MISTRY TRANSCENDS THE BOUNDARY

Rohinton Mistry has emerged as a formidable writer on world literary scene. It is he who has enjoyed acclaim from critics both at home and abroad. Many put him on a par with Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Joyce, Thomas Hardy and Chekhov. 

Nandini Bhautoo- Dewnarain says, ‘Rohinton Mistry is a writer with great honesty of imagination. He does not attempt to follow fades and fashions. His writing suggests sensitivity to the beauty and the fragmentations, the failings and the cruelties of his world. Much of Mistry’s fiction works with the humanistic premise that the universal lies in the ordinary. This is the trajectory he has chalked out for himself in the course of his brief but meteoric literary career’. 

Mistry transcends the boundary of his geography when he writes. He is cited almost everywhere as a Canadian writer but Canada hardly finds expression in his writing. He draws his major source of material from the observed life in India. He has chosen Bombay as a background for all his novels and short stories. Almost all his works start with a family and gradually widen into the social, cultural, and political backdrop. The characters change and develop subtly. They have a remarkable capacity to survive. The details of their experience are chronicled with a painter's sensibility. 

Mistry’s writing is markedly nostalgic. It is Mistry’s unmistakable yearning to go back to his roots nostalgically that finds its multiple expressions in his fictional world. During the course of narration he imagines India in its multifaceted complexities and realities. 

Mistry’s fictional writing includes Tales from Firozsha Baag, Such a Long Journey, A Fine Balance and Family Matters. Tales from Firozsha Baag is Mistry’s first collection of eleven interrelated short stories. Here most of Misty’s later themes and preoccupations may be found in miniature. A critic has rightly observed that Tales from Firozsha Baag is Mistry’s Malgudi. Here Mistry uses the narrative technique of memory and remembering. 

Haldar Santwana is of the view that though the novel, Such a Long Journey, was published sixteen years after Rohinton Mistry had settled in Toronto, it has no trace of Canada. A Fine Balance and Family Matters also deal with various features of Bombay. His fiction is conspicuous for his use of vernacular, Indian jokes and Indian slogans. In short, Mistry transcends various types of boundaries in his literary world. 

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