Fasting, Feasting

While Arun, as a male and an accomplished scholar, has many more opportunities than Uma, he too struggles to escape familial obligation and to forge his own self-determined identity. Arun’s childhood in India is spent in a single-minded and enforced discipline of academic rigor. Attending school by day and literally repeating the school day curriculum with a cadre of subject tutors by night, Arun’s boyhood and adolescence are centered entirely on two goals that are enforced by his father: pass his examinations and earn an academic scholarship. By the time Arun does in fact pass his examinations and earns the academic scholarship, there is no joy or celebration in the occasion. Arun’s life, bereft of recreation and any counter-balance to spartan academic training, has left him incapable of expressing happiness, because happiness has never been the point. Instead, he accepts his scholarship prize with the stoic dispassion that is the consequence of a life devoid of self-exploration and determination.

For this reason, his studies at the University of Massachusetts represent a rare freedom and opportunity for greater self-determination. Initially, it does seem liberating, as college life affords Arun the ability to separate himself from communal obligation. The lectures, his job at the library, his disengaged roommate, and the vapid partying at the college dorms provide him with innumerable options to disengage and remain anonymous. While his life at college may seem lonely and alienating, for Arun, his solitude is a personal choice, and personal choice is the very thing that he never had at home in India.

While Arun is able to carve out privacy and independence during the college term, the summer term gives his parents an opportunity to exert renewed control over his life from half-way across the world. Needing a place to stay over the summer, Arun is obliged to accept a living arrangement set up by his parents, an arrangement that forces him back into familial limitations and obligations. Taking a room at the home of the Patton’s, relatives of Mrs. O’Henry, Arun struggles to find meaning and connection within the cold and sterile suburban home. While Mrs. Patton attempts to take him under her wing, taking him on shopping trips, preparing him vegetarian meals, and including him in family outings, it is a forced companionship. Finding the shopping trips wasteful and self-indulgent and Mrs. Patton’s interpretation of vegetarianism to be markedly different than Indian vegetarianism, Arun’s relationship with her is fraught with miscommunication and cultural misunderstanding. Arun, having lived his life in a culture of obligation, is unable to extricate himself from Mrs. Patton’s overtures and is unable to communicate his personal needs and preferences to her. This is not simply his problem, but the problem of the rest of the family, who are all notably distant from one another, rarely sharing meals together and ignoring troubling patterns that plague the family.

Arun, thrust in the role of silent cultural critic, discovers one of these patterns in Melanie’s bulimia. Melanie eats a steady diet of junk food and candy, gorging herself on mouthful after mouthful of peanuts and Hershey bars. Later, she will sneak away in secrecy to purge all the toxic junk food in bulimic fits of self-induced vomiting. While Arun instantly realizes that something is wrong, the rest of the family either ignores or dismisses all the obvious signs of Melanie’s disease until Mrs. Patton finally catches her daughter in the act. Through the Patton family, Arun realizes the difference between food and nourishment. While the Patton family’s freezers are overflowing with meat and food, the family members, particularly Melanie, are starved for the nourishment offered by genuine love.

In the culminating episode of Part II, Arun manages to literally and symbolically shed himself of both families. The summer over, he packs his bags and prepares to leave the conflict of the Patton home behind. But before he leaves, he decides that there is no room to fit the parcel from his family—a brown shawl and some tea—in his suitcase. Instead of taking it, he leaves it with Mrs. Patton, and his final departure from the home is a symbolic purging of both family burdens. While Uma’s character follows a sustained tragic arc, the final stage of Arun’s character arc at least offers the hope of a new school year, lighter burdens, and a renewed self-determination. 

Papa is the central authority figure of Part I, and characterized by his obsession with maintaining his masculine appearance of status and control. Within the household, he is treated like a Rajah, barking commands at the servants, arranging marriages, imposing routine, refusing fruit until his wife and daughter have prepared it properly, and only engaging in jokes that bring discomfort and embarrassment to his colleagues in the legal community. Semi-retired from a successful legal practice, rather than accepting or embracing a slower pace of living, Papa struggles to maintain his official status and authority in spite of the visible signs of his waning influence, status, and vitality. 

Often described as a single unit conjoined with her husband, Mama’s role in the household is to accommodate her husband’s every need, even when those needs counter the health and wellbeing of herself and her children. For example, when Papa insists she follow through with a potentially lethal pregnancy, she obliges him. Even though she is more visibly supportive to her children and more outwardly affectionate, she quickly marches in lockstep with her husbands’ commands and forms an outward unified leadership front within the household. Although she secretly enjoys card games and gossip with her girlfriends, Papa’s retirement and disapproval limit even these momentary glimpses of individuality and self- expression.

Aruna

Aruna, the middle-child of the family, unlike Uma, is both beautiful and academically accomplished. Initially named Arun, she is already a teenager when her birth name and identity are given away to her new baby brother. This perhaps explains Aruna’s ceaseless determination to establish her own separate and perfect identity. While she is extremely fortunate, marrying a handsome and successful husband who treats her well and offers her a life of affluence in Bombay, she is rendered hapless by relentless perfectionism. Even though her life is leisurely and marked by good fortune, she is ill-equipped to fully enjoy or realize the happiness that life has so generously given her.

Mira-masi, a widow and distant relative of Mama and Papa, is the most deeply spiritual character in the novel, spending her later years in an endless pilgrimage around India visiting family and praying at temples. While every other character treats Uma like a child and a failure, Mira-masi views her setbacks and sufferings not as a curse, but as a blessing, believing she has been chosen and blessed by Lord Shiva. Relentlessly devout, Mira-masi resolves to keep traveling, through sickness and advanced age, until she reclaims a sacred idol of Lord Shiva that she lost in one of her journeys. When she finally does reclaim an idol of Lord Shiva and retires to a temple in the Himalayas, Uma comes to see her as the living representation of a woman that has achieved her greatest desire. She is the closest the novel comes to a symbol of self-realization and fulfillment.

If Mira-masi represents self-realization and fulfillment, Anamika represents the tragic waste of feminine grace, beauty and accomplishment. Anamika is not only the most accomplished member of the family, earning a scholarship to Oxford, but she also manages to be the kindest and most likable, sharing her attention and warmth equally with everyone in the family. Unfortunately for Anamika, her family values status and appearance more than happiness. Rather than being allowed to pursue her education at Oxford, her degree is instead used to leverage a marriage with a powerful, wealthy, and similarly educated husband. While this arranged marriage displays all the outward signs of an ideal pairing, the husband’s advanced degrees make him arrogant and in conjunction with his mother, he subjects Anamika to horrific abuse and neglect. Prevented from attending family gatherings and virtually imprisoned in her marital home, Anamika meets a tragic and unjust ending. While her in-laws claim suicide, the neighbors reveal that Anamika was doused with kerosene and burned to death by her husband and mother-in-law. Though Anamika had done everything right and was a model of perfection in life, her death reveals the cruelty of fate and the injustice perpetuated by social arrangements and institutions that routinely disempower women.  

While Mama and Papa’s household is a stifling and limiting place, Mrs. Joshi’s home is a rare slice of freedom and abundance. Like many women in the novel, Mrs. Joshi begins her arranged marriage under the tyrannical authority of her mother-in-law. However, when her mother-in-law dies, Mrs. Joshi becomes the head of her household and supported by a husband who truly loves her, she is a symbol of health, happiness, and fertile abundance. Unlike Uma, Arun and Aruna, her children are given free range to run and play around the neighborhood. This freedom in no way limits their accomplishments, as they all find success in school and happiness in marriage. Mrs. Joshi and her household are symbolic counterpoints to the centralized and confining authority of Mama and Papa’s home.

Mr. Patton, like Papa, is the central authority figure of his household, but unlike Papa, his attempts to wield that authority are routinely futile. A caricature of the American dad, who loves baseball, red meat, family barbecues, and boating, Mr. Patton is characterized by his disengagement and disapproval for anything, like Arun’s vegetarianism, that lives in opposition to his narrowly defined vision of the world.

Mrs. Patton, much like her husband, is a caricature of an American idealism that searches for meaning through endless shopping, mindless consumption, thoughtless spending, and the restless and ceaseless pursuit of fads ranging from yoga, to astrology, to vegetarianism. While Mrs. Patton outwardly embraces Arun and his vegetarianism, her relationship with him is fundamentally superficial, built on her own vague ideals of Hindu vegetarianism and culture rather than a significant attempt at genuine understanding. Caught up in her own appearance and gross materialism, she overlooks the troubling signs of her own daughter’s bulimia, and helps to sustain the household’s disengaged and distant atmosphere.

Melanie is Uma’s ironic double. While Uma’s personal needs and desires are thwarted by parental control, Melanie’s needs and desires are exacerbated by parental neglect. Like Uma, she has her fits and displays of sickness and rage, but her bulimia is an ongoing secret either ignored or dismissed by family members who refuse to intervene. Though Melanie is surrounded by food, abundance and space, none of these freedoms offer her the individual attention and love she needs.