Plot Summary

Rather a series of events from a life than a complexly plotted work. We follow the fortunes of Uma and
Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day to day living.
The novel is in two parts. The first part is set in India and is focused on the life of Uma who is the
overworked daughter of Mama and Papa. She is put upon by them at every turn, preparing food,
running errands. In the early part of the novel we see her struggling at school. She is not very bright but
loves the sisters who teach and appreciate her. Finally she is made to leave school and serve her
parents.
We meet many interesting characters through her; Ramu-Bhai a travelling bon viveur who tries to show
Uma a good time. He is banished by her parents.
Another character is the religious Mira Masi who tells Uma all the tales of Krishna and takes her to the
ashram allowing her to escape her mother's domination for a time.
Uma's parents attempt to marry her off on two occasions; on the first occasion the chosen man fell for
Uma's younger sister, Aruna. On the second occasion a marriage took place but it turns out the Uma's
new husband already has a wife. She lives with his sisters while he lives in another town spending her
dowry on his ailing business. Uma's father quickly spirits her home.
We are also told of the episode of Anamika's (Uma's cousin) sad fate. She has won a scholarship to
Oxford but her parents insist that she get married. She does and fails to please her husband by
providing him with children. He keeps her for a time as a servant but eventually she dies by burning. It
is strongly hinted that her in-laws killed her. The final scene of Part 1 is the immersion of Anamika's
ashes in the sacred river.
We are left with great sympathy for Uma and her simple kindness as she survives as best she can in a
not altogether friendly world.
In Part 2 we meet Arun, Uma's privileged brother. He is attending college in America and during summer
holidays he lives with the Pattons an all American family. Again, plot is not complex or intricate. The
events are told in a serial manner as Arun encounters them.
Of note is his intense dislike of American food and cooking methods. He is dismayed at the behaviour of
Melanie, the daughter who is deeply troubled and suffering from bulimia. Although Mrs Patton seems to
care about Melanie, she does little to help.
While apparently close, the family are actually distant from one another, something very different from
Arun's experience of family life in India. Arun spends most of his time alone and isolated.
In her novel, Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai eventually accomplishes what many writers
attempt and then fail to achieve. She uses light touch, simple language, uncomplicated
structure, but at the same time addresses some very big issues and makes a point.
Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity
that parents present. These parents, however, are not at all alike. Mama is protective,
perhaps selfish, and not a little indolent. Papa is a parsimonious control freak who locks
away the telephone because someone might use it. But they are at least together. Their
relationship has survived, despite the long wait for a son, and their disappointment at his
disability.
Uma and Arun also have a sister, Aruna. She is bright and pretty, but in her own way
she is also disabled, because she is a woman. Arun's disability is visible, but Aruna's
exists because of the her society's preconceptions about women.
Uma is not pretty, nor is she academic. She wears thick glasses and has fits. And so in
the middle class society the family inhabits, Uma can pursue only two possible roles.
Either she can be married off, or she can become a labourer, a near slave for the family.
The former, of course, is the same as the latter. Only the location is different. For Uma
marriage doesn't happen. It does, but it fails before it starts, since the groom was
already married and merely wanted to collect another dowry. The arranged marriages of
both Uma's sister and her cousin also fail. Initially well starred, both end tragically.
The first part of Fasting, Feasting suggests a domestic drama, a faintly comic family
trying to cope with their own cultural minority status within India's vastness. It takes
awhile for the tragic elements of the story to surface. But when they do, they also
disappoint, because only the two disabled characters, Uma and Arun, eventually display
any honesty or compassion, everyone else being merely selfish, even those who kill
themselves to end the pain. For women, it seems, even achievement is nothing but an
asset to assist their trade. 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 to be a pleasant family tale of the idiosyncrasies of culture becomes a tragedy,
and a tragedy for all women. Ugly, unmemorable Uma is the only apparent survivor, and
that only because she is not even a competitor. She exists on the scraps of life she is
allowed.
But what of Arun, the disabled boy? Well he is quite a bright lad. He goes to university in
the USA, and to an institution with status in Massachusetts. But what is he to do in the
holidays when the college is closed? We can't afford to bring his all the way home,
concludes parsimonious Papa.
So Arun lodges with the Pattons, an all-American nuclear family, an American Dream of
sorts, mum, dad, two kids, one of each. But Dad is a laconic type. A beer from the fridge
keeps him quiet. The son has all kinds of ambitions, and yet none that are realistic. Mom
is an emotional wreck. She years for something in her confusion, but has not idea what
it might be. And her daughter is bulimic. Happy families.
So through Arun's eyes, and to some extent as a result of his culturally challenging
presence, Anita Desai presents a picture of middle class American life that is utterly
dysfunctional. But it is again the women who are most deeply affected. Mom does all the
shopping and cooking to feed the unappreciative men and the daughter who cannot eat.
She fantasises about Arun's cultural authenticity, sees in him qualities for which she
yearns. The daughter is a complete head case. She is fat wanting to be thin, eating to
fast, stuffing sweets until she vomits, perhaps a slave to a male-generated concept of
female perfection. And Arun witnesses all of 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, if
imbalanced scenarios, India and the USA. It offers two deformed observers, Uma and
Arun. It unpicks two contrasting cultures and finds that women are slaves in both. The
opposites are thus ultimately similar, hardly opposed.


The family life in two different cultures is portrayed beautifully in this novel. The Indian family consists of a retired
father, mother who is a housewife, their two daughters Uma and Aruna and the youngest son, Arun. Uma, the
eldest daughter was refused to study a lot by her conservative parents and was forced to do only household
works. Her younger sister Aruna is a very bold, charming and ambitious character quite opposite to Uma. She
has brought out a good marriage while Uma gets married to a person without knowing that he is already married
and has four children. When she came to know about it, her parents brought her back home. Again she is forced
to stay alone doing all the household works losing all her desires and hopes in life. Arun, the youngest son, who
is the parents pet, gets admission to higher studies in Massachusetts, USA. Then there is Umas cousin sister,
the beautiful Amelia and her tragedy in life and also her cousin brother, Ramu in the novel. Across the world in
Massachusetts, where young Arun goes as a student, the life in suburbs is quite different. In the Patton family
with which he is staying, the men char hunks of meat while the women folk dont appear to cook or eat. At all is
bewildering end full of terror for the young adolescent far from home. Thus the story moves from the hub of a
close knit Indian household , with its traditional obligations and impositions ,its overpowering warmth and sexual
response to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedoms, freezers and paradoxically self denying self
indulgence. In both, there are victims and survivers.
Cultural Context
Two cultures are explored in this text, the Indian and the American. In both cultures males are
portrayed as dominant with Arun being given tutors(17) while Uma is taken out of school. (18). Indian
society is portrayed as patriarchal. See (24/5) as the women watch Papa eating fruit! Note Papa's
attitude to women working (143) His frownfor women who dared to step into the world he occupied.
In America things are much the same. Mr. Patton rules the house while Mrs Patton stays sane by visiting
the shopping mall (see Chap. 19). Ironically, Mama appear to have more freedom than Mrs Patton (30)
those games of rummy, those secret betel leaves..

Themes and issues
Suffering
Human suffering is depicted frequently in both parts of the novel. Uma is made to suffer by her parents
and men who take advantage of her. The unusual thing about her is her response to this suffering. She
seems to maintain optimism throughout her ordeals. Anamika's terrible life and the abuse she suffers
may illuminate your discussion of suffering as would the plight of Melanie who suffers mental illness and
bulimia and is a sad example of American youth.
Loneliness
The plight of Arun in America will yield many examples of loneliness as will Uma herself who despite her
large extended family keeping her busy seems quite isolated.
Loyalty/Betrayal
You might advance the notion that Uma and Anamika are betrayed by their parents in that they treat
them very badly when it comes to marriage and relationships. Both girls are seen as burdens to be
disposed of and you could say they were betrayed. Similarly, Melanie's plight is so ignored by her
mother that the word betrayal might not be too strong.
Biographical Information
Desai was born on June 24, 1937, at Mussoorie, a hill station north of Delhi, India, to D.
N. Mazumdar, a Bengali business executive, and Toni Nime, a German expatriate. As a
child, Desai spoke German at home and Hindi among her friends. At primary school, she
learned to read and write Englishwhich eventually became her literary language
publishing her first short story at the age of nine. Despite the somewhat limited
opportunities for women in Indian society, Desai attended Queen Mary's Higher
Secondary School in New Delhi before enrolling at Miranda House, Delhi University,
where she earned a bachelor's degree with honors in English literature in 1957. In
December of 1958, she married Ashrin Desai, with whom she has four children. Although
she regularly wrote short stories since adolescence, Desai officially launched her career
as a novelist in 1963 with the British publication of Cry, the Peacock, which was
subsequently followed by Voices in the City (1965) and Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1968). In
the late 1970s, Desai published the critically acclaimed novel Fire on the
Mountain (1977), which won the National Academy of Letters Award, and Games at
Twilight and Other Stories (1978), her first short story collection. During the 1980s,
Desai enhanced her reputation with the novelsClear Light of Day (1980) and In
Custody (1984), both of which were short-listed for the Booker Prize, England' s highest
literary award. Desai later adapted In Custody as a screenplay, which Ismail Merchant
and James Ivory produced as a motion picture in 1993. In 1982 Desai published the
children's work Village by the Sea: An Indian Family Story, which won the Guardian
Award for Children's Fiction. In 1990 she received the Padma Shri, India's highest artistic
honor. A member of both the Advisory Board for English in New Delhi and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Desai
has also taught writing at several universities, including Girton College at Cambridge
University, Smith College, and Mt. Holyoke College. In 1993 she joined the faculty at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a creative writing instructor, teaching one
semester each year and returning to India for the remainder. Desai has since published
the novels Journey to Ithaca(1995) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), which brought her a
third nomination for the Booker Prize, and Diamond Dust: Stories (2000), her second
short story collection.

Fasting, Feasting (2000), so far Desai's latest novel, is, above all, a work whose main concern
is the condition of women in India and is related to women in general. To deal with the situation of
women in India, however, it is impossible to stay simply with what is termed "feminism" in the
Western sense. First, as Vrinda Nabar argues in her book Caste as Woman, "feminism hasn't even
begun in any real sense in India" (Nabar 6), although what can be called the women's movement
with its varying phases dates back roughly to the early nineteenth century. The Indian cultural and
social setting is different from the West and Nabar explores the social and historical contexts of
Indian cultural tradition, because, what is peculiar to India, is "the extent of the insistence on such
discrimination, the preference given to boys over girls as being historically and traditionally
prescribed and therefore indisputable" (Nabar 68). It is therefore necessary to "discredit some of
the legacies of the tradition" both in the social consciousness and in the collective unconscious, to
adopt a different (from the West) set of paradigms before any consciousness-raising and a
consequent reform could take place (see Nabar 20, 30, 34). Second, any relevant research
concerning women should not depart from assumptions expressed by vague and simplistic notions
such as "the third world women" or "Asian women." Such discourse, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty
warns, would be Eurocentric and therefore based upon a paternalistic attitude and would create a
"homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group" which would consider a specific
group of women regardless of its ethnic, social, religious, and historical context (see Mohanty 214,
199, 212). Fasting, Feasting is a novel which attempts to interconnect its two parts in one work
and this aspiration can be called conveniently called "through difference to androgyny" (a phrase
that would certainly please Virginia Woolf). The "difference" from which Desai departs is this: the
first part is told as perceived by Uma, a female protagonist, and, characteristically, its prevalent
setting is a domestic environment. As such it is a representation of the "accumulation of
unrecorded life" (Woolf 135). On the contrary, the main hero of the second part, Uma's brother
Arun, is put into a "larger world," an emblematically masculine environment. In each part the
respective sets of values and sensitivity associated with its main character can be observed. The
"difference" is alluded to by Desai already in the title of her book: te words "fasting" and "feasting"
can stand for the two parts of the novel respectively: the first is situated in India (the country of
"fasting," which refers not only to the religious aspect, but also to an unwilling "fasting" of the
many poor of the country) and the second in the United States (the country of "feasting,"
abundance). However, there is an apparent difference (another one) as concerns the nature of
perception of the two main personages. The "fasting" and the "feasting" of the individual
characters is relative and multiple at the same time as perceived by the main protagonists of each
part respectively.
The Women

This book is filled with all sort of women there was MamaPapa, Uma, Aunt
Miramasi, Annamika, Melanie and Mrs. Paton. Amongst the women of India, the
reader discovers the life of an aging married woman, a single woman, a widow and a
newly married woman. In their varying shapes and sizes their stories are never truly
happy. Women were not expected to be educated, they were expected to marry. It
begins and ends with marriage. The luckiest of characters in this pursuit is Mama
whose existence in conjoint with Papa. Her freedoms are fewa game of cards with a
neighborand often enjoyed in secret. Annamika, Umas cousin, despite her
acceptance of an Ivy League, as tradition dictates pursue a life of marriage to a man
she barely knows. As wonderful as the mans credential were, Annamikas fate
wasnt. The widow Miramasi tried her best to stand against the dictates of tradition
and to her Uma gravitated towards. She was not perfect, but she lived her life
following her path, for some widows of India are often orphanedkicked out and left
to fend on their own like beggars in the street (see here). However, we soon discover
that the women of India are not so different from the Women in the US. Through the
eyes of Arun we discover that Melanie and Mrs. Paton suffer like the Women he knew
in India. The manifestations were different, but the dynamics similar:

He (Arun) stares at her to see if her (Melanie) feelings reflect his, but he cannot
decipher her expression. It is certainly not the sullen mask he usually sees, but it is
not one he can recognizeThen Arun does see a resemblance to something he
knows: a resemblance to the contorted face of an enraged sister who, failing to
express her outrage against neglect, against misunderstanding, against inattention
to her unique and singular being and its hungers, merely spits and froths in
ineffectual protest.
And so we learn, as we learn of these women, that cultures may differ and the details
of an experience may differ, but the pain and suffering inflicts all.