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Living in Toronto, Dreaming of Bombay : SWIMMING LESSONS And Other Stories From Firozsha Baag <i> by Rohinton Mistry (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95; 250 pp.; 0-395-49862-7) </i>

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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.

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. 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.

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. R. K. 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. 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.

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Firozsha 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. By the final story, we know Firozsha Baag. 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. 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. 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. 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. But this was a false lead.”

The liveliest stories are the early ones, when the children who will later emigrate are still playing cricket in the compound, and teasing the old ayah who sees ghosts, and hiding under the slatted steps with voyeuristic intentions when the teen-age girls go upstairs. The tiny details that make up life in Bombay are exquisitely evoked: the constant chewing and spitting of betel juice that covers the ground (and in one story, a freshly laundered white lungi) with what appear to be splats of blood; the way the city water supply is turned off at 6 a.m. during the hot, dry season, so that a household has to be up at 5 a.m. to fill all available vessels with water; the way people are far more intimately connected with the processes of aging and bodily frailty and dying than is the case any more in North America.

There are weaknesses in the stories, moments when the reader is conscious that this is a first collection from a young writer. Mistry is imitative of Indian novelist Anita Desai in his depiction of sudden and grotesque incursions of violence into the community, but he has a habit of predictably and rather portentiously foreshadowing these events (a splat of betel juice on white cloth prefigures a murder; a rat bludgeoned with a cricket bat precedes the bludgeoning of a starving servant) and in general there is a tendency toward heavy-handed symbolism.

In “Swimming Lessons,” which charts most closely the cultural displacement of the young Parsi in Toronto, I was forcibly struck by the narrator’s blind spot, an unintentional one, I suspect, on the author’s part. The swimmer alludes (without comment, and hence powerfully) to racist gestures and remarks made by others in the locker room; but he himself frequently makes extremely sexist observations about women and seems unaware of the parallel insult. In both cases, with derogatory impact, a human being is reduced to caricature and bodily stereotype.

On the other hand, there are cultural nuances in Bombay that Mistry conveys with the skill of a master. He evokes, with sharp eye and gentle wit, the secret eroticism of a puritan culture: the innocent voyeurism of married men (who covertly watch their unencumbered-by-underwear washerwomen at work) and the fantasies of widowed women (an old ayah is molested by a most affectionate ghost). He conveys sparsely and powerfully the tug of war between compassion and the survival instinct: “Rustomji too would have liked to feel sorrow and compassion. But he was afraid. He had decided long ago that this was no country for sorrow or compassion or pity--these were worthless and, at best, inappropriate.”

As for the Firozsha Baag people who now live in Toronto and New York, I feel that Mistry’s significant stories about those displaced lives are yet to come, and that they will be worth waiting for.

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