Robert's Reviews > Tales from Firozsha Baag

Although my view of short story collections is starting to change, I still can’t say that I actively seek them out. I’ve talked about my problems with the medium. HOWEVER I’m a huge fan of interlinked short stories. The idea of reoccurring characters or even cleverly putting in similar details makes me approach the book like a puzzle.

Rohinton Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag was the very first interlinked short story collection I read. This was back in 2002. As I have stated before, I’m a big fan of rereading books as I discover new things or to see if time has been kind to a book.

Tales from Firozsha Baag is Mistry’s first book, he later went on to write three more novels, all excellent, with A Fine Balance slowly receiving classic status. As with all first works it has the problems that occur but more of that later.

Firozsha Baag is an apartment complex (and an unkempt one at that) and there’s a handful of eccentric tenants : there’s the lady who sees ghosts , the family who have problems with paying guests, the ringleader of a gang of boys and more. As I said, each of these characters meet with each other, with Mistry dropping hints about the character’s futures in most of the stories.

Usually in this situation there’s always a standout character and that’s Kesi. he appears in a lot of the stories and the narrative follows him out of Firozsha Baag and to Toronto, Canada.

Tales.. is rich and themes but the one that stuck out was social class. The inhabitants of the block are Parsis, according to the caste system Parsis are middle class, with doctors and accountants forming part of the caste (If I am wrong please correct me) so a lot of the stories feature different classes bonding or clashing. The Ghost of Firozsha Baag is about two classes seeing eye to eye. One Sunday is about attitudes towards lower castes.

Traditions are criticised. Condolence Visit is about death rites and how they go wrong. Exercisers is about dating within one’s caste and Squatter is a brilliant look at culture clashing.

Back in 2001 my favorite story was The Collectors, a piece about a vet and a loner bonding over stamps, while the vet’s delinquent son is pushed to the side. rereading it was still fun and made me laugh.

The concluding story, Swimming Lessons deals with Kesi’s adventures in Canada and is ,possibly, a new favorite. It’s a story about overcoming fears and contains a subplot with a meta element.

As these are early writings, Mistry’s style is not as refined as in his subsequent novels plus the toilet humor wears off a bit. Obviously as the book is about a culture I’m not sure about I’m sure a lot of the foreign language words had double meanings which I did not get (unfortunately Google was unhelpful in this case) but really this is nitpicking, Tales from Firozsha Baag is a confident first effort and definitely worth a read if you are starting with Mistry’s tiny but impressive output.