Family Matters

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The plot of this latest novel by award-winning author Rohinton Mistry
bears more than a slight resemblance to Shakespeare’s King Lear. His
central character, Nariman Vakeel, was once a prosperous and respected
middle-class English professor living in a huge seven-room Bombay flat
with a wife and three children. Now he is a 69-year-old suffering from a
multitude of age-related ailments. His flat is in ruins from lack of
maintenance. His wife is dead, his mistress is long gone, and he lives
at the mercy of his two middle-aged unmarried stepchildren, who try to
curtail his every modest pleasure by insisting that everything is bad
for his health. His only ray of joy is Roxana, his youngest child, who
lives with her husband and two children in a tiny two-room flat that
Nariman bought as a wedding gift with the last of his savings. Roxana
and her two half-siblings quarrel repeatedly about what is good or bad
for “Papa.” The dispute becomes more than a philosophical one when
Nariman breaks his ankle during an evening stroll and his stepchildren
find themselves having to provide full-time health care for him. They
quickly decide they cannot cope and deviously find a way to dump Nariman
in Roxana’s tiny flat. As the old man’s “temporary” visit to his
daughter stretches into a permanent residence, a series of tragicomic
events unfolds for the reader like a train wreck in slow motion.

Once again, Mistry has proven that he is a master of fiction writing.
From page one, the reader is immersed into a fully formed landscape
populated by complex characters who tug at our heartstrings while
simultaneously tempting us to give them a whack. The forces of political
corruption, religious intolerance, poverty, and family obligations warp
and weft through every character. The bleak theme is counterbalanced by
Mistry’s steady injection of droll humor. Beaten down but never quite
defeated, the characters keep going because, for better or worse, they
are a family that sticks together.