Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  In spite of that, they had generously offered, towards the end of that semester, 'You can join us if you like—we're taking a house for the summer—it'll work out cheap if we share.'

  Arun pretended to have other plans. Not quite finalised, he muttered, he'd let them know.

  The truth was that he had no plans, only the hope that his time in the US would continue in this manner, that he could always share a cell of a room with a silent roommate who concealed his facial expressions behind a screen of smoke, that he would attend lectures where the lecturer never even learnt his name, and find food in a cavernous cafeteria where no one tried to sit beside him.

  It was the first time in his life away from home, away from MamaPapa, his sisters, the neighbourhood of old bungalows, dusty gardens and straggling hedges where he had grown up, the only town he had ever known; he had at last experienced the total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, needs, requests, ties, responsibilities, commitments. He was Arun. He had no past, no family and no country.

  The summer in the US stretched out open, clear and blank. Arun had every intention of keeping it so.

  Seventeen

  UNFORTUNATELY there were two matters he had not taken into consideration.

  One was that the dorm needed to be emptied of all students: the university wanted every room back for its summer courses and conferences from which it made a sizeable income, and he would have to move out for the summer.

  Having turned down the offer made by fellow Indian students, he was driven to looking for a place on his own: a single room in some featureless housing block was his desire, somewhere he would not run into anyone he knew. He began to look up ads in the local newspaper for rooms to let.

  One turned out to be the back of a garage, boarded up into a kind of dog-house, the only window a long narrow panel set up high under the rafters. Arun was not driven away even by such conditions; what did turn him away was the information that he would have to enter the owner's house to make use of the bathroom and kitchen. He withdrew hastily.

  Another turned out to be in a hamlet in the woods where he would be alone in a tiny cabin surrounded by miles of conifer trees with the owner and his wife. They beamed at him welcomingly: he fled as from a spider's nest.

  He went to the Student Centre on the campus and sat with other students at a long table, flipping through files marked Rooms or Apartments to Let, and passing them up and down to each other. There was a telephone outside the door from where they could telephone the numbers they found in the files as long as their dimes and quarters lasted.

  Arun queued up behind them and found: a farmer who was letting a room in a loft at the top of his barn in return for help with the hay, but Arun could not drive a car, let alone a tractor, and had to pass that up; a single mother in a two-roomed apartment who was offering a living room couch in return for baby-sitting her two-year-old-son, and three women who shared a studio apartment and wanted a fourth to help bring down the rent and were offering a divan beside their own beds and could not understand why Arun would not even come to take a look at it.

  His dream of a self-contained room in an apartment or housing block where no one would know him or talk to him was disintegrating.

  That was when the aerogramme from home arrived, carefully penned by Uma in her square, even handwriting like that of a child doing a writing exercise, but dictated—of course—by Papa. It gave him some information so unexpected that he had to read it a second time before he could digest it: Mrs O'Henry, the wife of the local Baptist missionary (he was Vice-Principal of the school Arun had attended and had written a recommendation to help him win a scholarship in the States), had a sister who lived in a suburb of that very town, and had written to her regarding the problems Arun was having in finding a place for the summer (they were discussing it all the way back there? Had they still not stopped discussing him, plotting and planning his life for him?) and she had come up with an offer of a room in their house. He was to telephone her and 'finalise it' (Papa's term): it was a kind offer, generously made, and not to be rejected.

  Immediately Arun was overcome by the sensation of his family laying its hands upon him, pushing him down into a chair at his desk, shoving a textbook under his nose, catching that nose and making him swallow cod liver oil, spooning food into him, telling him: Arun, this, Arun, that, Arun, nothing but...

  He floundered, he sank.

  His voice on the telephone was so low that Mrs Patton could hardly hear him. 'Oh dear, it's a very bad line,' she piped, 'I can hardly hear you.'

  'Umm—I—I'm working in the library here—it's very far from where you live—'

  'Oh no, oh no,' she went on piping, 'there's a bus service, you know. You can catch a bus out to us. It's real pretty out here. You'll love it—and I have two youngsters, just about your age, I think.'

  He put his hand over his mouth to quell his nausea.

  MRS Patton gave him a pleasant light-filled room on the first floor of the house on Bayberry Lane. It had a white bed, a white chest of drawers, a white rug on the floor and white curtains at the window that looked through the branches of a maple tree at a slope of grass leading down into the woods. When she left him after showing him the closet and the hangers, he stood watching as a squirrel with a long tail emerged, sat on the sloping lawn, seeming to listen to or watch something happening in the woods that Arun could not see or hear, then dropped to its four feet and scurried towards it. The woods seemed to draw closer, settle about the window, looking in. Seeing the string of the shade dangle before him, Arun pulled at it. The shade tumbled down precipitously. The room was dark. He tugged to raise it a little, a few inches from the sill, but it merely fell lower. Now it hung limply from its rail, its full length unfurled.

  Fearing he had broken the string, or some spring, and that it would hang there accusingly always, Arun tiptoed guiltily out of the room onto the landing. The door to the bathroom stood open. He could see a corner of the bathtub, a length of shower curtain, a shelf piled with toothbrushes and squeezed tubes of toothpaste, some pots of cream. The other doors on the landing were shut. One bore a pennant proclaiming Boston Red Sox and the other a long scratch and a spattering of nail polish.

  Gulping, Arun went down to the kitchen again and asked Mrs Patton if there were wild animals in the woods.

  'Wild animals?' She stood astounded, dripping jelly from a long-handled spoon, then burst out laughing. 'Oh yes, yes,' she chuckled, 'lots—two-legged ones. They like to play out there after school, and there's a swimming hole at the bottom of the hill. That's where all the kids swim in the summer,' she explained. 'Those aren't real woods, you know. To get to the real woods you've got to go all the way to Quabbin. Around here there's just—just trees,' she smiled, with a little flutter of her hands, spraying pink jelly.

  Arun gave an involuntary shiver as he felt them creeping up around him, rustling as they closed in.

  'I think,' he blurted, 'I've broken the shade.'

  Eighteen

  THERE followed an embarrassing scene, but it did not have to do with the shade: that she brushed aside as too unimportant to take up, but said, apologetically, 'You'll be wanting your own kind of food, I'm sure, and I know I won't be able to provide that, my sister's written and told me how different your food is from ours. She's lived there—oh, twenty years or more, and writes me these amazing letters. My, I'm amazed by what she tells me, I am. India—gee!'

  'Oh, uh,' he mumbled, wondering how to deal with the dread he had of sitting down to meals with this family of strangers and providing them with amazing stories as well. 'I could—I could eat my meals in town when I go to work—at the library—and before I get back at—uh, night—'

  She was both horrified and relieved—he could see that; her face was the most transparent he had encountered: she had no guile at all. He had only to insist a little and he knew she would give in, and he could continue with the blessed anonymity of eating in a cafeteria or buying a sandwic
h to eat out under a tree.

  He tried to establish some routine that would allow him to pursue this line, but it soon became obvious that it was not really possible. The hours he worked at the library were irregular, they did not always include a lunch hour, or extend till dinner-time, and if he was in the Pattons' house in the suburbs, he could not walk all the way back into town for a meal—the nominal bus service having been cut down to its seasonal minimum, something Mrs Patton could not have known since she never used it—or he would be spending most of the summer trudging along the highways, climbing onto grass verges to avoid speeding cars, and eating their dust, and jeers.

  As he trailed back in the afternoon dust one day, coming in at the kitchen door and wiping his shoes on the mat, Mrs Patton placed her hands on the kitchen table and faced him. Her hands were brown and square, the skin slack and wrinkled. A wristwatch and gold wedding band on one, a cheap silver ring on the other, no nail polish. She pressed her fingertips on the wooden table and spoke to Arun.

  'No, Ahroon,' she said, 'you can't go on going out and walking into town for every meal. Why, what would my sister think? This just can't go on. It's clear you've got to do your cooking and eating here. I know my cooking wouldn't suit you—my sister warned me about that—but if you tell me how you like things, I'll try to fix them just so. You'll only need to tell me how.'

  He looked at her miserably: so much kindness, so much goodness, how was he to defend himself? 'I am sure I will like your cooking, Mrs Patton,' he said, choking.

  Her eyes gazed upon him, as unbelieving as a young girl's. 'You really think so? I just do plain old home cooking, you know.'

  'Oh, Mrs Patton,' he muttered, 'I—I'm a vegetarian.'

  Her eager face froze, then retreated. She seemed frightened.

  'I—I don't eat meat,' he explained, red-faced. It was all so much more complicated than he had expected—life, travel, escape, recapture.

  But while he stared at his shoes, seeing all the dust that lay heavily on them, she had changed, darted into another mood, and now her voice came ringing out, clear and light. 'But I think that's wonderful—I really do. My sister told me many Indians were vegetarians. I've always wanted to be one myself. I've always hated eating meat—oh, that red, raw stuff, the smell of it! I've always, always disliked it—but never could—never knew how—you know, my family wouldn't have liked it. But I've always liked vegetables best. My, yes, all those wonderful fresh vegetables and fruit you get in the market—they're so pretty, they're so good. I could—I can live on them. Look, Ahroon, you and I—we'll be vegetarians together! I'll cook the vegetables, and we'll eat together—'

  'Oh, oh,' he tried to laugh. 'Oh no, Mrs Patton, you don't have to do that—'

  'No, no, no, I don't have to—I want to. I really, really do. Now I've got a vegetarian living here right in my house, now is the time for me to become one myself. You know, the two of us together—' She laughed, too, easily, like a conspirator. 'I couldn't do it with just—just Dad and the kids, you know. Dad likes his meat, and Rod—well, Rod needs all the proteins he can get, for all that weight-lifting and jogging that he does. And Melanie—oh, Melanie. No, no—they don't even eat vegetables. But now you're living with us, I can cook vegetables at last—'

  She ran on as happily and eagerly as if she had discovered a new toy. He began to grow puzzled by her enthusiasm, wondered how he had set it off, having none himself.

  'We'll go down to the stores together,' she was saying, 'and stock up on—cereals, and—and spices and stuff. You can show me how to fix a vegetarian meal. It'll be my vegetarian summer,' she ended with a delighted laugh.

  Nineteen

  AND so they began their careers as shoppers, Mrs Patton driving Arun in her white Honda Civic to the supermarkets along Route Two and opening out to him a vista of experience he had never expected to have. He was perplexed to find these stores and their attendant parking lots, bank outlets, gas stations, Burger Kings, Belly Delis and Dunkin' Donuts stranded on huge stretches of tarmac spread upon fields of meadow grass and summer flowers while in the distance the blue hazy line of woods smouldered and smoked against the blazing summer sky. Why would townspeople need to go into the country to shop? he wondered, but when he ventured to ask Mrs Patton, she could only give a little shake of her head and a small smile, not having understood his question: why should anyone question what was there?

  She had already parked her car, swung out of it with her handbag, and was hurrying past the ranks of parked cars to the nest of stacked shopping carts in her eagerness to begin, while Arun trailed slowly after her, his eyes lingering over the cars that were not what he had previously known as cars—vehicles, designed to carry passengers from one point to another—but whole establishments, solid and rooted in their bulk, all laboriously acquired: weightage, history, even an inheritance. Their backseats piled with baby seats, dog blankets, boxes of Kleenex, toys and mascots adhering to their windows like barnacles. Each a module designed to contain and propel lives and dreams. Numberplates that read:

  'I l♥ve my Car'

  'Another Day, Another Dollar'

  and stickers that proclaimed:

  'Guns, Guts and God

  Make America Great.'

  Histories inscribed on strips of plastic:

  'My Daughter and I Both Go To College,

  My Money and Her Brains.'

  Certificates of pride:

  'Dartmouth.' 'University of Pennsylvania.' 'Williams.'

  And warnings:

  'Baby on Board'

  'I Brake for Animals'

  'One Nuclear Accident

  Could Spoil Your Whole Day'

  Arun was dizzied by these biographies, these statements of faith. He could have lingered here, constructing characters, lives to go with these containers, all safely invisible, but Mrs Patton was waiting for him at the automatic doors. He could see her in her flat rubber-soled sandals, her yellow slacks and T-shirt that bore the legend Born to Shop, her hands on the cart she had chosen. As with his question regarding the location of the supermarket, she could not understand what was preoccupying him. 'Everything okay?' she asked as he caught up at last.

  Once inside the chilled air and controlled atmosphere of the market, she showed him how to shop by her own assured and accomplished example, all the tentativeness and timidity she showed at home gone from her. He learnt to follow her up and down the aisles obediently, at her own measured pace, and to read the labels on the cans and cartons with the high seriousness she brought to the exercise, studying the different brands not only for their different prices—as he was inclined to do—but for their relative food value and calorific content. Together they wheeled the cart around and avoided walking past the open freezers where the meat lay steaming in pink packages of rawness, the tank where helpless lobsters, their claws rubber-banded together, rose on ascending bubbles and then sank again, tragically, the trays where the pale flesh of fish curled in opaque twists upon the polystyrene, and made their way instead to the shelves piled with pasta, beans and lentils, all harmlessly dry and odour-free, the racks of nuts and spices where whatever surprises might be were bottled and boxed with kindergarten attractiveness. Mrs Patron's eyes gleamed as they approached the vegetables, all shining and wet and sprinkled perpetually with a soft mist spread upon them, bringing out colours and presenting shapes impossible in the outside world. To Arun they seemed as unreal in their bright perfection as plastic representations, but she insisted on loading their cart with enough broccoli and bean sprouts, radishes and celery to feed the family for a month.

  'But will they eat?' he asked worriedly as he helped her pull polythene bags off their rollers and open them, then fill and close them with a twist.

  'What does it matter, Ahroon? We will,' she laughed gaily, at the same time weighing a cantaloupe in her hands and testing it for ripeness.

  'Excuse me,' said a voice, and a woman leant over to pick her own cantaloupe: she wore a T-shirt that declared Shop Till You Dro
p.

  This unnerved Arun but Mrs Patton did not seem to see.

  Her joy lay in carrying home this hoard she had won from the maze of the supermarket, storing it away in her kitchen cupboards, her refrigerator and freezer. Arun, handing her the packages one by one—butter, yoghurt, milk to go in here, jam and cookies and cereal there—worried that they would never make their way through so much food but this did not seem to be the object of her purchases. Once it was all stored away in the gleaming white caves where ice secretly whispered to itself, she was content. She did not appear to think there was another stage beyond this final, satisfying one.

  It was left to him to extract what he wanted from this hoard, to slice tomatoes and lay lettuce on bread, or spill cereal into a bowl; she watched, with pride and complicity. Arun ate with an expression of woe and a sense of mistreatment. How was he to tell Mrs Patton that these were not the foods that figured in his culture? That his digestive system did not know how to turn them into nourishment? For the first time in his existence, he found he craved what he had taken for granted before and even at times thought an unbearable nuisance—those meals cooked and placed before him whether he wanted them or not (and how often he had not), that duty to consume what others thought he must consume.

  If she noticed his expression, she seemed incapable of doing anything about it. She had provided: she had foraged, she had gathered, she had put forth. Now she stood beaming, her arms crossed over that T-shirt that bore those ominous words, her eyes flashing the message of the bond between man and woman, between woman and child, brought to ideal consummation.