Fasting, Feasting
Anita Desai
Vintage £6.99, pp228
Buy it at BOL

‘If we could have chosen a runner-up, we would have undoubtedly given the runner-up award to Anita Desai,’ Gerald Kaufman, chair of the judges, announced when JM Coetzee won the Booker Prize last year. But for Uma, the centre of our attention for much of Desai’s quietly unforgettable, almost-winning novel Fasting, Feasting, even small consolations are in short supply.

Uma is a Cinderella figure, kept at home to babysit, make lemonade and massage her mother’s feet – only she isn’t the one with the looks, either. While her pretty younger sister, Aruna, achieves a ‘good’ marriage and moves to the seafront in Bombay, and her little brother, Arun, is hothoused in preparation for university abroad, Uma - myopic, plain and not very bright - remains on the shelf, grows lumpen, grey and bitter alone with her parents, ‘MamaPapa’ - a two-headed monster of suffocating, middle-class Indian tradition who rule their small world from a swing on the veranda.

Fairy godmothers come and go; respect, spiritual nourishment and novelty are as fleeting as a flash of sun on the sacred river nearby. Desai writes in vignettes that accentuate the brevity of Uma’s desperately sad-funny moments of respite: a drink of shandy one evening; a stolen phone call; the local convent’s Christmas bazaar (her idea of heaven).

In eloquent contrast, part two of the novel follows Arun in the US, where life is so alien he ‘knows nothing’. Here, he is repulsed by the amount of food crammed into ‘gleaming white caves where ice secretly whispered to itself’, although the all-American family he stays with are starving in a different way. ‘But what is plenty? What is not?’ wonders Arun. ‘Can one tell the difference?’