Fasting, Feasting

Uma, the protagonist of Part I, lives a changeless and confined existence in her parents’ home. While her younger brother earns a scholarship to study in America and her younger sister moves to a fashionable and affluent life in Bombay, Uma’s lack of success at school and in arranged marriages leaves her with little other options within the constraints of her household, community and culture.

At the core of her journey is an attempt to find greater independence and identity outside of her proscribed household role; however, her problems in actualizing these desires are limited by major obstacles: 1) her father’s relentless and obsessive attempts to maintain patriarchal authority and control; 2) her mother’s controlling impulse to support and maintain Papa’s ceremonial power; 3) the larger cultures’ commodification and degradation of women, valuing them on the money they bring with them in marital dowries, and using them as pawns in inter-familial attempts at social advancement, and 4), her own intellectual and imaginative limitations.

Uma’s story, particularly within the narrow perspective of her family and culture, is fraught with failed attempts to establish identity outside the home. Loving the songs, rituals and pageantry of her daily life at the convent school, Uma’s formative attempts to break free and to gain an education are scuttled by her inability to pass school exams and her parents’ desire to have her in the home to help raise her younger brother, Arun.