Fasting, Feasting

Uma is the eldest daughter of an Indian family, and she has never really left the house she grew up in. Plain and judged unmarriageable, she lives under the watch of parents who keep her close and give her little room for a life of her own. Her days are tied to the small comforts of home, such as puri-alu and barfi, which are sweet and sad at once. Her sister Aruna is the successful one, and her brother Arun is the son who never quite lives up to what is expected of him.

Arun is sent abroad to study in Massachusetts, and the novel follows him into a very different kind of household. He lodges with the Pattons, an American suburban family whose habits he finds baffling and at times disturbing. The women barely seem to cook, yet they fill their shopping carts to the brim. The men grill enormous cuts of meat in the yard, and the daughter works her way through candy bars in secret binges. Mrs Patton, meanwhile, longs to become a vegetarian like Arun, while all he wants is to go unnoticed.

By setting a restrictive Indian home beside a bloated American one, Anita Desai builds a story about appetite and denial, and about who gets to want things and who is taught to go without. Fasting, Feasting is among her most socially perceptive novels, quietly sharp about family, gender and the different ways people are starved.