Fasting, Feasting

“Uma tried not to look into the priest’s face, or listen to the words of the hymn either: there was an air of abandonment about them that made her feel uneasily as if MamaPapa, those enemies of abandon, were standing behind her and watching her and all of them, with scorn.” 

Even far removed from her household and ensconced within the Ashram’s evening prayers, Uma struggles to lose herself completely in the religious ceremony. MamaPapa, the singular, monolithic authority that her parents represent, are obsessed with maintaining a rigid outward appearance, a discipline that never allows them to lose self-control in momentary displays of emotion or piety. Though she desperately wants to lose herself completely in the prayers like the rest of the pilgrims, she suffers from a self-conscious anxiety and traumatic memory of her parents’ patterned judgment and contempt for anything outside their range of understanding and view of.

“Who cares what they say? Who cares what they think?” 

Aruna’s response to Mama is loaded with layered meaning. Anamika’s arranged marriage is a disaster, and a recent miscarriage after a vicious beating by her husband has aroused familial fears that Anamika will be sent home in shame. Although Uma secretly struggles to crystallize and focus her own response to Mama’s fear of public shaming, Aruna gives perfect voice to her own scrambled thoughts. She dismisses the family’s superficial and damaging obsession with public appearance, especially since this fear seems to overwhelm what should be a genuine concern for Anamika’s health and security.

“Yes, that is why the Goyals are able to do such things, because of parents being in too much of a hurry. If parents will not take the time to make proper enquiries, what terrible fates their daughters may have! Be grateful that Uma was not married into a family that could have burnt her to death in order to procure another dowry.” 

Mrs. Joshi’s remarks function as cultural criticism and foreshadowing in the aftermath of Mama and Papa’s first failed attempt to marry off Uma. The Goyal family, sadly, is indicative of a larger cultural pattern of dowry swindling, where families like the Goyals take advantage of other families’ desperation, taking the dowry money that comes with the bride and using it for personal financial gain. This practice turns young women into human commodities, to be traded and dumped like stocks on the market. Beyond the ugly dehumanization of this dowry system, Mrs. Joshi alludes to the absolute vulnerability of young women like Uma, whose health, safety and future are completely dependent on their parents’ diligent research and good judgment in arranging these marriages. Furthermore, it foreshadows two future disasters in marital arrangements: 1) Uma’s parents repeat their mistake yet again, arranging an even more disastrous and humiliating marital arrangement, and 2) Amarika, in the novel’s most horrifying exposure of the dowry systems inhumanity, will literally be burned to death by her in-laws. 

“All those astrologers we consulted about her horoscope, what liars they proved to be.” 

In a conversation with Mira-masi, Mama bitterly laments Uma’s ill fate in the aftermath of her second failed arrangement. Uma, initially given a bright future by the astrologers at birth, is seen as a failure by her parents. While it is true that her marital arrangements are failures, these are failures brought upon by her parents’ reckless and desperate decision making. Rather than acknowledging their own responsibility in these disasters, they instead blame the victim, Uma, as well as the astrologers.

“Clearly Aruna had a vision of a perfect world in which all of them—her own family as well as Arvind’s—were flaws she was constantly uncovering and correcting in her quest for perfection.” 

Aruna, the second daughter, seems to have everything—a rich, handsome and good husband and an affluent lifestyle in Bombay. In spite of all these blessings, Aruna’s fault finding and perfectionism undermine her ability to be happy and to be grateful for her good fortune.

“Or rather, these were only what edged something much darker, wilder, more thrilling, a kind of exultation—it was exactly what she had always wanted, she realized. Then they had saved her. The saving was what made her shudder and cry, there on the sandbar, soaking wet, while the morning sun leapt up in the hazy, sand-coloured sky and struck the boat, the brass pots that the women held, and their white drifting garments in the water.” 

Uma nearly drowns during a family boating trip on the Ganges River but is saved from near death by her family. Although it is unclear whether Uma’s near drowning was a willful attempt at suicide, her sadness at being saved from the river speaks to the misery of her condition, where death is a form of freedom and life is a prolonged prison sentence.

“When they leave, the ladies laugh gaily all the way back to their own homes and families where no one expects any such talents or expertise from them, but Uma clutches a large envelope full of Mrs. O’Henry’s failures, each pressed fern and violet and pastel paper frill—tokens of a fairytale existence elsewhere. Elsewhere. Elsewhere.” 

While the rest of the ladies at Mrs. O’Henry’s coffee party head off for lighter, more frivolous households, Uma sees the coffee party and Mrs. O’Henry’s leaf-pressings as emblems of a larger, fantastic world she is prohibited from exploring.

“He might just as well have written that from the local college hostel, Uma thought in disappointment.”

Arun’s letters from college in Massachusetts are highly anticipated by his family. Arun was not only the sole boy in the family, but the first to attend college abroad. Ironically, in spite of all the anticipatory buildup, Arun’s letters are disappointingly laconic, with only superficial phrases about his classes and the weather. 

“Where under the old tyrant, there had been nothing but dust and desolation around the big house, Mrs. Joshi now had a bed of roses bloom in her front garden while at the back were beds of fresh vegetables, so profuse and luxuriant that their bounty was shared with all the neighbors.” 

Mrs. Joshi serves the plot as a foil to Mama. While Mama lives under her husband’s ultimate authority, Mrs. Joshi, once liberated from her mother-in-law, became the leader of her household, and this agency contributes to a lush and fertile atmosphere of joyful abundance.

“A career. Leaving home. Living alone. These troubling, secret possibilities now entered Uma’s mind—as Mama would have pointed out had she known—whenever Uma was idle. They were like seeds dropped on the stony, arid land that Uma inhabited. Sometimes, miraculously, they sprouted forth the idea: run away, escape. But Uma could not visualize escape in the form of a career.” 

Uma, though desperate for escape, is limited in her ability to imagine and fully conceptualize a career. Her mental landscape, made stony and arid by her condition, is the antithesis of Mrs. Joshi’s fertile and lush physical landscape. Although Uma has the desire to leave her home, her limited imagination and understanding make a real escape highly unlikely.

“Only at night the idea that there was someone who had won what she desired would come winging through her in the dark, rustling her awake, sweeping across her and making her sit up so she could see its shadowy passage and watch it fade into the paleness of daybreak, the sound of its beating wings overtaken by the cacophony of the mynah birds in the sun-drenched trees outside.” 

Uma’s dreams are filled with thoughts about Mira-masi, perhaps the only woman she knows who actually achieved what she most desired in life. Thus, Mira-masi is an ideal figure for Uma, a symbol of spiritual realization.

“The frown was filled with everything he thought of working women, of women who dared to presume to step into the world he occupied.” 

Papa’s contempt towards Dr. Dutt is a reflection of his disapproval of career women. Very much a reflection of traditional patriarchal Indian society, Papa believes that careers and professions are the sole domain of men.

“Never earned anything in her life, made me spend and spend, on her dowry and her wedding. Oh, yes, spend till I’m ruined, till I am a pauper.” 

Papa’s bitter and cutting remarks are double-edged. On one hand, they recall the humiliation of her failed marriages—remembering not her real suffering and degradation but the money lost—and on the other hand, they are a bitter rejection of Uma’s attempt to support herself outside the home. 

“The letter—the letter from Oxford—where is it? Did you—did you burn it?” 

Uma’s direct question to Lila Aunty, Anamika’s mother, in the wake of her horrible murder (by burning) forces the family to confront their own complicity in Anamika’s wasted potential. Rather than let her realize her intellectual promise and study at Oxford, they locked the letter away and used it as a bargaining chip in what turned out to be a disastrous marital arrangement. 

“Uma dips her jar in the river, and lifts it high over her head. When she tilts it and pours it out, the murky water catches the blaze of the sun and flashes fire.” 

Part I’s final passage combines the sacred and the profane. Uma is not only participating in the final sacred phase of Anamika’s traditional Hindu funeral, but simultaneously recalls Anamika’s horrible and profane death by immolation through the image of fire and water.

“There are so many objects, so rarely any people.” 

Arun’s experience studying in America provides a sharp critique of suburban culture and conspicuous consumption. Walking through the suburban streets, Arun sees very little life, warmth, or human exchange. Instead, he sees lawns littered with fake flamingoes, gnomes, bicycles and other substitutions for life and meaning.

“Mr. Patton sounds petulant, a minister who cannot see why his congregation dwindles.” 

This quote recalls both the ceremonial language of the failed attempt at the steak barbecue, but also the emotional distance between Mr. Patton and his family. Neither of his children attends the barbecue in spite of Mr. Patton’s pleas, and the whole contrived dinner dissolves into a failed ceremony and a public display of a disjointed family.

“The woods seemed to draw closer, settle about the window, looking in. Seeing the string of the shade dangle before him, Arun pulled it. The shade tumbled down precipitously. The room was dark. He tugged to raise it a little, a few inches from the sill, but it merely fell lower. Now it hung limply from its rail, its full length unfurled.” 

Arun views the woods and wilderness that surround the Patton home and the suburbs with great trepidation. To him, it represents emptiness and desolation, the void of meaning forever closing in on life. In the American suburbs, people like Mrs. Patton attempt to temporarily hold back the void by vapid consumerism. Arun, however, attempts to literally shut out the wilderness by closing his shades.

“On the other side of the world, he is caught up again in the sugar-sticky web of family conflict.” 

Even though Arun desperately hoped to liberate himself from the habitual family conflict and control he experienced growing up in India, living with the Patton family inevitably returns him to the daily dramatics of family squabbling and dysfunction. His private thoughts reveal the impossibility or difficulty of escaping familial or communal conflict.

“Arun gets out of the way, quickly; one can’t tell what is more dangerous in this country, the pursuit of health or of sickness.” 

Having just caught Melanie, the Patton daughter, in another bulimic episode, Arun appeals to her brother, Rod, to intervene. Rod, however, is so caught up in his workout routine that he cannot be bothered to help. Melanie’s habitual sickness coupled with Rod’s obsessive pursuit of health point to a unifying portrait of unbalanced lifestyles fueled by disconnection and neglect.

“What do you think we all are—garbage bags you keep stuffing and stuffing?” 

Melanie rejects Mrs. Patton’s breakfast offering of scrambled eggs and bitterly lashes out, pointing to her mother’s mindless shopping and inattention to her children, in which she mistakes food for motherly love, affection and attention.

“This is no plastic mock-up, no cartoon representation such as he has been seeing all summer; this is a real pain and a real hunger. But what hunger does a person so sated feel?” 

Arun stumbles upon Melanie, who has collapsed to the ground after a bulimic episode in the woods. For the first time since his arrival in the suburbs, Arun sees real suffering and real hunger for love, attention and comfort. Ironically, Melanie’s sickness is not the result of real starvation—there is an overabundance of food in her household—but a starvation of substantive familial care and concern.

‘My Lord,” says Mrs. Patton. ‘Dear Lord.’ 

Just as Melanie has revealed raw and unfiltered suffering, Mrs. Patton reveals the same, forced to confront her daughter’s bulimia and pain. For the first time in Part II, Mrs. Patton’s words are an appeal—whether intended or not—to a higher spiritual being, something beyond the material world she so obsessively inhabits. Exposed to her daughter’s suffering, she cannot escape, deny or evade the truth of her own neglect and frivolous pre-occupations anymore.