Tales from Firozsha Baag

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Tales from Firozsha Baag

• Rohinton Mistry

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Rohinton Mistry (1952)

• Born in Bombay, Mistry lives in Canada now.
• His works portray diverse facets of Indian
  socioeconomic life as well as Parsi Zoroastrian
  life, customs, and religion. (source)
• Suspected of being Muslim during the post-911
  period.

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The Good Parsi

• identified with the 'symbolic discourse of
  colonial authority'.
• They internalized the powerful side of colonial
  self-representation to create an image of the
  'Good Parsi' who, like his British role-model,
  was 'more truthful, more pure, more charitable,
  more pregressive, more rational and more
  masculine than the Hindu-of-the-masses'.
• As with other elite Indians, the Parsis shaped
  their ideals and aesthetics around British
  values. However, their sense of self became
  frozen at a particular moment of communal
  ascendancy
• Now there is a notion among the Parsis that they
  have themselves become ineffectual and
  emasculated, overtaken by the majority Hindu
  population who now manifest the qualities of a
  dominant group. (Morey 12)
• Parsi Homi Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa.

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Tales from Firozsha Baag
Isolation from the environment

• Auspicious Occasion
• One Sunday
• The Ghost of Firozsha Baag
• Condolence Visit
• The Collectors
• Of White Hairs and Cricket

Home

• The Paying Guests
• Squatter
• Lend Me Your Light
• Exercisers
• Swimming Lessons

Death. Change and loss
Migration as exile or escape
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Examples of Britishness or Eurpoean/Western
cultures

• Rustom nostalgia for Lifebuoy soap and Johnnie
  Walker (15)
• Najamaithe strains of The Blue Danube (32)
• Nariman
• -- fondness for introducing new English words
  into his stories, for exposing "young minds to as
  shimmering and varied a vocabulary as possible"
  (146)
• -- owns a Mercedes-Benz, has cultivated a Clark
  Gable moustache, and likes to whistle the march
  from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
• Kersi My Fair Lady 175

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Story Cycle

• Definition a set of stories linked to each other
  in such a way as to maintain a balance between
  the individuality of each of the stories and the
  necessities of the larger unit ... so that
  the reader's successive experience in various
  levels of the pattern of the whole significantly
  modifies his experience of each of its component
  parts.
• formal materialization of the trope of doubleness
  as the between-worlds condition is presented via
  a form that itself oscillates between two genres
  novel and short story.(Davis)
• Formal hybridity or fragmentation of identity
• Other examples The Dubliners, The Woman Warrior

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Tales from Firozsha Baag

• The growth the artist Kersi from a boy to a
  young man.

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Places

• Firozsha Baag in Bombay//
• an apartment building in Toronto
• Dolly in British Columbia, Vera in Alberta, Kersi
  in Toronto, Ontario and Jamshed in New York

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Narrative Hybridity

• Nariman unpredictability was the brush he used
  to paint his tales with, and ambiguity the
  palette he mixed his colours in ... Nariman
  sometimes told a funny incident in a very serious
  way, or expressed a significant matter in a light
  and playful manner. And these were only two rough
  divisions, in between were lots of subtle
  gradations of tone and texture. Which, then, was
  the funny story and which the serious? Their
  opinions were divided, but ultimately, said
  Jehangir, it was up to the listener to
  decide.(147-48)

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"Squatter"

• Narimans stories about Savukshaw and Sarosh
• How are the two set in contrast with each other?
  
• What does squatter mean?
• Is Sarosh happy to be back to Bombay?
• What is the function of the narrative frame (of
  Nariman)?

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Savukshaw and Sarosh

• Savukshaw 146-53
• A cricket player, a hunter, a pole-vaulter and a
  bicyclist
• Success does not mean happiness

• Sarosh
• Emigration a good choice? ? 10-year term
• As Sid wants complete adaptation
• Dependence on the old way
• Other related Problems wonder bread (158), CNI
  (160), fired (163)

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Squatter vs. CNI

• ????????(???)??, but Saroshs squatting is both
  literal/physical and symbolic.
• And if the one outside could receive the fetor
  of Sarosh's business wafting through the door,
  poor unhappy Sarosh too could detect something
  malodorous in the air the presence of xenophobia
  and hostility.(Tales 156)
• Crappus Non Interruptus once implanted, one can
  never pass a motion in the natural wayneither
  sitting nor squatting. // Canadas
  Multiculturalism

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Saroshs Return

• Sense of Defeat 164
• bowel movement
• Must get off the plane?
• calm
• forlorn and woebegone (167)

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Narimans role 1) comic-heroic A parody of
Othello's last speech

• The original here
• "I pray you, in your stories ... When you shall
  these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am
  nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice
  tell them that in Toronto once there lived a
  Parsi boy as best as he could. Set you down this
  and say, besides, that for some it was good and
  for some it was bad, but for me life in the land
  of milk and honey was just a pain in the
  posterior."(168)

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Narimans role 2) multiple perspectives

• He himself is Westernized
• Starts with indicating two examples of
  successful migration.
• ambiguities and mixing of seriousness and comic
  tone.

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"Lend Me Your Light"

• "your lights are all lit--then where do you go
  with your lamp? / My house is all dark and
  lonesome,--lend me your light. Tagore
• Kersi-- in between two worlds I, Tiresias,
  blind and throbbing between two lives, the one in
  Bombay and the one to come in Toronto
  ...(179-80) examples of his in-betweenness?

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Kersis in-betweenness

• A. In-between Jamshed and Percy
• His responses to Jamsheds letter (181-82)
• distanced from Percys actions ()
• Connected with the Parsi community in Toronto 183
  
• Bombaydirtier -- It was disconcerting to
  discover that I'd become unused to Bombay the
  drama of Reality (187)

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"Swimming Lessons"

• What does swimming lessons mean?
• What does Kersi learn here?
• How are the two parts of the story connected to
  each other?

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The parents views

• Sense of racial inferiority "We've seen
  advertisements in newspapers from England, where
  Canadian Immigration is encouraging people to
  come to Canada. Of course, they won't advertise
  in a country like India--who would want these
  bloody ghatis to come charging into their fine
  land?" (178).
• Disappointed at Percy in Lend me your Light 188
• after reading the first 5 stories
• shesad he must be unhappy there
• he all writers worked in the same way, they
  used their memories and experiences and made
  stories out of them, changing some things, adding
  some, imagining some, all writers were very good
  at remembering details of their lives. (243)
• After reading allhope that there are more
  Canadian stories, feel that they know their son
  better, wished there were many more stories. (245)

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Kersis epiphany

• For me, it is already too late for snowmen and
  snowball fights, and all I will have is thoughts
  about childhood thoughts and dreams, built around
  snows-capes and winter-wonderlands on the
  Christmas cards so popular in Bombay, my snowmen
  and snowball fights and Christmas trees are in
  the pages of Enid Blyton's books.(244)
• "My snowflakes are even less forgettable than
  the old man's, for they never melt" (244).

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References

• Davis, Rocío G. "Paradigms of Postcolonial and
  Immigrant Doubleness Rohinton Mistry's Tales
  from Firozsha Baag." Tricks with a Glass Writing
  Ethnicity in Canada. Ed. Rocío G. Davis.
  Amsterdam, Netherlands Rodopi, 2000. 71-92. Rpt.
  in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey
  W. Hunter. Vol. 196. Detroit Gale, 2005.
  Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2010.
• Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry. Manchester UP, 2004