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In this essay, I am going to read the bodies of the Parsi male characters in Rohinton Mistry’s  Tales from Firozsha Baag  (1987) through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject. According to Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, a reaction elicited by bodily fluids such as excrement, blood or even semen. The bodies of the Parsi males in  Tales of Firozsha Baag  are a site of awareness in which the “bodily borders” (Moreno-Álvarez 2014: 39) explode. In the first section of the essay, I will discuss the stories “One Sunday”, “The Collectors” and “Exercisers”. In the second section, I will delve into Mistry’s Canadian trilogy — ”Squatter”, “Lend Me Your Light” and “Swimming Lessons” — whose main subject is the young Parsi male striving for happiness and individual liberation ( moksha ) through emigration to North America. I will conclude that these Parsi men have difficulties integrating themselves in their Indian and North American contexts because the realms of the corporeal and the spiritual are, quoting Frantz Fanon’s phrase, “zones of occult instability” (Fanon 1967: 21).

Bodily and Spiritual Borders in the Parsi Males of Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag