55 pages • 1 hour read
Anita DesaiFasting, Feasting
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part One: India
Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7 begins a sequence of chapters chronicling problematic arranged marriages. Uma is presented to Mr. Syal at a dinner, a man who ignores her and ends up asking for Aruna instead. Aruna is beautiful, intelligent and deeply attractive to men while Uma is homely, simple and socially awkward. While the family receives several offers for Aruna, they are determined to keep with tradition and marry their eldest daughter, Uma, first. So desperate are they to marry Uma, they hastily arrange a marriage with a merchant family, the Goyals, who live in a modern suburb and blatantly reveal that they need the hefty dowry to finance home construction on a large piece of land they have recently purchased. In spite of this admission, Mama convinces them to go on with the arrangement, which ends in disaster. The father of Uma’s fiancée ignores their invitations and finally, when they do show up at his home, they are coldly received, with Mr. Goyal expressing that his son has decided to postpone the engagement to focus on his education. When Mama asks for the dowry money back, Mr. Goyal reveals that he has spent it to build the house—just as he said he would. Later, Mrs. Joshi reveals that the Goyals are notorious swindlers, using dowry money from a previous broken marriage agreement to buy the large land tract in the first place. The chapter ends with Mrs. Joshi reminding Mama that things could have been much worse for Uma—at least she wasn’t burned to death.
Chapter 8 Summary
Yet another marriage is arranged for Uma to Harish, a middle-aged man in the pharmaceutical business, after a concerted effort by Mama to advertise her availability with touched up photos in the matrimonial columns of the Sunday papers. Unlike the two previous arrangements, there is a traditional wedding ceremony, but her new husband, like the other men, is disinterested in her and even orders the priest to hurry the ceremony along. After an overnight journey by train, Uma arrives at the modest family home on an impoverished street. Immediately upon arrival, Harish leaves her with his family, telling her only that he has to go to work in Meerut. For the next several weeks, she sees no sign of her new husband nor does his family communicate anything about his whereabouts. Instead, the only communication she receives comes in the form of instructions—how to cut vegetables in uniform slices and how to grind spices into a paste.
Her stay with the Harish family comes to a jarring halt when Papa comes to the home. Harish, it turns out, already had a wife and four children in Meerut, and his marriage to Uma was a sham designed to funnel dowry money into Harish’s struggling pharmaceutical factory. With the fraudulent marriage annulled, Uma returns home with Papa, and after costing her parents two dowries with no marriage to show for it, she is considered ill-fated and no more attempts are made to marry her off.
Sometime after these failed arrangements, Uma overhears a conversation between Mama and Mira-masi. Mama laments her daughter’s fate, bitterly claiming that the astrologers lied in their glowing horoscope at Uma’s birth. Mira-masi counters this, saying the family should have taken her to Lord Shiva instead and asked for a blessing. Like she did at the ashram, Mira-masi asserts that Uma’s marriages have failed because Lord Shiva has chosen her for himself. Overhearing this conversation, Uma takes it literally, wondering what it would be like to have Lord Shiva as a husband, and what it would have felt like if her short-lived husband, Harish, had consummated the marriage.
Chapter 9 Summary
Uma’s younger sister, Aruna, has much greater fortune in marriage. Beautiful and accomplished in school, she is overwhelmed with marriage offers and has the rare luxury of choosing Arvind, the husband she finds the flashiest, wealthiest and most handsome. Determined to have a stylish and modern engagement and marriage, Aruna plans a lavish wedding followed by a decadent cocktail party reception at the Carlton Hotel. Unfortunately, this reception is ruined by yet another one of Uma’s public fits. After the wedding, Aruna relocates to Bombay with her new husband, starting a glamorous life in the big city. Once married, the family rarely sees her and she never invites the family for visits to Bombay. When she does arrive, she affects arrogant superiority, referring to her family as provincial “villagers” and criticizing Uma’s unfashionable hairstyle. On these rare visits, Aruna brings her two young children, a girl named Aisha, who looks like a doll, and her spoiled son, Dinesh, who tortures animals and behaves boorishly.
On one of these visits, Aruna’s husband and in-laws arrive for a visit, eager to bathe in the holy river near their town. Aruna arrives ahead of them, determined to make sure the family home is made presentable for her wealthier relatives. Dissatisfied with everything, she scolds her mother and criticizes the state of the household. While Mama is shocked at Aruna’s behavior, she takes some solace out of the fact that when her husband arrives, she also treats him with a similarly sharp tongue. Though the visit is mostly unpleasant due to Aruna’s behavior, Uma enjoys the family trip to the river on a flat-bottomed boat. Uma, liberated by the sudden license afforded by the bathing ceremony, dives off the boat and nearly drowns. Although Uma is saved, she cries miserable tears as a result of her deliverance.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Like the previous chapters, the arranged marriages transform the women of the family into a commodity traded for currency. The marriage process is both dehumanizing and humiliating for the women involved. While Uma is not married off to a cruel and arrogant man like her cousin Anamika, her failed arrangements, where she is dressed up and forced to lie about her abilities, are ritualistic ceremonies of rejection where her social awkwardness is put on public display. She not only has to face the fact that potential suitors prefer her younger sister, but that her parents are much more upset about losing money than they are about her feelings. Through the troubling marital arrangements of Anamika and Uma, the novel portrays the fate of women as completely at the arbitrary mercy of their parents’ financial negotiations.
The arranged marriage in Chapter 8 is the final and most traumatic attempt by the family to marry her off. Again, the family is victimized by financial fraud, swindled out of a dowry for a second time. Again, Papa prioritizes his finances and the reputation of his family over the feelings and emotions of his daughter. What makes this arrangement even more painful is the fact that the ceremony actually takes place, Uma has to go through the added upheaval and degradation of being dropped off at his family home and then abandoned there for several weeks with relatives that treat her like a servant. When Papa arrives to retrieve her, the revelation of the fraud and the fact that Harish has another family only underscores the cruelty of a marital system rife with financial corruption, a system where women are used as bargaining chips. While Harish’s actions are deplorable, Mama and Papa participate in the business of marriage, taking out newspaper ads and actively marketing their daughter like a tradable commodity. They also hastily arrange the marriage without checking up on the family, more concerned with marrying her off than ensuring her immediate safety. Complicit in this traumatic ordeal, they even blame the victim with Mama suggesting that Uma’s failures are the result of ill fate rather than misguided parenting, and a corrupt system that allows for widespread fraud and the gross mistreatment of women.
While Uma and Anamika’s marital arrangements lead to trauma and tragedy, Aruna’s marriage is by far the most fortunate. With so many marriage offers, Aruna has the leverage to choose her husband. This agency is a rare privilege in the culture of arranged marriages, where women’s choices are generally an afterthought and far less important than social and financial advancement. While her wedding and marital life seems ideal—Aruna is whisked away to a fashionable apartment and a comfortable life and marriage in Bombay—her relentless obsession with perfectionism leaves little room for happiness and contentment. She not only harangues her family on her few visits but also constantly criticizes her husband’s imperfections. Ironically, even though Aruna has by far the greatest fortune in marriage of all the family members, she is the least inclined to enjoy, appreciate, or realize a rare streak of good fortune.
Aruna, now married, treats her older sister with patronizing contempt. She mocks her hairstyle, mistrusts her with her children, and allows her children to mistreat their aunt. Her perfectionism also amplifies her embarrassment at Uma’s public fits, and overshadows any opportunity to show compassion for her far less fortunate sister.
This mistreatment and cruel contempt towards Uma is part of a larger pattern that perhaps explains the near drowning at the river. Treated like a pariah by her family, and especially her younger sister in the chapter, Uma’s dive into the river, while not obviously a suicide attempt, is a revelatory scene. While submerged and on the verge of drowning, Uma feels tremendous bliss rather than terror. Ironically, it is not near death that saddens her, but being saved from drowning, taken from the verge of death and restored to life. For Uma, life is a ceaseless burden while death is the release from all of life’s burdens and degradations.
Related Titles
By Anita Desai
