44 pages • 1 hour read
A Fine Balance
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Circle Is Completed”
Dina waits eagerly for Om and Ishvar to return. After several weeks, she loses hope and lets the rental company take away their sewing machines. She also receives a letter from Maneck announcing that his grades weren’t good enough to allow him to enter the three-year program. He’ll have to be content with his one-year certificate in refrigeration and air conditioning. He’s received a job offer in Dubai and intends to take it. Although he won’t be coming back to rent his room, he promises to visit Dina next year.
Beggarmaster comes to collect his fees, and Dina tells him about the missing tailors. He tells her not to worry about what they owe him and that her apartment is still under his protection. The next day, Ibrahim comes by to say the landlord has fired him. He warns Dina that she’s going to be evicted. Nobody can protect her now because an angry guardian of two children blinded and maimed for Beggarmaster’s troupe has murdered Beggarmaster.
Ibrahim advises Dina to get a lawyer and file an injunction to prevent the eviction. She goes to the courthouse where the proofreader Vasantrao writes up her plea. He laments the corruption of the court system and the losses that life inflicts on all. By the time Dina returns home, the landlord’s thugs are at her door, waiting to evict her, but the policeman with them prevents them from harming her. She calls her brother to send a truck to take her possessions to his house.
Dina is once more forced to live under Nusswan’s roof, but the rancor has gone out of their relationship. When she falls asleep in the room that Nusswan and Ruby kept for her, she covers herself with the quilt she stitched during her evenings with Maneck, Ishvar, and Om. She reminisces about the old days: “At night in bed, she covered herself with the quilt and took to recounting the abundance of events in the tightly knit family of patches, the fragments that she had fashioned with needle, thread, and affection” (563).
Epilogue Summary: “1984”
After an absence of eight years, Maneck returns from Dubai to his hometown for his father’s funeral. When his mother questions his withdrawn attitude, he ruefully replies, “You sent me away, you and Daddy. And then I couldn’t come back. You lost me, and I lost—everything” (581).
Maneck broods and idly rummages through old newspapers left in his family’s basement. He comes across an article about three teenage girls who hanged themselves to spare their parents the shame of not being able to provide their dowries. Maneck is shaken to learn that the girls were the sisters of his murdered school chum, Avinash.
Trying desperately to find a sliver of hope in the world, Maneck decides to take a train to visit Dina and the tailors. When he finds that Dina’s tenement has been converted to luxury apartments, he looks up her brother’s address and plans to walk there.
On the way, he comes across people gathered in a cricket field to consult with a Himalayan holy man. Maneck discovers that the holy man is none other than Rajaram, the hair-collector, selling fake cures and blessings. Maneck taunts the man about his past and vows to return the next day with Ishvar and Om. As he leaves, Maneck stumbles across Vasantrao, who now works for Rajaram. The former proofreader now writes fake predictions for the guru’s mail-order petitioners.
Maneck finds Dina at Nusswan’s house. She is nearly blind and a shadow of her former self. She invites him in and tells him that the tailors are now beggars. Maneck is shocked at the news. Dina says that Ishvar and Om will arrive at one o’clock for lunch. Maneck assures her that he’ll return to see them.
As Maneck leaves, he passes Ishvar and Om as beggars on the street, but he is too disturbed by their altered appearance to acknowledge them. Instead of returning for a reunion at Dina’s, he heads straight to the train station. Having lost all hope that life can offer any lasting happiness, he throws himself in front of a speeding express train, still ruminating on the past: “Maneck’s last thought was that he still had Avinash’s chessmen” (601).
Unaware of what has happened, Dina brings the beggars into the kitchen for lunch. She feeds them whenever the family isn’t at home. They talk, joke, and reminisce about the old days, as Dina gratefully acknowledges that “[t]hose two made her laugh every day. Like Maneck used to, once” (603).
Chapter 16-Epilogue Analysis
The final section of the book again spotlights the theme of adaptation to change. Each of the characters has undergone an extreme change of circumstance at the start of these chapters: Dina is forced to move back with her brother’s family when Beggarmaster is murdered; Ishvar and Om become beggars; and Maneck leaves Dubai after the death of his father.
However, not all the characters adapt to the changes that life thrusts upon them. Dina is able to adjust primarily because she has the quilt to remind her of the bonds of affection between the four flatmates. On her first night back at her brother’s home, the quilt symbolizes that she has created something of value that will transcend her unhappy surroundings.
The quilt reappears later as a seat cushion for Ishvar, echoing the way Ishvar and Om used the leftover fabric pieces meant for them to sew a vest for Shankar. Dina has transferred the quilt’s emotional and physical comfort—it now softens Ishvar’s hard, wooden platform.
Two other minor characters also adapt quite easily to new circumstances. Vasantrao, the proofreader, makes several career changes in the novel and ends the story as a fake fortune prognosticator. His career trajectory parallels that of Rajaram, who has now become a self-appointed mystical guru. Because he is a quickly adapting con artist, Rajaram always manages to land on his feet.
The only character who fails to adjust to change is Maneck. The disillusionment he felt as a youth has only intensified over the years. When he returns to India for his father’s funeral, he is met with a barrage of unwelcome changes: his father’s death, the dwindling family business, Dina’s reduced circumstances, the tailors turned beggars, and the suicides of Avinash’s sisters.
Maneck has always attempted to hold change at bay. The sheer number of alterations he’s forced to confront in such a short period of time pushes him over the edge—quite literally over the edge of a train platform. Ironically, Maneck is the one character who hasn’t suffered any material misfortunes of his own. The characters surrounding him, tried by suffering, have developed a resiliency that he refused to acquire.
Unlock all 44 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
