Family Matters

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About Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry has not lived in his native India for many years; but like many expatriate writers, he continues a relationship with his country in his writings and has enriched his readers' understanding of it.
After emigrating to Toronto in 1975, Mistry got a job as a bank clerk and ascended to the supervisor of customer service after a few years. His dissatisfaction in the job led to his taking classes in English, first at York College, and ultimately pursuing a degree part-time at the University of Toronto.
Rohinton Mistry had no ambitions to be a writer until he got to Canada and began taking classes in literature at the University of Toronto. Encouraged by his wife, he set out to win a university literary contest by writing his first short story. He called in sick from work, devoted several days to the story, entered it, and won the contest.

Selected Works by Rohinton Mistry

• Family Matters, 2002
• A Fine Balance, 1995
• Such a Long Journey, 1991
• Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag, 1987

From Publisher's Weekly

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 Mistry's 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 Parkinson's disease. Nariman's 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, everyone's behavior deteriorates, and the affecting secret of Nariman's 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.

Reading Group Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Rohinston Mistry's eagerly anticipated and hugely ambitious third novel, Family Matters.

• The family's story springs from Nariman's marriage to the widowed mother of Coomy and Jal. We're told, "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" (p. 10). He also blames his parents and their friends, "the wilful manufacturers of misery" (p.76). Why did Nariman give in, after his eleven-year love affair with Lucy, to his parents' demand that he marry a Parsi woman? He was forty-two years old at the time. Was his decision an act of weakness?
• When the medical assistant setting plaster on his broken ankle says to Nariman, "we need a Mahatma these days," Nariman retorts, "All we get instead are micro-mini atmas" (p. 47). What is the novel's perspective on the state of India's politics, compared with the idealism of Mahatma Gandhi? Is Nariman a cynic, a wit, or simply a realist at this stage of his experience?
• Nariman's memories of the past, including his love affair with Lucy, are presented in italics at intervals throughout the novel. What is the effect of Mistry's revealing the family's tragic history in this intermittent way? How central is the theme of memory to Family Matters?
• Yezad's friend Vilas writes lettersfor illiterate workers in Bombay. How does his presence in the novel illuminate the lives of those less privileged, and even more unfortunate, than the Chenoy and Vakeel families?
• Most of the novel's events take place in two apartments. What perspective do the names of these buildings—Chateau Felicity and Pleasant Villas—cast on the lives lived within them? How are these dwellings described? Coomy asserts that Roxana's flat, though only two rooms is "huge" by Bombay standards: "You know that in chawls and colonies, families of eight, nine, ten live in one room" (see p. 75). Why is it important to our comprehension of Bombay life that we understand just how little space people are living in?
• In answer to their question about why Yezad moved out of his beloved family home, Roxana tells her sons, "Daddy's three sisters didn't like me" (p. 40). Why does Mistry suggest, as in his Tolstoyan epigraph, that "all unhappy families resemble one another"? To what degree does family unhappiness result from constant togetherness?
• Does Coomy force the care of Nariman onto Roxana as an act of revenge? Is it understandable that, given her loyalty to her mother's memory, Coomy would resent having to tend her ailing stepfather? Why are the circumstances of Coomy's death particularly ironic?
• In Family Matters, several characters take steps to alleviate their difficulties. Yezad tries to bring in more money through gambling, and he also makes efforts to change Mr. Kapur's mind about running for office so that he himself will be promoted. Jehangir, as homework monitor, accepts bribes. Coomy and Jal try to delay their stepfather's return by destroying the ceiling of their apartment. Why do these characters' strenuous efforts to arrange the events of their lives come to grief? Does Mistry suggest that fate—rather than desire or will—rules human lives?
• Why is Roxana so moved by the sight of Jehangir feeding his grandfather, a moment she perceives as "something almost sacred" (p. 98)? Of all the characters in the story, Roxana is the one who understands most fully the weighty responsibilities that come with loving one's family. How does this understanding impinge upon her happiness? Is she too self-sacrificing?
• How seriously are we to take the ideas of Mr. Kapur, Yezad's employer? Are we to assume that he would not have made a successful politician? Is Mistry using him to represent the best of India's secular and pluralist ideals? What is the meaning of his murder? What sort of person is his widow?
• Mr. Kapur tells Yezad, "Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories—your life, my life, old Husain's life, they're the same. 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" (p. 197). How does Kapur's insight address the need for empathy, a theme that is underscored at various times throughout the novel?
• What place does the Hindu extremist party Shiv Sena have in the novel's political background? Should Yezad feel partly responsible for the death of Mr. Kapur? How does Mistry use the murder and its aftermath to reflect the complexity and danger of life in contemporary Bombay?
• Yezad's return to religion is presented in terms of timelessness, peace and comfort; he perceives his Zoroastrianism as "encoded in blood and bone" (p. 297) Yet the novel makes readers all too aware of the destructive aspects of religious belief as well. How does Yezad's spiritual life change as the novel proceeds? What effect does his embrace of orthodoxy have on his family? How does the description of Yezad five years later (p. 403), point to what has become most important for him?
• The Parsis, followers of an ancient Persian religion, were in colonial days an influential and highly respected minority in India. Family Matters addresses the dwindling of their cultural dominance despite the efforts of people like Nariman's father who refuse to let their children intermarry. How does Mistry express his ambivalence about the Parsis? What are the positive and negative aspects of their tradition and their exclusivity?
• Mistry's descriptions of Nariman's faltering mind and body are sobering, not least for the impact his failing health has on those around him. Coomy and Jal "were bewildered, and indignant, that a human creature of blood and bone, so efficient in good health, could suddenly become so messy.… Sometimes they took it personally, as though their stepfather had reduced himself to this state to harass them" (p. 68). Roxana, on the other hand, quotes Gandhi's injunction "that there was nothing nobler than the service of the weak, the old, the unfortunate" (p. 248). How do such realizations about loving service, as well as the awareness of mortality, affect the ethical thinking of Mistry's characters?
• The novel's epilogue is presented by Jehangir, now fourteen. Why has Mistry chosen to make Jehangir a central consciousness in the novel? What are we to make of Jehangir's final words?
• Mistry's realism and his broad social canvas reflect the influence nineteenth-century fiction. How is his approach like or unlike other novels you may have read that address the conditions of a society through one family?