Mistry and Nasrin - I have struggled to finish two novels in the last couple of weeks.  Taslima Nasrin's Shame about the backlash against Hindus in Bangladesh after the demolition of  the Babri Mosque in Ayodha, India, in 1992, and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a gripping 600 page weaving of threads describing several lives in 1970s India after Indira Gandhi was accused of rigging the election and the State of Internal Emergency was imposed.

Nasrin's novel was turgid in its sporadic quoting of newspapers and reports.  Her novel lost the thread of urgency and involvement in the characters because of her repeated documentary digressions.  She hit us over the head with her statistics and lists of atrocities perpetrated against the innocent Bangladeshi Hindus in  retaliation against a group of Hindus' desecration of a mosque in another country.  I am sure that everything she wrote happened, probably not all to one family, and the writing does help see the utter barbarity of the violence and gave me a far better understanding of the recent history of Bangladesh.

Mistry's novel, on the other hand, is a page turner.  In his work, too, I suspect that most of the events are possible, though hardly all probable in one set of characters.  However, this book, too, had to be put aside for days at a time as the degree of pain and inhumanity he describes was unbearable. 

The Fine Balance paints a grim picture of caste in the villages with elections being a total farce:
 "'There must be a lot of duplication in our country's laws,' said Dukhi. 'Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws.'
'For politicians, passing laws is like passing water,' said Narayan. 'It all ends down the drain.'"

Mistry goes on to explain how the voting proceeded: the election officer was plied with gifts and led off to eat and drink the day away, while the local goon's henchmen got every villager to put his thumb print on a ballot which the henchmen then filled in as the goon directed.  Narayan decides that he will vote for himself in the next election and the goon has him and the whole of his family annihilated.

Mistry describes a Mafia like organization for organizing beggars in which there is a Beggarmaster who 'takes care of' the beggars by giving them poignant identities, specific begging territory, 'protection,'and if they have might have babies he takes care of 'professional modifications' to make the babies more pathetic and thus more profitable in the begging profession.

Both novels are unrelenting in their depiction of misery and horror and evil.  Although I learned a great deal by reading both I don't recommend either book.

There is a larger discussion of good and evil that these stories provoke.  Evil is present in all parts of the world, but I feel that it is far bolder here than in the west.   Ghastly things do happen in London and Washington, but everyone agrees that they are ghastly.  Here there is too much indifference to the suffering of others and a tolerance for evil that sometimes makes me feel hopeless. 

Clearly lots of God-sized problems in India, and not likely that I will persuade Indian politicians to start enforcing the laws they promise to pass, but perhaps I can walk the little book and oranges up the street to my little band of street urchins entertaining the rush hour traffic.   Oranges and books won't be collected by any Beggarmaster.

As an absolute antidote to the depressing reading I bought myself Madhur Jaffrey's autobiography of growing up in India, Climbing the Mango Trees.  She can't possibly publish a grim book - it would destroy her revenues on all the cookbooks. :)