International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL)

Volume 3, Issue 10, October 2015, PP 30-33

ISSN 2347-3126 (Print) & ISSN 2347-3134 (Online)
www.arcjournals.org

A Short Reintroduction to Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction - Family

Matters
Pendela Vikramarka
M.A., English, Nizam College
Department of English
Osmania University, Hyderabad

1. INTRODUCTION
Rohinton Mistry is one Indian author who has received acclaim worldwide. Rohinton Mistry provides
rich, diverse and sharply critical insights into post-Independence Indian in his fiction. His range of
concerns is also admirable vast; politics, community life, urbanism, the caste system, economic
inequality, national „events such as wars, communalism and the subaltern classes among others. His
portraits of the Parsi community map the tensions of modernity and their struggle against
marginalization. Mistry‟s fiction is about heroism in an age and context where mere survival is a
heroic act.
Rohinton Mistry is a writer with great honesty of imagination. He does not attempt to follow fads and
fashion. His writing suggests sensitivity to both the beauty and the fragmentation, the failings and the
cruelties of his world. Much of Mistry‟s fiction works with the humanistic premise that the „universal‟
lies in the ordinary. This is the trajectory he has chalked out for himself in the course of his brief but
meteoric literary career.
Rohinton Misty, born on 3rd July 1952, is an Indian-born Canadian who writes in English. Mistry is of
Indian origin, originally from Mumbai, and currently resides in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. He
practices Zoroastrianism and belongs to the Parsi community. Mistry is a Neustadt International Prize
for Literature laureate (2012). He wrote novels, short stores and chapbooks.
His third novel “Family Matters” is a consideration of the difficulties that come with ageing, which
Mistry returned to in 2008 with the short fiction The Scream (Published as a separate volume, in
support of World Literacy of Canada, with illustrations by Tony Urquhart). It was first published by
McClelland and Stewart in 2002. The novel is set in the city of Mumbai, where Mistry was born and
grew up, and tells the story of a middle-class Parsi family living through a domestic crisis. Through
one family, Mistry conveys everything from the dilemmas among India‟s Parsis, Persian descended
Zoroastrians, to the wider concerns of corruption and communalism, Mistry writes in simple
language, using a lot of dialogue.
2. FAMILY MATTERS (NOVEL)
Some of the action takes place in Chateau Felicity, a flat inhabited by a 79-year-old, Parkinson‟s
stricken Nariman, who is the decaying patriarch and a widower with a small, discordant family
consisting of his two middle-aged step children: Coomy (bitter and domineering) and Jal
(mild-mannered and subservient). When Nariman‟s sickness is compounded by a broken ankle,
Coomy‟s harshness reaches its summit. She plots to turn his round-the-clock care over to Roxana, her
sweet-tempered sister and Nariman‟s real daughter and that‟s where the problems start.
Roxana, who lives a contented life with Yezad and her two children (Murad and Jehangir) in a small
flat at Pleasant Villa takes up the care of Nariman like a dutiful daughter, but the inclusion of a new
member in an already stuffed house soon becomes evidently painful both physically and emotionally
for Roxana‟s family. As loathing for Nariman‟s sickness increases and finances of the already strained
household go bust, inundated by the ever increasing financial worries, Yezad pushes himself into a
scheme of deception involving Vikram Kapur (his eccentric and sometimes exasperating employer at
Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium). Two terrible incidents occur, which turn the plot and the lives
of the characters topsy-turvy.
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Pendela Vikramarka

Plot summary of Family Matters

The book opens with Nariman‟s accident as a result of which he is bedridden. He suffers humiliation
due to deterioration in his health and the grudging care (bedpans, sponge baths, etc.) of his two
step-children especially Coomy his step-daughter who has never accepted him or any of his efforts to
be a father. The poor man is entirely at their mercy and they are uncomfortable with the burden of
caring for him. Coomy in a fit of inspiration born of a desperate desire to not suffer this burden any
longer creates with Jars grudging assistance the perfect reason as to why they can no longer nurse
him. In this way, they shift the burden on to their younger sister Roxana who is married with two
young sons. She lives in a tiny apartment with less than half the space as that of the flat that Coomy
and Jal share.
Roxana is fond of her father but her household‟s resources are stretched to the limit with the cost of
nursing him. Her older son and her husband resent the instrusion. Her younger son assists her as much
as he can. He and his mother are the only ones who help Nariman keep his humanity. As Yezad
comes to centre stage for the following part of the book, the author explores the problems faced by an
average middle-class family. Financial problems lure him and Jehangir towards greed and money.
The subplot of the book, which involves Yezad hatching a plan to cheat his employer of a large sum
in order to meet his growing expenses by making up a Shiv Sainik threat. This subplot acts as the
turning point in the main story. The book contains many details of the Parsis‟ practices, rituals,
intolerances, and the concerns of native Parsis. In the epilogue, the youngest of all characters,
Jehangir, becomes the narrator, describing the metamorphosis that religion, age, death, and wealth
bring to his family. Coomy is now dead. Roxanna‟s family now lives with Jal. A full time nurse has
been hired for Nariman and Roxanna feels guilty about it since her father now has bedsores - a sign of
lack of care. Yezad has undergone a sea change from an atheist to a fanatic.
3. SOME PERSPECTIVES OF FAMILY MATTERS
After the national scope of the his earlier novels, Mistry‟s return to the tapestry of family life in
Family matters seems surprising until one realizes that it is but a variation on the theme of heroism in
ordinariness (which I would characterize as Mistry‟s chief concern in every work). It is the story of
Yezad who tries to balance his job, society and family. At the same time, this novel marks the
reassertion of Mistry‟s identity as a Parsi and works to centre that experience as symbolic of the
„universal‟.
Although Rohinton Mistry is cited almost everywhere as a Canadian writer, Canada hardly features in
his writing, except marginally - as a location for the immigrant experience in his first collection of
short stories. Mistry chooses to revisit his „original‟ home, city and culture rather than detail the
immigrant experience. In an interview, he discusses why he writes about Bombay, the middle-class
Parsis in Bombay, the world he has left behind:
Going to Canada, faced with the reality of earning a living and realizing that although I had, up to that
point in my life, read books and listened to music that came from the West, there was a lot more
involved in living in the West. I felt very comfortable with the books and the music, but actually
living in the West made that same music seem much less relevant. It suddenly brought home to me
very clearly the fact that I was imitating something that was not mine, that made no sense in terms of
my own life, my own reality. (Shaikh)
Thematically, Mistry‟s fiction has moved from the family in Tales from Firozsha Baag to the wider
Parsi community in Such a Long Journey to the national tapestry in A Fine Balance. Family Matters
moves back to the theme of the family and uses narrative strategies first used in A Fine Balance to
intensify the plot, the human interest and the sense that the characters are firmly embedded in their
Present.
The chronological timeline of Mistry‟s various plots shows an interesting gradual movement towards
the contemporary Such a Long Journey was set in the early 1970s, during the war against Pakistan
and chronicled in relation to his characters‟ lives how the abuse of political authority affected the
ordinary citizen. In A Fine Balance, the figure of Indira Gandhi and her manipulation of Congress
ideologies, political rhetoric and cruel pragmatism have direct repercussions on the lives of the four
main characters of the novel. With Family Matters, Mistry moves to the India of the 1990s and the
political subtext of his novel is the growth of fundamentalist Hindutva ideology and its repercussions
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A Short Reintroduction to Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction - Family Matters

on the life of the ordinary, unsuspecting citizen. The discussion of extremist Hindutva permeates the
novel from early on, mainly through Yezad‟s public world of friends, employers, customers, etc.
However, for the most part, it is Yezad‟s family problems that are subject to sustained narrative
attention.
The political subtext is important, however, as it allows us to identify the novel as a narrative of the
contemporary. Mistry self-reflexively allows Yezad to reflect upon the contemporary literature on
India:
Sometimes, when Mr. Kapur spoke about 1947 and Partition, Yezad felt that Punjabi migrants of a
certain age were like Indian authors writing about that period, whether in realist novels of
corpse-filled trains or in the magic-realist midnight muddles, all repeating the same catalogue of
horrors about slaughter and burning, rape and mutilation. This functions both as a comment and as a
statement of intent.
It is important, at this point, to focus on the narrative strategies of Family Matters that show that the
whole world can be made to inhabit one small place and that the family can become the nexus of the
collective and the universal. Each of the characters in the story becomes the point of entry for a whole
series of experiences and varying networks of contacts which enrich the novel. Thus, Coomy‟s story
allows an insight into several issues and subplots within the tale: the childhood rituals, Roxana‟s
struggles for her family and the solidarity of the apartment‟s community among others.
Yezad‟s life away from home allows the exploration of political concerns. Through Yezad the novel
introduces the horrors of partition (Mr. Kapur) and, closer in time, the horrors of the Babri Masjid
riots through the agony of Husain, the Muslim peon who intermittently relives the trauma of seeing
the burning bodies of his wife and children. Vilas and his actor friends introduce concerns of both a
secular and artistic nature - they discuss Hindutva politics, the nation‟s dire state of poverty and the
upliftment of the people. Their little game with Mr. Kapur (where they pose as Shiv Sena activists in
order to push him into politics), metamorphoses into real Shiv Sena horror as he is beaten up and
killed in front of his traumatized peon.
Mistry‟s greatest feat is the complication of Nariman Vakeel‟s tale. The old man, initially depicted in
a state of gradual degeneration of his bodily functions (which disgusts Coomy), becomes
progressively more interesting. He is redeemed by the love and caring of his children and
grandchildren, who look beyond the body to the goodness of the man. But parallel to the story, of his
illness, the story of his disastrous past is gradually unveiled - the story of a brilliant and madly-in-love
young man who is forced because of the bigotry of his parents to abandon the Catholic woman he
loves and agree to an arranged marriage to a widowed Parsi woman, already mother of two children,
Lucy, the rejected woman, haunts him. Ridden with guilt, Nariman helps her, thus infuriating his wife
and earning him the lifelong resentment of his stepchildren. The proximity of the former lovers, the
shame of the Parsi parents and the selfishness of the employers, gradually unfold into disaster as both
the former lover and the angry wife die, leaving Nariman with eternal regret, grief and guilt.
Nariman‟s story is itself a commentary on excessive community exclusiveness within communities
and the disastrous consequences of tyrannical parental authority.
By the time Nariman dies, his death appears „natural‟ and timely, both in terms of the people around
him and the narrative. His is a life lived fully, having traversed love, rejection, grief, guilt, generosity,
disease, desertion and redemption.
4. CONCLUSION
Some of the major themes of Family Matters are: The family and its claustrophobia, Faith and
fundamentalism, Memory, Care, Charity and humanity.
When surveying the work of an author, it is always tempting to read his/her last published work as the
culmination of the craftsmanship that has been evolving from the first book onwards. This reading can
certainly be adapted to the corpus of Mistry‟s work with Family Matters seen as reflecting the
culmination of his craftsmanship. But for Misty‟s literary self-assurance, it is difficult to imagine how
the story of an old man dying from Parkinson‟s disease in a materially straitened family could make
for such a fascinating tale. Despite the scatological explicitness and the horrors created by man, the
novel reverberates with the music of humanity, giving us the incredible trajectories of old and young
and the precarious balance of sense and stability in existence. After the motifs of the journey and the
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Pendela Vikramarka

balancing act in his two earlier novels, all the underlying patterns of reference in this novel are based
on the story of Nariman Vakeel‟s past and his present.
REFERENCES
[1] Mistry, Rohinton, Family Matters, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 2002
[2] Ahmed, Aijaz. On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right. New Delhi:
Three Essays Press, 2002.
[3] Albertazzi, Silvia. „Passages: The “Indian Connection” from Sara Jeanette Duncan to Rohinton
Mistry‟. In M.T. Bindella and G. V. Davis (eds.) Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the
New Literatures in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993: 57-66.
[4] Appiah, Kwame Anthony. „Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?‟. Critical
Inquiry 17, 1991: 336-357.
[5] In My Father‟s House: Africa and the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992.
[6] Author Profile: Rohinton Misty‟. Accessed 26 March 2004 on http://www.contemporarriters.com
[7] Bahri, Deepika. “The Economy of Postcolonial Literature: Rohinton Misty‟s Such a Long
Journey”. In Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003: 120-151.
[8] Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.
[9] Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form”. In Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and
Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990: 44-71.
[10] Brydon, Diana, and Helen Tiffin. Decolonizing Fictions. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993.
[11] Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
[12] Bharucha, Nilufer E. “When Old Tracks are Lost”: Rohinton Misty‟s Fiction as Diasporic
Discourse‟. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, 1995: 57-64.
[13] Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces. Jaipur: Rawat, 2003.
[14] „From Behind a Fine Veil: A Feminist Reading of Three Parsi Novels‟, In Jasbir Jain and Amina
Amin (eds.) Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Sub continental Novel in English. New Delhi:
Sterling, 1995: 174—185.
[15] Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Delhi: Picador, 2001.
[16] Cooke, Hope. „Beehive in Bombay.‟ Review of Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from
Firozsha Baag. New York Times) 5 March 1989:26.

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