Halfway through this meticulous, realist novel set among the Parsi community in Bombay (Mumbai), one of the characters is shown three photographs of the area where he lived as a child. The first shows the street as he remembers it, the second as it was when his parents married, and the third immediately before any buildings had been constructed. \n"Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories ... they're the same," the man who has shown him the pictures comments. "In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different." \nWhat the speaker means by "redemption" is the desire to do something with your life that saves you from the bleakness and emptiness brought on by the loss of youth, together with the thought of eventual annihilation. This search for significance, or for a meaning that people can inject into their lives, is at the heart of this novel. \nThe speaker in question is Mr. Kapur, and the person addressed is Yezad. Kapur is Yezad's employer, and the two men seek to give meaning to their existences in different ways. Kapur dedicates himself to civic pride. He tries to feel the city's pulse by adopting the dress of the ordinary workers, despite his middle-class background, and going to work on the impossibly overcrowded train rather than by taxi. Yezad, on the other hand, gradually reverts to the Parsi religious practice of his ancestors, in spite of his earlier skepticism and to the delight of his devout wife. \nRohinton Mistry is himself of Parsi origin, and if you want to know more about the Parsis, this book will to some extent inform you. Their religion is Zoroastrianism, the oldest of the monotheistic religions. It pits light against darkness, with a god of light called Ormazd (or Ahura Mazda -- hence the trade name Mazda for a modern brand of light bulbs). Devotees must know the position of the sun when observing their religious rituals, and their temples contain an inner sanctum in which burns a perpetual fire. When Parsis come to pray there they buy a slip of sandalwood which an attendant adds to the pile from which he replenishes the flames. The day is divided into four parts, all requiring ritual observances in which a special belt, or kusti, worn by the pious plays an important part. The dead are exposed on "towers of silence" where they are consumed by awaiting vultures. \nIn this, Family Matters can be compared to War and Peace in which we learn the details of Masonic ritual when the character Pierre decides to become an initiate. Masonry also has its roots in light versus dark, and takes elements from Zoroastrianism. It's not by accident that the authority figure at the center of Mozart's Masonic opera The Magic Flute is called Sarastro, or that it culminates in a Temple of the Sun, and a trial by fire. \nIndeed, Mozart once attended an imperial masked ball disguised as "an oriental philosopher" and handed out a pamphlet he himself had written entitled Excerpts from the Fragments of Zoroaster. \nBut this new novel is at one point equally reminiscent of A Christmas Carol. The benign businessman Mr. Kapur decides, in Dickensian mode, to introduce the figure of Santa Claus to Bombay's children, thereby cutting across local religious differences, like a modern Scrooge assuming the guise of benefactor to Bob Cratchit's impoverished family and providing them with the biggest Christmas turkey in the market. \nMore mundane matters lie at the novel's heart, however. The 79-year-old Nariman Vakeel presides over his less than affluent family, contemplating as he lies sick his marriage 35 years earlier, and regretting the loss of his non-Parsi beloved whom his parents had prevented him marrying. Later, a daughter who doesn't want him living in her apartment causes a ceiling to collapse as a pretext for keeping him away. Money is short on all sides, and the risks family members run to in order to make ends meet drives the plot. \nIt is often said that contemporary novelists of Indian origin writing in English are far more loyal to the novel's social realist roots than their British and American counterparts. Martin Amis, for instance, for inexplicable reasons doyen of the UK literary establishment, once wrote a dreadful novel in which time flowed backwards. It would be hard to imagine Rohinton Mistry doing that. Far from embracing any experimental scenario, Mistry's fictional world is reminiscent of the 19th century novelist George Eliot -- a broadly sympathetic humanity focusing on people in a family setting, struggling to resolve differences and find meaning in what is for some of them an increasingly meaningless world. Neither of these authors may admit to any religious belief, but their sympathy is strongly with those of their characters who do. \nYezad's good-natured wife Roxana, for instance, is pure George Eliot, a descendent of Maggie from The Mill on the Floss. And it's wonderful to see these literary connections across the ages, testifying to the continuity of a humane, socially-concerned, warmly sympathetic fictional tradition, in contrast to the blood-spattered and pornographic pages of many best-sellers. \nRohinton Mistry must be one of the gentlest and kindest figures currently operating on the literary scene, and the great success of his second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), was very heartening. \nAspects of family life are presented, though, that none of Mistry's 19th century predecessors would have touched on -- menstruation and excrement, for instance, both make a showing. An unsuccessful attempt to emigrate to Canada also features in this novel (Mistry has lived there since the age of 23). \nThis book will not be everyone's cup of tea. Some will find it bland, though few will go as far as critic Germaine Greer notoriously did when she declared A Fine Balance to bear no relation to her (far briefer) experience of Indian life. I didn't find it a gripping read, but thoughtful, sane and unneurotic it undoubtedly is. This may prove very welcome to some people. \nPublication Notes: \nFamily Matters \nBy Rohinton Mistry \n487 pages \nFaber
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