A Fine Balance

India during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975-77 — the suspension of civil liberties, the forced sterilization campaigns, the slum clearances. Four people share a apartment in an unnamed city: a widow, a student, two Dalit tailors. Mistry writes about India's hierarchy with the precision of someone who knows its every gradation — caste, class, religion, gender — and the Emergency as the moment when the state made that hierarchy explicit and lethal. One of the great novels of the 20th century, almost unknown outside literary circles. The most devastating Indian dispatch on this shelf.