Nidhi Singh's Reviews > A Fine Balance

This was life? Or a cruel joke? He no longer believed that the scales would ever balance fairly. If his pan was not empty, if there was some little sustenance in it for his days and nights, it was enough for him.

This is one book that made me want to clutch the life I live, as some blanket of security, and hide within. I have never known what it is to live with such constant uncertainty. That one could be completely uprooted today, the next day, or any day. Each day of struggle, each day of building the hopes for a future which comes undone with the incessant tugs and pulls of life. With my fictional foray, maybe I lived a little of what Om, Ishvar, and Dina lived. Maybe I traced a part of the space they made for themselves. Maybe I felt a bit of what they did. Breathing, fighting, heaving through life. Life hard enough to break one’s bones with the sheer weight of its unpredictability. When one has to collect the scraps of it, weave each day of it, like the patches of the quilt Dina sews. It never seems as bleak to them as it does to me. I can sense the foreboding, the unalterable doom before they can. That it is all so hopeless. But who could have the heart to say it. They are never tired of it; tired of life no matter how much life tires them out.

Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure...

I had never thought so much about the worth of human life. How much it is and how little it is. I could figure their histories buried in the casualties of the Emergency: forced sterilization, governmental brutality, upper caste atrocities. ‘A Fine Balance’ encompasses the tale of many who fared no better than jaded cattle, or bent and battered pieces of old furniture. Men and women, hoarded together, in the slums, in the irrigation camps, on the pavements. Infants of beggars sent away for ‘professional modifications’. There are explicit bodily details, of the infestations, the stench, the odor. The intricate descriptions of the physicality of life, so organism like, which breathes and lives as long as it is permitted to, as long as it is of service. With the barest detail of humanity stripped of love, of kindness, of dignity. In a sense, it is the disposability of human lives.

You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.

Between hope and despair, are mostly their quiet dreams, the claim to the future of their liking. To have something of their own in the world, their own space, their family, their children, the success they always wanted, the long-awaited return to their land, the ache for their loved ones, the pride of their community. Then there is the anger; silent and smothered, but it lives. And one knows where it comes from, what provokes it and that it wouldn’t die out. It would strike back only to inflict destruction on oneself. But it needs to be seen and acknowledged and avenged. I felt such helplessness, embarrassment, anger with myself and everything. While I can never stop asking more from this life, they have been denied the very least. Everything about this book made me look towards something I long believed or pretended to be invisible.

If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes - as long as one knew where to look for it.

And there is beauty in the squalor, hope in hopelessness, strongest bonds formed across insurmountable boundaries. There is an affirmation of life, but not in how everything turns out to be right in the end, how all the good balances the bad. Because that, probably doesn’t or won’t happen. Maybe it lies in the trust and recognition we place in each other. The close family that is formed among complete strangers. Something that Dina, Ishvar, Maneck, and Om built up for themselves. That moment in time would always belong to them, no matter what turn life takes, or how it all concludes in the end.