In her novel Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai finally achieves what many writers try and then fail to achieve. She uses a light touch, simple language, uncomplicated structure, but at the same time she addresses some very important issues and makes a point.
Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity presented by the parents. These parents, however, are nothing alike. Mom is protective, perhaps selfish, and not a little indolent. Dad is a freak of parsimonious control who keeps the phone locked up because someone might use it. But at least they are together. Their relationship has survived, despite the long wait for a child and his disappointment at his disability.
Uma and Arun also have a sister, Aruna. She’s bright and pretty, but in her own way she’s also disabled, because she’s a woman. Arun’s disability is visible, but Aruna’s exists because of her society’s preconceived ideas about women.
Uma is not pretty, nor is she academic. She wears thick glasses and has seizures. And so, in the middle-class society that the family inhabits, Uma can only play two possible roles. Either she can be married or she can become a worker, almost a slave for the family. The former, of course, is the same as the latter. Only the location is different. For Uma marriage does not happen. She does so, but she fails before she begins, as the groom was already married and just wanted to collect another dowry. The arranged marriages of Uma’s sister and her cousin also fail. Initially well staged, both end tragically.
The first part of Fasting, Feasting suggests a domestic drama, a slightly comical family trying to cope with their own status as a cultural minority within the vastness of India. The tragic elements of the story take a while to surface. But when they do, they also disappoint, because only the two disabled characters, Uma and Arun, eventually show honesty or compassion, everyone else is just plain selfish, even those who commit suicide to end the pain. For women, it seems, even achievement is nothing more than an asset to help their craft. When offered a place at Oxford, a girl’s duty precludes acceptance, and necessity frames the letter as evidence of her greater eligibility. So what seemed like a nice family tale of the idiosyncrasies of the culture turns into a tragedy, and a tragedy for all women. The ugly and unmemorable Uma is the sole apparent survivor, and that’s only because she’s not even a competitor. She exists in the scraps of life that she is allowed.
But what about Arun, the disabled boy? Well, he’s a pretty bright boy. He goes to college in the US and to an institution with status in Massachusetts. But what is he going to do in the holidays when the university is closed? We can’t afford to carry yours all the way home, Dad concludes parsimoniously.
So Arun stays with the Pattons, an all-American nuclear family, kind of an American Dream, mom, dad, two kids, one of each. But dad is a laconic guy. A beer from the fridge keeps him calm. The son has all sorts of ambitions, and yet none that are realistic. Mom is an emotional wreck. She yearns for something in her confusion, but she has no idea what she could be. And his daughter is bulimic. happy families.
So, through Arun’s eyes, and to some extent as a result of her culturally challenging presence, Anita Desai presents a picture of middle-class American life that is completely dysfunctional. But it is again women who are most deeply affected. Mom does all the shopping and cooking to feed the ungrateful men and the daughter who can’t eat. She fantasizes about Arun’s cultural authenticity, she sees in him the qualities she yearns for. The daughter is a complete case of head. She is fat wanting to be thin, she eats very fast, fills herself with sweets until she vomits, perhaps a slave to a concept of feminine perfection generated by men. And Arun witnesses all this. Eventually, in his deformity, he is the only presence that is not self-obsessed.
The title is important. Fasting, Feasting presents apparent opposites, two contrasting yet unbalanced settings, India and the USA. It offers two warped observers, Uma and Arun. It reveals two contrasting cultures and finds that women are slaves in both. Opposites are thus ultimately similar, just opposites.
