Summary
Chapter 14
Arun is in the wooded neighborhood of Edge Hill, Massachusetts in July, overcome by the almost primeval forest around him. He sees many objects in front yards and backyards but few people. Sometimes there is a car. He inspects mailboxes and gardens and flags.
He approaches the house he is staying at and sees Mrs. Patton through the window, unpacking grocery bags. Arun lets himself in and she laughs, startled. She calls him “Ah-roon” and tells him Dad got back early and is on the patio making dinner. Arun is morose, knowing this to be another suburban evening of charred meat. Mrs. Patton wonders what the two of them will eat. Arun looks at her dejectedly.
Chapter 15
Mr. Patton asks angrily from the yard if anyone is interested in BBQ. Mrs. Patton looks around wildly, then tells Arun to wash his hands. Arun sees Melanie, the teenage daughter, with her habitual sullen expression and mumbles to her dinner is ready. She responds by eating peanuts from a bag. Melanie never wants to talk to him.
The petulant Mr. Patton asks where Melanie and Rod (the teenage son) are. Arun is nervous, wondering if Mrs. Patton will have to awkwardly announce again that they are vegetarians. Mr. Patton jovially serves Arun meat, and Arun bravely says he will just have the bun and the salad. Mr. Patton is surprised, and Mrs. Patton speaks up that Arun is a vegetarian like her. Mr. Patton says he does not know why anyone wouldn’t want a good piece of meat, and it isn’t natural.
Arun listens to Mr. Patton whine, repeating this same farce. He cannot watch the blood pool from the piece Mr. Patton is cutting into. Mrs. Patton tries to be cheerful, and says her children, who have not shown up to dinner, don’t know what they’re missing.
Chapter 16
Arun spent the school year in a dorm room with a roommate from Louisiana who chain-smoked and aggravated his asthma, but blissfully never talked to him. The room overlooked a bleak parking lot, which students would sometimes occupy and drink beer and carouse. Arun did not want to befriend any of the other students in his classes, every cell in his body resisting being included.
His own countrymen reached out, but he resisted them too. They’d asked if he wanted to go in with them on a house for the summer, but he pretended to have other plans. He did not have any, of course, but hoped he could just find another silent roommate. This was the first time he had ever been free and had no obligations, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Chapter 17
He did not realize the dorms had to be emptied of students, which came as a shock. He started looking for rooms to let but none of them were right. Fortuitously, Uma’s letter about Mrs. O’Henry’s sister came. He did not like thinking he was being discussed back at home, and felt like his family was putting their hands on him.
But he took the room, which was lovely and light-filled. It was the woods that bothered him, seeming to draw close and look in at him. He asked Mrs. Patton if there were wild animals in there, and she smiled and said no—these were not the real woods.
Chapter 18
When he first arrived, Mrs. Patton expressed some doubt that he would like the food here, and he said he would be taking most of his meals in town when he went to work at the library, and she seemed relieved. But this timing did not really work out with the bus service, and Mrs. Patton said he could not just walk to town to eat. If he would just tell her about the things he wanted to eat, she would try to make them. Her kindness prompted him to tell her he was a vegetarian.
Mrs. Patton was delighted to hear this and said she always wanted to be one, and now the two of them could do it together. She wanted to eat more vegetables but her family never did, and now was her chance. She became happy and eager, to the point where Arun was surprised, having no enthusiasm himself. She announced they would go to the store.
Chapter 19
And so “they began their careers as shoppers” (181). Mrs. Patton drove Arun to the grocery store, and inside “showed him how to shop by her own assured and accomplished example, all the tentativeness and timidity she showed at home gone from her” (183).
She was overjoyed bringing this hoard home and packing it away, content when it was in its place as if this was the final stage. Arun did not know how to tell her that the foods she bought were not what he was used to eating, that a tomato and a piece of bread did not make sense as food. For the first time he was thankful for the food back home, which someone always gave him if he wanted it or not. Here he realized he had not escaped, just “stumbled into what was like a plastic representation of what he had known at home” (185).
Mr. Patton had reacted like he hadn’t heard, ignoring the vegetarians and continuing to grill meat. Arun did recognize this in his own father—the tendency to just walk away from things that opposed his authority and wait until they disappeared.
Chapter 20
Arun sees Melanie watching television, and she shoots him a look to leave her alone. He has his own set in his room, but it occupies too much space on his desk.
Arun looks outside later and sees Rod, who has returned from his jog, gnawing at whatever food he can find. Later that night he looks out and sees a raccoon in the same place, dragging away what it can into the trees.
Arun is awake now, and has to go to the bathroom. Someone has left the light on, and when he opens the door he sees Melanie in front of the toilet, vomiting. She hisses at him to get out.
Analysis
Fasting, Feasting spends the rest of its chapters on Arun, studying in Massachusetts. During the summer he finds lodging with the Pattons, an arrangement facilitated by Mrs. O’Henry and Arun’s parents back in India. Desai sets up subtle but provocative comparisons between the United States and India, as well as the two sets of parents, exploring the various permutations of feasting and fasting.
Arun was privy to “feasting” in comparison to Uma, for his parents lavished attention on him and filled him not only with food, but also with education and opportunity. Arun did not always respond in the way they hoped, as he became a vegetarian, but he largely went along with their plans for him. This “feast” was not one that nourished him, however, and he became bland, boring, deeply introverted, and diffident. He shunned his classmates and invitations from the other Indian students at his college, wrote superficial letters home to his family, and wished only to be left alone. Staying with the Pattons does not allow for the latter, with both Mr. and Mrs. Patton imposing themselves on him and a new web of family drama spinning itself into existence before him.
Mr. Patton reminds Arun of his own father, and when Mr. Patton refuses to acknowledge Arun’s vegetarianism (as his father did), Arun thinks of “his father’s very expression, walking off, denying any opposition, any challenge to his authority, his stony wait for it to grow disheartened, despair—and disappear” (188). Mrs. Patton, like his own mother, is obsessively concerned with what Arun eats, and, like his mother, does not cook. When she is enthusiastic about the disgusting Indian meal she forces Arun to make and eat, he sees “a bright plastic copy of a mother-smile that Arun remembers from another world and another time, the smile that is tight at the corners with pressure” (194). Adriana Elena Stoican suggests that “While Arun’s mother stands for excessive and forced feeding of male offspring, Mrs. Patton’s greed illustrates the idea of motherhood that provides raw materials without feeding.” She is a “shallow mother and wife who is, however, satisfied with the performance of her roles.”
And Melanie reminds Arun of Uma, with 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” (214).
Desai is a keen observer of the American suburban landscape. She writes of the houses with their in-your-face patriotism with their flags out front “with all the bravado of a new frontier” (160), the conspicuous consumption of capitalism in the fact that Arun sees “so many objects, so rarely any people” (160), and the prevailing fakeness of it all, with a house looking like “stage sets before the play begins” (161). Shopping at the grocery store takes that conspicuous consumption to another level; Arun marvels at the excess, the vegetables that “seemed as unreal in their bright perfection as plastic representations” (184). The pastime of backyard barbecue becomes a violent, grotesque ritual as Arun smells the charring of raw meat and sees a piece that seems “not merely raw but living: it is bleeding in a stream across Mr. Patton’s plate” (167). There is a death drive here under the shininess and plenty, and Arun can feel it, smell it, and see it. He trenchantly observes, “He had travelled and he had stumbled into what was like a plastic representation of what he had known at home, not the real thing—which was plain, unbeautiful, misshapen, fraught, and compromised—but the unreal thing—clean, bright, gleaming, without taste, savour, or nourishment” (185).
Stoican explains that while some critics think the novel’s “title expresses the contrast between the Indian and American cultures, since India is associated with the tradition of religion and fasting, while American stands for a consumerist drive,” she “[thinks] this argument maintains a dichotomous relationship between cultures that is not supported by the novel’s plot. My suggestion is that this argument can be extended to support a transcultural interpretation of the novel, since Fasting, Feasting presents two antipodal cultural models only to show that their differences are paralleled by a common neglect of individuals. This interplay of cultural commonalities and differences suggests the fluidity of cultural borders that facilitates communication between cultures.” Arun’s story in particular shows how he can be both fasting and feasting in both India and the United States, and how trying to maintain the binary of the two is ultimately deleterious to individuals in either situation.
