A Fine Balance

Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, both lower-class Indian men from the Chamaar caste, are traveling on a train to a big city, where they have been hired to work as tailors. On the train, they meet a student named Maneck, and they learn that they’re all headed to the same place: Maneck is renting a room from Dina, the woman who has hired Ishvar and Omprakash to work for her. The men’s journey is happening during a time of social upheaval, a couple decades after India gained independence from Britain, when the Prime Minister has declared the nation to be in a state of crisis known as the Emergency.

Ishvar grew up in a small village where he left with his brother, Narayan, to learn how to be a tailor from a Muslim man named Ashraf. But when Narayan challenged a powerful upper-caste villager named Thakur Dharamsi who oversaw voting in the area, Thakur Dharamsi killed Narayan and much of his family, leaving just Ishvar and Omprakash as survivors who have to find their own way in the world.

Meanwhile, Maneck came from a wealthier background, but his father, Farokh’s, successful soda business has struggled to compete in a modern industrialized India. Farokh sent Maneck away to be educated in a new trade, but aside from a friend named Avinash that he plays chess with, Maneck struggled to fit in with the other boys at college.

Dina also grew up in a relatively comfortable background, with a father, Dr. Shroff, who devoted long hours at his job to helping other people. Dina fell in love with and married a man named Rustom, but after three happy years of marriage, he was killed in a bicycling accident while going to the store to pick up ice cream.

Now, circumstances have brought Ishvar, Omprakash, Maneck, and Dina together. Dina needs money to keep paying for her house and not have to move back in with her strict brother, Nusswan. The dresses that Ishvar and Omprakash sew for Dina help to provide both her and them with income. The money that Dina receives from hosting Maneck as a renter also helps her stay independent. In her free time, Dina makes a quilt out of old scraps of material from various sources.

Ishvar and Omprakash struggle to adapt to life in the big city. The hut that they live in gets demolished during a slum “beautification” that police Sergeant Kesar leads. At one point, trucks come to round up the people in the slum, and Ishvar and Omprakash end up working for a while as unpaid laborers on an irrigation project. They manage to make it out of the camp with the help of a man called Beggarmaster who protects local beggars but takes a cut of their earnings and sometimes disfigures infants in order to make them better beggars.

When Ishvar and Omprakash make it back to the city, Dina eventually lets them spend the evenings on her verandah. Although her rent collector, Ibrahim, threatens to evict her on behalf of the landlord for running an illegal business out of her home, Beggarmaster offers to protect Dina and keeps away the goondas who try to intimidate her.

Ishvar, Omprakash, Maneck, and Dina all begin to make meals together and eat at the same table, despite Dina’s initial resistance. Dina comes to enjoy having so many people in her home. Ishvar and Omprakash make plans to get Omprakash married and bring his new wife back to Dina’s house. Meanwhile, Maneck plans to go to college for another three years and continue to stay with Dina.

But when Ishvar and Omprakash go back to their home village to try to find a wife for Omprakash, police round them up and truck them off to one of the sterilization camps that have been popping up around the country. The doctors at the camp force Omprakash and Ishvar to get vasectomies with unsterilized equipment. When Thakur Dharamsi sees Omprakash, he orders for him to be castrated as well. By the time Ishvar and Omprakash make it back to the big city, Omprakash is a eunuch and Ishvar has gotten his legs amputated due to an infection. Around the same time, Maneck gets rejected from continuing on at college, and Dina gets evicted from her house after Beggarmaster is murdered and she is left vulnerable.

About eight years later, Maneck comes back from a job in Dubai to the city where he once went to college. The Prime Minister’s Sikh bodyguards have just assassinated her, leading to riots against Sikhs across the country. Maneck learns from an old newspaper article that his old friend Avinash, who disappeared, likely died in police custody. He goes to Nusswan’s house to see Dina, who is about to get a visit from Ishvar and Omprakash, but Maneck doesn’t stay long enough to meet them.

As Maneck is leaving Dina’s, he happens to run into Ishvar and Omprakash. Seeing the two of them as beggars, Maneck feels sad and thinks that they don’t recognize him. Later that day, Maneck commits suicide by jumping in front of a moving express train.

As it turns out, Ishvar and Omprakash did recognize Maneck but just thought he was ignoring them. They arrive at Dina’s and have a meal with her. She has been feeding them in secret for a long time. When the meal is over, Dina sends them off, and Ishvar and Omprakash laugh with each other until it’s time to hit the streets and act like beggars again. Dina washes the dishes so that Nusswan and his wife can use them later.