Fasting, Feasting: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The chapter opens with a scene in the modern day, in the summer in India. Uma’s mother tells her to pass the fruit bowel to her father, but Papa remains still and silent and does not take it. Mama interprets this silence as his nonverbal demand that the women peel and part the fruit for him. Following her mother’s instructions, Uma helps her mother to silently feed her father an orange in an elaborate, almost-ceremonial process, and when it is over, her mother sits back, proud and relieved.

The novel flashes back to Uma’s teenage years, after her baby brother Arun is born. While everyone else is napping during a hot afternoon, Uma runs away from home. She hires a rickshaw (a two-wheeled wooden cart, pulled by a man on a bicycle)—to ride her to the convent school. There, she goes in search of Mother Agnes, the head nun, and falls at her feet, begging her to allow her to return to school, telling of her unhappiness at home with the baby. Mother Agnes embraces Uma, then tells her that she has done everything she can to convince Papa, and that now Uma should try to learn home keeping. Uma shrieks, and has her first epileptic seizure on the convent floor. Mama blames the convent nuns for causing Uma’s seizure, using the incident to justify her decision to keep Uma out of school.

Uma settles into taking care of baby Arun. Mama and Papa attend nervously to Arun’s care, worrying over his diet, his every step, his progress, and making sure he has the best of everything. Uma observes that Arun’s birth is a great pride for Mama—who, to Uma’s dismay, bases her happiness on her status as the mother of the son by an important politician. Uma forms the conclusion over the years that her mother and father appear to connect solely as partners in running their household, and not in any romantic way. Uma thinks to herself that she wouldn’t like to have a marriage without love. Arun grows up to be sickly and weak, and he refuses even as a baby to eat meat. This greatly distresses his parents, who see meat as a sign of power and progress, and think of vegetarianism as rustic and old-fashioned.

The story flashes forward briefly a few years, to Arun as a little boy playing in the bushes outside with Uma. She is sneaking unripened fruit and salt to him as a snack, and she reminds him of a time when he bit her on the finger as a baby. He does not think it is funny, and he threatens to tell their parents that Uma is sneaking forbidden snacks to him. This scares Uma, who jumps up and gets caught in the bushes, but Arun just laughs.