Family Matters [Paperback]

For Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry puts his own spin on Tolstoy's maxim that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The result is a thoroughly absorbing tale about matters of family, told with wise, gentle humour. In the early 1990s, Hindu fundamentalists, the Shiv Sena, razed the Babri mosque, a Muslim holy site in the Indian city of Ayodhya. This incident and the bloody inter-religious strife it precipitated form the novel's political background, which encroaches on the realm of personal ethics with dire and unforeseen consequences.

Family Matters, which follows upon Mistry's much lauded novels, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance, is a modern take on King Lear set in the roiling multicultural bustle of Bombay. Mistry's Lear is Nariman Vakeel, an elderly widower of the Parsi minority, who lives with his two middle-aged stepchildren, the embittered Coomy and her decent but spineless sister, Jal. When Nariman breaks his leg, Coomy and Jal conspire to off-load him onto their younger half-sister, the good-hearted Roxana, whose family is barely making ends meet as it is.

Mistry engages all the family members in the telling of his saga. Entering the interior world of each character, he presents a richly textured portrait of how a family copes or fails to cope with the messes and smells of an infirm member, about the friable brink of poverty that can leave one vulnerable to the seduction of the quick fix, about the corruptive power of bitterness, about how room can always be made in the human heart. A less compelling subplot involving Roxana's husband Yezad aside, the undeniable fulcrum of both the family and the narrative remains the charismatic and wise patriarch, Nariman. Tortured by regret, haunted by memories that, despite the decrepitude of his body, will not be repressed, he will surely leave an indelible mark on readers of this novel about how family truly does matter. --Diana Kuprel --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Warm, humane, tender and bittersweet are not the words one would expect to describe a novel that portrays a society where the government is corrupt, the standard of living is barely above poverty level and religious, ethnic and class divisions poison the community. Yet Mistrys compassionate eye and his ability to focus on the small decencies that maintain civilization, preserve the family unit and even lead to happiness attest to his masterly skill as a writer who makes sense of the world by using laughter, as one of his characters observes. Bombay in the mid-1990s, a once-elegant city in the process of deterioration, is mirrored in the physical situation of elderly retired professor Nariman Vakeel, whose body is succumbing to the progressive debilitation of Parkinsons disease. Narimans apartment, which he shares with his two resentful, middle-aged stepchildren, is also in terrible disrepair. But when an accident forces him to recuperate in the tortuously crowded apartment that barely accommodates his daughter Roxana, her husband and two young boys, family tensions are exacerbated and the limits of responsibility and obligation are explored with a full measure of anguish. In the ensuing situation, everyones behavior deteriorates, and the affecting secret of Narimans thwarted lifetime love affair provides a haunting leitmotif. Light moments of domestic interaction, a series of ridiculous comic situations, ironic juxtapositions and tenderly observed human eccentricities provide humorous relief, as the author of A Fine Balance again explores the tightrope act that constitutes life on this planet. Mistry is not just a fiction writer; he's a philosopher who finds meaning-indeed, perhaps a divine plan in small human interactions. This beautifully paced, elegantly expressed novel is notable for the breadth of its vision as well as its immensely appealing characters and enticing plot.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Yes, family does matter, but Nariman's is falling apart even as he himself crumbles from Parkinson's. The award-winning Mistry revisits Bombay in his latest work, which is slated for a 75,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Mistry's flawless style and absolute yet inconspicuous command of character, place, and story made prizewinners of his previous novels, including A Fine Balance (1996). He now presents a magnetic tale of family obligations that comes as close to perfect as a novel can get. The setting is the ever-hectic city of Bombay during a 1990s wave of violent religious extremism, and the focus is on an extended Parsi family suffering the long-term consequences of a Juliet and Romeo-like tragedy. Septuagenarian widower Nariman survived the catastrophic love affair, but Parkinson's disease is now eroding his health and autonomy, forcing him to confront his guilt over capitulating to his family's vehement objections to the non-Parsi love of his life and entering into an unhappy arranged marriage with a Parsi widow with two children. Nariman and his wife had one daughter together, the sweet-natured Roxana, who lives joyfully in a tiny apartment on a tight budget with her two magnificent sons and loving husband, while regretful Nariman lives in an enormous but neglected flat with his deeply resentful stepdaughter and lazy and timid stepson. These two diametrically opposed households collide when Nariman becomes bed-ridden, an event that places incalculable emotional, physical, and financial strains on everyone, causing even the scrupulously honest to cheat, and exposing the hypocrisy of religious beliefs that cause strife instead of fostering tolerance and generosity. A discerning social observer and master dramatist, Mistry evokes laughter and tears as he spins the great wheel of human life and charts the soul's confusion and the body's decline, the endless cycle of repeated mistakes and failures of heart, and, yes, the radiant revelations of love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“Once again, Rohinton Mistry has written an absolutely fabulous novel.”
–Noah Richler, National Post

“He ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive.”
–Atlantic Monthly

“The reader is moved, even to tears, by these rites of passage among characters we have lived with long enough to feel as family. . . . The exercise of compassion, by the writer and then by the reader, remains one of the novel’s chief duties and complex pleasures.”
–John Updike, The New Yorker

“A magnetic tale that comes as close to perfect as a novel can get.”
–Booklist

“Magnificent.…Family Matters could well be one of the finest novels most of us will ever read. It is certainly a masterpiece.”
–Irish Times

“Warm, humane, tender and bittersweet.…The author of A Fine Balance again explores the tightrope act that constitutes life on this planet.…This beautifully paced, elegantly expressed novel is notable for the breadth of its vision as well as its immensely appealing characters and enticing plot.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“For the purposefulness and clarity of his moral vision, there is no better writer living in Canada today.…Mistry weaves a marvelous tapestry.…”
–Montreal Gazette

“Family Matters moves and engages at every moment.…Mistry is among the most distinguished of the Indian writers currently visible, partly because he does not try to make India itself his main subject.…His real territory if the divided heart.”
–Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books

“Heart-breaking and utterly beguiling.…”
–The Herald (U.K.)

“Compassionately attentive to the blend of tragedy and comedy and strikes the notes of each with grace, precision and tenderness.…”
–Edmonton Journal

“Impressive. . . . Wry and richly perceptive.…”
–Times Literary Supplement

“A giant among writers.…A vibrant and full-bodied novel.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Compelling and rich.…”
–Globe and Mail

“With deceptive simplicity, Mistry draws his fine balance between scepticism and affirmation, faith and bigotry, family nurture and control.”
–The Guardian (U.K.)

[He is] blessed by talent as natural as breathing.…”
–Maclean’s

“His prose style is as clear as a pane of newly polished glass.”
–The Economist

“Mistry remains one of our most important writers –one of our most important moral voices.…”
–Quill & Quire



From the Hardcover edition.

Set in Bombay in the mid-1990s, Family Matters tells a story of familial love and obligation, of personal and political corruption, of the demands of tradition and the possibilities for compassion. Nariman Vakeel, the patriarch of a small discordant family, is beset by Parkinson’s and haunted by memories of his past. He lives with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her brother, Jal, mild-mannered and acquiescent. But the burden of the illness worsens the already strained family relationships. Soon, their sweet-tempered half-sister, Roxana, is forced to assume sole responsibility for her bedridden father. And Roxana’s husband, besieged by financial worries, devises a scheme of deception involving his eccentric employer at a sporting goods store, setting in motion a series of events that leads to the narrative’s moving outcome. Family Matters has all the richness, the gentle humour, and the narrative sweep that have earned Mistry the highest of accolades around the world.


From the Hardcover edition.

“Once again, Rohinton Mistry has written an absolutely fabulous novel.”
–Noah Richler, National Post

“He ought to be considered simply one of the best writers, Indian or otherwise, now alive.”
–Atlantic Monthly

“The reader is moved, even to tears, by these rites of passage among characters we have lived with long enough to feel as family. . . . The exercise of compassion, by the writer and then by the reader, remains one of the novel’s chief duties and complex pleasures.”
–John Updike, The New Yorker

“A magnetic tale that comes as close to perfect as a novel can get.”
–Booklist

“Magnificent.…Family Matters could well be one of the finest novels most of us will ever read. It is certainly a masterpiece.”
–Irish Times

“Warm, humane, tender and bittersweet.…The author of A Fine Balance again explores the tightrope act that constitutes life on this planet.…This beautifully paced, elegantly expressed novel is notable for the breadth of its vision as well as its immensely appealing characters and enticing plot.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“For the purposefulness and clarity of his moral vision, there is no better writer living in Canada today.…Mistry weaves a marvelous tapestry.…”
–Montreal Gazette

“Family Matters moves and engages at every moment.…Mistry is among the most distinguished of the Indian writers currently visible, partly because he does not try to make India itself his main subject.…His real territory if the divided heart.”
–Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books

“Heart-breaking and utterly beguiling.…”
–The Herald (U.K.)

“Compassionately attentive to the blend of tragedy and comedy and strikes the notes of each with grace, precision and tenderness.…”
–Edmonton Journal

“Impressive. . . . Wry and richly perceptive.…”
–Times Literary Supplement

“A giant among writers.…A vibrant and full-bodied novel.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Compelling and rich.…”
–Globe and Mail

“With deceptive simplicity, Mistry draws his fine balance between scepticism and affirmation, faith and bigotry, family nurture and control.”
–The Guardian (U.K.)

[He is] blessed by talent as natural as breathing.…”
–Maclean’s

“His prose style is as clear as a pane of newly polished glass.”
–The Economist

“Mistry remains one of our most important writers –one of our most important moral voices.…”
–Quill & Quire



From the Hardcover edition.

Rohinton Mistry is the author of a collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), and three internationally acclaimed novels, Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002). His fiction has won many prestigious international awards, including The Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the Governor General’s Award, the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, The Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Award, and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction. A Fine Balance was also an Oprah’s Book Club® selection.

Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry came to Canada in 1975.


From the Hardcover edition.

Though Roxana was their half-sister, Jal and Coomy’s love for her had been full and complete from the moment she was born. At fourteen and twelve, they were not prey to the complicated feelings of jealousy, neglect, rivalry, or even hatred, which newborns evoke in siblings closer in age.

Or perhaps Jal and Coomy were grateful for Roxana because she filled the void left by their own father’s death, four years earlier. Their father had been sickly through most of their childhood. And during brief stretches when his lungs did not confine him to bed, he was still weak, seldom able to get through the day unassisted. His chronic pleurisy was the symptom of a more serious pulmonary disease, its two dreaded initials never mentioned among friends and relatives. Just a little water in the lungs, was how Palonji’s illness was described.

And Palonji, to alleviate his family’s anxiety, made a running joke out of this coded description. If Jal, always full of mischief as a child, did something silly, it was due to a little water in his head. “You must plug your ears when you wash your hair,” his father teased. Clumsy hands meant the person was a real water-fingers. And if little Coomy cried, her father said, “My lovely daughter does not cry, it’s just a little water in the eyes,” which would promptly make her smile.

Palonji Contractor’s courage and his determination to keep up his family’s spirits were heroic, but the end, when it came, was devastating for Jal and Coomy. And three years after his death, when their mother remarried, they were stiff towards the stranger, awkward in their dealings with him. They insisted on addressing Nariman Vakeel as New Pappa.

The word stung like a pebble each time it was hurled to his face. He made light of it at first, laughing it off: “That’s all – just New Pappa? Why not a longer title? How about Brand New Improved Pappa?”

But his choice of adjectives was infelicitous; Jal told him coldly that no one could be an improvement on their real father. It took a few weeks for their mother to convince her children that it would make her very happy if they dropped the New. Jal and Coomy agreed; they were maturing rapidly, far too rapidly. They told their mother they would use whatever word she wanted. Merely calling him Pappa, they said, did not make him one.

Nariman wondered what he had let himself in for by marrying Yasmin Contractor. Neither had come together for love – it was an arranged marriage. She had taken the step for security, for her son and daughter.

And he, when he looked back on it all, across the wasteland of their lives, despaired at how he could have been so feeble-­minded, so spineless, to have allowed it to happen.…


************


Thirty-­six years had passed since. And still he remembered the Sunday evening, the hebdomadal get-­together of his parents’ circle of friends. In this very drawing–room, where the furniture was still the same, the walls carried the same paint, and all their voices still echoed from that Sunday evening….

•

Much rejoicing had erupted when his parents announced that their only son, after years of refusing to end his ill–considered liaison with that Goan woman, refusing to meet decent Parsi girls, refusing to marry someone respectable – that their beloved Nari had finally listened to reason and agreed to settle down.

He could hear every word on the balcony where he sat alone. As usual, Soli Bamboat, his parents’ oldest friend, semi-retired and still a very influential lawyer, was the first to respond. “Three cheers for Nari!” he shouted. “Heep-heep-heep!” and the rest answered, “Hooray!”

Soli Bamboat’s vocal machinery, despite a lifetime’s struggle with the treachery of English vowels, was frequently undone by them. His speech had been a source of great puzzlement and entertainment for Nariman in childhood.…

Meanwhile, the group responded thrice to Soli’s heep­heep-heep before commencing with an assortment of individual cheers and good wishes for his parents.

“Congratulations, Marzi!” said Mr. Kotwal to his father. “After eleven years of battle you win!”

“Better late than never,” said Mr. Burdy. “But fortune always favours the bold. Remember, the fruits of patience are sweet, and all’s well that ends well.”

“Stop, Mr. Proverb, enough,” said Soli. “Save a few for the rest of us.”

Curious about their comments, Nariman shifted his chair on the balcony so he could observe them without being seen. Now Mrs. Unvala began professing that she had always had faith in the boy to make the right choice in the end, and her husband, Dara, nodded vigorously. Their opinions were offered as a team; the group called him the Silent Partner.

Then Soli entered the balcony, and Nariman pretended to be engrossed in a book. “Hey, Nari! Why are you alone? Come and join the circle, you seely boy.”

“Later, Soli Uncle, I want to finish this chapter.”

“No, no, Nari, we nid you now,” he said, taking the book away. “What’s the rush, the words ­won’t vaneesh from the page.” Seizing his arm, he pulled him into the drawing-room, into the centre of the gathering.

They thumped his back, shook his hand, hugged him while he cringed and wished he ­hadn’t stayed home that evening. But he knew he would have to face them at some point. He heard Soli Uncle’s wife, Nargesh Aunty, ask his mother, “Tell me, Jeroo, is it sincere? Has he really given up that Lucy Braganza?”

“Oh yes,” said his mother. “Yes, he has given us his word.”

Now Mrs. Kotwal scuttled across the room, pinched his cheek, and said, “When the naughty boy at last becomes a good boy, it’s a double delight.”

He felt like reminding her he was forty­two years old. Then Nargesh Aunty beckoned from her seat on the sofa. She was the most softspoken of the group and usually drowned by its din. She patted the place beside her and bade him sit. Taking his hand in hers, which was shrivelled from burns in a kitchen accident during her youth, she whispered, “No happiness is more lasting than the happiness that you get from fulfilling your parents’ wishes. Remember that, Nari.”

Her voice came to him from a great distance, and he had neither will nor energy for argument. He was remembering the week before, when he and Lucy had watched the tide go out at Breach Candy. Some children were dragging a little net in pools of water among the rocks, searching for sea life forgotten by the amnesiac waves. As he watched them splash and yell, he thought about the eleven years he and Lucy had struggled to create a world for themselves. A cocoon, she used to call it. A cocoon was what they needed, she said, into which they could retreat, and after their families had forgotten their existence, they would emerge like two glistening butterflies and fly away together…

The memory made him weaken for an instant – was he making the right decision?…Yes. He was. They had been ground down by their families. Exhausted by the strain of it. He reminded himself how hopeless it was now – Lucy and he had even reached the point where scarcely an evening went by that they did not quarrel about something or the other. What was the purpose in continuing, letting it all crumble in useless bickering?

Then, while the children nearby squealed with excitement at a creature caught in their net, Lucy tried one last time to convince him: they could turn their backs on everyone, walk away from the suffo­cating world of family tyrannies, from the guilt and blackmail that parents specialized in. They could start their own life together, just the two of them.

Struggling to maintain his resolve, he told her they had discussed it all before, their families would hound them, no matter what. The only way to do this was to end it quickly.

Fine, she said, no use talking any more, and walked away from him. He found himself alone beside the sea.

And now, as his parents and their friends discussed his future while sipping Scotch and soda, he felt he was eavesdropping on strangers. They were delightedly conducting their “round­table conference,” as they called it, planning his married life, having as much fun as though it was their whist drive or housie evening.

“There is one problem,” said Mr. Burdy. “We have indeed shut the stable door before the horse bolted, but we must provide a substitute mare.”

“What did he say?” asked Nargesh Aunty.

“Mr. Proverb believes the bridegroom is ready, but we nid to find heem a bride.”

­“Don’t you think,” she said timidly, “that love­marriage would be better than arranged?”

“Of course,” said his father. “You think we ­haven’t encouraged it? But our Nari seems incapable of falling in love with a Parsi girl. Now it’s up to us to find a match.”

“And that will be a challenge, mark my words,” said Mr. Kotwal. “You can look as far from Bombay as you like. You can try from Calcutta to Karachi. But when they make inquiries, they will find out about Nari’s lufroo with that ferangi woman.”

“Impossible to hide it,” agreed Mrs. Unvala. “We’ll have to ­com­promise.”

“Oh I’m sure Nari will find a lovely wife,” said his mother loyally. “The cream of the crop.”

“I think we’ll have to forget about the cream of the crop,” said Mr. Burdy. “As you sow, so shall you reap. You cannot plough the s...