Natacha Lasorak

 

Natacha Lasorak is a PhD candidate at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon (France) and a member of the joint research unit Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM). She works under the supervision of Professor Vanessa Guignery and her research focuses on the representation of home in contemporary anglophone novels from the Indian subcontinent.

natacha.lasorak@ens-lyon.fr

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Hosting and homemaking in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995)

 

If a famous Indian saying states that ‘our guests are our gods’ (‘atithi devo bhava’), the journeys related in A Fine Balance (1995) nevertheless underline the difficulty of being accepted in someone else’s place, be it a city, a household or a mere awning. Rohinton Mistry’s second novel follows the evolution of four characters as they struggle for independence and survival in an unnamed city by the sea, “Bombay and not-Bombay at the same time” (122), and questions the role of hospitality in the possibility of establishing a home. Ishvar and Om, two cobblers turned tailors leave their native village for the nearby town and then the city; a Parsi student, Maneck, departs from his beloved mountain town to study in the same city; the three of them are reunited in the flat of Dina, a Parsi widow whose independence depends on the financial income they provide. If the four of them manage to create a household of some sort, their reunion is not the result of choice, but first and foremost a financial necessity. What Jacques Derrida calls ‘absolute hospitality’, the welcoming of an other in a place without any reciprocity or even the asking of their name (29), is hard to find in the novel, for the ‘guest’ is often a ‘paying guest’, whether their contribution is material or symbolic. The tailors’ journey takes them from one household to the next in the search for a home, a precarious state in which hospitality as it is displayed is selective and threatens at all times to turn into hostility. However, the four characters’ common experience of living together seems to prove that it is only through hospitality that a place can be called ‘home’, even if it is reached only for a few months before they are thrown back on the pavement as beggars. As Daniela Rogobete notices, “A Fine Balance [starts] by creating a cozy, familial universe that offers an ideal shelter against the violence of the exterior world. Mistry always disrupts this peacefulness by unleashing the ominous political forces” (110).

Ishvar and Om’s quest for a home is complicated by the very inhospitality of a city in which overpopulation, thug landlords and the progressive erasing of all the slums due to the Emergency (1975-77), endlessly darken the situation for the homeless who cannot even afford to sleep on the pavement. The close proximity of people, threatening intimacy inside the home, encourages characters to close their doors to strangers and their belongings, for even a suitcase, we are told, could justify a claim for territory by its owner and bring the rightful landlord to court. The guest is often perceived as a potential threat, inspiring hostility rather than a wish to show hospitality for possessing land or a house or paying a rent are no guarantees of being able to stay in a place. Home is never given but always defended, might be taken over at any moment, threatening to turn hosts into guests and throwing them out.

As the tailors finally manage to settle on Dina’s verandah, the question of the lines to be respected between host and guests becomes crucial. When thinking about hospitality, Derrida insists on the necessity to think about the possibility of delineating a frontier between familial and non-familial, strange and non-strange, private and public (47). Yet as Peter Morey puts it, “A Fine Balance sets up such limits, such dividing lines, only to have characters transgress them” (115). If it seems at first that preserving a home entails rejecting outsiders, the evolution of the story calls for another definition of the domestic space. The porosity of walls and the numerous occurrences of transgression beyond the lines of religion, caste and class, suggests that showing hospitality could be a way of establishing a home. This interpretation calls for a parallel with a metatextual reading, for Mistry’s gallery of characters also entices us to reflect on the novel’s ability to welcome stories at its heart. In both perspectives, one is led to wonder how hosts and guests may preserve their respective identities in the new home they share, be it Dina’s flat or the home of literature.