Fasting, Feasting

The opening scene set in a lavish Indian estate immediately portrays Papa and Mama as a wealthy and powerful couple, living a privileged life where there initial queries about what to have for afternoon tea—fritters and tea or fritters, tea and sweets?—are the kind of frivolous worries that characterize the idle rich.

While swinging languidly in the afternoon heat, they order their daughter, Uma, about as if she were yet another servant. And Uma, the protagonist and narrator, seems accustomed to being ordered about.  From her gray hair, it becomes clear that Uma, their eldest daughter, has been in this servile role for some time. While the parents seem preoccupied with getting a Kashmir sweater to make sure their son, her brother, is warm enough in America, they seem to pay little attention to welfare of the daughter who lives with them.

Uma sees her parents as one singular entity, calling them MamandPapa. While they came from dramatically different backgrounds, they make every effort to blur their pre-marital past and to come across as Siamese twins. On occasion, Uma does see her mother show flashes of her girlish self whenever she covertly plays rummy with friends; however, Papa is always maintaining his authoritarian appearance. He curtly orders his servants about, brags about his tennis victories over colleagues, and makes jokes at social gatherings that are intended to humiliate or bring discomfort to his counterparts, reinforcing and elevating his alpha status.

The opening park scene portrays Papa in a restless semi-retirement that, like the rusting car, illustrates a slow and difficult decline, especially for someone like Papa, with a massive ego, who must obsessively keep up the appearance of power and authority. Rather than enjoy the outing in the park, rather than slow down and notice the Jacaranda bloom, Papa plows straight ahead at a brisk pace, as if he were on an urgent mission. This urgency intensifies on the trip home as he barks orders at his driver, telling him to go faster.

Papa’s inability to accept his advanced age and the shift in identity that comes with it signals a man relentless and maniacal in his obsession with appearances. While one might feel pity for Papa’s struggle, his actions, as revealed by the chapter, make sympathy difficult. Papa not only forced his wife to suffer through a late pregnancy—a pregnancy that very well could have taken her life—but he also strips his daughter, Aruna, of her original name and identity, giving both to her younger brother. The way he orders and treats the women of his family and the way he favors his son and desperately tries to hang on to power makes him a symbolic representation of patriarchal authority. In the patriarchal culture of India, women are taught to be subservient and subordinate. While Mama may be his companion, it is clear that she and her daughters are less valuable and less of a priority than the men of the household.

Chapter 3 further develops the substantial inequality that exists between the women and men of Uma’s household beginning with the fruit ceremony. Papa’s refusal to eat unprepared fruit and the elaborate lengths that Mama goes to in order to remove the peel and pith of an orange to meet his standards reinforces his total power in the household. Ironically, rather than squelching anger or resentment, Mama seems to take great pride in the daily ritual of being the perfect wife and servant to Papa. 

While Mama’s pride in her servile and subservient role may seem surprising from a Western point of view, the lower status and expectations of women are a byproduct of a larger patriarchal culture. This gender inequality is reinforced when Uma begs Mother Agnes to keep her at the Convent School. Mother Agnes, the headmistress of the school, only reinforces her father’s ruling, ennobling the role of feminine child-rearing, reminding her of the Virgin Mary and giving her a card featuring Mary, the feminine archetype of child-care, holding baby Jesus. Uma’s subsequent collapse and violent fit are a physical response to a powerful emotional betrayal. Hoping that a woman would be the one to stand up for a girl’s education, Uma is devastated when that very woman only seems to reinforce the male dominated status quo represented by Papa and Papa’s decision.

The male dominated status begins at birth, which is illustrated in the extreme care and “proper attention” given to baby Arun. While servants were allowed to take care of the girls, they are not suitable for looking after the boy, who is fawned over like a young prince. When servants bathe or dress him, Mama is there to supervise and micro-manage their performance, and his diet is strictly measured with the precise details reported to Papa. These details over the baby’s diet become a source of grave concern, especially for Papa, when it is revealed that Arun is a vegetarian and refuses meat. Papa equates vegetarianism with the humble origins of his ancestry and meat with the progress and power brought about in his life by education and success. He recoils at the idea that his only male heir would regress back to a peasant diet and not enjoy meat, a symbol of the family’s rising success and power.

The chapter’s final scene illustrates an older Arun, who, even though much younger than his sister Uma, has already grown accustomed to his superior household status. Knowing his role within the family and how obsessed his parents are with ensuring he eat a perfectly regimented diet, he uses this information to play a cruel prank on his sister, threatening to tell Mama and Papa that Uma gave him unripe guava. This threat has an immediate response as Uma leaps up in terror and gets her hair caught on bougainvillea thorns. Arun laughs hysterically at his sister, reinforcing the notion that women are playthings; their emotions and fears can be manipulated and toyed with for the amusement and in the service of the men.