Tales from Firozsha Baag

The World Before the Novels

Rohinton Mistry’s debut collection, published in Canada in 1987, introduces Firozsha Baag — a Parsi apartment complex in Bombay — as the world he would spend his career illuminating. The eleven stories that make up the collection range across residents, generations, and states of displacement, and together they constitute something greater than a collection: a portrait of a community, a place, and a way of life that was already, when Mistry was writing, under pressure from time.

The collection is sometimes published as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag in North America, with the title story — in which a young man in Canada corresponds with his parents in Bombay — positioned as the culminating piece that links the immigrant’s experience to the community he has left.

Comedy and Compassion

What is immediately apparent in these early stories is that Mistry’s voice was essentially formed from the beginning. His dark comedy — the ability to make you laugh at something genuinely terrible because the alternative is despair — is present in the very first story. His compassion for his characters, even when they are foolish or petty or cruel in the small ways that close quarters encourage, is unwavering.

The Parsi community that populates Firozsha Baag is rendered from within: their specific rituals, their anxieties about assimilation and decline, their relationship to a India that is becoming less hospitable to minorities, their pride in a community that has contributed disproportionately to the country’s professional and intellectual life.

Seeds of the Later Work

Readers of Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance will recognize in these stories the embryonic forms of themes and preoccupations that Mistry would develop at greater length. The immigrant experience of the final story prefigures the displacement that haunts his novels. The political corruption of post-independence India appears here in miniature. The apartment building community — its interdependencies and claustrophobia and warmth — is the petri dish in which his Dickensian social vision first developed.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — An essential starting point for Mistry readers — the collection where his compassionate, darkly comic vision of Bombay’s Parsi community first fully emerged.