Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I said. You think animals take the place of babies for us love-starved spinsters,’ Bim said with a certain satisfaction and lowered the rumpled cat to the gravel walk as they came up to the house. ‘But you’re wrong,’ she said, striding across the sun-slashed drive. ‘You can’t possibly feel for them what I do about these wretched animals of mine.’

  ‘Oh Bim,’ protested Tara, recognising the moment when Bim went too far with which all their encounters had ended throughout their childhood, but she was prevented from explaining herself by the approach of a monstrous body of noise that seemed to be pushing its way out through a tight tunnel, rustily grinding through, and then emerged into full brassy volume, making the pigeons that lived on the ledge under the veranda ceiling throw up their wings and depart as if at a shot. It was not Bakul who was responsible for the cacophony. He was sitting—flabbily, flaccidly—in one of the cane chairs on the veranda with the tea tray in front of him, waiting for someone to come and pour. The noise beat and thrummed in one of the curtained rooms behind him. ‘Sm-o-oke gets in your eyes,’ moaned an agonised voice, and Tara sighed and her shoulders drooped by a visible inch or two.

  ‘Baba still plays the same old records?’ she asked as they went slowly up the wide stairs between the massed pots of spider lilies and asparagus fern to the veranda.

  ‘He never stops,’ said Bim, smiling. ‘Not for a day.’

  ‘Don’t you mind the noise?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Bim, the lightness of her tone carefully contrived. ‘I don’t hear it any more.’

  ‘It’s loud,’ complained Tara in a distressed voice. ‘I used to look for records to send Baba—I thought he’d like some new ones—but they don’t make 78s any more.’

  ‘Oh he doesn’t want any new records,’ said Bim. ‘He wouldn’t play them. He loves his old ones.’

  ‘Isn’t it strange,’ said Tara, wincing at the unmodulated roar that swept across the still, shady veranda in an almost visible onslaught of destruction.

  ‘We are strange, I told you,’ laughed Bim, striding across the tiled floor to the cane chairs and the tea tray. ‘Oh, Bakul—bhai, you’re up. Did you sleep?’ she asked carelessly, sitting down in front of the tray. But instead of pouring out the tea she only lifted the milk jug and, bending down, filled a saucer for the cat who crouched before it and began to lap even before Bim had finished pouring so that some drops fell on her ears and on her whiskers, a sight that made Bim laugh as she held the jug, waiting for the cat to finish the milk. Then she bent and refilled the saucer. Tara, who had poured out a cup of tea for Bakul, waited for her to surrender the milk jug. When she did, there was very little left in it for Bakul’s tea. Tara shook it to bring out a few reluctant drops.

  ‘Is that enough?’ she asked uneasily, even guiltily, handing the cup to Bakul.

  He shrugged, making no reply, his lower lip thrust out in the beginning of a sulk. It may not have been the lack of milk, though, it might have been the din that stood about them like sheets of corrugated iron, making conversation impossible. As he stirred his tea thoughtfully with a little spoon, the song rose to its raucous crescendo as though the singer had a dagger plunged into his breast and were letting fly the heartfelt notes of his last plaint on earth. Then at last the rusty needle ground to a halt in the felt-embedded groove of the antique record and they all sighed, simultaneously, and sank back in their chairs, exhausted.

  The pigeons that had retreated to the roof came fluttering back to their nests and settled down with small complaining sounds, guttural and comfortable. The bamboo screen in the doorway lifted and 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.

  But no one on the veranda started. Instead, they turned on him their most careful smiles, trying to make their smiles express feelings that were comforting, reassuring, not startling.

  Then Bim began to bustle. Now she called out for more milk and a freshly refilled jug appeared from the pantry, full to the brim, before Bakul’s widened eyes. Baba’s cup was filled not with tea at all but with milk that had seemed so short a moment ago. Then, to top it, a spoonful of sugar was poured in as well and all stirred up with a tremendous clatter and handed, generously slopping, to Baba who took it without any expression of distaste or embarrassment and sat down on his little cane stool to sip it. Even the cat was transfixed by the spectacle and sat back on her haunches, staring at him with eyes that were circles of sharp green glass.

  Only Bim seemed to notice nothing odd. Nor did she seem to think it necessary to speak to or be spoken to by Baba. She said, ‘Look at her. You’d think I had given her enough but no, if we take any ourselves, she feels it’s come out of her share.’

  After a minute Tara realised she was speaking of the cat. Tara had lost the childhood habit of including animals in the family once she had married and begun the perpetual travels and moves that precluded the keeping of pets. It was with a small effort that she tore her eyes away from her brother and regarded the reproachful cat.

  ‘She’s too fat,’ she said, thinking pet-owners generally liked such remarks. It was not a truthful one: the cat was thin as a string.

  Bim put out her toe and scratched the creature under her ear but the cat turned angrily away, refusing such advances, and kept her eyes riveted on Baba till he had sipped the last drop of milk and put the cup back on the saucer with an unmistakably empty ring. Then she dropped sulkily onto the tiles and lay there noisily tearing at her fur with a sandpapered tongue of an angry red.

  While the two women sat upright and tense and seethed with unspoken speech, the two men seemed dehydrated, emptied out, with not a word to say about anything. Only the pigeons cooed on and on, too lazy even to open their beaks, content to mutter in their throats rather than sing or call. The dog, stretched out at Bim’s feet, writhed and coiled, now catching his tail between his teeth, now scrabbling with his paws, then bit at fleas and chewed his hair, weaving a thick mat of sound together with the cat who was busy with herself.

  Bakul could bear it no longer. When his expression had grown so thin and so sour that it was about to split, he said, in a voice meant to be sonorous, ‘Our first morning in Delhi.’ To Bim’s wonder and astonishment, Tara smiled at this radiantly as though he had made a profound remark on which he was to be congratulated. He gave her a small, confidential smile in return. ‘What shall we do with it?’

  Bim suddenly scratched her head as if the dog had started up something there. ‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, ‘but I have some of my students coming over this morning.’

  ‘Students? But Bim, I thought your summer vacation had begun.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I wanted to give them some reading lists so they don’t waste all their time walking up and down the Mall in Simla or going to the pictures. Then they reminded me I had missed a tutorial and had to see some of their papers. You see, it isn’t just I who make them work—they make me work, too. So I asked them to come down here—they love to come, I don’t know why. I’ll go and get ready—I’m late. And you? You two? What will you do?’

  Tara gazed at her husband for answer till he finally lowered his eyes by careful inches from the plaster moulding under the ceiling where the pigeons strutted and squatted and puffed themselves, and said ‘Perhaps I could ask my uncle to send us a car. Then we could go and call on some of my relations in New Delhi. They will be expecting us.’

  ‘I’ll get ready,’ said Tara, instantly getting to her feet as if in relief.

  Bim, who remembered her as a languid little girl, listless, a dawdler, noted
her quick movements, her efficient briskness, with some surprise, but said nothing. Instead, she turned to Baba and drawled, slowly, ‘And Baba,’ as she bent forward and started stacking the cups onto the wooden tray. The others got up and stretched and walked about the veranda except for Baba who sat calmly with his long white hands dangling loosely on either side of him. When Bim said ‘Baba’ again, he smiled gently at the floor. ‘Baba,’ she said again in a very low voice so that Bakul, standing on the steps and scrutinizing the bougainvilleas at the pillars, would not hear her, ‘do you think you might go to the office today?’

  Tara, who was at the door at the end of the veranda, about to lift the bamboo curtain and go in, paused. Somehow she had heard. Even in her rush to get dressed and be ready for anything her husband might suggest, she paused in shock to find that Bim still made attempts to send Baba to the office. Considering their futility, she thought they must have been given up long ago. She could not help stopping and turning round to see Bim piling up the tea tray and Baba seated on his small child’s stool, smiling, his hands helplessly dangling, the busy dog licking, scratching, while the morning took another stride forward and stood with its feet planted on the tiled floor.

  ‘Won’t you go today, Baba?’ Bim asked softly, not looking at him, looking at the tea cups. ‘Do go. You could catch a bus. It’ll make a change. We’ll all be busy. Then come home to lunch. Or stay if you find it interesting.’

  Baba smiled at the bare tiles. His hands swung as if loose in their sockets, as if in a light breeze. But there was no breeze: the heat dropped out of the sky and stood before them like a sheet of foil.

  Then Bim got up and lifted the tray and went barefoot down the other end of the veranda to the pantry. Tara could hear her talking to the cook in her normal speaking voice. She turned and went into the room herself, unable to face the sight of Baba alone and hopeless on the veranda. But Baba did not stay either. He must have gone back to his room, too, for in another minute or two she heard that ominous roar pushing its way through the tunnel and emerging as the maudlin clamour of ‘Lilli Marlene’. ‘Now this is precisely what I told you,’ Bakul said, bustling into the bedroom after making his phone call. ‘I pointed out to you how much more convenient it would be to stay with my uncle and aunt, right in the centre of town, on Aurangzeb Road, how it would save us all the trouble of finding a car to travel up and down in . . .’

  Tara, who was bending over the bed, laying out his clothes, straightened and said in a strained voice ‘But I had not meant to go anywhere. I only wanted to stay at home.’

  He flicked his silk dressing gown open and said impatiently ‘You know you can’t do that when there’s so much to do—relations to visit, colleagues to look up, all that shopping you had planned to do—’

  ‘I’ll wait till the girls come. I’ll go shopping with them,’ said Tara with an unaccustomed stubbornness. She held up a cluster of ties and waited, a bit sullenly, for him to choose one.

  He put out his hand and picked one of broadly striped raw silk and said ‘You surely don’t mean that. You can’t just sit about with your brother and sister all day, doing nothing.’

  ‘But it’s what I want—just to be at home again, with them. And of course there are the neighbours—I’ll see them. But I don’t want to go anywhere today, and I don’t want to go to New Delhi at all.’

  ‘Of course you will come,’ Bakul said quite sharply, going towards the bathroom with an immense towel he had picked up. ‘There’s no question about that.’

  When the bathroom door had shut, Tara went out onto the veranda again. The veranda ran all around the house and every room opened out onto it. This room had been hers and Bim’s when they were girls. It opened onto the dense grove of guava trees that separated the back of the house from the row of servants’ quarters. Bright morning sounds of activity came from them—a water tap running, a child crying, a cock crowing, a bicycle bell ringing—but the house was separated from them by the thick screen of low, dusty guava trees in which invisible parrots screamed and quarrelled over the fruit. Now and then one fell to the ground with a soft thud. Tara could see some lying in the dust with chunks bitten out by the parrots. If she had been younger—no, if she had been sure Bakul would not look out and see—she would have run down the veranda steps and searched for one that was whole. Her mouth tingled with longing to bite into that hard astringent flesh under the green rind. She wondered if her girls would do it when they arrived to spend their holidays here. No, they would not. 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.

  Further up the veranda was Baba’s room and from behind the light bamboo curtain that hung in the doorway came the guttural rattling of ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. For a while Tara leant her head against a pillar, listening. It was not unfamiliar, yet it disturbed.

  A part of her was sinking languidly down into the passive pleasure of having returned to the familiar—like a pebble, she had been picked up and hurled back into the pond, and sunk down through the layer of green scum, through the secret cool depths to the soft rich mud at the bottom, sending up a line of bubbles of relief and joy. A part of her twitched, stirred like a fin in resentment: why was the pond so muddy and stagnant? Why had nothing changed? She had changed—why did it not keep up with her?

  Why did Bim allow nothing to change? Surely Baba ought to begin to grow and develop at last, to unfold and reach out and stretch. But whenever she saw them, at intervals of three or five years, all was exactly as before.

  Drawing away from the pillar, she moved towards his room, propelled by her disturbance, by her resentment at this petrified state in which her family lived. Bakul was right to criticise it, disapprove of it. Yes, he was right, she told herself and, lifting the dusty bamboo curtain, slipped into Baba’s room.

  He was sitting on his bed, a string cot spread with a cotton rug and an old sheet, that stood in the centre of the room under the slowly revolving electric fan. He was crouched low, listening raptly to the last of ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ unwinding itself on the old HMV gramophone on a small bamboo table beside his bed. The records, not so very many of them—there must have been breakages after all—were stacked on a shelf beneath the table in their tattered yellow sleeves. The string cot, the table, the HMV gramophone, a canvas chair and a wardrobe—nothing else. It was a large room and looked bare. Once it had been Aunt Mira’s room, and crowded. Baba looked up at her.

  Tara stood staring, made speechless by his fine, serene face, the shapeliness of his long fingers, his hands that either moved lightly as if in a breeze or rested calmly at his sides. He was an angel, she told herself, catching her lip between her teeth—an angel descended to earth, unsoiled by any of it.

  But then why did he spend his days and years listening to this appalling noise? Her daughters could not live through a day without their record-player either; they, too, kept it heaped with records that slipped down onto the turntable in a regular sequence, keeping them supplied with an almost uninterrupted flow of music to which they worked and danced with equal ease. But, she wanted to explain to him, theirs was an ever-growing, ever-changing collection, their interest in it was lively, fresh, developing all the time. Also, she knew they would outgrow their need of it. Already Maya had friends who took her to concerts from which she returned with a sheen of uplifting pleasure spread across her face and talked of learning to play the flute. Soon it would be behind her—this need for an elemental, primitive rhythm automatically supplied. But Baba would never leave his behind, he would never move on.

  Her anguish and impatience made her say, very quickly and loudly, as the record ground to a halt and before Baba could turn it over, ‘Are you going out this morning, Baba? We’ve sent for a car—can we give
you a lift?’

  Baba lifted the smoothly curving metal arm off the record and sat with his hand resting on it, protectively. It was clear he would have liked to turn over the record but he hesitated, politely, his eyes cast down, flickering slightly as if with fear or guilt.

  Tara too began to squirm with guilt at having caused him this panic. ‘Are you, Baba?’

  He glanced at her very quickly, with a kind of pleading, and then looked away and shook his head very slightly.

  This made her cry out ‘But don’t you go to the office in the mornings?’

  He kept his head lowered, smiling slightly, sadly.

  ‘Never?’

  The room rang with her voice, then with silence. 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. Was it to keep it at bay that Baba played those records so endlessly, so obsessively? But it was not right. She herself had been taught, by her husband and by her daughters, to answer questions, to make statements, to be frank and to be precise. They would have none of these silences and shadows. Here things were left unsaid and undone. It was what they called ‘Old Delhi decadence.’ She knotted her fingers together in an effort to break it.

  ‘Do you think you will go to the office today?’ she persisted, beads of perspiration welling out of her upper lip.

  Now Baba took his hand off the gramophone arm, relinquishing it sadly, and his hands hung loosely at his sides, as helplessly as a dead man’s. His head, too, sank lower and lower.

  Tara was furious with herself for causing him this shame, this distress. She hated her probing, her questioning with which she was punishing him. Punishing him for what? For his birth—and for that he was not responsible. Yet it was wrong to leave things as they were—she knew Bakul would say so, and her girls, too. It was all quite lunatic. Yet there was no alternative, no solution. Surely they would see there was none. Sighing, she said in a tone of defeat ‘I’ll ask Bim.’