Plain, unmarriageable Uma has failed to outgrow her childhood home. Overprotected and starved for a life, she is surrounded and smothered by her overbearing parents, successful sister Aruna, who has outpaced her by pulling off a ‘good marriage’, and Arun, the family’s disappointment of a son. Eccentric aunts and cousins complete the scene of her claustrophobic existence, with its bitter-sweet treats of puri-alu and barfi s, samosas and fritters; and tragedies, big and small. Across the world in Massachusetts, where Arun has gone as a student, family life in an American suburb is bewilderingly different. The Pattons, who he lives with, appear strange and terrible to a young Indian, far from home. The women don’t appear to cook at all, though they stuff their shopping carts till they run over; the men barbecue huge hunks of meat; their daughter binges on innumerable candy bars. Increasingly, Mrs Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun wants most is to be invisible. Moving from the heated hub of a traditional Indian household to the cooler centre of an American one, Fasting, Feasting is a powerful exploration of hunger and plenty, in what is one of Anita Desai’s most socially acute novels.