CHAPTER-IV

CONCLUSION

Fasting, Feasting by Antia Desai, Houghton Mifflin Company,

1999.The title drew me in. (Also. I’ll admit, ‘the Booker Prize Finalist sticker on
the cover.)The title made me think this book would have some rich theological
insight hidden inside, even if it never mentioned God. Fasting and Feasting are
such rich concepts for contemplation. The book did follow its title with interwoven
threads of deprivation and abundance, although it did not capture my heart and
mind as much as I had hoped.

The story is told in two parts, from two central characters. The first
part takes place in India, and focuses on Uma, the eldest sister of an aspiring
middle-class family. Uma is a bit slow-witted and physically clumsy, but she has
dreams for her life. However, at every turn, her parents thwart her aspirations and
turn her into a servant in the household. Her prospects for marriage crumble, and
she is denied even the simplest pleasures. She is not alone. Nearly all the women in
the story are bound in service to men, their own dreams unsupported and
unsustained.

The second part takes place in United States, and focuses on Arun,
the youngest child and only boy in the family. The family (especially Uma)
scarifies everything so that Arun can succeed, achieve and prosper. While it seems

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that he has everything, he long desperately for affection. During his time in the
United States, the land of plenty, he sees the elements of physical and emotional
deprivation in American family life, even as he himself goes hungry rather than eat
meat with the host family.

The novel is beautiful, intricate and run through with allusions to

various kinds of fasting and feasting. At times, it felt a bit heavy-handed to me,
like it was a morality tale or parable about abundance and deprivation, rather than a
novel.

A certain starkness of vision, an uncompromising realism and

superbly evocative images are immediately striking in the novel. One also has a
sense of wonder at the order and control of the narrative style, which serves as a
counterpoint to the simmering cauldron of emotions generated in the pages.

The story revolves around a family in Patna comprising three

children, Uma, Aruna and Arun, and their parents. Anita Desai shows the
frustrating entrapment and incarceration of the female characters in tradition, social
mores and custom where conservatism and modernization are gender specific and
serve dominant ideologies.

Anamika’s (a cousin of Uma’s in Mumbai)scholarship letter to

Oxford furthers her parent’s ambition of getting her a good bridegroom. Uma has
to leave her missionary school to take care of her baby brother. The lack of any

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role that society accords to women except in marriage is what is poignantly
articulated in the personal stories of Uma and Anamika.

The first part of the novel alternates between the bleakness of

Uma’s present and her past. Part two moves to a foreign location, America in this
case, and to Arun’s student life.Only, the obvious contrast between Indian culture-
where Desai, in an interview, pointed out tradition takes precedence over
individuals-and the western one dominated by individualism reveals at a more
subtle level of similarity.

After all, the fasting of Mira-masi and the grotesque feasting in

Melanie and Mrs. Patton’s family in America are both related to hunger. It is this
that permeates in Uma and Melanie as a hunger for fulfillment, and for a life
against “misunderstand again inattention to (their) unique and singular being”
(p.12). And the “Papas” of both the American and the Indian families, with stony
indifference, cut down any challenge to their authority. And yes, both have similar
scowls!.

A splendid novel in two segments, moving from the heart of a

loving Indian family unit, with its restrictions and prejudices, its clamorous warmth
and stimulating valuation for sustenance, to the cool point of convergence of an
American family, with its adaptability and strangely self- preventing states from
claiming brain to eating.

The primary region of the book is set in India, and set up around
Uma, a plain, irritated at young lady. Her life seems, by all accounts, to be truly
discouraging without the option of a life partner for whom she can improves his

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reputation. Over and over, we see Uma being dismissed and bearing the
desolations of being an Indian woman who is not picked as a wife of a man, but
rather then, Desai moreover sets this disrespect amidst the lives of different women
have been offered and are certainly not happy. In one case, what was seen as an
immaculate marriage is later to be seen as a devastatingly shocking one.

Fragment two is much shorter, yet based on the family’s star, Arun,
who is in the United States taking off to school. One gets the inclination that this
youthful individual is terribly harried, and depressed with his life, paying little
personality to where he’s found. Not the scarcest piece do you see him in control
of his own life, yet like his sister, is all that much being controlled by the wishes
and longings of his family, people and society.

Desai’s novel demonstrates to us that all social orders can and put weights
on us to finish or be things that we could possibly wish for. In a bona fide sense,
the reality opportunities ached for, yet not seen.

Desai’s novel demonstrated to us that all societies can put weights on us to

accomplish or be things that we could conceivably wish for. In a genuine sense, the
novel speaks the truth opportunities longed for, yet not seen.

Furthermore, as is evident in the text, women in the Indian culture are

appraised on their ability to produce male offspring. “The news came that Anamika
had had to go the hospital. She had had a miscarriage at home; it was said, after a
beating. It was said she could not bear more children. Now Anamika was flawed,
she was damaged goods. She was no longer perfect. Would she be sent back to her

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family? Everyone wanted to hear” (p.16). The inequality of value gender is
disgusting demonstrated as it wasn’t Anamika’s beating or miscarriage which
people where concerned with people where concerned with but rather with her
inability to produce sons.

As protagonist, Uma’s struggle for self- definition is stifled by her

extreme devotion to her parent and the theoretical leash she is bound to. Without
beauty she is unable to find a husband, and without a husband she is unable to
experience permanent freedom from her tyrannical parents. She is chastised for
going out with Ramu and having fun, “Quiet, you hussy! Not another word from
you, you idiot child! Mama’s face glints like a knife in the dark, growing narrower
and fiercer as it comes closer. You, you disgrace to the family” (p.19).

This book is about the children and families of middle class who is living
and surviving in Bombay. I have truly delighted in perusing this novel. It is
composed well, streams easily however not tastelessly, and is compellingly
fascinating. The characters in it are all around depicted and to a great degree
authentic.

Things being what are, the book’s title gets to be curious- fasting and
feasting, Where are profound void and renewal to be found?. It strikes you as
deceiving when the first half is over and you find the second half is another
fundamental hero. Still, by and large, I must say- awesome read.

Short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize, Desai’s stunning new novel (after
journey to Ithaca) looks gently but without sentimentality at an Indian family that,
despite Western influence, is bound by Eastern traditions. As Desai’s title implies,

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the novel is divided into two parts. At the heart of Part one, set in India, is Uma,
the overprotected daughter who finds herself starved for a life. Plain, myopic and
perhaps dim, Uma gives up school and marriage, finding herself in her 40s looking
after her demanding if well- meaning parents. Uma’s younger, prettier sister
marries quickly to escape the same fate, but seems dissatisfied. Although the
family is “quite capable of putting on a progressive, westernized front,” it’s clear
that privileges are still reserved for boys. When her brother, Arun, is born, Uma is
expected to abandon her education at the convent school to take care of him. It is
Arun, the ostensibly privileged son, smothered by his father’s expectations, who is
focus of the second part of the novel. The summer after his freshmen year at the
University of Massachusetts, Arun stays with the Pattrons, as only –too –
recognizable American family. While Deasi paints a nuanced and delicate portrait
of Uma’s family, here the writer broadens her brush strokes, starkly contrasting the
Pattons’ surfeit of food and material comforts with the domestic routine of Indian
household. Indeed, Desai is so adept at portraying Americans through Indian eyes
that the Pattons remain as inscrutable to the reader as they are to Arun. But Arun
himself, as he picks his way through a mine field of puzzling American customs,
becomes a more sympathetic character, and his final act in the novel suggests both
how far he has come and how much he has lost. Although Desai takes a risk in
shifting from the endearing Uma to Arun, she has much to say in this graceful,
supple novel about the inability of the families in either culture to nurture their
children.

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This is the story of a young Indian boy trapped in a dysfunctional Indian

family who travels to America to study and ends up an exchange student in the
house of a dysfunctional American family. The story raises questions of nationality
versus human nature, the loneliness of the human soul, and the search for affection
in a world devoid of love. While the story itself may have worked, it’s written in a
boring, almost expository manner. Desai doesn’t spend time developing her
characters and they come across the flat. They seem puppets in a play rather than
people. The novel is extremely plot driven and jam packed with too many issues
and too little exploration. I would rather have a simple story filled with issues and
characters that don’t emote. This book gave me a good look at how not to write
prose.

I am amazed at some of the negative or lukewarm reviews this book has

received. I read this when it was first published and was left breathless. I was in a
state of bliss. This is what literature is supposed to be, I thought. This book, the
first I had read by Anita Desai, restored my faith in fiction for years and was
ecstatic that I had found a book that could please me in a way that only great art is
capable of doing. It is unfortunate that Desai has not received the popular acclaim
that she deserves, despite her critical acclaim. She will undoubtedly be recognized
as one of the best writers of the late twentieth century. I simply cannot say enough
about this powerful, beautifully written, and subtle novel.

Anita Desai has been celebrated by some for her ear for dialogue, but she
gets it all wrong here. Her presentation of life in the United States is especially
obvious. Her characters, living in Massachusetts, talk like they are in Texas. The

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America daughter, predictably, is a bulimic, something that may strike Indian

writers as novel but in Desai’s hands in nothing more than a cliché. And she seems
terribly amused by her young America jock’s pastime of “jogging”, a word that a
real American high school football player wouldn’t be caught dead using.

As for her chapters set in India, Desai allows ideology to drive her
narrative, with predictable results. It they way she incorporates dowry death into
her story and less of a cliché in India then the way she utilizes the bulimic girl in
order to describe American excess? Unfortunately, American readers of
Anglophone Indian fiction are so often overwhelmed by the exoticism of these
stories that they fail to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Very disappointing work from one of my favorite authors. Minimal

character development, hardly and plot to speak of, stereotypical in the extreme,
‘Fasting, Feasting” is a very pale reflection of the earlier ‘Clear Light of Day’. The
attempt to juxtapose an eastern family dynamic versus a western one, without fully
exploring either, came off as forced and disjointed... And left each narrative feeling
incomplete and unfulfilling to the reader.

By reading this novel I have made another conscious effort on

understanding and appreciating the Indian authors… and it has paid off… Indian
authors have a very dies feeling to the whole storyline which makes it easy to
related to… but then there is a distinct disadvantages to it as well… the outsider
who reads this book may find it difficult to comprehend the situations, dilemma’s
and the undercurrent… also there is a conscious effort on showing the negatives
more than the positive.

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The central character of the novel is novel doubts Uma…the eldest one …
she is clumsy and has no major achievements to her credit expect that she took care
of his small brother and failed her school exams regularly… the black sheep of
the family on which nobody has any hopes… but the character does evoke
sympathy … the life which leads has not been chosen by her but gifted to her
family… her only fault is she obliged them.

Aruna is happy character in the plot. She is someone who knows how to get
things done and is successful in everything she does. That’s what her parents
thinks about her and is proud of the fact that too with a person who is rich and non
fussy. Again a stark reality in our society wherein the only achievement of a
women sometimes is carrying off a marriage.

Patton’s family is the typical American family comprising of the

parents and kids, all doing what they doing what they want to do no dependencies,
no interferences from anyone. Relaxed parenting leading to behavioral problems
with the daughter, Melaine. She is in her own shell which is enveloped in her
unhappiness.

Fasting, Feasting is a bleak book by all standards .The words,

situations and the character evokes sympathy but you don’t feel for them. As in
they are mere characters for the readers. The style is lucid and simple. The novel in
contrasts has been worked out well accurately. But the novel doesn’t make for a
happy reading.

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Fasting, Feasting is relevant as the title though. Fasting, symbolizes

deprivation, unhappiness and tragedy of one daughter Uma in India. Feasting is the
celebration of the opulence of America and of the daughter living there.
 The novel also conveys the message that parents, siblings, family ties,
country boundaries are all threads that bind us as human. These are ties which are
not made by choice. We inherit them and live with them there must be a way out
for some of us to leave these ties behind. Some of us find it. Some don’t!!!

Between Uma and Arun, between Mama Papa’s family and the Patton’s,
between Mira-Masi’s sparse meals and the Patton’ fridge full of food, Desai
cleverly integrates the title of the book.

Also brought to mind for me the part of the first line of Anna Karenina:
‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. This was the first book by
Anita Desai that I read. Enjoyed the wonderful play of words and the way
everyday characters and happenings are brought to life here but they book left me
oddly dissatisfied too, waiting for some sort of closure for the main characters at
least.

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