Clear Light of Day

 “As she stared, a petal rose and tumbled onto its back, and she saw uncovered the gleam of a—a pearl? a silver ring? Something that gleamed, something that flashed, then flowed—and she saw it was her childhood snail slowly, resignedly making its way from under the flower up a clod of earth only to tumble off the top onto its side—an eternal, miniature Sisyphus.”

The adult Tara is in the garden, re-enacting a scene from her childhood. There is initially the wonder of a child believing she might find a treasure hidden in the earth. Then she realizes that it is the same snail from her childhood, and that nothing has changed, just like nothing in the household or family has changed. There is a direct allusion to the classical Sisyphus, punished by the gods for trying to cheat death. There is a more indirect echo of Virginia Woolf’s classic Modernist short story “Kew Gardens” (1919) which follows the travels of a snail through a garden.

“Baba came out for his tea. He did not look as if he could be held responsible for any degree of noise whatsoever. Coming out into the veranda, he blinked as if the sun surprised him. He was in his pyjamas—an old pair with frayed ends, over which he wore a grey bush-shirt worn and washed almost to translucency. His face, too, was blanched, like a plant grown underground or in deepest shade, and his hair was quite white, giving his young, fine face a ghostly look that made people start whenever he appeared.”

The incessant record playing that annoys Bakul and Tara anticipates Baba’s physical appearance in the garden. Ironically, his appearance does not match the noise he creates. He instead has the mole-like appearance of an old man or plant deprived of sunlight. His clothing suggests poverty and decay. He is one of the “creatures” who haunts the Das home.

“Much travelled, brought up in embassies, fluent in several languages, they were far too sophisticated for such rustic pleasures, she knew, and felt guilty over her own lack of that desirable quality. She had fooled Bakul into believing that she had acquired it, that he had shown her how to acquire it. But it was all just dust thrown into his eyes, dust.”

This is one of Tara’s earlier revelations about herself and her marriage. Unlike her daughters, who were raised as modern and cosmopolitan young women, she still enjoys “rustic pleasures” even though this is an “undesirable quality” in the eyes of her husband. Yet she is not an innocent “rustic,” for she admits that she has fooled him.

“In the shaded darkness, silence had the quality of a looming dragon. It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate, to dominate. To escape from it would require a burst of recklessness, even cruelty.”

The Das family operates in a world of secrets and silence. Baba is nonspeaking, and no one seems able to penetrate his inner world—not even the omniscient narrator. Tara keeps secrets from her husband. Bim seems to keep secrets from herself. The sisters have remained silent about childhood traumas they shared: the neglect by their parents, the death of their aunt, Bim’s estrangement from Raja. The family silence is powerful, taking on mythical or biblical proportions. Escaping it would require truth telling, which can often be cruel.

“Whenever she saw a tangle, an emotional tangle of this kind, rise up before her, she wanted only to turn and flee into that neat, sanitary, disinfected land in which she lived with Bakul, with its set of rules and regulations, its neatness and orderliness.”

Tara’s response to difficult situations in life is to run away. She admits later in the story that she had used her husband Bakul as an “instrument of escape.” She could no longer tolerate the messy lives of her family members, choosing instead a man who offered her the kind of order described above. Even during this visit, she has moments when she wants to flee to her husband’s family in modern New Delhi, away from the chaos and emotional turmoil of her family’s home in Old Delhi.

“Bim laughed sarcastically as she came and picked up the letter and put it back in the desk. It seemed to have a pigeon-hole all to itself as if it were a holy relic like fingernails or a crooked yellow tooth.”

Sarcasm is a harsh emotional response, often used as a defense mechanism to hide a vulnerability. Here, Bim is hiding the pain her brother’s letter causes her. Similes are used to describe the letter, which has taken on the kind of magical or symbolic power of a holy relic of a very intimate and not especially attractive nature—“fingernails” or “a crooked yellow tooth.”

“Tara’s not quite assimilated cosmopolitanism that sat on her oddly, as if a child had dressed up in its mother’s high-heeled shoes—taller, certainly, but wobbling.”

The narrator describes Tara here from the outside, as opposed to internal thought or revelations discussed above. If Tara had assimilated her cosmopolitanism, it would have become a naturalized part of her. Instead, she wears it like a child dressing up in her mother’s high heels, suggesting that she is just playing at being a modern, urban woman. This reinforces her own prior revelation that she is fooling her husband into believing she has become sophisticated.

“‘Nineteen forty-seven. That summer. We could see the fires burning in the city every night—’

Tara shuddered. ‘I hate to think about it.’

‘Why? It was the great event of our lives—of our youth. What would our youth have been without it to round it off in such a definite and dramatic way?’

‘I was glad when it was over,’ Tara’s voice trembled with the passion she was always obliged to conceal. ‘I’m so glad it is over and we can never be young again.’”

Tara and Bim have diametrically opposed reactions to their memories of the events of 1947. To Bim, the violence and drama leading up to Independence and Partition marked their youth in exciting ways. To Tara, it is a relief that those tumultuous months are over. The excess of energy and emotion in the streets were unsettling to her, just like they were in her private life.

“‘Oh Bim, Bim,’ he said, dramatically gesturing towards the door that opened out into the thick, dusty twilight. ‘Look there—look,’ he said, ‘the city’s burning down. Delhi is being destroyed. The whole country is split up and everyone’s become a refugee. Our friends have been driven away, perhaps killed. And you ask me to worry about a few cheques and files in father’s office.’”

Raja here appears like a heroic figure from one of the poems or histories that he adores. He speaks to his sister as if on stage, delivering a dramatic speech. While he, like everyone else in the country, is unsettled or excited by the events unfolding in the country, Raja uses them as an excuse not to take care of his familial responsibilities.

 “‘Oh, did she?’ laughed Bim. ‘I’m head of the family now, am I? You think so, so I must be.’ She shrugged, looking plain again. ‘I don’t think you need to ask anyone—except Tara. Modern times. Modern India. Independent India.’”

This conversation takes place in the past between a young Bakul and Bim. Bakul, on the verge of asking to marry Tara, is having a moment of intimacy and desire with Tara’s sister, whom he confesses elsewhere that he finds appealing. Bim’s response to the intimacy is flirtatious laughter. Then, a shift happens, and she appears “plain” (rather than appealing) again. Her words delivered in a staccato manner mark this shift; words that reflect the modernism and feminism to which she ascribes.

“She always told herself that was the last time she saw him, the day that Mahatma Gandhi was shot. But it was not true—there was one more time, one that she never admitted and tried never to remember.”

Bim here is thinking about the young Dr. Biswas who had wished to marry her. She connects her breaking off the possible engagement to the assassination of Gandhi, which was a moment of breaking off the potential for non-violence in the country. However, this is a false memory, purposefully manufactured by Bim. It is not clear whether it is the narrator alone who is aware of this duplicity, or if Bim herself is also.

“Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others—to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.”

This statement by Dr. Biswas is the reason Bim “tried never to remember” her final meeting with him. He speaks a truth to Bim that she has been trying to avoid telling herself her entire life. She is not the independent “modern Indian woman” who rebels against tradition, but rather the traditional woman who sacrifices her own dreams and desires for the needs of her family.

“Yet it was as if she had drowned for Bim dreamt night after night of her bloated white body floating naked on the surface of the well. Even when drinking her morning tea, she had only to look into the tea-cup to see her aunt’s drowned face in it, her fine-spun silver hair spread out like Ophelia’s, floating in the tea.”

The literary allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet reflects Bim’s high level of education in English literature. This is because of British colonization of India as well as her family’s level of privilege within colonized society. Dreams of death by drowning haunt her like they haunt others in her family. Here, she romanticizes her aunt’s “drowning” in alcoholism into an aestheticized death like that of Ophelia.

“Now they had an aunt, handed to them like a discarded household appliance they might find of use. They exchanged deep, understanding looks with each other: they had understood their power over her, they had seen she was buying, or begging for their tolerance and patronage. They were not beyond, even at that age, feeling the superiority of their position and of extending their gratitude from that elevated position of power.”

This is an extremely capitalistic view of someone’s worth. In the eyes of the children, their aunt is a “commodity” with use value. The quote also reveals that they understand their privileged position and the power that comes with it. While they did extend gratitude to her, it was not without feelings of superiority. This is an unsettling quote, yet one that reflects the power that the wealthy hold over the poor, or the British over the Indian population during colonization.

“Quick, nervy and jumpy—yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its roots and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived. “Strange, when she was not their mother and did not rule the household. She really had not the qualities required by a mother or a wife.”

Despite her acknowledged flaws, Aunt Mira is the most stable feature in the children’s lives. She is “quick, nervy, and jumpy” because of her personality, but also because of her alcohol addiction. The metaphor of Aunt Mira as a tree suggests that she has become rooted in the family and that she provides shelter to the children. She functions as their surrogate mother, despite not having the authority, or according to her, the qualities to do so.

“Then Tara knew she had witnessed a murder—her father had killed her mother. She stumbled out of the room and was sick on the drawing room carpet.”

Tara remembers this scene as she understood it at the time, when she was a child. Her father did not kill her mother, but the narrative voice describes the scene with certainty (“she knew”) because Tara felt this certainty in the moment. Tara’s reaction was visceral and immediate, supporting the idea that she really believed her mother had been murdered by her father.

“He stuck out his tongue at them for he had no idea that they were not screaming with rage at his escape from their clutching fingers and pinching nails but at the horror behind the hedge, the well that waited for them at the bottom of the garden, bottomless and black and stinking.”

This disconnect between Raja’s interpretation of his sisters’ behavior and their real emotions indicates his self-absorption and lack of empathy. He reacts inappropriately to their terror just as his letter to Bim reacts inappropriately to having inherited the house that the Das family rents. Rather than reassuring his sisters in either instance, he dismisses their feelings. This suggests a lack of caring and empathy for his family.

“Whenever Tara smelt vinegar or tasted lime paste in a betel leaf, her

flesh crept, she shivered, she recalled the zig-zag advance of threatening bees emerging from that dark, stinking tomb to capture Bim and leave her bloated and blue like a plum. Aunt Mira and the ayah between them treated Bim and drew out all her stings, but Tara kept hers hidden.”

The smell or taste of acid transports Tara back to a particular moment in her past. For her, this is moment full of fear and guilt, as she abandoned her sister Bim to the bee swarm. The language is gloomy (“dark stinking tomb”), and the use of a simile makes Bim’s swollen and discolored face easy to imagine. The “stings” Tara keeps hidden are the emotional wounds she feels because of this incident.

“Something about Raja’s letter, Tara’s comments, the world of luxury and extravagance created by them and approved by both of them, excluding her, her standards, too rough and too austere for them, made anger flower in her like some wild red tropical bloom, and a kind of resentment mixed with fear made her stutter, half-aloud.”

Bim has a list of grievances that cause her anger to grow as she feels bullied and excluded from the comfortable lives of her siblings. The simile changes the negativity of anger into something beautiful (a flower) yet also something wild and potentially dangerous. Her feeling of resentment is mixed with fear that robs her of the ability to speak.

“The mosquitoes that night were like the thoughts of the day embodied in monster form, invisible in the dark but present everywhere, most of all in and around the ears, piercingly audible.”

The use of a simile here brings to life the guilt and bitterness Bim feels as a result of her conversation with Bim, with all the buried memories that conversation has brought to light.

“Then Bim’s rage was spent at last. It had reached its peak, its acme, like a great glittering wave that had hovered over everyone and that now collapsed, fell on the sand and seeped away, leaving nothing but a soggy shadow in the shape of Baba’s silence.”

This quote describes Bim’s rage, which has likely been building throughout her life, like a wave. The use of this simile helps the reader to envision the menace of Bim’s anger, which like the wave threatens all with possible destruction, but once it has crested empties of its power to harm. Like the wave leaves a “soggy shadow” on the shore, Bim’s rage leaves its unpleasant trace behind.

“She had not realized that Raja’s ambitions were so modest and unassertive. Far from playing the hero, he had only worshipped the heroes of his youth. Since he had set about imitating them and deriving from them so meticulously and painstakingly, they were not quite so bad as they might have been if he had trusted only in his own worth.”

Sifting through her old translations of Raja’s poems, Bim has an important epiphany about her brother. She had hero-worshipped him, placed him on a pedestal, and was therefore angry and unforgiving when he failed to live up to this unrealistic ideal. But now she realizes that he was much smaller and much more human than she had originally thought; he wasn’t the hero but was emulating heroes because he did not have enough confidence in his own value.

“They sat in silence then, the three of them, for now there seemed no need to say another word. Everything had been said at last, cleared out of the way finally. There was nothing left in the way of a barrier or a shadow, only the clear light pouring down from the sun.”

Bim, Baba, and the cat are attending the concert in the neighbor’s garden. It is somewhat ironic that there is no need for them to say another word, since Bim is the only one of the three who is capable of speech. Perhaps here the narrator is referring back to the conversations Bim had with Tara before she left for the wedding. Tara was able to express her guilt over abandoning Bim to the bees, and for abandoning the family more generally. Bim was able to express her desire to repair her relationship with her estranged brother Raja. Silence here is no longer hiding hurts or secrets as it had in the family’s past.