[In the following review of A Fine Balance, Goldblatt asserts that Mistry imbues his characters with noble strength despite their struggles against the pre-assigned cultural roles in which they are trapped.]

Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is the story of the heroic struggle of two tailors whose attempts at survival become the microcosm for all the suffering poor in India. It is through the eyes of the affable Ishvar and cynical Omprakash (Om) that we become encompassed in their tale, one painted in shades of green, brown, and ultimately black.

The story winds and unwinds to envelop strands from the tailors' present, past, and futures. When we first meet the two men, they are excited and nervous, hoping to secure jobs. Mistry soon fills in the background that has brought them to the city. We learn that Om is the grandson of Dukhi, a lower caste Chamaar, whose desire for a better future has caused him to send his sons, Ishvar and Narayan, away from home to pursue a livelihood different from his prescribed one. Narayan, Om's father, continues his father's desire for self-determination that results in the brutal murder of his family by Thakur Dharamsi, a man resentful of Dukhi and his son's destruction of the caste system's defining positions.

Gradually the tailors' lives are entwined with the lives of Dina Dalal, their employer, revealing a portrait of people grappling with an inconstant world that preys, manipulates, and most often devours the poor. The security of home and family support are continually knocked away in the lives of these players. Moments of fun and relaxation are fleeting: a teatime chat, a massage on the beach, a concert, a lover's embrace are the memories to which our characters cling, for the accruing onslaught of troubles wreak havoc on the lives of unfortunates who possess little money or influence in a world where connections can make the difference between life on the street or protected subsistence.

Yet, Mistry endows his characters with pride and determination to continue on in their daily journeys. When Ishvar and Om discover that their jhopadpatti has been levelled by government bulldozers, they stubbornly refuse to tell Dina and eventually work a deal to sleep outside a chemist shop. Om's nightmares finally cease so that he can dream of wasted fields transformed “into garden[s] teeming with flowers and butterflies” and he can make love on a magic carpet of clouds. Similarly, when Dina's husband, Rustom, returning home with strawberry ice cream to celebrate their third anniversary, is knocked from his bicycle and killed, Dina reaches into her past. She resurrects her knowledge of sewing in order to support herself so she will not have to return to her brother, Nusswan.

It is not an unfeeling, embittered coldness that drives each character; rather, each rises to fulfill his or her destiny, filling themselves with tenacity and courage to encounter whatever life has handed them. Each remembers and longs for those sustaining days of familial love, yet, each knows that he or she cannot linger in the nostalgia of the past. There is no choice but to continue on in search of a livelihood to sustain body, and occasionally soul, in a world so unkind that children are purposefully blinded for the sake of a few piastres. In his presentation, Mistry evokes the widows, the orphans, the masses ravaged by a government so simple and savage that it believes that by removing the homeless from the streets that they will simply cease to exist.

However, it is the human spirit that prevails and the multifaceted portrayals of A Fine Balance enfold the reader to impart enduring memories of the helpless caught by Indira Gandhi's government in a no-win game. By presenting so many aspects of character, Mistry's “villains” are also portrayed as puppets in India's repressive society.

From a haughty weak-eyed employer, Dina grows and becomes a friend to the tailors, sharing her shelter and her life with them, putting her own life at peril for their sake. In the process, she has softened and has rekindled some happiness in an illusory world of ersatz family. Mistry's creation of these characters rings so true that the reader feels that she is in the next room, smelling Om's chapatis, and watching Dina arrange the scraps of discarded cloth into her patchwork quilt.

And life, Mistry seems to say, is like a quilt, each piece separate, unique, but the odd one colourful, bright, standing out, holding together the many dull, frayed and monotonous ones. In the final scenes of the story, the quilt that was to be Om's wedding present serves as a kind of cushion for Ishvar to rest his body upon: a comfort and a support, a visual patchwork of a life filled with many sorrows and few joys.