordinary people.

Conversations punctuate the action, and it is the chattering of minor characters that brings the colour and hubbub of the outside world to life: Aunty Villie who dreams "hot" gambling tips; Nariman's religious parents who speak in educated aphorisms yet remain steadfastly ignorant of human emotion; Yezad's friend Vilas Rane who acts as "a writer of letters for those who couldn't" and finds himself at the eye of a storm of stories that represent the miseries and joys of all India; Yezad's boss Mr Kapur, a Hindi who hates the encroaching religious fundamentalists and talks about standing for local government.

At the heart of the story, though, is the little apartment where Nariman is becoming increasingly lost to the world, oblivious to the conflict that rages around him, sunk in his dreams and memories that are repeated to us as a warning of the dangers of religious and racial bigotry - and, perhaps, that as we sow, so shall we reap.

By the end of the book, natural justice - in the form of a balance between action and outcome - has the upper hand in some important ways. Humanity has kept the family together, yet failed to enforce a fairytale ending; guilt has found an outlet in religious extremism that we realise has simply set history in repeat of itself, lessons not learned.

The double meaning offered to us in the title serves as a fundamental, if obvious, observation: families are our greatest comfort, the source of our identity; but they are also our most virulent battleground. Mistry has once again given us something absolutely, painfully pleasurable: a bittersweet rendition of life in its most ordinary, intimate setting.

Faber and Faber

($34.95)