44 pages • 1 hour read
A Fine Balance
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Themes
Striking a Balance
The title of A Fine Balance plays on the idea of finding a middle ground between despair and hope. Vasantrao tells Maneck that the secret to life lies in finding that balance. All of the main characters confront the fact that the demoralizing nature of life in India in 1975 makes hope difficult to come by, but necessary for survival.
Ishvar and Om find balance by being counterpoints of hope and despair. Ishvar is optimistic even at the worst of times. He’s jovial and appears better fed than his nephew, who has a lean and hungry look. On the other hand, Om is perpetually dissatisfied. He frets that Dina is cheating him, so he wants to cut her out of the sewing operation. The two men counterbalance one another until time and adversity mellow the extreme outlook of each. Over time, Ishvar becomes a little more realistic and Om a little less judgmental.
Dina offsets her natural distrust with her loneliness. At the beginning of the book, Dina is overly cautious and suspicious of both her boarder and the tailors. By the end of the year they spend together, she regards them as family. This transformation suggests that she has found her own personal balance.
Conversely, Maneck never allows hope to overcome his inner sense of despair. He consistently views life as random and pointless. He confides to Dina that he used to think God was dead, but now thinks the deity is just as confused as God’s creation:
But now I prefer to think that God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it (334).
Ultimately, because Maneck has allowed his hopelessness to outweigh every other consideration, he commits suicide.
Personal Greed and Political Corruption
The toxic influence of the government hovers over all the major events of the story. Greed and corruption are woven so inextricably into the fabric of Indian politics that every reform ends up worsening the plight of the poor.
Ishvar and Om feel the brunt of government corruption at several different points in the story. Initially, they are hijacked on their way to work so that they can attend a political rally where the prime minister duplicitously explains why the Emergency, a form of martial law, protects people and preserves order. The tailors are promised food and pay, but the greedy officials orchestrating the event fail to keep even that promise.
Each of the government’s new policies makes it easy for those in power to become even more corrupt: “With the Emergency, everything is upside-down. Black can be made white, day turned into night. With the right influence and a little cash, sending people to jail is very easy” (295). Meanwhile, as part of a government initiative called Beautification, the tailors’ shantytown is plowed under. The man who has already collected the rent on their shack is double-dipping: After pocketing rent from all the tenants, he is being paid to supervise the demolition of their homes.
When Ishvar and Om sleep in a shop doorway, they are taken away to a labor camp to work on an irrigation project through another part of the Beautification initiative to get indigents off the streets and employ them. The greedy officials running the round-up collect a fee for every homeless person they deliver and refuse to listen to Ishvar and Om’s protests that they are gainfully employed already. Ishvar and Om only escape because Beggarmaster is bribing the men in charge to release prospective beggars into his care.
The worst example of greed and political corruption occurs when Ishvar and Om are forced to receive vasectomies. The Family Planning initiative is supposed to be voluntary, but grasping officials are paid for every “volunteer” they deliver. Everyone turns a blind eye to the fact that people are being captured and forced to have the surgery. Thakur abuses his power as the head of the Family Planning Centre even further by having Om castrated.
Adapting to Change
The theme of adaptation to change is closely related to the notion of striking a balance between hope and despair. Because of the precarious conditions all the characters face, they must reinvent themselves several times. The degree to which they can successfully adapt determines their chances of survival.
Ishvar and Om start out in life as leatherworkers. They then become tailors and end up as beggars. Dina begins as an unmarried girl, then an unpaid servant, a wife, widow, business owner, and a spinster aunt. The tenement she rented changes into a luxury apartment building. Rajaram starts as a hair-collector, briefly becomes a family planning motivator, a barber, a hair thief and murderer, a penitent monk, and ends as a fake guru. Vasantrao starts as a proofreader, then becomes a political organizer, a lawyer, and finally a fake prognosticator of fortunes. He gives Maneck this advice:
‘Please always remember, the secret to survival is to embrace change, and to adapt […] You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success’ (228).
The greatest tragedy of the story is that Maneck refuses to adapt. He wants to hold onto the happiest moments of his childhood and never move beyond them. Knowing that this is impossible, he loses all interest in his future, which he believes to be hopelessly unstable:
A house with suicidal tendencies, Avinash had called it. A little bit, and then a little more—and eventually it would rip out the anchors, tumble headlong down the hill. It seemed fitting. Everything was losing its moorings, slipping away, becoming irrecoverable (585).
When Maneck finds he can no longer hold onto the happy illusion that Dina and the tailors are just as he left them, he loses his own moorings and deliberately tumbles over a railroad track.
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