The current paper is about Mistry’s depiction of the life of Gustad Noble, his friends
and family, and their essential humanity—common people performing actions of
uncommon, heroic potential, even in the face of constraining factors like loss of a
glorious past and its haunting specters. In my view, Mistry charts a telescopic course
from a larger political national-international scale to one involving the local neighborhood
and family, how the two meet and influence each other and how it is imprinted and
imbibed in the collective memory of people as experienced in the business of their daily
lived lives. I find that he lends a rare human dignity to members of a minority class as they
brave the vicissitudes of daily life in the face of threatening implications of these sociopolitical
factors, summoning courage that would be the stuff of epical heroes like those of
the Mahabharata. I make frequent references to Gurucharan Das’s The Difficulty of
Being Good, a modern text that revisits the Mahabharata to help throw some light on
contemporary life to offer possibilities of elucidation and possible tangible solutions to
contemporary problems. The Difficulty of Being Good, by Das’s admission, is his attempt
“to learn about that past with full conscious of the present—and also to learn something
about the present in encountering the past” (Das, 2012, p. xxxvii).
“The Parsis’ responses to the plurality of thought over social and religious issues
continues to be shaped by the process of assimilation and adaptation to their
environment…” (Palsetia, 2001, p. 320) |
