swimming lessons and other stories from firozsha baag

As a Toronto counselor for Immigration Problems comments about certain symptoms of culture shock: “Some of us thought these problems were linked to retention of original citizenship.

In fact, as one deliciously satirical story makes clear, neither distance nor time nor even a legal chance of passport can free the roving sons and daughters of Firozsha Baag from their past. We know the families and their servants and their relatives, including the sons and daughters who’ve emigrated to New York or Toronto, and who remain no less tied to Firozsha Baag for that. We know its leaking plumbing and peeling paint, its aged cars, the apartment that has the refrigerator (shared by many) and the one with the telephone (shared by all.) We know marital secrets, family triumphs, generational conflicts. By the final story, we know Firozsha Baag. One is frequently reminded of both authors in reading “Swimming Lessons” as Mistry, with the meticulousness of an archeologist uncovering a civilization shard by shard, reveals the microcosm of Firozsha Baag, an apartment complex in Bombay.įirozsha Baag’s residents, mostly Parsi, but also Hindu and Muslim, represent middle-class Bombay, or rather the professional middle class (accountants, lawyers, doctors) who live in more or less genteel poverty. Narayan wrote tales that intermesh and map out life in the South Indian village of Malgudi, and Alice Munro continues to embroider the rich tapestry of a small Ontario town. In writing a series of interlinked tales, which have a cumulative and reverberative effect, Mistry is following a pattern received from both his Indian and Canadian literary milieus. Rohinton Mistry, a young Parsi writer from Bombay who has been living in Toronto since 1975, explores this quicksand territory with intelligence, compassion, wit, and memorable flair in “Swimming Lessons,” his first collection of stories.

Since the last few decades have seen an ever-increasing number of people who find themselves (for reasons of political, economic, educational, or professional necessity) obliged to move between two (or even three or four) cultures within a single life span, it is hardly surprising that cross-cultural malaise and dislocation keep surfacing as topics for exploration in short stories and novels. It takes two generations to make the transition from one culture to another, a cultural anthropologist claims in a recently published book, and those caught “in transit” can suffer from cultural trauma even after years of apparently successful adapting.

Swimming lessons and other stories from firozsha baag