Tales from Firozsha Baag

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Tales from Firozsha Baag

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Tales from Firozsha Baag Rohinton Mistry Rohinton Mistry (1952~) Born in Bombay, Mistry lives in Canada now. His works portray diverse facets of Indian ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Tales from Firozsha Baag

1
Tales from Firozsha Baag

Rohinton Mistry

2
Rohinton Mistry (1952)

Born in Bombay, Mistry lives in Canada now.
His works portray diverse facets of Indian
socioeconomic life as well as Parsi Zoroastrian
life, customs, and religion. (source)
Suspected of being Muslim during the post-911
period.

3
The Good Parsi

identified with the 'symbolic discourse of
colonial authority'.
They internalized the powerful side of colonial
self-representation to create an image of the
'Good Parsi' who, like his British role-model,
was 'more truthful, more pure, more charitable,
more pregressive, more rational and more
masculine than the Hindu-of-the-masses'.
As with other elite Indians, the Parsis shaped
their ideals and aesthetics around British
values. However, their sense of self became
frozen at a particular moment of communal
ascendancy
Now there is a notion among the Parsis that they
have themselves become ineffectual and
emasculated, overtaken by the majority Hindu
population who now manifest the qualities of a
dominant group. (Morey 12)
Parsi Homi Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa.

4
Tales from Firozsha Baag
Isolation from the environment

Auspicious Occasion
One Sunday
The Ghost of Firozsha Baag
Condolence Visit
The Collectors
Of White Hairs and Cricket

Home

The Paying Guests
Squatter
Lend Me Your Light
Exercisers
Swimming Lessons

Death. Change and loss
Migration as exile or escape
5
Examples of Britishness or Eurpoean/Western
cultures

Rustom nostalgia for Lifebuoy soap and Johnnie
Walker (15)
Najamaithe strains of The Blue Danube (32)
Nariman
-- fondness for introducing new English words
into his stories, for exposing "young minds to as
shimmering and varied a vocabulary as possible"
(146)
-- owns a Mercedes-Benz, has cultivated a Clark
Gable moustache, and likes to whistle the march
from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Kersi My Fair Lady 175

6
Story Cycle

Definition a set of stories linked to each other
in such a way as to maintain a balance between
the individuality of each of the stories and the
necessities of the larger unit ... so that
the reader's successive experience in various
levels of the pattern of the whole significantly
modifies his experience of each of its component
parts.
formal materialization of the trope of doubleness
as the between-worlds condition is presented via
a form that itself oscillates between two genres
novel and short story.(Davis)
Formal hybridity or fragmentation of identity
Other examples The Dubliners, The Woman Warrior

7
Tales from Firozsha Baag

The growth the artist Kersi from a boy to a
young man.

8
Places

Firozsha Baag in Bombay//
an apartment building in Toronto
Dolly in British Columbia, Vera in Alberta, Kersi
in Toronto, Ontario and Jamshed in New York

9
Narrative Hybridity

Nariman unpredictability was the brush he used
to paint his tales with, and ambiguity the
palette he mixed his colours in ... Nariman
sometimes told a funny incident in a very serious
way, or expressed a significant matter in a light
and playful manner. And these were only two rough
divisions, in between were lots of subtle
gradations of tone and texture. Which, then, was
the funny story and which the serious? Their
opinions were divided, but ultimately, said
Jehangir, it was up to the listener to
decide.(147-48)

10
"Squatter"

Narimans stories about Savukshaw and Sarosh
How are the two set in contrast with each other?
What does squatter mean?
Is Sarosh happy to be back to Bombay?
What is the function of the narrative frame (of
Nariman)?

11
Savukshaw and Sarosh

Savukshaw 146-53
A cricket player, a hunter, a pole-vaulter and a
bicyclist
Success does not mean happiness

Sarosh
Emigration a good choice? ? 10-year term
As Sid wants complete adaptation
Dependence on the old way
Other related Problems wonder bread (158), CNI
(160), fired (163)

12
Squatter vs. CNI

????????(???)??, but Saroshs squatting is both
literal/physical and symbolic.
And if the one outside could receive the fetor
of Sarosh's business wafting through the door,
poor unhappy Sarosh too could detect something
malodorous in the air the presence of xenophobia
and hostility.(Tales 156)
Crappus Non Interruptus once implanted, one can
never pass a motion in the natural wayneither
sitting nor squatting. // Canadas
Multiculturalism

13
Saroshs Return

Sense of Defeat 164
bowel movement
Must get off the plane?
calm
forlorn and woebegone (167)

14
Narimans role 1) comic-heroic A parody of
Othello's last speech

The original here
"I pray you, in your stories ... When you shall
these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am
nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice
tell them that in Toronto once there lived a
Parsi boy as best as he could. Set you down this
and say, besides, that for some it was good and
for some it was bad, but for me life in the land
of milk and honey was just a pain in the
posterior."(168)

15
Narimans role 2) multiple perspectives

He himself is Westernized
Starts with indicating two examples of
successful migration.
ambiguities and mixing of seriousness and comic
tone.

16
"Lend Me Your Light"

"your lights are all lit--then where do you go
with your lamp? / My house is all dark and
lonesome,--lend me your light. Tagore
Kersi-- in between two worlds I, Tiresias,
blind and throbbing between two lives, the one in
Bombay and the one to come in Toronto
...(179-80) examples of his in-betweenness?

17
Kersis in-betweenness

A. In-between Jamshed and Percy
His responses to Jamsheds letter (181-82)
distanced from Percys actions ()
Connected with the Parsi community in Toronto 183
Bombaydirtier -- It was disconcerting to
discover that I'd become unused to Bombay the
drama of Reality (187)

18
"Swimming Lessons"

What does swimming lessons mean?
What does Kersi learn here?
How are the two parts of the story connected to
each other?

19
The parents views

Sense of racial inferiority "We've seen
advertisements in newspapers from England, where
Canadian Immigration is encouraging people to
come to Canada. Of course, they won't advertise
in a country like India--who would want these
bloody ghatis to come charging into their fine
land?" (178).
Disappointed at Percy in Lend me your Light 188
after reading the first 5 stories
shesad he must be unhappy there
he all writers worked in the same way, they
used their memories and experiences and made
stories out of them, changing some things, adding
some, imagining some, all writers were very good
at remembering details of their lives. (243)
After reading allhope that there are more
Canadian stories, feel that they know their son
better, wished there were many more stories. (245)

20
Kersis epiphany

For me, it is already too late for snowmen and
snowball fights, and all I will have is thoughts
about childhood thoughts and dreams, built around
snows-capes and winter-wonderlands on the
Christmas cards so popular in Bombay, my snowmen
and snowball fights and Christmas trees are in
the pages of Enid Blyton's books.(244)
"My snowflakes are even less forgettable than
the old man's, for they never melt" (244).

21
References

Davis, Rocío G. "Paradigms of Postcolonial and
Immigrant Doubleness Rohinton Mistry's Tales
from Firozsha Baag." Tricks with a Glass Writing
Ethnicity in Canada. Ed. Rocío G. Davis.
Amsterdam, Netherlands Rodopi, 2000. 71-92. Rpt.
in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey
W. Hunter. Vol. 196. Detroit Gale, 2005.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2010.
Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry. Manchester UP, 2004

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