Ordinary lives

CHARLES DICKENS is alive and well and presiding over the pen of the Indian writer Rohinton Mistry. If this seemed a fair assumption to make on the publication of Mistry's debut, Such a Long Journey (1991), it is confirmed as an irrefutable fact on reading his lively new novel, A Fine Balance (Faber, £15.99 in UK). Mistry's characters dominate his work, just as Dickens sustained long, often unwieldy narratives through large casts of vividly drawn eccentrics. Story is secondary to both writers. Mistry is apparently more interested in evoking a sense of modern India as the backdrop to the small dramas of his characters than he is in pursuing a conventional plot.

The central character is Dina, a woman who married young after a suitably romantic courtship, only to lose her husband in a freak cycling accident. Now in middle age, but still beautiful if more sharp of tongue, Dina attempts to make her way in the world through exploiting the labour of two tailors forced to make as many dresses as they can reasonably throw together, to a high enough standard to please the factory owner Dina supplies. Meanwhile she is trying to supplement her income through taking a lodger, Maneck, the son of a former school pal, into her sub-substandard flat. When the boy objects to the worms writhing in the sink he is expected to wash in, she dismisses his fears.

Ishvar and Omprakash, the tailors, an uncle and nephew, left their village home after a tragic attack on their family left them destitute. In the opening scene, which takes place on a crowded train, the tailors meet up with Meneck. They all arrive at Dina's humble home, a place which soon comes under siege because Dina is breaking the law by conducting a business from her rented house. Initially the tailors work as if their lives depend on it, but as they become lazier and more resentful of Dina, she takes to locking them in when she goes out.

Much of the impetus of the book, as well as its comedy, comes from her exasperated attempts to cheat the rent collector. "You are talking rubbish," she shouts at him, "this man, he is my husband. The two boys are our sons. And the dresses are all mine. Part of my new 1975 wardrobe. Go, tell, your landlord he has no case. ,Later, on being asked for a marriage licence to prove she is married to the employee she is attempting to pass off as a husband, she screams: "My slipper across your mouth is what you will see! How dare you insult me! Tell your landlord, if he does not stop harassing my family I'll take him straight to court."

Set during Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency period, the book follows the main characters through their current lives, but Mistry is careful to provide them each with a well-chronicled past. India's history is contained in these individual stories. All of them have suffered. Dina was oppressed by a bullying elder brother; the country tailors have been brutalised; Maneck may not have been as loved by his parents as we think. Further back in family history, there is the sad reality of Roopa, Ishvar's own mother. Ravaged by poverty and afflicted with an ineffectual husband an Untouchable leather-worker, Roopa must provide for her children. Having lost three daughters in early infancy, she finally bears a precious son. Turning thief, Roopa subjects herself to various humiliations, as keeping her son alive becomes her life's project.

Such A Long Journey, short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize, a gentle novel concerning the perplexities of one Gustad Nobel, an Everyman figure who works in a bank and wants the best for his eldest son, has a tragic dimension, and A Fine Balance, though more formal, never quite matches it. The tragedy is broader, and the book is more about India itself than the individual characters however vividly their experiences are recounted. At each funeral it is India, not the individual who is buried.

The earlier work operates on a more philosophical level. There are moments in the new novel when the reader feels close to the scheming, childless, widowed Dina, particularly when she ponders the unfulfilled promise of her girlhood - "her own life's lonely, troubled years came rushing back" - but she never becomes as sympathetic as Gustad in Such a Long Journey, the dreamer of hopeless dreams and distraught parent of a lazy boy and an ailing daughter.

Several of the sideshows along the way here are both funny and tragic; the tailors when searching for lodgings become involved with the local beggars, many of whom are crippled and who view their afflictions as their only way of securing a living. Serious subjects such as caste hatred, poverty, parents desperate to give their children a future, arranged marriages, political repression, death and survival underlie the action. Mistry wants to remind his reader that even if he or she does find the novel entertaining they should be mindful of the harsher aspects of real life, in particular, the cruelly complex reality of the caste system.

"Time passed slowly, as though it had lost interest in the world, observes the author late in the novel. The phrase stands out; it might have come from the pages of a 19th-century Russian novel, and is uncharacteristically lyrical - A Fine Balance is written in a formal, descriptive prose yet is both stately and strangely workmanlike. Mistry does not deal in linguistic fireworks. This is a subtle, solid exploration of character.

Old-fashioned but eminently readable, this novel is further evidence of the confidence of Indian fiction. Mistry, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra as well as Vikram Seth, all testify to the fact that Salman Rushdie does not own the Indian novel. Mistry's humour is mild here, the exuberance of his first novel and his collection of short, stories, From Firozsha Baag, is absent. A Fine Balance is a big book, with a big heart, an ordinary story of small lives, more social history than yarn. It is also sadder, ultimately far more subdued than one might have expected from this author.