Previous
Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Fine Balance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Resilience
Corruption
Class and Caste
The Meaning of Family
Religion and Violence
Summary
Analysis
Ishvar and Omprakash invite Maneck to dinner at their house, and Dina is surprised and disappointed when Maneck accepts—she wants Maneck to distance himself from her employees. Ishvar and Omprakash leave one evening to have dinner in their slum, the evening before Maneck is set to come, but when they arrive, they’re surprised to see no smoke from anyone else’s cooking fires. All of a sudden, there is a sound in the distance of people in pain and terror.
Dina’s feeling that she and Maneck should separate themselves from Ishvar and Omprakash seems to suggest once again that, in spite of Dina’s own status as an outsider with money problems, she still has prejudices against people from lower classes. Maneck, on the other hand, seems more open to getting to know Ishvar and Omprakash, perhaps because as a man and as someone from an even wealthier family, he feels more secure about his own status.
Active
Themes
Rajaram tells Omprakash and Ishvar that men from the government came in and destroyed all the huts in the neighborhood with big machines. Apparently, this is legal due to the Emergency.
Omprakash and Ishvar scavenge some of their possessions from the wreckage. Rajaram tries to save part of his stock of hair. Ishvar decides they should go see Nawaz, but when they arrive at his house, strangers are living there. Apparently, he has been arrested for smuggling gold, although the stranger claims this was just a pretext, and in fact, Nawaz was arrested for quarreling with a well-connected man.
Active
Themes
With nowhere else to go, Omprakash and Ishvar decide to sleep at the railway station, but it’s already full of beggars. A policeman stops them and tells them they can’t stay. He implies that the other beggars there have all paid him a bribe to be allowed to stay. Ishvar and Omprakash tell him they don’t plan to stay, then wait for him to leave before going to sleep. But right after they fall asleep, a policeman pours cold water on them to wake them up.
Active
Themes
Get the entire A Fine Balance LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Omprakash and Ishvar arrive at Dina’s early for once, with a trunk full of their things that they hope to leave with her, without revealing that they’re now homeless. They tell Maneck they’ll have to postpone dinner. When they go back to where their hut used to be, Sergeant Kesar says they’ll go to jail if they try to build in that area again due to new “city beautification” laws. Ishvar wonders whether they should let Dina know about their problems, although Omprakash is skeptical that she’d help.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
Ishvar tells Dina and Maneck everything about how their home was destroyed. Ishvar asks if he and Omprakash can sleep on Dina’s verandah, but she’s afraid of the rent collector seeing them. She also makes them take back their trunk, which Maneck later scolds her for. In their search for a place to sleep, Ishvar and Omprakash find a nightwatchman and reach a deal where they’ll pay him to sleep on a mat near him.
Active
Themes
Ishvar and Omprakash spend a couple nights with the nightwatchman. One day at Dina’s, they get a surprise visit from Rajaram, who has found a new job. They make plans to meet at the nightwatchman’s place, where Dina won’t be listening. When they talk later, they learn that Rajaram now has a job as a “Motivator” distributing leaflets to promote birth control. Rajaram says there are plenty more openings for Motivators, but Ishvar and Omprakash turn him down. Dina changes her mind and allows Ishvar and Omprakash to keep their trunk with her, wondering about its contents.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
