55 pages • 1 hour read
Fasting, Feasting
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Chapters 20-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part Two: America
Chapter 20 Summary
Chapters 20 to 25 help develop our understanding of the dysfunctional Patton household, exploring both Arun’s alienation and the troubling distance and chill between every member of the household. For example, Melanie spends hours alone monopolizing the television and munching on peanuts, ignoring the rest of the family and exiling Arun with cold stares into the solitude of his own room. Through his bedroom window, he secretly watches Rod, the athletic and muscular Patton son, dripping with sweat, forage for leftover meat on the smoldering grill. From the same window later that evening, he catches a raccoon foraging and stealing the food waste from the Patton’s trashcans. Later that evening, he discovers Melanie vomiting in the toilet, purging that day’s supply of binge eating.
Chapter 21 Summary
In Chapter 21, Arun misses the bus home and is forced to make the long trek. He sees Rod out for one of his frequent jogs along the road. Rod invites him along to jog, but Arun, frail and underdeveloped, politely deflects the invitation. Arriving home that evening, he smells tacos and hears the sounds of a baseball game in the living room. He longs to join the men, but instead joins Mrs. Patton in the kitchen. When she senses Arun’s distaste for the bean sprouts she planned to prepare, she thrusts a flurry of Indian spices and lentils at him, assuming he would like to cook his own food instead. She does not realize that Arun has never had to cook before. He attempts, rather clumsily, to make a dhal from the spices and lentils, and he is in the middle of putting his lentils on the plate when Melanie walks in and creates a minor scene, turning up her nose at the sight of his food, sparking an argument with Mrs. Patton and then dramatically storming out of the room. After the meal, he heads back to his room but discovers Melanie sitting on the landing, munching on Hershey bars, blocking his path up the stairs, and complaining about the food that Arun and Mrs. Patton cook. Horrified at being dragged into another family conflict, Arun retreats to his room.
Chapter 22 Summary
In Chapter 22, Arun and Mrs. Patton shop at the supermarket. Mrs. Patton recalls the times when Melanie, as a little girl, would sit, queen-like, atop the collapsible shelf over the top of the cart. Reminded of the earlier scene with Melanie on the stairwell landing, Arun questions whether the family eats like they used to. Mrs. Patton reveals that because they don’t like her cooking, they all eat at their own times and according to their own preferences, rarely sharing family meals.
Chapter 23 Summary
Arun decides to take up jogging. With a new pair of running shoes and a jogging outfit, he goes for a long run through the suburbs and along the roadways. He arrives at the Patton home, tired and limping, just as Mr. Patton pulls into the driveway. Handing Arun a bloody packet of meat to carry, he greets Mrs. Patton with complaints about their idle children, who tend to hide in their rooms or find other diversions. Fleeing from this tense scene, Arun, still sweating from the jog, tries to take a shower, but Melanie occupies the bathroom, blaring music and running the shower to dampen the sound of her vomiting. When Arun confronts Rod about Melanie’s bulimia, Rod only dismisses his sister’s sickness with derisive amusement.
Chapter 24 Summary
Arun finds Melanie, looking sick and unhealthy, at the kitchen table. Mrs. Patton cooks scrambled eggs for breakfast, which Melanie refuses to eat. Throwing a public tantrum, she compares her family to garbage bags that her mother keeps mindlessly stuffing with garbage. Mrs. Patton summons Arun for yet another shopping trip, even though the freezer is still stuffed with food. At the checkout counter, Mrs. Patton is unsettled when the young woman behind the checkout counter asks her, rather thoughtlessly and insensitively, if she is pregnant. Insulted and self-conscious on the drive home, Mrs. Patton stews over the comment, asking Arun whether she appears fat. She is so unsettled and distracted by the comment that she narrowly avoids a parked car on their suburban street.
Chapter 25 Summary
In Chapter 25, Arun returns home from his summer job to find Mrs. Patton sunbathing on the lawn. In Indian culture, it is taboo for a woman to bare her skin so publicly, and the image of Mrs. Patton sunbathing discomfits Arun. Inside the house, he finds Melanie, who is equally horrified and embarrassed by her mother’s exhibitionism. It, like yoga and vegetarianism, is her mother’s latest fad.
Chapters 20-25 Analysis
Chapters 20 to 25 characterize Mrs. Patton and the Patton children through Mrs. Patton’s alternating fads, the family’s troubling relationship with food and eating, and through Melanie and Rod’s contrasting pursuits of sickness and health. While Melanie spends much of her time zoning out in front of the television and overindulging on peanuts, the bathroom scene reveals a problematic pattern of bulimia. Likewise, Rod, ignoring the family barbecue, chooses instead to secretly scavenge the smoldering grill for leftover scraps. While food is over-abundant in their household, both children have a problematic relationship with it, either purging their meals or choosing to silently forage for it to avoid family meals. Rather than being a uniting or nourishing force, food and eating is cloaked in ritual secrecy, shame and a habitual wastefulness.
Arun’s relationships with the Patton family are full of missed connections, contrived relationships, and unintended conflict. While Arun would like to join Rod and Mr. Patton in the living room with the baseball game, he is drawn yet again into Mrs. Patton’s orbit. Mrs. Patton’s attempts to bond with Arun over shared vegetarian meals are forced attempts at companionship and connection. Rather than providing this connection, Mrs. Patton routinely misinterprets Arun’s responses, and Arun, terrified of coming across as rude or ungrateful, generates more conflict through his inability to communicate openly and honestly. Mrs. Patton’s attempts to bond with him cause friction within the family, as Melanie comes to resent Arun, dragging him yet again into the family conflict he sought to avoid.
While Arun’s family meals were forced obligations, there is something equally unsettling about the Patton family’s disengaged and solitary eating habits. The family never sits down together to share meals, and the lack of shared connection reinforces the chill and sterility of their household atmosphere. Although Mrs. Patton implies that they have all accepted this arrangement, her earlier confrontation with Melanie seems to hint at greater tension, disharmony, and dissatisfaction with the family’s estrangement.
If Chapter 22 reveals the cold distance of the Patton family through their solitary meals, Chapter 23 reinforces this disconnection through the health habits of the two children, Rod and Melanie. While Rod seeks to escape from his unhappy home life through workouts and his pursuit of perfect health and fitness, Melanie copes with her unhappiness through a troubling pattern of feasting and purging, holing herself up in the bathroom for prolonged episodes of bulimic vomiting. The sharp contrast between the two children’s coping mechanisms—one chooses health and one chooses sickness—draws a troubling picture of equally incomplete and unbalanced pursuits for physical perfection.
While Rod and Melanie attempt to fill the void of familial warmth and connection through forced health and sickness, Mrs. Patton seeks meaning through frivolous and endless consumption. Even though her family has plenty of food, she is forever buying food and wasting money on items they do not need, want, or eat. In the absence of genuine connection, her trips to the store are not about nourishing her family but are attempts to find meaning through the instant gratification of shopping. Although she appears upbeat and lighthearted, chuckling over the labels on her favorite ice cream, the scene at the checkout counter exposes the superficiality of this happiness. With one thoughtless question from the young lady behind the checkout counter—“Are you pregnant?”—Mrs. Patton is transformed into an angry, self-conscious woman. She spends the entire car ride home lingering over this question, unsettled by what it may suggest about her appearance. While she narrowly avoids an accident with a parked car, this close call illustrates deeply troubled emotions lurking beneath the superficial appearance of domestic control.
Mrs. Patton’s sunbathing routine marks the decline not only of summer, but of her interest in Arun’s companionship. Like shopping, like Arun and vegetarianism, sunbathing is Mrs. Patton’s latest fad, and she uses it to distance herself from her family, a trait that particularly enrages her daughter, Melanie. Reminding Arun of Uma, who displayed similar displays of rage and neglect back in India, Melanie’s contempt for her mother’s sun bathing is a similar signal of protest. Although the household of the Patton’s and Mama and Papa are worlds apart, they are united by a similar pattern of unfulfilled longing and spiritual disconnection. Though sunbathing is an attempt to look healthier, Mrs. Patton’s sunbathing represents the final unveiling and exposure of her family’s dysfunction and decay.
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By Anita Desai
