How to Cook a Good Tale - Three Stories from Rohinton Mistry's Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1987)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the following pages I want to concentrate on three stories from Rohinton Mistry's (1952 -) Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firoszha Baag (1987)*' The eleven stories of this collection are all placed in a Baag, or Baug, here in the meaning of "Parsi housing estate or 'colony"'*' in Bombay.They can be read independently from one another, however one of the charming points of the book is the fact that the different stories are intertwined by figures from certain stories which reappear in other ones.More important is the function of the concluding story in the book which combines them all.Without confusing elementary narratological principles, that is mixing up figures, narrators and the author himself, in this case it will be possible to say, that the stories in the collection are reflecting most presumably experiences by the author.Rohinton Mistry*' was born in a Parsi family in Bombay, in 1975 he emigrated to Canada, and studied at Toronto University.The main figure in the first story discussed here,The Ghost of Firozsha Baag, is a sixty-three-year old ayah ("nurse-maid", etc., L, p.55)* 4 in one ofthe Parsi households.She is a Catholic from Goa and this enables her to see the Parsis from outside, more exactly, as will be seen, from below, because a main part of her living takes place on the How to Cook a Good Tale -Three Stories from Rohinton Mistry's Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag ( 1987) "floor'' (p.45).This poses her into a picaro-like position, but picaro is used here of course only as a makeshift.In the second story Squatter the troubles of a young man from Firozsha Baag who emigrates to Canada are told.If not exactly parallel one can read this story as a mirror reflecting that of the ayah from Goa because now the Indian Parsi is in a position comparable to her's in the Parsi household.The narrator of this story being depicted in strange positions on the toilet can, thus, be seen too, at least in some moments, resembling a picaro with a queer position in society.The third story Swimming Lessons tells at the same time the story of one more emigrant from Firozsha Baag to Canada, his fixing down his memories in a book of short stories and his parents' reaction to this.The somewhat picaresque feature of the narrative character to be found especially in the two first mentioned stories and the concluding one is alluded there by the father when he expresses his feelings about Squatter, that the story "with a little bit about Toronto, where a man perches on top of the toilet, is shameful and disgusting, althoug it is funny at times and did make me laugh" (245-246)*s Just one word to the character of this paper, which belongs at the same time to two projects I am working on now.One of which concentrates on Indian literature in English, the other one on the problems involved in Goan identity.The first has, not intendedly from the beginning, brought up in three successive essays problems of Jews in India, and that meant, that the planed essay about the Parsi novelist R. Mistry could not stop at the level of writing about Indian authors writing in English, but should focus as well on the religious aspect.Pushing forward study on Mistry, there appeared his fascinating story about the How to Cook a Good Tale-Three Stories from Rohinton Mistry's Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1987) Catholic ayah from Goa in a Parsi household in Bombay, The Ghost of How to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".