Parsi Fiction in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long journey

Abstract

such a long journey is the first novel written by Rohinton Mistry, a writer of Indian Diaspora, who settled in Canada. Though the novel was published sixteen years after Rohinton Mistry has settled in Toronto, it has no trace of Canada. Rather, it reveals the author’s deep concern for the Parsis in India in Particular, and for the development of postcolonial India in general. This feeling may not be explained with the word ‘nostalgia’ which is loosely associated with romantic feelings.Rohinton Mistry’s feeling for India is not just longing for the past, but a mixed feeling of unpleasant jolt when the Parsi community felt hurt at the Nagarwala incident and the restoring the honor of the Parsi community through a realistic portrayal of the said incident was the basis of the novel. During the regime of Indira Gandhi in India, one Parsi gentleman Mr.Nagarwala was accused of imitating Indira Gandhi’s voice while talking over the phone to the chief cashier of a nationalized bank from where he took sixty lakh rupees presumably for the fighters in Bangladesh. Mr.Nagarwala was pronounced guilty by the court and the entire Parsi community felt shocked and disgraced. Rohinton Mistry ‘s pride for his community, which had been maintaining a high moral standard and which had secured a prestigious position in the past, got hurt and he decided to take revenge on Indira Gandhi through his fiction.