A Fine Balance

A college student named Maneck Kohlah is riding a train in a large Indian city in 1975. He accidentally drops his textbooks, and they tumble onto two other passengers, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji. After Maneck apologizes, the three men strike up a conversation.

When the train slows unexpectedly, they wonder about the cause of the delay. Someone has committed suicide by throwing himself in front of an oncoming train, a frequent occurrence in the city. After the train resumes its progress, the three men discover that they’re all exiting at the same stop.

Off the train, Maneck asks the other two for directions to his destination, but they protest that they are strangers themselves. When they compare notes, they all realize they’re heading to the same address—the house of Dina Dalal. Ishvar and Om are tailors seeking work. Om is suspicious that Maneck is a competitor for their jobs. Maneck protests that he’s a student whose mother knew Dina—he only intends to rent a room from her.

When they arrive at Dina’s flat, Maneck notices how shabby it is. He realizes that the woman needs to take in boarders just to make ends meet. Dina negotiates terms with Ishvar and Om, who agree to sew dresses from patterns and supply their own sewing machines.

Once their business with Dina is concluded, the three men go their separate ways. They will meet again after they move in with all their equipment and baggage. After her visitors are gone, Dina spends a moment registering relief. The extra income they provide will preserve her fragile financial independence. She won’t have to beg her brother for next month’s rent.

This chapter focuses on Dina Shroff’s background. She has a happy childhood in her parents’ home. Her father is a physician and an extreme philanthropist. He prefers treating cholera in small, poor villages to taking care of his affluent city patients. On one such village trip, when Dina is only 12, he dies from a cobra bite.

Dina’s mother soon loses the will to live and dies shortly after. Dina’s greedy elder brother Nusswan takes charge, fires the maid, and makes Dina do all the household chores. They have a stormy relationship until Nusswan marries Ruby. Dina and her sister-in-law get along reasonably well. Ruby even teaches Dina to sew.

To escape the monotony of her life, Dina sometimes goes to the library or to musical concerts. Although Nusswan has been trying to marry Dina off to one of his friends, she announces that she prefers Rustom Dalal, a man she met at a concert series. It’s a love match, and the couple lives happily for three years until Rustom is run over by a truck while riding his bicycle at night.

Dina moves back in with her brother even though she still retains the Dalal family apartment. Eventually, Rustom’s aunt finds Dina some customers for her sewing work, and she achieves financial independence. She is able to move back to Rustom’s apartment herself. Things go well for several years despite Nusswan’s repeated attempts to marry Dina off again.

When she reaches her early 40s, Dina’s eyesight begins to fail because of all the close embroidery work she’s done over the years. Once more finding herself in financial straits, she takes work from Au Revoir Exports. The job requires her to hire tailors who can sew from patterns. Dina hands out flyers for weeks, trying to find tailors, as she struggles to make ends meet:

She felt like the lost children in that fairy tale whose title had slipped her mind, leaving a trail of bread, hoping to be rescued. But birds had devoured the bread. Would she ever be saved, she wondered, or would her trail of paper be devoured, by the wind, by the black sewer sludge, by the hungry army of paper-collectors roaming the streets with their sacks? (68).

Her luck changes when Maneck and the two tailors converge on her home on the same day.