Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai's latest novel, is the companion piece to Clear Light of Day. In Fasting, Feasting, Desai returns to the Indian family, and the relations between parents and children. Parental neglect is frequently referred to in Clear Light of Day, but the novel focuses on the children's shared experience of neglect which both bonds and divides them. Neglect – and rejection – as the condition of everyday experience and the frame of a life-long existence, is the burden of Fasting, Feasting. The daughter, Uma, in Fasting, Feasting bears shades of both Bim and Tara; like Bim, she is the one who did not get away but she has none of Bim's autonomy. In the novel, she is the household drudge doing her parents’ bidding as Tara does her husband's, but her domestic bondage far exceeds Tara's for her parents have never thought her worthy of attention or encouragement. In her absence of self-worth, Uma's predicament is an extreme magnification of the discomfiting insecurity that Tara clearly feels in being marginalized in the family. Beginning with what she has left unsaid in Clear Light of Day, Desai, in her latest novel, paints an unforgiving picture of the psychological havoc which parents wreak on their children. Fasting, Feasting is a novel unsparing in its detail of parental abuse, and the children's selfabuse which is the tragic consequence.

While Part 1 of the novel, set in India, details Uma's subjection to her parents, and her frustrated and pathos-ridden attempts at self-fashioning, Part 2 moves to suburban United States, and the experience of Uma's brother, Arun, in an equally dysfunctional American family. The changes in location align with the globalizing orientations of Baumgartner's Bombay and Journey to Ithaca; so too does the determinism which haunts Desai's characters and which she traces to their early life. In Fasting, Feasting, the dysfunctional family returns as the main site of fictional exploration, specifically in the parents’ use and abuse of authority as they withhold their love. The novel inscribes Desai's most stringent critique of parental failure; there is almost no redeeming feature in the characterization of MamaPapa, that linked identity, or, perhaps more appropriately, entity which is the function of absolute self-interest.