SOURCE: Bailey, Peter J. “Fiction and Difference.” North American Review 274, no. 4 (December 1989): 61-4.

In the following excerpt, Bailey underscores the originality and distinctiveness of the stories in Tales from Firozsha Baag.

At the end of Rohinton Mistry's story, “Swimming Lessons,” the protagonist, an Indian who has emigrated to Canada, sends the manuscript of a collection of stories he has written while in his new land to his parents back home in Bombay. Although delighted with the work, his father nonetheless anticipates a problem. These stories about his son's boyhood in India, about the apartment complex he grew up in and the eccentric people who reside there, will, his father thinks, “become popular because I am sure they are interested there in reading about life through the eyes of an immigrant, it provides a different viewpoint; the only danger is if he changes and becomes so much like them...