Fasting, Feasting

Anita Desai has long proved herself one of the most accomplished and admired chroniclers of middle-class India. Her 1999 novel,?ÿFasting, Feasting, is the tale of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and son of strict and conventional parents. So united are her parents in Umas mind that she conflates their names. “MamaPapa themselves rarely spoke of a time when they were not one. The few anecdotes they related separately acquired great significance because of their rarity, their singularity.” Throughout, Desai perfectly matches form and content: details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and needs given no place. Uma, as daughter and female, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation. Now in her 40s, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, and she is at MamaPapas beck and call, with only her collection of bracelets and old Christmas cards for consolation.