FAMILY MATTERS By Rohinton Mistry Faber Price: £5.50 Pages: 498

Elsewhere in this novel which could have been called Such An Ordinary Life or A Fine Imbalance, there is an example of misreading from a salesman at a Bombay bookshop: "A while back I read a novel about the Emergency. A big book, full of horrors, real as life. But also full of life, and the laughter and dignity of ordinary people. One hundred per cent honest-made me laugh and cry as I read it. But some reviewers said no, no, things were not that bad. Especially foreign critics. You know how they come here for two weeks and become experts. One poor woman whose name I can't remember made such a hash of it, she had to be a bit pagal, defending Indira, defending the Sanjay sterilization scheme, defending the entire Emergency-you felt sorry for her even though she was a big professor at some big university in England. What to do? People are afraid to accept the truth. As T.S. Eliot wrote, 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality'."

BOMBAY BOY: Mistry

Ah, Mr Mistry, you still can't forgive that "asinine" professor who cut deep. You had to rent a paragraph from your own text to parade the grievance: "I hate this book ... I just don't recognise this dismal, dreary city ... It's a Canadian book about India. What could be worse? What could be more terrible?" Five years ago, Germaine Greer, in a pre-Booker discussion on BBC, savaged one of the shortlisted novels, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. The squalid, godforsaken Bombay in the novel was not the Bombay she saw while teaching at a women's college in the city for four months. Mistry was hurt, he called the formidable lady asinine, brainless. So, the reviewer is warned: Beware, you may lose your brain and gain a paragraph in the next novel. You take the precaution. Before writing the first line on Family Matters, you call him up at his London hotel. "Are you intolerant towards criticism?" The voice at the other end is too gentle, too measured, to be a literary bigot. "I'm older and wiser now. Today I may say something like this: If a tree falls in a forest, you may not hear the sound if Germaine Greer is not there." It was a silly statement though-he refuses to absolve the critic.

Maybe, the wiser, older and more famous Mistry can afford a Greer today, for one of the last books Oprah Winfrey chose before she closed the bestseller-making Book Club was A Fine Balance. Canonisation courtesy the mistress of middlebrow saw Mistry, in his newly acquired paperback stardom, climbing up the American bestseller list. "It was a pleasant surprise. A stroke of good fortune. I enjoyed the experience. I'm thankful to my stars." He, or his publishers, could not have hoped for better atmospherics to launch the new Mistry novel after Such A Long Journey and A Fine Balance, both Booker-shortlisted. It's the familiar Mistry, the connoisseur of the quotidian. The geography of the imagination hasn't changed: it's Bombay, the city of memory vanishing into a vandalising, vulgarised reality. Even the subculture of the Parsi must be familiar for those who have read Such A Long Journey. So is the political zeitgeist: after the war of the 1970s and the dictatorship of Mrs G, it is the Age of the Shiv Sena in Bombay.

The story has changed. The man who occupies the emotional centre of this novel of ordinary people, is a 79-year-old Parsi widower afflicted with Parkinson's, living under the care of his stepson and stepdaughter, Coomy and Jal. Chateau Felicity is a house without happiness, and the loneliness of Nariman Vakeel, a decaying old man who lapses into italicised memory of love and betrayal, is the energy that animates the lives around him, rearranges the matrix of emotions in a small, confined universe of the ordinary. The act of caring-bedpans, soiled sheets, commodes, the smell-brings out the best and worst, and changes everyone's life except Nariman's, which has changed long ago, when he married the woman who was not his choice, when he wrecked the marriage by not rejecting the woman he loved, a non-Parsi, when he wrecked both women's lives. Today other lives are falling apart. And the unravelling of ordinary lives makes extraordinary situations when Nariman moves into Pleasant Villa, his daughter Roxana's flat, where he becomes the patriarch of Unpleasantville. This bleak house journal has a distinctive cadence, and a quiet dignity when Mistry limns the grey mindscape of his characters with the least use of adjectives, through the syntax of everyday life. "I enjoy doing this, developing a story like this. It's the character that interests me, not the plot as such." That is why the Mistry narrative is hardly kinetic. It is a placid province where the action is in the mind, like the italicised remembrance of Nariman, the axis of Family Matters. It was an image that was growing within Mistry for 12 years. "I wrote a short story called 'Scream', in which a neglected old man tells his story. I always wanted to do something of that sort. That way, the image of Nariman has some connection to that story." Halfway through the novel, effects-fatal, tragic-outgrow the cause in the life of Yezad, Nariman's son-in-law. He becomes the medium for putting the personal in the context of the political, for achieving a balance between the sociology of the mind and the mind of the sociology.

The context, that is: Bombay on the verge of Mumbai, its soul ransacked by the Shiv Sena; the demographic tragedy of the Parsis; religion as the destination of the derailed. Like Salman Rushdie, Mistry too is a Bombay chokra, though, in style and sweep, they have nothing in common. Against Rushdie's affectionate pun, Wombay, or his lost-city rhapsodies, you have Mistry's own poetry and protest: "If Bombay were a creature of flesh and blood, with my own blood type ... then I would give her a transfusion down to my last drop, to save her life." This is the Bombay after riots, kept in fear by the storm troopers of Shiv Sena. Has Mistry's Bombay lost to a terrible reality? "It is the city I grew up, and it still engages my imagination. Not that I am writing out of nostalgia. Though you can't resist it, nostalgia leads to bad writing. Still I'm optimistic... Bombay is stronger than the forces which are trying to undermine it." And the political in this human story? "With its divide and rule policy, the Shiv Sena signifies everything that is bad about politics. And one way to tell a good story is not to overlook any social reality." In Family Matters it includes the reality of the shrinking Parsi community and its internal debate on reforms and tradition.

Still, the social is a non-intrusive adjective to the humane in which Mistry macerates the mundane to achieve slow frisson on the page. In the lengthening narrative of India Anagrammatised, he is the old-fashioned storyteller, a loner, never astonishing but always engaging.