Fasting Feasting

In Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, the characters, Uma, Aruna, Anamika, Arun, Melanie and Rod suffer from entrapment as an inescapable fact in their lives in many senses. On the one hand, Uma is suppressed, repressed and imprisoned, she is a reluctant victim of entrapment at home,” She walks off to her room and shuts the door behind her. She knows that when she shuts the door mama and Papa immediately become suspicious”. Uma is not able to have some privacy even at her own home, her parents are always watching her and doesn’t give her any time for herself. She was a babysitter in her early day, “We are not sending you back to school, Uma. You are staying at home to help with Arun ”, and an unpaid servant for her self-centered parents,” All morning mama and papa had found things for Uma to do”, her parents ruled her life. They even forced her to drop off school,” What is the use of going back to school if you keep failing, Uma?”, as she is not a straight A student, her parents do not allow her to keep going. When she gets a job offer through Dr. Dutt, she feels strange, “A career, living alone, leaving home. These troubling secret possibilities now entered Uma’s mind”. May be, if could have been able to take the job, she would have finally escape, but Mama refuses to send her. Her parents never let her do the things she wants, because they considered it totally unnecessary. When Uma receives an invitation for a coffee party, she feels special, “Mrs O’Henry, she has invited me to a coffee party, she would like to keep this treasure invitation for herself, it is for herself alone after all”, but mama and papa consider this not to be important so they do not want her to go. When Uma is allowed to go on a pilgrimage, she makes a connection between her life and the barks and howls of the dogs, “That was what Uma felt her own life to have been, full of barks, howls, messages, and now – silence”. This means that she has lived her life repressed with her parent