Fasting, Feasting

Fasting, Feasting, through Uma and Arun’s narrative arc, presents two major obstacles to self-realization and fulfillment: family and culture. Though Uma is born with limited intellectual faculties, her personal limitations are vastly overshadowed by the limitations imposed on her by Mama and Papa. Virtually every individual need or choice is lifted from her. She is removed from the beloved convent school, her marriages are arranged for her and result in public shame and humiliation, her few social outings are met with parental scorn and disapproval, and her one great opportunity, to live and work outside the home in a nursing dormitory, is squashed by her parents’ supreme authority.

This final act of parental control is perhaps the most crushing blow to Uma’s desire for self-realization and fulfillment. Dr. Dutt has offered Uma the perfect opportunity, a job providing care and looking after nurse trainees in a new nursing school dormitory. For the first time since convent school, Uma would have a daily escape from the limitations of her home. Unfortunately, her parents’ definition of female independence—an advantageous marriage—does not include the concept of an unmarried, independent life. They are so determined to preserve their traditional structure—a structure that severely limits and controls the opportunities of women—that they bend the truth to keep her. They lie to Dr. Dutt, claiming, falsely, that Mama’s declining health necessitates Uma’s help in the household. Even when Uma boldly defies her parental authority, calling Dr. Dutt and exposing the lie, it makes no difference. Her parents’ control is so complete that they not only control her movement, but they also can bend and alter her truth with no consequence.

If the Indian family and culture of Mama and Papa represents the eternal squeeze of central authority and an external locus of control, the Patton household represents its American cultural antithesis. As Arun points out, American life is a “challenge [against] the space and desolation…[against] the wilderness and the vacuum” (201). While the scenes in India portray the massive crowding of public space in the bazaars, streets, trains and busses, and households where every hour is structured around rigid discipline and obligation to parents, the American suburbs are characterized by vast space, personal distance, shopping malls appearing out of the woods and wilderness and familial households where control is completely decentralized and there is little or no obligation to the family or the parents.

This cultural arrangement breeds its own litany of polarizing problems ranging from personal obsession to familial neglect, from gluttony to starvation, and from illusion of public license to the disillusion of personal fulfillment. Melanie, the Patton daughter, is a tragic representation of this hollow freedom and sterile idealism and a poignant foil to Uma. Left completely to her own devices, she engages in a self-destructive and diseased pattern of behavior, engaging in a constant cycle of consuming junk-food and then forcefully purging that toxic junk in a symbolic show of self-loathing and self-degradation. While Melanie has the freedom and agency that Uma never had, she is equally miserable in spite of this. 

Arun recognizes this patterned unhappiness, this ironic similarity between Uma and Melanie in Part II: “…Then Arun does see a resemblance to something he knows…the contorted face of an enraged sister who, failing to express her outrage against neglect, against misunderstanding, against inattention…merely spits and froths in ineffectual protest” (214). Arun’s revelation, his ability to connect the vastly contrasting cultural lives and experiences of Uma and Melanie points to a unifying and universal human problem—that misunderstanding, neglect, disconnection, and miscommunication can equally annihilate human happiness and self-expression. Though Indian families offer greater connection through mutual responsibility and American families offer greater license and space to recognize self-fulfillment, neither Mama, Papa, nor the Pattons offer their children the attention, affection, and understanding necessary to nourish the sustained growth and fulfillment of the soul.

Mira-masi, perhaps the only character who achieves a form of self-realization and fulfillment, is able to do so because her familial responsibilities are limited, her agency as a widow is free from the constrictions of patriarchal authority, and once realizing this freedom, she refuses to compromise her faith or values even when it causes tension or conflict with her family and community. It is not surprising that Mama and Papa disapprove of her. She moves freely within their home; she refuses to eat their food, insisting on her own diet, and structuring her own hours around her faith. Even though Mama and Papa visibly resent her breaking the social code, Mira-masi ignores their disapproval and even defies Papa’s authority when she attempts to keep Uma at the Ashram.

She defies the social code and Papa’s authority, and realizes her true desire, to rediscover her lost Lord Shiva idol, by refusing to yield to the shopkeeper in Benares. When she sees the Lord Shiva idol in the shop-keepers window, she immediately moves to possess the idol as if possessing it was an act of destiny. Understandably, the shopkeeper reminds her that the idol belongs to him and is a favored object that he refuses to part with. His assertion of ownership is backed by the law and by the very masculine structure of worldly law; however, Mira-masi combats his right of possession and worldly ownership with otherworldly prophecy and the right of spiritual possession. She claims that Lord Shiva came to her in a “dream she had,” foretelling that she would find her lost idol in this shop on this very street (139). Regardless of whether Mira-masi’s dream and repossession of the idol is genuine prophecy fulfillment or the brilliant execution of a hoax, she manages to win the stand-off with the shopkeeper. She not only achieves her desired object, but seizes it in style, followed down the street by an adoring and cheering crowd, and then retiring to an idyllic temple high in the Himalayas (140). Her elevation to the temple is both literal and figurative, and as Uma points out, she is the one character “who had won what she desired,” and she wins by refusing to compromise, and refusing to budge to familial and cultural pressure (140).