A Fine Balance

“When the familiar music filled her head, the past was conquered for a brief while, and she felt herself ache with the ecstasy of completion, as though a missing limb had been recovered.” 

Dina’s life with Nusswan is a grind because her brother is a greedy materialist. When she loses herself in music, it feels as if part of her soul is restored. 

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”

Dina nearly loses herself in her own happy past. However, unlike Maneck, she realizes that this is a futile way to soothe herself and acknowledges when it’s time to move on. 

“He was covered in the slippery sewer sludge, and when he stood up, he shone and shimmered in the sun with a terrible beauty. His hair, stiffened by the muck, flared from his head like a crown of black flames.” 

Dina sees a boy pulled up out of a sewer. He represents a hellish vision of what the city and India have become—this is no longer the dazzling city of her youth. 

“His own dark secrets swam up again from their murky depths of confusion and despair. He tried to push them back […] But they kept slipping away like eels, resurfacing to haunt him.” 

The rent-collector finds his mind troubled by the tasks he’s forced to do for his greedy landlord. It takes a toll on what remains of his conscience, but because he is trapped in a corrupt system, he carries out the landlord’s wishes. 

“Dukhi learned what it was to be a Chamaar, an untouchable in village society […] Like the filth of dead animals which covered him and his father as they worked, the ethos of the caste system was smeared everywhere.” 

This quote gives the reader a sense of the pervasiveness of caste ideology. It also equates the corruption of the system itself with the stench and decay of dead animals. 

“‘It’s not good to go far from your native village. Then you forget who you are.’” 

The untouchables in Ishvar’s village have internalized the caste system’s damaging consequences and see themselves as inferior. In contrast, Ishvar and Om leave their village precisely to forget this ideology and find a better life.

“And the entire scene was so mean and squalid by twilight, so utterly beyond his ability to accept or comprehend. He felt lost and frightened.” 

Maneck’s father reacts to the urban blight encroaching on his lovely mountain village—a region previously untouched by change—much as Maneck later will in response to the city. They both have trouble adapting and both see the past as a golden age that can’t ever be reclaimed. 

“Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.”

Maneck’s mother fears the distance that will be created once Maneck leaves for college in the same way her husband and Maneck fear change. No one in the family seems to have the capacity to adapt.  

“‘What can anyone do in such circumstances? Accept it, and go on. Please always remember, the secret of survival is to embrace change, and to adapt.’” 

Vasantrao’s advice is lost on Maneck. The rest of the book illustrates that Maneck’s inability to accept change as inevitable dooms him.

“‘You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.’” 

Vasantrao elaborates on his advice—which is so thematically crucial that the novel’s title is an echo of his words—stressing the need to find pockets of optimism between the inevitable disasters that strike.

Vasantrao elaborates on his advice—which is so thematically crucial that the novel’s title is an echo of his words—stressing the need to find pockets of optimism between the inevitable disasters that strike.

This offhand comment from a night watchman encapsulates the message of the book. Most of the characters learn to adjust to change, no matter how extreme. When Maneck refuses, he becomes suicidal. 

“Splotches of pale moonlight revealed an endless stretch of patchwork shacks, the sordid quiltings of plastic and cardboard and paper and sackcloth like scabs and blisters creeping in a dermatological nightmare across the rotting body of the metropolis.” 

In this nightmare vision of urban blight, Om perceives the slum as a disease advancing across the rotting corpse of the city proper. At the same time, by describing the slum as a “quilting,” the novel foreshadows Dina’s life-affirming quilt and its ability to memorialize the makeshift family the flatmates will create. Her comforting quilt is the positive flipside to this evil one.

“Maneck was silent as they persevered to rescue the shreds of their livelihood. Not all their skills with needle and thread could set it together again, he thought […] Embrace misery and destruction? No.” 

Maneck once more rejects the advice to embrace change after the apartment is ransacked. He despairs whenever a negative experience confronts him. Because he has never developed resilience, he prefers to cling to a world of happy memories rather than adjust to the world as he finds it. 

“They stared at the drawing, uncertain how to respond to Beggarmaster’s creation. He saved them the embarrassment by offering his own interpretation. ‘Freaks, that’s what we are—all of us.’” 

Beggarmaster has been responsible for creating many of the “freaks” in his beggar troupe, but he also classifies himself among them. He draws no distinction between a deformed body and a deformed spirit. 

 “If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present.”

Once again, Maneck articulates his futile desire to freeze time. Rather than accepting reality, he chooses to mire himself in depression over an existential impossibility.

“Why did humans do that to their feelings? Whether it was anger or love or sadness, they always tried to put something else forward in its place […] Either way it was dishonest.” 

Even the Beggarmaster’s attempt to hide his grief at Shankar’s funeral ties into the theme of dishonesty found throughout the book. Despite the fact that Beggarmaster genuinely feels sorry for his favorite beggar—and recently discovered half-brother—he refuses to allow his vulnerability to show.

“‘What to do, bhai, when educated people are behaving like savages. How do you talk to them? When the ones in power have lost their reason, there is no hope.’” 

This comment sums up the book’s theme of political corruption and personal greed, pointing out the dire consequences of this societal breakdown. If there is no reason left for hope, balance can never be achieved.

“Could she describe for Zenobia the extent to which Maneck and Om had become inseparable, and how Ishvar regarded both boys like his own sons?” 

Dina acknowledges the family bond between the four flatmates, with Ishvar as a husband figure and the two young men as sons. She also realizes that most people would never be able to comprehend such an unusual phenomenon, much less value it. 

“Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all. And maybe Maneck was right, everything did end badly.” 

In a dark moment, Dina considers that Maneck may be right about the fact that the future is completely bleak and life has no meaning. However, she never chooses to end her life as he does. Apparently, some part of her still carries a spark of hope to balance her despair.

“‘After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents—a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.’” 

Vasantrao is waxing philosophical, but he isn’t as devastated by his own observations as Maneck might be. Rather, his words convey humorous bemusement. He is able to make observations about the grim state of the world and at the same time not take those observations too much to heart.

“‘In fact, that is the central theme of my life story—loss […] Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.’” 

Vasantrao conveys a calm acceptance of present circumstances—an attitude that has allowed him to find whatever niches he can to prosper opportunistically. This stands in direct opposition to Maneck’s desire to entirely eradicate loss from his own life. 

“The three sisters looked disappointed, he thought, as though they had expected something more out of hanging; something more than death, and then discovered that death was all there was.” 

In contemplating the photo of Avinash’s sisters, Maneck appears to be projecting his own thoughts about life, speculating that death will be as big a disappointment to him as life has been.