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by Anita Desai Chatto and Windus, 1999, ISBN 070 11 68 943 |
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Two words came again and again to my mind when I was reading Anita Desai's "Fasting, Feasting" - stereotype and cliché! The book teems with them. It is about an India - and an USA - that is difficult to recognise or identify with. The novel has two parts - the first has little to do with the second. The first part is centred in India, and the second in USA. Two poles of countries - India and USA -, two kinds of families - Uma's and Melanie's -, two poles of titles - fasting and feasting - but not much different in their essentials and not treated with any great understanding by the author. The only connection between the first and the second part is Arun. Arun, Uma's brother, commands little sympathy in the first part not because he does not deserve it but because his role has been greatly marginalised. It is not much better in the second part, perhaps because one is constantly asking oneself what the relevance of the second part is to what one has just finished reading. Uma is the main character of the first part. Poor Uma. She is the first daughter of Papamama. Though "Papa (was) the son of a tax inspector with one burning ambition, to give his son the best available education, had won prizes at school meanwhile, played tennis as a young man, trained for the bar and eventually built up a solid practice", and "Mama had been born to a merchant family in the city of Kanpur and lived in the bosom of her enormous family till at sixteen she married Papa" , after their marriage they became Papamama and Mamapapa. As if they had incarnated to make Uma's life as miserable as any Indian girl's could ever be. Uma is taken off the school when Arun, the much yearned after son, is born after two girls. Well, the question in which age this all happens is perhaps irrelevant here because one will never stop asking that kind of questions. Uma is made to marry to a guy already married. Which parents - Indian parents - would get their daughter married without finding out about the would be son-in-law? That too when they had already burnt their hands once, by giving heavy dowry to a prospective father-in-law who had taken the money simply to finance the house he was building, whose son had no idea of marrying. Well, there is really no point in asking such questions. Uma is at least brought back home by her father when the fact comes out that she is not a legal wife to her husband! Does this all sound complicated, and unbelievable? Well, that is how it is. |