[In the following excerpt, Bailey underscores the originality and distinctiveness of the stories in Tales from Firozsha Baag.]

At the end of Rohinton Mistry's story, “Swimming Lessons,” the protagonist, an Indian who has emigrated to Canada, sends the manuscript of a collection of stories he has written while in his new land to his parents back home in Bombay. Although delighted with the work, his father nonetheless anticipates a problem. These stories about his son's boyhood in India, about the apartment complex he grew up in and the eccentric people who reside there, will, his father thinks, “become popular because I am sure they are interested there in reading about life through the eyes of an immigrant, it provides a different viewpoint; the only danger is if he changes and becomes so much like them that he will write like one of them and lose the important difference.”

What Kersi's father is invoking here is not only the immigrant's anxieties about being completely absorbed into an adopted culture, but also the writer's nightmare of losing the “important difference” which makes her/his work distinctive, individual, original. At a time when more fiction is being published than at any other period in history, when there are more forms of media turning out more competing narratives than has ever previously been the case; at a time when psychology and literature conspire to undermine the distinction between the artist and the average wo/man—at such a time it is perhaps the hardest thing of all, the most presumptuous as well, for writers to unequivocally affirm that “this narrative is different—it matters, it makes a difference.” And yet any fiction which doesn't attempt to make any such claim for itself simply isn't going to be able to compete—the blurbs from famous writers won't be forthcoming, and an early relegation to the remainder table and bargain books circular will be its fate.

In such a climate, against such odds, are fiction writers writing fiction today, tilting against reality's windmills in proclaiming the higher truth of the aesthetically-shaped lie, registering their romantic protests of difference and distinctiveness in the forms of stories and novels. Each of the four works of fiction considered here makes its own claim to originality and distinctiveness, chooses among a number of competing themes, styles and techniques whose aggregate constitutes its attempt at creating and enacting a “different viewpoint.”

Which brings us back to Kersi, his father, and the literary necessity of a “different viewpoint.” As Kersi's father's comments indicate, Rohinton Mistry's story collection is not without its own share of self-consciousness, the manuscript Kersi has sent his parents closely resembling Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag [Tales from Firozsha Baag]. Unlike Boylan, however, whose self-conscious narratives tend to consume and mock their contents (see “Aloe: Part Three: The Making of ‘Aloe’”), Mistry's literary self-consciousness augments rather than undermines the reality of his book.

The early stories in Mistry's collection are highly traditional narratives detailing the lives of characters inhabiting Firozsha Baag, a Bombay apartment complex. Through the voice of an all-knowing, distinctly judgmental narrator who speaks in the accents of the residents and shares their Indian English lexicon we are introduced to a practically Dickensian range of characters: Rustomji, a comically anal-retentive miser; Mehroo, his wife, whose “own private key to the universe” exists in the fire-temple, the central flame of which somehow makes “less frightening the notions of eternity and infinity”; Jaakaylee, a servant whose village roots allow her to perceive the ghost—bhoot—of Firoszha Baag to which her citified employers are oblivious; Daulat, a widow struggling to reconcile her personal sense of loss with Parsi mourning rituals; Dr. Bujor Mody, who shares his stamp collection with a neighbor's boy in preference to his own delinquent son; and Jehangir, a young man poised between his parents' repressiveness and his own sexual initiation. The sense of authority which permeates these stories derives from two sources: the accumulated weight of the mimetic tradition in Anglo-Indian literature which the collection extends, and the nearly boundless sympathy for and understanding of his characters which Mistry demonstrates on the book's every page. In their density of detail and patient depiction of the not-very-communal community of Firozsha Baag, these stories make a mimetically-rendered place seem exotic, legendary, mythic.

Interspersed among these tales of Firozsha Baag life and customs are stories which establish the book's counter-movement, stories which anticipate and ultimately describe characters who leave Bombay for the West. The most striking of these is “The Squatter,” a story which conveys the impossibility of the emigrant's ever completely accommodating himself to his new culture through the example of Sarosh—who becomes Sid upon arriving in Canada—and his utter inability to defecate when seated upon Western toilets. It is a parable Kafka couldn't have written, but might have admired. The other stories dealing with the ambiguities of emigration follow Kersi from his childhood disillusionments with the Firozsha Baag residents through his move to Toronto, the dynamic of the collection moving the action progressively away from Bombay to Canada. By the closing story, “Swimming Lessons,” Firozsha Baag has been replaced by the grim “Don Mills, Ontario, Canada” apartment building where Kersi lives among strangers, watching alien snowflakes fall and indulging himself in sexual fantasies about the women taking swimming lessons with him at an indoor high school pool. The exotic, densely-consonated Indian words which lent such strangeness to the early stories have given way to the “gutang-khutang” sound the building's elevator makes, and Bombay exists only as a truncated echo in Kersi's parents' letters, which admonish him to “say prayers and do kusti at least twice a day,” and which comment on the very stories the reader has come to the end of. Kersi must be “so unhappy there,” his mother concludes, because “all his stories are about Bombay, he remembers every little thing about his childhood, he is thinking about it all the time even though he is ten thousand miles away, my poor son, I think he misses his home and us and everything he left behind, because if he likes it over there why would he not write stories about that, there must be so many new ideas that his new life could give him.”

“Swimming Lessons” movingly dramatizes both the truth and error of Kersi's mother's opinion; Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag anatomizes the process which has left Kersi dreaming of one culture, living in another, and feeling himself a citizen of neither. In this stunning first work of fiction, Mistry manages to epitomize the “important difference” necessary to render fiction individual, distinctive, even as it affectingly enacts the protagonist/author surrendering up that “different viewpoint.” His book renders simultaneously what is saved and what is lost.