Word: nariman
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...heading toward another spell of cold comfort? That was the question TIME posed to its Board of Economists. "It will feel like a jobless recovery largely because our point of reference is the boom years of the '90s, when unemployment went all the way down to 3.9%," says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for the consulting firm DRI-WEFA. "When it is up around 6%, it feels a lot worse...
...center of Mistry's fine new novel Family Matters (Faber and Faber; 487 pages) is Nariman Vakeel, a 79-year-old Parsi widower besieged equally by Parkinson's disease and his middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal. Nariman is also haunted by memories of the real love of his life, a Catholic Goan whom he did not marry in deference to the "marriage arrangers, the wilful manufacturers of misery," a failure of courage that resulted in scandal and tragedy. His joyless family resides in a spacious apartment in Bombay's Chateau Felicity...
...When Nariman fractures an ankle, Coomy, a miserable woman who blames him for her mother's death, banishes her stepfather from his own house on the pretext that she cannot care for him. Like King Lear, the elderly patriarch is forced to seek the generosity of his progeny. Luckily for him, his youngest daughter, a kind soul named Roxana, welcomes her parent, despite the fact that she dwells in a tiny tenement in Pleasant Villa with her husband and two sons...
...Much of the story is devoted to Nariman's confinement and its effects on his daughter's once contented family. Medical costs take food off the table. One of the sons must sleep on the balcony. Then there are the realities of bodily decrepitude. Bowel movements and bedpans, stinks and sores become not only a helpless old man's cross to bear but a burden for those who love him most...
...Family members grapple with their own revulsion and bafflement at what Nariman and they must endure. To do so, the novel suggests, is to fully engage with your own humanity. In the hospital, Nariman, pondering an older orderly, wonders if "collecting feces and urine from the beds of the lame and the halt and the diseased" might be the "necessary conditions" for achieving enlightenment. Watching her youngest boy feed his grandfather, Roxana decides she is "witnessing something almost sacred...