Family Matters
by Rohinton Mistry
Reviewed by Peter J. Coughlan

Winner of the 2002 Kiriyama Fiction Prize, Rohinton Mistry’s third novel, Family Matters confirms his position as an outstanding writer whose books will be read for many years to come. Family Matters is characterized by a profound sense of compassion and humanity, strongly reminiscent of the great social novels of Dickens and other nineteenth century writers.

Set in Bombay in the mid-1990s, Nariman Vakeel, the patriarch of a small and discordant Parsi family, is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. A fall, in which he breaks his ankle, throws him upon the mercy of his family. Coomy, his middle-aged stepdaughter, is unable to cope with the needs of Nariman’s diseased and deteriorating body. She succeeds in foisting him off upon the family of his only daughter, Roxanna, who lives in an already overcrowded two-room apartment with her husband, Yezad, and their two sons. The resulting family tensions and anguish are explored unsparingly and without sentimentality; yet laced with humor and tenderness.

Running through it all is the thread of Nariman’s lifetime love affair, a relationship painfully thwarted by the narrow religious and social attitudes of his parents. The actions and prejudices of his parents are examples of the “family matters” of the book’s title: they form a chain of cause and effect that touch, involve, and partially determine the lives of each generation. Nariman, a retired English professor, wryly likens his situation to that of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The allusion to Lear is also suggestive of themes that lie at the heart of the novel. What are the limits of family responsibilities and obligations? How far must love go? In Roxanna’s apartment Mistry offers us the world in two rooms. Her extended family and its interactions with society are a microcosm of the wider family of Bombay, and indeed of all of India and beyond. The novel asks whether tolerance and humanity will prevail, or whether bigotry and intolerance will sink the wider human family into an abyss of political, religious, and communal corruption and violence. Hope and and human solidarity never disappear in Mistry’s novel, but despair and darkness lie close. This juxtaposition is constantly reflected in the blend of strength and fragility that characterize relationships in Family Matters.

Laughter and comic characters – the Pickwickian shopkeeper Vikram Kapur, with his eccentricities and markedly human sympathies is a striking example – soften and relieve this picture. Mistry is a writer who, to quote the words of one of his characters, “makes sense of the world by using laughter.”

The novel gradually moves from Nariman’s point of view to that of Yezad, his son-in-law, and finally to Nariman’s grandson, Jehangir. It is, however, Nariman, the grandfather, who sums up the chain of family matters that have shaped his life with a comment that is a leitmotiv of Mistry’s remarkable novel: “In the end all human beings become candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception.”