Family matters

Family Matters is Rohinton Mistry's novel of a Parsi family in 1990s Bombay, centered on Nariman Vakeel, a widower in his late seventies living with Parkinson's disease and the weight of old memories. After a fall breaks his ankle during a walk, Nariman needs a month of bed rest — a burden his stepchildren, Coomy and Jal, are unwilling to shoulder.

Coomy engineers a pretext to keep Nariman from returning to their shared apartment, arranging for him to be sent, without warning, to the cramped flat of his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad. Roxana takes her father in without hesitation, but the financial strain of his care — on top of an already stretched household budget — pushes the family toward crisis, as Yezad turns to illegal gambling to make ends meet.

Set against the backdrop of Bombay's political and religious tensions in the 1990s, the novel uses one family's caregiving crisis to examine duty, sacrifice, and the corrosive effects of financial precarity on people who love each other.