Fasting, Feasting

by Anita Desai

  She might have been on display in the Foodmart, a special offer for the summer, gleaming with invitation. Almost, one feels, one might see a discount sign above it.

  Arun hopes to get past without being heard but his shoes crunch upon the gravel and she stirs instantly, lifting her head to gaze at him. She takes off and waves her glasses at him with an unfamiliarly expansive manner.

  'Ahroon!' she calls. 'Hi! I'm sunbathing, Ahroon.'

  He would like to disappear. He does not even want to glance in her direction. It is like confronting his mother naked. When he glances, as he must, he cannot help staring at her limp breasts that fall into pockets of mauve plaid cotton, freckled and mottled like old leather. Or at the creases and wrinkles cut into the slack flesh of her bared belly, grey and soft as if cut into felt. Mrs Patton, why?

  He croaks, 'Hi,' and hurries past, but hears her sing out, 'Oh, Ahroon, you should try this. The sun's glorious! It just irons your troubles right out!'

  When he bursts into the kitchen, his face purplish from the strain of all his turbulent feelings, he finds it is no longer empty either. Melanie is seated at the table in much the same costume as her mother's although in her case it is much more fully packed and filled. Her bare legs are locked around the chair legs and her face is lowered, along with strings of hair, into a tub of icecream which she is rapidly spooning out. It is the Chunky Monkey her mother bought. She stops when Arun enters and holds the spoon suspended, a globule of yellow cream slipping up her fingers.

  Instead of looking away disgustedly as usual, she gives him a strange grimace. 'D'you see Mom?' she asks.

  Arun does not understand immediately: he still finds it difficult to follow Melanie's slurred speech. While he turns over the sounds in his mind and tries to reconstruct them as words, the icecream slips off the spoon and onto the tabletop.

  'She's sunbathing? Melanie spits out suddenly, with great force, the same force that is pent up in Arun and that he will not allow to burst out.

  He stares at her to see if her feelings really reflect his, but he cannot decipher her expression. It is certainly not the sullen mask he usually sees, but it is not one he can recognise.

  Unexpectedly, Melanie grins. 'She won't be cooking you dinner tonight,' she says vengefully, then returns to the tub of icecream and attacks it with renewed ferocity.

  Then Arun does see a resemblance to something he knows: a resemblance to the contorted face of an enraged sister who, failing to express her outrage against neglect, against misunderstanding, against inattention to her unique and singular being and its hungers, merely spits and froths in ineffectual protest. How strange to encounter it here, Arun thinks, where so much is given, where there is both licence and plenty.

  But what is plenty? What is not? Can one tell the difference?

  Hungrily, Melanie is eating the icecream. Her lips part so she can cram the spoon in, loaded and dripping onto her chin, then diving down for more, and more, of the sweet, sticky, dribbling stuff with which she needs to satisfy herself.

  In a little while, Arun knows, she will be blundering upstairs where it will come streaming out of her, rejected.

  MRS Patton no longer cooks dinner for Arun. She does not set out to fetch food for her family either. She seems sunstruck, bedazzled, as she spreads herself on the sagging canvas of a deck chair, or sometimes on an immense towel laid on the grass, rousing herself only to tip more oil from a bottle into the cupped palm of her hand and smear it over her shoulders, her legs, her neck, the backs of her arms and her elbows. She does this with a slow, voluptuous motion—up, down, up, down—caressing the limp, lined flesh tenderly. The dark glasses she wears mask her expression as she does so. She looks up only when she hears someone leaving or entering the house, calling out a lazy, 'Hi! Come and enjoy the sun?'

  The very idea appals Arun, if it means the baring of flesh in public. He has never seen so much female flesh before. Then to see it scarred and wrinkled, shrunk or sagging with age fills him not so much with disgust as with distress. His body shrinks and closes upon itself, affronted. Averting his eyes, he tries to slip past unnoticed.

  Mr Patton clearly disapproves too. Slamming the car door and making his way around to the kitchen, he grumbles, 'Aren't you through sunbathing yet?'

  'Mmm-hmm,' she answers gaily.

  Mr Patton goes indoors, gets himself a can of beer from the refrigerator, and slumps onto the sofa in front of the television.

  There is a kind of desolation in the kitchen now. Where once there had been so much bustle and activity, such ambitious brews and novel odours, there is now only a litter of empty jars and cartons that have been opened and emptied by various members of the household when hunger has overtaken them, then abandoned on counters and tabletops in ruined attitudes.

  Arun, left to his own devices, finds he has lost his appetite. He stays longer in town, getting himself a cheese sandwich from the deli and sitting on a bench under the huge dusty maple trees in the town square to eat it before going home. On other benches young couples sit on each other's laps, tightly interwoven. An old man goes about with a thin stick, turning over leaves as if he expects to find something underneath. A young man with his hair wrapped in a red scarf plucks at a guitar, drawing out melancholy notes that fill Arun with a canine urge to howl. Once he wanders into the cinema and sits among the popcorn eaters, suffering through a film about a large rabbit that enters the world of human beings and proves their equal. On shuffling out, he runs into one of the Indian students at the university. They are embarrassed at finding each other at such a show, alone. The others in the group have gone on a trip to Washington, he learns, to look at the sights. They will not be back till all the students return, on Labor Day in September.

  It is difficult to believe that the hands of the Town Hall clock will move forwards, and the calendar on the brick wall behind the counter of muffins and doughnuts in the deli will lose its pages, one by one. The summer seems arrested in the sky, stalled in its great blaze of heat, too dispirited to move. The trees wilt, dust weighs down their leaves that have achieved full span and can unfold no further.

  At dusk, he makes his way reluctantly the long miles to Bayberry Lane, past darkened yards where the smoke spiralling up from all the barbecue fires smells of charred flesh, of food that is spoilt. Cicadas rasp relentlessly and mosquitoes come swarming out of the woods, out of the wilderness. It was there all the time, waiting—and it is what has taken over the town, the household, Mrs Patton.

  Twenty-six

  ANOTHER morning, feverish with heat. The glare, pouring in at all windows, beats down upon the faded rugs, shows up dust where no one has cleaned.

  But today Mrs Patton is in the kitchen. She is still in that mauve plaid sunsuit of hers, and the blue sandals, but at least she is on her feet, and working at the kitchen table. Perhaps there will be a return to normalcy now. Then she shatters such hopes by throwing Arun her newly roguish smile. She wears lipstick now, very pink. She is not very skilled at using it: it smears her front teeth. 'There you are!' she cries, too loudly. 'Come along! We're going to spend the day down at the swimming hole. It's too hot to lie in the yard and Daddy won't get us a pool, so Melanie and I've decided—' she looks archly through the door towards the den '—we'll go swimming instead, all by ourselves. Coming?'

  It is Saturday. Arun cannot plead work. He stands despondent, and when Melanie comes to the door, dressed in her bathing suit with a big shirt drawn over her shoulders, and stares at him challengingly, he starts wildly to find excuses.

  Mrs Patton will not hear them. No, she will not. Absolutely not. So she says, with her hands spread out and pressing against the air. 'No, no, no. We're all three of us going. Rod and Daddy have gone sailing on Lake Wyola and we're not going to sit here waiting for them to come home—oh no.'

  Arun must go back upstairs and collect his towel and swimming trunks. Then he follows Melanie to the driveway where Mrs Patton is waiting with baskets of equipment—oils and lotions, paperba
cks and dark glasses, sandwiches and lemonade. With that new and animated prance galvanising her dwindled shanks, she leads the way through a gap in the bushes to one of the woodland paths. Melanie and Arun follow silently. They try to find a way to walk that will not compel them to be side by side or in any way close together. But who is to follow whom? It is an awkward problem. Arun finally stops trying to lag behind her—she can lag even better—and goes ahead to catch up with Mrs Patton. He ought to help carry those baskets anyway. He takes one from her hands and she throws him a radiant, lipsticked smile. Then she swings away and goes confidently forwards.

  'Summertime,' he hears her singing, 'when the living is eeh-zee—'

  They make their way along scuffed paths through layers of old soft pine needles. The woods are thrumming with cicadas: they shrill and shrill as if the sun is playing on their sinews, as if they were small harps suspended in the trees. A bird shrieks hoarsely, flies on, shrieks elsewhere, further off—that ugly, jarring note that does not vary. But there are no birds to be seen, nor animals. It is as if they are in hiding, or have fled. Perhaps they have because the houses of Edge Hill do intrude and one can glimpse a bit of wall here or roof there, a washing line hung with sheets or a plastic gnome, finger to nose, enigmatically winking. Arun finds the hair on the back of his neck begin to prickle, as if in warning. He is sweating, and the palms of his hands are becoming puffy and damp. Why must people live in the vicinity of such benighted wilderness and become a part of it? The town may be small and have little to offer, but how passionately he prefers its post office, its shops, its dry-cleaning stores and picture framers to this creeping curtain of insidious green, these grasses stirring with insidious life, and bushes with posionous berries—so bright or else so pale. Nearly tripping upon a root, he stumbles and has to steady himself so as not to spill the contents of the basket.

  As he stands panting to recover himself, Melanie comes up the path, chewing on a grass, her brow lowered and surly. In the dim light under the branches, her face looks not only puffy but raw and swollen, the skin a mass of pimples. Throwing him her most contemptuous look, she strikes off the path, ostentatiously refusing to pass by him. He wants to yell, 'Melanie!' and demand her company, demand attention, but restrains himself and continues along his way.

  Then the ground begins to slope steeply. He has to concentrate on how to lower himself downhill without dropping the basket. He places his feet carefully in the rungs of tree roots, frowning with anxiety over the difficult descent.

  BELOW lies the swimming hole. Mrs Patton has already reached the shore. She stands on a boulder, striking a pose. Then she looks back, laughing. 'Nice, Ahroon?'

  'Very nice,' says Arun, miserably. He is pouring now with sweat and needs a swim, but it is something he never enjoyed at school, in the scummy green swimming pool that stank of boys, and in all his life he has never swum in a pond. He wonders if it is clean. He wonders what animal life might lurk in it. He cannot help eyeing it with the greatest suspicion.

  The water sparkles innocently, spreading itself in a rough circle between rocks and overhanging pines. Mrs Patton has brought them to a sandy shelf where there are no other picnickers or swimmers; these all swarm at the other end of the pond, near the parking lot. Bare bodies gleam in the shimmer of heat on the sand. Relatively few of them are in the water: a knot of small boys, splashing, a dog effortfully keeping its head above the skin of water while its paws paddle invisibly underneath, a girl on a raft who seems asleep as she drifts. But the people on the beach make such a din—playing with rubber balls, turning up the volume of their radios—that it gives the impression of being crowded. This, too, makes Arun pause: he had not expected people at all. He would prefer there to be no one to witness him gingerly confronting the water.

  Melanie has come out of the woods behind them and flung herself on the sand in a moody heap. Pulling candy bars out of a bag, she begins to unwrap them and bite at them angrily. Mrs Patton sighs, 'Dear, there are sandwiches in the baskets, you know.'

  Arun stands at the edge, still wondering if it is safe to plunge in amidst the waterweeds that float thickly at their end of the pond (perhaps that is what keeps the other swimmers away). Then he becomes aware of Mrs Patton casually removing her sunsuit, slipping it off her hips and shoulders as she stands barefoot on a towel she has spread on the sand. Rather than see her stripped, he puts out his arms like a man fleeing and plunges hastily into the water, bracing himself for the cold splash, and falling on his stomach noisily and painfully just as he remembers doing all through his school years. Then he pushes away from the edge, through the dragging weeds to where the water is clear. He wonders if he has the strength to swim to the centre of the pond where there is a rock and a single twisted pine tree that seems to proffer shelter. He strikes out towards it purposefully but when he tires he turns on his back and lies on the water, kicking his legs mightily to give an impression of undiminished vigour. Now that he is contributing to the din, he begins to feel pleased. Surprisingly, it is due to the water, an element that removes him from his normal self, and opens out another world of possibilities.

  Of course, he tires, and the knot of splashing boys seems suddenly close, threatening to overtake him. So he turns landwards again, breast-stroking with great gulps of air, and hopes that the green opacity of water will disguise his lack of stamina. He is relieved to crawl out onto the shingle, then upright himself on the sand. Bending over to pick up his towel, he glances surreptitiously at Mrs Patton's supine figure. She has put on her sunglasses and he cannot tell if she is sleeping: her lips are parted and the cords of her neck are relaxed, like slack ropes. Her body lies spreadeagled on the pink towel with another, smaller towel covering only those parts that Arun fears most to see. The rest of her straggles away from these points, limply. A small plastic radio by her head is playing: there is a fund-raising drive on for public radio and two young people are offering contributors coffee mugs and umbrellas if only they will ring in and send their subscriptions to I-800-uh-uh-uh.

  Melanie is gone. Where she sat there is now a heap of candy papers, brown and gummy.

  WHAT is he to do? He has swum and swum. He does not want to be sitting beside Mrs Patton, both of them undressed, listening to the fund-raising drive. He moves away from her, up the sand, into the shade of the trees. Perhaps he can sit there on a tuft of grass, and it will be cooler. He wishes he had brought along a book. He dares not pick up the radio and take it with him; that would wake her.

  But as soon as he settles himself upon the grass, the mosquitoes attack. Mosquitoes, midges, gnats, enough to craze anyone in search of peace. A few minutes, and they have got into his hair, his eyes, his nostrils. In disgust, he rises from the grass and goes deeper into the woods, hoping to leave the plague behind.

  He is on another path. The earth is moist and crumbling under his feet. It seems to head somewhere. He follows it, parting the bushes and vines on the way, and comes to a clearing amongst some poisonous-looking plants with evil dark heads and a rank odour. Melanie is there, lying on the ground. Not on her back, not covered by a towel, but facedown in the dirt in which she has obviously been kicking and struggling. The dampness and discoloration around her show that it is not the strange green plants that give off that sour odour but her vomit. She is lying in her vomit, her hair streaked with it, her face turned to one side, and it is still leaking from her mouth.

  'Melanie,' Arun whispers, 'Melanie—are you dead?'

  She twitches and grunts, 'Hhh, hhh,' then rubs her face with her hands. It is smudged with dirt and soiled with vomit. Her eyes are tightly shut. 'Go. Go 'way,' she burst out, and thrashes her arms upon the ground. Then, with a groan, she lifts herself onto her knees, thrusts her finger down her throat and vomits again, copiously.

  Arun backs away. He stands, his hands twisted at his sides, looking around to see if any help is coming. But the woods hold out nothing but these leaves, twigs, branches, fronds, roots and vines that he so distrusts. They murmur, men
acingly, or perhaps it is the mosquitoes. Seeing no one, he approaches her gingerly—she is panting now, but still—and puts his hand on her shoulder. Its nakedness startles him and quickly he draws back.

  'Melanie,' he says, desperately, 'shall I call your mother?' Staring at her, huddled on the ground and trembling, he feels this could be a scene in a film—a maiden at the feet of the hero, crying—but of course it is no such thing. It is not safely in the distance, flattened and reduced to black and white: it is daylit, three-dimensional and malodorous. They are not the stuff of dreams or even cinema: he is not the hero, nor she the heroine, and what she is crying for, he cannot tell. This is no plastic mock-up, no cartoon representation such as he has been seeing all summer; this is a real pain and a real hunger. But what hunger does a person so sated feel? He croaks, 'Shall I, Melanie, shall I?' but is rooted to the spot, its reality holds him captive. There is no escape, and it is Mrs Patron who comes in search of them and finds them.

  'My Lord,' says Mrs Patton. 'Dear Lord.'

  Twenty-seven

  IF summer was a gilded ball that had been flung up, up into the sky—high, high—now it comes plummeting down, down. It has reached its peak, it has hung for an incredible length of time, suspended in mid-air, but now the sun lowers itself, quite gently, with a barely audible sigh. The woods and meadows that had shimmered in its heat, now shiver and turn grey, subdued. Everything is normal again.