A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The owl hooted again. The moonlight wavered, hesitating, letting a cloud slide across. Her hands stirred within Maneck’s suitcase. The dogs on the porch barked – at what ghost?
Farokh Kohlah heard the ticking of the clock, and then the single bong of twelve-fifteen. He felt grateful to the night for giving him this opportunity, this vision by moonlight. He returned to bed, and did not disturb her when she slid under the sheet minutes later.
The time for last-minute instructions had arrived. More or less repeating the advice given all along, after Maneck’s going away had first become reality, his parents cautioned him against mixing at college with those who gambled or drank or smoked. They told him to be careful with his money, and to cultivate a healthy scepticism, for people were very different in the city. “All your life here, we never once discouraged your friendly nature. Whether your companions were rich or poor, and whatever caste or religion – those differences were not important. But now you are facing the most crucial difference of all, by leaving here for the city. You must be very, very careful.”
Mr. Kohlah was planning to accompany his son on the bus ride into the valley, and then by auto-rickshaw to the railway station. But the part-time assistant who had promised to arrive early to take over the morning chores did not show up. So Maneck started off alone on the long day-and-a-half trip to the city.
“Be sure to get a coolie at the station,” said his father. “Don’t try to carry everything yourself. And fix the amount before he touches the luggage. Three rupees should be enough.”
“Aren’t you going to hug him?” said Mrs. Kohlah, exasperated, as the two shook hands.
“Oh, all right,” said Maneck, and put his arms around his father.
The Frontier Mail was in the station when the shuddering auto-rickshaw drew up at the gate. Maneck paid, then followed the coolie over the footbridge to reach the southbound platform. He paused for a moment at the top, the train stretched long and thin underneath him with people scurrying around it. Like ants trying to carry off a dead worm, he thought.
The coolie had walked on, and he ran to catch up. Near the waiting room a vendor was roasting maize, fanning the crepitating coals. Maneck decided to come back for some after finding his seat.
“Fifty rupees from now on,” he overheard the Stationmaster, who was collecting his weekly tribute of maize and money. “You have the best location. That’s what others are willing to pay for it.”
“All day the burning smoke blinds my eyes and throttles my lungs,” said the vendor. “And just look at my fingers – charred black. Have some pity, sahab.” He turned the corncobs deftly to keep them from scorching. “How to afford fifty rupees? Police also have to be kept happy.”
“Don’t pretend,” said the Stationmaster, tucking the money into a pocket of his starched white uniform. “I know how much you earn.”
Now and again a kernel exploded with a sharp burst. The sound and aroma faithfully nudged Maneck’s memory of his first train journey: his mother and he, going to visit their relations.
Daddy had come to see them off. “You’re getting too heavy,” he had groaned playfully, lifting Maneck to give him a good view of the steam engine. How huge it was, and the train, like a string of bungalows, stretched so far, in a long, long line. Daddy carried him down to the end of the platform, close to the hissing, clanking monster, while Maneck busily tackled his corncob. He bit into it, and milk-white juice spotted Daddy’s spectacles.
Daddy made a yanking gesture, which the engine driver understood; he gave a smart tap to his cap visor and sounded the whistle for Maneck. The piercing shriek, so close it seemed to spring from his own heart, startled him into dropping the cob. “Never mind,” said Daddy. “Mummy will buy you another.”
He bundled Maneck through the window into his seat, next to Mummy, as the final announcement was made. The train moved, and the station began to float past them. Daddy waved his hand, smiling, blowing kisses. He walked beside the compartment, then ran a bit, but was soon left behind to disappear like the fallen corncob lying on the station platform. Everything familiar swept out of sight…
Maneck found his compartment and paid the coolie after the luggage was stowed away. The bungalow on wheels from his childhood had shrunk. Time had turned the magical to mundane. The whistle sounded. No time to buy the maize. He sank into the seat beside his fellow passenger.
The man did not encourage Maneck’s efforts at conversation, answering with nods and grunts, or vague hand movements. He was neatly dressed, his hair parted on the left. His shirt pocket bristled with pens and markers in a special clip-on plastic case. The two seats facing them were occupied by a young woman and her father. She was busy knitting. By the fragment hanging from the needles, Maneck tried to decipher what it might be – scarf, pullover sleeve, sock?
The father rose to go to the lavatory. “Wait, Papaji, I’ll help you,” said the daughter, as he limped into the aisle on one crutch. Good, thought Maneck, she would have to take the upper berth. The view would be better, from his own upper berth.
In the evening, Maneck offered his neatly dressed neighbour a Gluco biscuit. He whispered thank you. “You’re welcome,” Maneck whispered back, assuming the man had a preference for speaking softly. In return for the biscuit he received a banana. Its skin was blackened in the heat, but he ate it all the same.
The attendant began making the rounds with blankets and sheets, readying the berths for sleep. After he left, the neatly dressed man took a chain and padlock from the bag that held his bananas and shackled his trunk to a bracket under the seat. Leaning towards Maneck’s ear, he explained confidentially, “Because of thieves – they enter the compartments when passengers fall asleep.”
“Oh,” said Maneck, a little perturbed. No one had warned him about this. But maybe the chap was just a nervous type. “You know, some years ago my mother and I took this same train, and nothing was stolen.”
“Sadly, now the world is much changed.” The man took off his shirt and hung it neatly on a hook by the window. Then he removed the plastic case from the pocket and clipped it to his vest, careful not to snare his chest hair in the formidable spring. Seeing Maneck watching, he whispered with a smile, “I am very fond of my pens. I don’t like separating from them, not even in sleep.”
Maneck smiled back, whispering, “Yes, I also have a favourite pen. I don’t lend it to anyone – it spoils the angle of the nib.”
The father and daughter did not take kindly to these whispers which excluded them. “What can we do, Papaji, some people are just born rude,” she said, handing him his crutch. They went off again to the bathroom, hurling a frosty glance at the opposite seats.
It went unnoticed, for Maneck had begun to worry about his suitcase. The pen-lover’s soft words about thieves ruined his night, and he forgot all about the woman in the upper berth. By the time he remembered, she was under cover from prying eyes, Papaji having tucked in the sheet around her neck.
Before climbing into his own berth, Maneck positioned his suitcase so that one corner would be visible from above. He lay awake, peering at it every now and then. The young woman’s father caught him looking a few times, and eyed him suspiciously. Towards dawn, slumber overpowered Maneck’s vigilance. The last thing he saw while surrendering to sleep was Papaji balanced on one crutch, curtaining off his daughter with a bedsheet as she descended without exposing so much as a calf or an ankle.
He did not awake till the attendant came to collect the bedclothes. The young woman was already busy with her knitting, the inscrutable woollen segment dancing below her fingers. Tea was served. Now the neatly dressed pen-lover was more talkative. The cluster of pens was back in his shirt pocket. Maneck learned that yesterday’s reticence had been due to a throat ailment.
“Thankfully, it has eased a little this morning,” said the man, as he coughed and threatened to hawk.
Remembering how he had returned the man’s hoarse whispers by whispering back dramatically, Maneck felt a
“It’s a very serious condition,” he explained. “And I am travelling to seek specialist treatment.” He cleared his throat again. “I could never have imagined, long, long ago, when I started my career, that this was what it would do to me. But how can you fight your destiny?”
Maneck shook his head in sympathy. “Was it a factory job? Toxic fumes?”
The man laughed scornfully at the suggestion. “I’m an LL.B., a fully qualified lawyer.”
“Oh, I see. So the lengthy speeches in dusty courtrooms strained and ruined your vocal cords.”
“Not at all – quite the contrary.” He hesitated, “It’s such a long story.”
“But we have lots of time,” encouraged Maneck. “It’s such a long journey.”
Papaji and daughter had had enough of them exchanging comments in low voices. Papaji was certain that their soft laughter contained a leering note, aimed directly at his innocent daughter. He scowled, picked up his crutch, took his daughter by the hand and stomped one-leggedly down the aisle. “What to do, Papaji,” she said. “Some people just have no manners.”
“I wonder what’s wrong with those two,” said the pen-lover, watching the precise, machinelike movement of the crutch. He uncorked a small green bottle, sipped, and put it aside. Fingering his pens affectionately, he tried out the freshly medicated larynx with the opening sentence of the story of his throat.
“My law career, which was my first, my best-loved career, started a very long time ago. In the year of our independence.”
Maneck counted rapidly. “From 1947 to 1975 – twenty-eight years. That’s a lot of legal experience.”
“Not really. Within two years I changed careers. I couldn’t stand it, performing before a courtroom audience day after day. Too much stress for a shy person like me. I would lie in bed at night, sweating and shivering, scared of the next morning. I needed a job where I would be left to myself. Where I could work in camera.”
“Photography?”
“No, that’s Latin, it means in private.” He scratched his pens as though relieving an itch for them, and looked rueful. “It’s a bad habit I have, because of my law training – using these silly phrases instead of good English words. Anyway, seeking privacy, I became a proofreader for The Times of India.”
How would proofreading ravage the throat? wondered Maneck. But he had already interrupted twice and made a fool of himself. Better to keep quiet and listen.
“I was the best they had, the absolute best. The most difficult and important things were saved for my inspection. The editorial page, court proceedings, legal texts, stockmarket figures. Politicians’ speeches, too – so boring they could make you drowsy, send you to sleep. And drowsiness is the one great enemy of the proofreader. I have seen it destroy several promising reputations.
“But nothing was too tricky for me. The letters sailed before my eyes, line after line, orderly fleets upon an ocean of newsprint. Sometimes I felt like a Lord High Admiral, in supreme command of the printer’s navy. And within months I was promoted to Chief Proofreader.
“My night sweats disappeared, I slept well. For twenty-four years I held the position. I was happy in my little cubicle – my kingdom with my desk, my chair, and my reading light. What more could anyone want?”
“Nothing,” said Maneck.
“Exactly. But kingdoms don’t last for ever – not even modest little cubicle kingdoms. One day it happened, without warning.”
“What?”
“Disaster. I was checking an editorial about a State Assembly member who made a personal fortune out of the Drought Relief Project. My eyes began to itch and water. Thinking nothing of it, I rubbed them, wiped them dry, and resumed my work. Within seconds they were wet again. I dried them once more. But it kept on happening, on and on. And it was no longer a tear or two which could be ignored, but a continuous stream.
“Soon, my concerned colleagues were gathered around me. They crowded my little cubicle, pouring comfort upon what they thought was grief. They presumed that reading about the sorry state of the nation, day after day – about the corruption, the natural calamities, the economic crises – had finally broken me. That I was dissolving in a fit of sorrow and despair.
“They were wrong, of course. I would never let emotions stand in the way of my professional duties. Mind you, I’m not saying a proofreader must be heartless. I’m not denying that I often felt like weeping at what I read – stories of misery, caste violence, government callousness, official arrogance, police brutality. I’m certain many of us felt that way, and an emotional outburst would be quite normal. But too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, as my favourite poet has written.”
“Who’s that?”
“W.B. Yeats. And I think that sometimes normal behaviour has to be suppressed, in order to carry on.”
“I’m not sure,” said Maneck. “Wouldn’t it be better to respond honestly instead of hiding it? Maybe if everyone in the country was angry or upset, it might change things, force the politicians to behave properly.”
The man’s eyes lit up at the challenge, relishing the opportunity to argue. “In theory, yes, I would agree with you. But in practice, it might lead to the onset of more major disasters. Just try to imagine six hundred million raging, howling, sobbing humans. Everyone in the country – including airline pilots, engine drivers, bus and tram conductors – all losing control of themselves. What a catastrophe. Aeroplanes falling from the skies, trains going off the tracks, boats sinking, buses and lorries and cars crashing. Chaos. Complete chaos.”
He paused to give Maneck’s imagination time to fill in the details of the anarchy he had unleashed. “And please also remember: scientists haven’t done any research on the effects of mass hysteria and mass suicide upon the environment. Not on this subcontinental scale. If a butterfly’s wings can create atmospheric disturbances halfway round the world, who knows what might happen in our case. Storms? Cyclones? Tidal waves? What about the land mass, would it quake in empathy? Would the mountains explode? What about rivers, would the tears from twelve hundred million eyes cause them to rise and flood?”
He took another sip from the green bottle. “No, it’s too dangerous. Better to carry on in the usual way.” He corked the bottle and wiped his lips. “To get back to the facts. There I was with the day’s proofs before me, and my eyes leaking copiously. Not one word was readable. The text, the disciplined rows and columns, were suddenly in mutiny, the letters pitching and tossing, disintegrating in a sea of stormy paper.”
He passed his hand across his eyes, reliving that fateful day, then stroked his pens comfortingly, as though they too might be upset by the evocation of those painful events. Maneck took the opportunity to slip in a bit of praise, to ensure that the story continued. “You know, you’re the first proofreader I’ve met. I would have guessed they’d be very dull people, but you speak so … with such … so differently. Almost like a poet.”
“And why shouldn’t I? For twenty-four years, the triumphs and tragedies of our country quickened my breath, making my pulse sing with joy or quiver with sorrow. In twenty-four years of proofreading, flocks of words flew into my head through the windows of my soul. Some of them stayed on and built nests in there. Why should I not speak like a poet, with a commonwealth of language at my disposal, constantly invigorated by new arrivals?” He gave a mighty sigh. “Until that wet day, of course, when it was all over. When the windows were slammed shut. And the ophthalmologist sentenced me to impotence, saying that my proofreading days were behind me.”
“Couldn’t he give you new spectacles or something?”
“That wouldn’t have helped. The trouble was, my eyes had become virulently allergic to printing ink.” He spread his hands in a gesture of emptiness. “The nectar that nurtured me had turned to poison.”
“Then what did you do?”
“What can
“Yeats?” guessed Maneck.
The proofreader nodded, “You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” He paused, considering what he had just said. “Yes,” he repeated. “In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”
Maneck nodded. “All the same, you must have missed your work very much.”
“Well, not really,” he dismissed the sympathy. “Not the work itself. Most of the stuff in the newspaper was pure garbage. A great quantity of that which entered through the windows of my soul was quickly evacuated by the trapdoor.”
This seemed to Maneck to contradict what the man had said earlier. Perhaps the lawyer behind the proofreader was still active, able to argue both sides of the question.
“A few good things I kept, and I still have them.” The proofreader tapped audibly, first on his forehead, then on his plastic pen case. “No rubbish or bats in my belfry – no dried-up pens in my pocket-case.”
The thump of the single crutch signalled the return down the aisle of Papaji and daughter. Maneck and the proofreader greeted them with pleasant smiles. But they were not to be so easily placated. While passing through to his seat, Papaji lunged with his crutch at the proofreader’s foot. He would have successfully speared it had the proofreader not anticipated the attack.
“Sorry,” said Papaji, gruff with disappointment. “What to do, clumsy mistakes happen when you have only one good leg in a world of two legs.”