# A cantankerous, middle-aged lady not using her best china, while hosting an important dinner, for the fear it may get chipped
# Sisters unashamedly squabbling over who will take care of an aged, ailing parent
# A besotted schoolboy nursing an unspoken crush on his teacher
# A middle-class family running on frugal budgets, getting saddled with additional responsibilities
Sounds familiar? And why shouldn't it. After all these are Family Matters. This compulsively page turning novel by Rohinton Mistry though set in a Parsi family in quintessential Bombay, could happen to any middle class family in the world.
A nominee for the 2002 Booker Prize, Family Matters explores the theme of reversal of care between generations, a domestic crisis situation within the home with a concomitant fundamentalist situation raging outside.
Whose responsibility is Papa?
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Parkinsonism stricken, Nariman Vakeel, a 79 year old widower, breaks his ankle, getting completely bedridden as a result. His bitter, spiteful, aging step-daughter Coomy is fed up of caring for him.
Nariman has raised and cared for three children, Coomy and Jal of his widowed, now dead wife and one of his own, Roxanna.
(Sadly none are willing to care for him when he needs it most)
Coomy dumps the ailing Nariman on Roxanna, who lives with her husband, Yezaad and two young sons in a cramped two-room apartment. Though, Roxanna sees to all her father's needs, her husband is uncomfortable with the whole situation.
Roxanna's family faces a severe shortage of space and funds after the high-maintenance old man is added to the tiny flat. This makes Yezaad slowly resent and then abhor Nariman's presence.
Meanwhile, Coomy plots to make sure that Roxana is forced to care of Nariman, pretending that her 7-room home is disintegrating and not fit for their father to live in.
As Roxanna's family faces increasing economic hardship, Yezaad takes onto gambling, duplicity and treachery while, Jehangir his son, succumbs to dubious moral choices at school.
And, Nariman, slowly dying in Yezaad and Roxana's living room, recalls his dark and embittered past that comprises of a forced marriage to a Parsi widow, being arm-twisted by his elders to give up his love for a non Parsi.
A legacy of enduring bitterness handed down generations; a telling comment on how traditions and customs can thwart, stifle and ruin the lives of people who do not chose to follow them.
What happens to Nariman? Who will take care of Papa?
Family Matters - a book of delightfully written characters
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Of all the characters, I found Coomy Contractor most interesting. She is physically and mentally inadequate, nursing an age old grudge against her step father, never married and now a crabby, irresponsible, scheming woman, slowly turning her nincompoop brother Jal into the same. Evidently, Mistry has enjoyed writing her.
The minute details on the verbal exchanges among the peripheral characters of the story are good fun to read. Mistry possesses a genuine gift for depicting ordinary people and the various small hassles and joys of daily life.
The writing is deliberately short on descriptions and abounds with dialogues between characters and hence is fast.
Though theatrical and loud, I thoroughly enjoyed those italicized flashbacks about Nariman’s and Lucy’s love affair. There is a successful use of flashbacks in the narrative, as the festering wounds that scar everyone in the present.
Family Matters makes a telling comment of how Bombay is now slowly getting divided on religious lines, with communalism sinking its ugly claws into its cosmopolitan heart.
Mistry never fails to take a dig at the Shiv Sena. What starts in his novel as wicked remarks on this political party, barbs at its leader, the party workers' hooligan-like ways (abolishing Valentine's day, attacking Muslims – all sarcastically interwoven in the narrative) slowly assumes an important facet of the novel towards its climax.
One wonders why the Shiv Sena hasn’t yet publicly burnt copies of this book. Maybe no one in the Sena reads.
The ever dwindling numbers of the Parsi faith and Mistry’s concerns for his community are real. Family Matters also offers a look into the Parsi family values clashing with the contemporary world.
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This story of a family's struggle to tend to the senior most member’s failing health would strike a cord with any reader who has aging parents.
Since taking care of our aging and dying elders is a worldwide issue, the book is easy to relate to.
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Another of the same author: A nice review, by member Cpearl, on Rohinton Mistry's other novel 'A Fine Balance' is available at:
https://mouthshut.com/readreview/29462.html
