Fasting, Feasting

The opening chapters of Part II describe Arun’s adjustment to American culture and his challenging and forced integration into a suburban American family. The opening episode of Part II describes Arun’s summer walk through his suburban Massachusetts neighborhood, suggesting an alienation from the American landscape—its sterile obsession with objects, inconspicuous consumption of meat and material, and cold, isolating suburban streets. While he does find company and shared meaning with his landlady, Mrs. Patton, a fellow vegetarian, they both struggle against the prevailing culture. Struggling to decide what to eat, Mrs. Patton breaks the silence by holding up a can of tomatoes, as if this were an answer, and uttering “three for a dollar” (162). Ironically, this gesture only reinforces the dominant tide of the prevailing consumerist culture, which peddles bargain objects as if they were a substitute for meaning and connection. 

Much like Papa, Mr. Patton attempts to impose his will on the family. The difference is, his attempts are futile, as his children refuse to join the family barbecue. This gathering, described as a “religious ceremony” with Mr. Patton as the minister, is centered round the offering of “red and rare steak.” This food sharing, much like a Mass, is meant to be a genuine communion, where familial relationships are reinforced around the union of a shared meal. However, even the family members who do share the meal with Mr. Patton do so either out of fear, in the case of Mrs. Patton, or with obligatory courtesy, in the case of Arun. While Arun joins the barbecue out of obligation, there is palpable cultural tension between him and Mr. Patton. Not only does Mr. Patton pressure him into accepting red meat—even after he is reminded that Arun is a vegetarian—he shows insensitivity towards Arun’s diet and cultural beliefs. Rather than being the communal family gathering that Mr. Patton wanted, the gathering instead illustrates the family’s ritual discord, disharmony, and disunity.

Arun’s resistance to being included in the culture of his American college is a response to the years of endless expectations, obligations, and limited choices offered him in the repressive atmosphere of Mama and Papa’s household. By resisting inclusion, Arun hopes to preserve and sustain an independence and freedom he has never tasted before. While his life at the college appears bleak and desolate—like the grease-stained and beer can littered parking lot outside his dorm—Arun has come to see people and relationships as the enemy of independence and personal freedom..

Arun’s plans to preserve independence are short-lived because his family’s authority seems to reach even from India to America. Their arrangement with Mrs. O’Henry’s sister, Mrs. Patton, forces Arun to live with a new family for the summer, and with family—regardless of culture—comes obligation, expectation and forced inclusion, the very qualities that Arun hoped to escape. Arun’s attempt to pull down the shade to hold back the woods around the Patton home and the symbolic world is a futile gesture. No matter how hard he attempts to find independence, there are too many natural, communal, and cultural forces to contend with. The broken shade represents his thwarted attempt at total freedom and absolute privacy.

Arun and Mrs. Patton’s shared vegetarianism represents an unlikely but significant alliance within the Patton home. While Arun is a cultural outsider in the Patton household, Mrs. Patton is a virtual outsider in her own home. For some time, she has eaten and prepared red meat out of obligation to her husband and children. Her revelation that she is a vegetarian, like Arun, is a bonding moment, not only because they share dietary habits, but because they both have had to squelch their independence and freedom out of familial obligation. The chapter’s conclusion, with Mrs. Patton joyfully planning out their vegetarian meals, foreshadows a symbolic communion between two characters sharing a common longing for independence in spite of their dramatically different cultural backgrounds.

Chapter 19 further develops the interesting parallels between the household of Mama and Papa and the household of the Pattons. Much like Uma, Mrs. Patton’s enthusiasm for change and independence, represented by her new vegetarian diet, are squashed by a male authority figure, Mr. Patton. Similar to Papa, Mr. Patton’s strategy for crushing opposition involves a prolonged siege of silence and disengagement. While Arun sees similarities between both men and sympathizes with Mrs. Patton because of this, his short-lived alliance with her is not without its own difficulties. Mrs. Patton’s attempt to create connection through vegetarianism only dramatizes her lack of understanding of Indian vegetarianism and culture. Rather than making him feel more at home, these meals have a reverse effect, making Arun miss meals back at home in India.