Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

good mistry novel

I’ve just finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters. A Parsi friend from college had suggested it in an email exchange a while back, and I’d immediately ordered it and started reading it. She said that I had “to read it with [my] knowledge of parsi eccentricities and oddities etc. [I would] love it. [It] also talks about india and hindu fanaticism with the shiv sena ruling bombay etc.” It is an amazing book. It conjures up a Bombay which the reader can reach out and touch or simply sit back and observe. Though most of the narrative covers a short period set in the 1990s, the story ranges over three generations of a Parsi family. The eternal cycle of youthful disparaging of religious strictures and the breaking of tabus before inevitable return to a rigid piety in their old age crosses cultures. One of my favorite parts is when Vikram Kapur, the owner of the Bombay Sporting Goods (or Gods after a neon oh blows out), a displaced Hindu from the Punjab, dresses up as Santa Claus during December. He sends one of his employees, a Muslim, out on the street to bring in children to meet Santa and get a sweet. (Meanwhile, a couple of Shivsainiks arrive to warn him to change the Bombay in his store’s name to Mumbai.) It kept reminding me of a clock in my friend Krishnan’s oldest brother’s flat, where I stayed in Srirangam (near Tiruchirappalli), that played an out-of-tune Santa Claus Is Coming To Town every hour on the hour. That and the humidity and the near-by temple somehow sums up what India means to me. Oh, and Sanskrit, too.