A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

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⭐ 5/5 Review: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry — A Masterpiece of Humanity, Suffering, and Survival

👉 Grab your copy of A Fine Balance on Amazon [affiliate link]

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🚨 Trigger Warnings

• Poverty & homelessness 🏚️

• Caste-based violence ⚖️

• Forced sterilization / mutilation 🩸

• Political corruption 🏛️

• Suicide 🚉

• Death of family members 💔

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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

This review contains a full plot summary with spoilers, including the ending. If you want to go into A Fine Balance blind, this is your chance to bow out.

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📖 Overview

Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 Booker Prize finalist A Fine Balance is one of those rare books that gets under your skin and stays there forever. Set in India during the Emergency of 1975, it weaves together the lives of four ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary injustice.

Despite its heft (over 600 pages!), this novel never dragged for me. Every page carried weight — the writing is gorgeous, quotable, and deeply human.

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👥 Meet the Characters

• Dina Dalal – a widowed woman determined to live independently in her cramped apartment, fighting off her landlord’s eviction attempts and her brother’s overbearing control.

• Ishvar & Omprakash (Om) Darji – uncle and nephew, lower-caste tailors fleeing a violent village past to find work in the city.

• Maneck Kohlah – a refrigeration student who moves into Dina’s flat, nostalgic for his childhood and struggling with the harshness of adulthood.

None of them are perfect. All of them are painfully, beautifully human.

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🧵 Detailed Plot Summary — FULL SPOILERS

A Makeshift Family Forms

Maneck rents a room in Dina’s apartment while Ishvar and Om find work as her tailors. Despite initial mistrust, the four form a fragile but warm household — a kind of found family. Their tiny flat becomes a safe haven in a world full of corruption, poverty, and political upheaval.

Dina sews a quilt from leftover scraps, each square becoming a patchwork memory of their year together.

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Violence Beyond the Walls

The outside world, however, is brutal. The Emergency has unleashed corruption: forced sterilizations, slum demolitions, police brutality, and caste violence.

• Ishvar and Om’s tragic backstory reveals how their family was slaughtered for daring to rise above their caste.

• Maneck, meanwhile, is paralyzed by despair — unable to let go of his childhood happiness and unable to face adulthood’s cruelty.

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The Tailors’ Return Home

When Ishvar and Om return to their village for Om to marry, tragedy strikes again. Om insults the corrupt landowner Thakur Dharamsi, who orchestrates his revenge through the sterilization program:

• Om is castrated.

• Ishvar’s botched vasectomy leads to gangrene, and both his legs are amputated.

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Time Moves On

Maneck leaves for Dubai, drifting through life without purpose. When he finally returns in 1984, it is for his father’s funeral. He reconnects with Dina — now nearly blind, living under her brother’s thumb — and learns the devastating truth:

• Ishvar and Om have been reduced to beggars.

• Dina has lost her independence.

• His found family has been shattered.

When Maneck sees the tailors on the street, their ragged state overwhelms him. He cannot bring himself to speak.

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The Crushing Finale

Maneck, lost in despair and unable to reconcile the injustices of the world, throws himself under a train.

Meanwhile, Dina welcomes Ishvar and Om for lunch. They joke and laugh, finding moments of light even in their suffering. Ishvar patches a square of Dina’s old quilt — a small act of survival, of holding together what’s left.

The novel ends on this devastating contrast: one man choosing death, while two others cling to the scraps of life with humor and resilience.

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💭 My Thoughts

This book is a masterpiece. It’s heavy, yes. It’s tragic, absolutely. But it’s also breathtakingly human.

✨ The characters feel real — flawed, brave, weak, hopeful, and broken.
✨ The prose is sharp, quotable, unforgettable.
✨ The injustices — based on real history — make this book not just fiction, but a mirror to humanity’s cruelty and resilience.

Despite the suffering, there are moments of warmth, humor, and beauty. And that’s what makes the sadness hit so much harder.

⭐ Final Rating: 5/5 stars — A book that will stay with me forever.

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📚 If You Liked This, Try:

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy — lyrical, heartbreaking, India’s social divides.

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga — corruption and class struggle with a biting wit.

• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie — India’s political history wrapped in magical realism.