Revisiting a Bombay neighbourhood through Rohinton Mistry’s story collection
I have a soft spot for books that engage in storytelling for the sake of it. No plot as such. Just a writer at their desk, writing about people they see through their window. The window this time is a Parsi apartment block in Bombay.
Before Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance catapulted him to fame, he debuted with a short story collection called Tales from Firozsha Baag. The book has eleven linked stories about a neighborhood that shares a staircase, water tank, and multiple other aspects of their lives. Like vignettes, these stories move from first person to third person, from a boy to an ayah to an old woman, with spicy commentary from the balconies.
The writing is simple, luxurious, and yet detailed, telling about the specificities and the little things in everyday Indian middle class lives. Despite his unhurried way of storytelling, we are invested in the stories that Nariman Hansotia tells the boys. And in the stamp that goes missing for whom Bookworm Bulsara is blamed. Or the refrigerator that everyone seems to covet. Or the leaking WCs, the cricket, the fire temple rituals. I loved the rich world-building, especially because it makes me nostalgic about so many such communities back home; neighbours quarrelling and endearing at the same time.
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The everyday ordinariness resembles RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days and the day-to-day minutiae is colorful and comic, capturing a microcosm of the daily banalities. And as with most warm close intimate neighborhoods, the people are both caring and quick to judge, making the milieu somewhat stifling with zero privacy.
“Don’t you see, said Father, that you are confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts, fiction can come from facts, it can grow out of facts by compounding, transposing, augmenting, diminishing, or altering them in any way; but you must not confuse cause and effect, you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not lose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies.”
My favorite story is The Ghost of Firozsha Baag narrated by Jacqueline, the old Goan Catholic ayah, or Jakaaylee as they call her. She firmly believes that she has seen the ghost and, in fact, gets quite ‘close’ to him. The way she believes in harmless usual ghosts is a bit like the belief in djinns who are supposed to be naturally existent in Persian and Islamic cultures. This particular ghost though becomes real even for the mistress of the household.
I like Mistry’s honesty in depicting his characters who despite being commonplace are quite distinct and memorable, be they Najamai, Daulat, Mehroo or the stamp collector and vet Dr. Mody. Then there are the Boyce brothers – Kersi and Percy whose immigration stories give us an insight into the ways their value systems diverged. Where Percy stays behind to work with rural poor, taking on the moneylenders, Kersi moves to Canada. Their friend, Jamshed, is the wealthy schoolfriend who has an issue with everything Indian. Some stories are darker than others like The Paying Guests where a young couple rents one of their rooms to an older couple and somehow, the fights get irrational, egoistic, go to court, and literally fall off the deep end.
“In the stories that he’d read so far Father said that all the Parsi families were poor or middle-class, but that was okay; nor did he mind that the seeds for the stories were picked from the sufferings of their own lives; but there should also have been something positive about Parsis, there was so much to be proud of…what would people reading these stories think, those who did not know about Parsis—that the whole community was full of cranky, bigoted people; and in reality it was the richest, most advanced and philanthropic community in India, and he did not need to tell his own son that Parsis had a reputation for being generous and family-oriented… Mother said what she liked best was his remembering everything so well, how beautifully he wrote about it all, even the sad things, and though he changed some of it, and used his imagination, there was truth in it.”
If you are looking for a read that promises honesty, affection, nostalgia and small old Indian communities, this could be a good read for you.
