Summary
Chapter 21
Arun is walking home from work at the library. Rod passes him, jogging, and asks if he wants to join. Arun says no, unable to fathom how a “small, underdeveloped and asthmatic boy from the Ganges plains… could compete with or even keep up with this gladiatorial species of northern power” (191).
When Arun makes it back, he sees Rod and Mr. Patton watching TV together. It is an inviting scene and he wishes he could join, especially when Mrs. Patton says she is making bean sprouts for the two of them. She tells him she has lentils and spices as well, and he is going to make an Indian dish. Arun wishes he could just spill all the lentils and run away, but he starts cooking, not exactly knowing what he is doing. He has never seen his mother cook.
Melanie comes in and wrinkles her nose, asking what the smell is. She says the food looks like shit, and Mrs. Patton admonishes her as she walks out of the room. Arun secretly agrees; it does not look good. Mrs. Patton smiles at him, a “bright plastic copy of a mother-smile that Arun remembers from another world and another time” (195).
After dinner Arun heads up to his room, encountering Melanie on the stairs. She asks him viciously if he enjoyed his dinner. She has a pile of candy bars on her lap. When he asks if she wants some and if she is hungry, she snarls that she cannot eat that goo that he and Mom cook. He feels terrible; he wishes he could admit it was the first time he cooked, but he does not want to critique Mrs. Patton or be stuck in a web of family conflict.
Chapter 22
Mrs. Patton and Arun are shopping again, and she is reminiscing about when her kids used to love coming to the grocery store and now they don’t get to eat together anymore since they are older. She says she just keeps things in the freezer and lets them take what they want. She says with a frown that they don’t like what she makes, and they don’t like eating at the table like she and Arun do.
Chapter 23
Arun is amazed at his own daring, for he is jogging. The heat of the morning is sullen and he slows, but does not stop. He looks up to see he has almost crashed into the woods, so he wheels around in fright and keeps going. He is dizzy with sweat and fatigue, staring at his plodding, insufficient feet.
When he returns, Mr. Patton is there, taking groceries out. He gives a bag to Arun to hold. Arun knows there is another bloody carcass in there that will soon be on the grill. Mr. Patton asks where Rod is and sounds tired and angry. Mrs. Patton tells him Rod is getting ready for the football team. Arun leaves, knowing a family squabble when he hears one.
Later Arun sees Melanie come out of the bathroom with a clammy face, holding her tape player. He tells Rod he thinks Melanie is sick and Rod snorts that she is nuts; she is making herself sick. He says girls are lazy to actually work out, so they have to resort to making themselves throw up. Arun wonders what is more dangerous, “the pursuit of health or of sickness” (205).
Chapter 24
In the morning, Melanie sits at the table. She looks bloated and haggard, and Arun cannot believe Mrs. Patton does not know. She scoops scrambled eggs on Melanie’s plate and Melanie bursts out that she hates scrambled eggs, and that everything her mother cooks is poison. She stomps away, and Mrs. Patton wonders why she would say that.
When Mrs. Patton announces it is shopping time, Arun suggests they finish the food in the freezer first. She is incredulous, asking what they would do in an emergency. They go to the store, where Mrs. Patton relaxes like always and Arun tenses up, “tight with anxiety over spending so much, having so much” and wondering if this is why Melanie feels sick (209).
In the checkout line, the cashier asks if Mrs. Patton is pregnant. She is aghast. The girl shrugs and says she has a glow. Out in the parking lot, Mrs. Patton asks anxiously if she looks fat. Arun mumbles no. She is not fat, but “shapeless” (211). Giving a little stage laugh, she drives too fast and someone honks.
Chapter 25
The sun is bright in the mornings and Arun wakes earlier and earlier. He dresses lightly as he would in India and tries to be quiet. He works at the library, and when he returns, Mrs. Patton is sunbathing, roasting in the brightness like one of the items at the grocery store. He is befuddled to see how much of her skin is showing and how glistening she is. She waves at him cheerily.
He bursts into the kitchen, trying to get away. Melanie is there, eating the ice cream Mrs. Patton had purchased. She actually speaks to him, and says incredulously that her mother is sunbathing. She then says Mrs. Patton won’t be cooking him dinner tonight. All of a sudden, Arun realizes it—she reminds him 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” (215). It is odd to encounter this here when there is so much plenty, but then again, he wonders, what is plenty and what is not?
Time passes. Mrs. Patton does not cook for Arun or go to fetch food for her family either. She simply sunbathes, and asks Arun if he wants to join her. He is acutely distressed. The kitchen seems desolate now, and Arun, left to his own devices, loses his appetite. He stays longer in town and eats minimally. Summer is oppressive and slow, the trees wilting and the food on the grills spoiling.
Chapter 26
Mrs. Patton is in the kitchen this morning. She announces that she and Melanie and Arun are going to the swimming hole. She will accept no excuses even though Arun quickly tries to find one. He reluctantly gathers his things and they walk through the woods. Arun is unnerved; there seem to be no birds or animals. He cannot understand why people have to live in this “benighted wilderness” (221), and thinks of how passionately he prefers the town. They arrive at the swimming hole and even though Arun does not like to swim, he is perspiring heavily and gets in, especially when Mrs. Patton strips down to her bathing suit. It is surprisingly delightful, and he finds himself enjoying this “element that removes him from his normal self, and opens out another world of possibilities” (222).
But he soon tires, and there are other splashing boys about, so he climbs out. Mrs. Patton is lying on the ground and he cannot tell if she is asleep or not. Melanie is gone, only a pile of candy wrappers remaining.
Arun is not sure what to do now that he has swum. When he awkwardly rests, the mosquitoes swarm. He jumps up and walks into the woods, hoping to leave them behind. To his horror, he comes across Melanie, face down in the dirt surrounded by her own vomit. She weakly tells him to go away, then forces her fingers into her mouth again. She is panting and he does not know what to do. This real pain and real hunger is startling. He asks over and over again if he should get her mother, but he is frozen. Mrs. Patton finds them.
Chapter 27
Summer is ending, the world grey and subdued again. Families return from their vacations and the town fills up with students.
Arun is all packed up, but he is unsure what to do with the parcel that has arrived from India this morning—a shawl and a packet of tea. There is no room in his bag.
Melanie is at an institution in the Berkshires and is apparently doing well. Mr. Patton has taken on a night job to help pay for it. Rod wins a football scholarship. Mrs. Patton no longer sunbathes, and does not offer to take Arun shopping even though the larder is more and more depleted. She is dressing in modest clothing and has developed an interest in traditional medicines.
Arun comes to the porch where she is sitting with an acupuncture chart on her lap. She is startled, not hearing him, but he says he just came to say goodbye and he brought some presents for her that his parents sent from India. She looks at the tea and asks if it is herbal. He takes the shawl and lays it gently on her shoulders. She feels it, and stammers out in delighted surprise that it is just beautiful, and thanks him. He leaves her sitting there “with the box of tea on her knees and the shawl on her shoulders” (228).
Analysis
Desai emphasizes Arun’s increasing insightfulness; though he is extremely shy and introverted, he is a keen observer of the people and places around him, and he begins to note the similarities between his family and this new family. Most importantly, Arun compares Melanie to Uma, seeing in both of them a sort of repression of self stemming from neglect. Uma manifests her frustration in small bursts of anger or defiance, while Melanie becomes bulimic. Both women have parents who refuse to see them for who they really are; both have siblings who are occasionally derisive of them; both seem unable to advocate for themselves. And, importantly, both harm themselves, though in very different ways—Uma throws herself into the river to (maybe) drown, and Melanie destroys her body through bulimia.
Melanie may live in a land of feasting, and she constantly feasts on candy bars and ice cream, but she is, in reality, fasting from real connections with her family or herself. Daniela Rossella calls her affliction “a repudiation of food: it is a blasphemous eating-vomiting in view of her painful and real hunger, and also of the useless abundance that surrounds her.” Adriana Elena Stoican agrees, suggesting that the bulimia can be “interpreted as an effect of excessive philosophies of consumption that trigger motherly neglect.”
Arun notices the family’s neglect of Melanie. One morning after he catches her vomiting, he sees her haggard appearance and wonders, “Does Mrs. Patton not see?” (206). He turns to Rod, telling him Melanie is sick, but her brother does know what is happening and only scoffs at her for being a silly woman. He says to Arun that girls are “Too lazy to get off their butts and go jogging or play a good hard ball game. So they’ve got to sick it up” (204). Mr. Patton seems too concerned with himself and his own interests rather than his unwell daughter, mentioning her only when she does not show up for his barbeque dinners.
Arun is not sure what to make of Melanie’s sickness. His attempt to talk to Rod comes to naught, and he is put off by Mr. and Mrs. Patton’s idiosyncratic behavior and his abhorrence of family drama. A lifetime of silence on the matter of his own sister seems to contribute to his reluctance to say anything, especially within the household that is so dominated by the masculine. Ludmila Volna unpacks the climax of Arun’s section of the novel when he and Mrs. Patton, separately, then together, come across the suffering Melanie in the forest: “neither [Arun] nor Mrs. Patton, herself a victim incapable of resisting the paralysing effects of the beams of patriarchal sun, are capable of doing anything for Melanie until the three of them escape temporarily the oppressive heat of the family's males' presence. Then, at the pool, enlightenment and discovery finally start to work for Melanie's benefit. A cooperation of two complementary agents is necessary: Arun, although he is well aware of the real state of affairs and acknowledges the necessity to act, is ‘paralysed’ as to action, he is unable to do anything himself. On the other hand, Arun's presence seems necessary for Mrs. Patton to discover finally the destructive consequences of Melanie's condition. As mother she is capable to act, although she ignores the true character of her daughter's suffering.”
One of the most famous lines from the novel is Arun’s rumination after he hears Rod so callously dismiss his sister’s disease: “one can’t tell what is more dangerous in this country, the pursuit of health or of sickness”(205). Melanie’s bulimia is contrasted with Rod’s obsession with his physique—the jogging, the scarfing down of protein, the pursuit of physical perfection. Stoican writes that Arun “realises that Melanie and her brother embody extreme manifestations of individual free choice… Rod’s egocentric stance and Melanie’s self-destructive attitude are regarded as specific translations of the American ideal of pursuing happiness… Rod’s pursuit of health and Melanie’s pursuit of sickness are perceived as distorted versions of the individual fulfillment guaranteed by the American creed.”
