Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  ‘Yes, she may go,’ Bim said slowly. ‘Can’t she, Mira-masi?’ she demanded of her aunt.

  Aunt Mira, nodding frantically, looked for a moment or two as if she would come sweeping across the veranda and fall upon Bakul, hold him fast for her niece before he had time to flee. Instead, to Tara’s relief, she teetered upon her toes, swung around and dived back into her room, leaving Bim to give Bakul sober directions about when to send Tara home. After Bakul had promised and left, she went in to see Aunt Mira for a moment and was so engrossed in this new prospect with which Tara had presented them that she didn’t notice, or remark on, her aunt hastily pouring a drink into her tumbler from a familiar looking bottle on her cupboard shelf, and only said ‘Mira-masi, do you think he will want to marry Tara?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aunt Mira with a loud hiccup. ‘Yes, yes, I do,’ and she dipped her face into the tumbler and drank, agitatedly, as if to hide from the intolerable prospect.

  The prospect was entirely Bim’s to survey.

  Their father had died suddenly. On his way back from the club one night, the car had bumped slightly against the curb of a traffic roundabout on a deserted street on the Ridge. The slight bump had caused the door to fly open and the father to be flung out. He was dead, of a broken neck, when the driver stopped the car and ran out to him. There was no damage to the car at all. It could scarcely be called an accident, so minor was it in appearance, and harmless, but of course that was the only label that fitted, and it was fatal. Dressed in his usual dark suit for the club, with a white handkerchief and a cigar in his breast pocket, he seemed prepared for death as if it were an evening at the club.

  Few of the people, mostly club members and bridge players, who came to condole, realised how little difference his death made to the household—they were so accustomed to his absence that it was but a small transition from the temporary to the permanent.

  Also, he left so little behind. A wardrobe full of very dark and sombre suits and very white and crisp shirts, a shelf ranged with shoes—all old but polished to the glow of wood, walnut, mahogany or black lacquer—and a desk piled with office files: that was all. He had even just come to the end of his stock of cigars, as if he had prepared for his accidental end. There was not one left for his son to try if he wanted, or to give his room a familiar whiff that might linger.

  For a while all that disturbed the children was the continuous presence of the car in the garage—it made them uneasy. They were simply not used to seeing it so much at home. When would it leave—for the club? for the office? Why did it not go? The driver, a surly man who seldom spoke a word, sat on his haunches by the garage door, sometimes smoking and staring over the caps of his knees, and sometimes just staring. Made nervous by their perpetual presence in the back yard, Bim told Raja they must decide on what to do about it. Raja simply telephoned a garage owner, whose son he knew at college, and sold him the car at the very first price he offered It was taken off to the garage the very next dav leaving the driver still sitting on his haunches by the garage door, looking more surly and more vacant than before.

  For a while Bim dreaded seeing the car on the road, passing her by on her way to college. She knew she would strain to see the familiar figures in it, and knew it would be a blow to find unfamiliar ones instead. But she did not. The car was too old and too large to be in demand any more, and it simply rotted in the junk yard behind the garage—Bim often saw it from the No. 9 bus window—till only a rusted skeleton was left.

  The driver, after waiting a while as if in expectation of the car being returned to him, finally got to his feet and began to help the gardener by mending his hose pipe and oiling his shears while Bim wondered what to do. Then this problem, too, was resolved quite simply and accidentally: the gardener was called home to his village since his elder brother had died and he was required to work on the farm, and the driver moved in to take his place. That was all.

  The garage door remained shut on the cobwebs, the oil stains and the empty tin cans.

  The effect of this death in the family then, was pecuniary only, for the father had been, if nothing else, a provider.

  When his junior partner at the insurance firm came to call on the family after the cremation—attended largely by the office staff and bridge players distinguished by their age, apparel and complexion—even Raja got himself out of bed and came to the drawing room in his pyjamas. The drawing room was as still and petrified as in their parents’ lifetime—the card table ready in the corner, the brass pot filled with spotted cannas from the garden, the thick red curtains and red carpets and red rexine sofas all emitting a faint pall of dust that seemed to stifle anyone who entered as if it were a vault containing the mortal remains of the departed.

  Raja was feverish—he had been to the cremation at the height of the afternoon to light his father’s funeral pyre: it was what he had to do—and he spoke rapidly, gesturing with his hands which had grown very long and thin and artistic after so many months of fever.

  ‘No, I don’t care what my father has written in his will—I don’t want to be a partner. I won’t have anything to do with it—I’m not a businessman—I’m—’

  ‘Raja,’ Bim burst out in agitation, ‘do think—

  ‘Bim, I know what I’m saying,’ he snapped at her, tossing back the hair that had grown so long and lanky from his moist forehead. ‘I know what I’m doing. Baba can take whatever position father meant for me—’

  ‘Baba? What are you talking about? You know Baba,’ Bim cried out in disbelief. ‘You are making fun of him, very cruelly, Raja, if you want to send him to the office—’

  ‘No, no, no, that is not necessary at all,’ the young man from the office soothed her, perching on the edge of the sofa like a teetering pigeon and making not dissimilar sounds of solace. ‘Not necessary at all. You know, your father himself was not at all concerned with the day-to-day administration—he left it all to me and to the staff. We can manage all that. All we need is the name, the signature—the name must remain, for the firm, that is all.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ said Bim, and Raja looked at her in triumph.

  ‘You see,’ he told her, ‘that is all. Don’t you think Baba can manage that much? Just signing papers?’

  ‘No, he can’t,’ Bim said more sharply. ‘But you can.’

  ‘Nonsense. I’ll speak to Baba—I’ll explain to him. He can go to the office for an hour or two—and then—Mr Sharma will help him. Don’t baby him, Bim, you treat him like a baby—’

  ‘What else can I do?’ she flared up, furious with Raja for talking so carelessly, with such cynical thoughtlessness, and furious with Mr Sharma for listening.

  ‘Let him grow up, let him take a little responsibility. Give him a simple task or two to perform. See if he can’t manage.’

  ‘And if he can’t—what then?’

  ‘Then,’ said Mr Sharma, giving a little bounce on the sofa to attract their attention and distract them from their quarrel, ‘then I shall manage. I can bring the files here to the house for you to see—’

  ‘You do that, Mr Sharma,’ Raja said hurriedly. ‘Yes, you do that. What a good idea. And Baba and I will sign whatever you ask us to—’

  ‘Raja,’ Bim warned him again; her face looked thin and elderly with warning.

  Mr Sharma smiled at her reassuringly. ‘It is what your father did also in these last years. It is all he did. The work was left to the clerks and myself. We will manage—you will have no worries.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ Raja said with relief and stood up to go back to bed while Mr Sharma hurried away, explaining he had to get back before the curfew.

  When Bim went in to take Raja’s temperature and see that he was quiet again, he said ‘It’s nothing to worry about, see, Bim. These aren’t the things to worry about in life.’

  ‘No?’ she said shortly as she shook down the thermometer with a professional air. ‘What do you worry about then?’

  ‘Oh Bim, Bim,’ he said, dramatical
ly 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.’

  ‘No, that’s only for me to worry about,’ said Bim, as dour as her father, as their house, popping the thermometer into his mouth. ‘That, and the rent to be paid on the house, and five, six, seven people to be fed every day, and Tara to be married off, and Baba to be taken care of for the rest of his life, and you to be got well again—and I don’t know what else.’

  Raja sputtered a bit and the thermometer wobbled between his lips so that she had to snap ‘Don’t talk.’

  That day Bim was so disturbed, so little reassured by Raja’s argument, that when the doctor came to visit him in the evening, she did not simply shove the temperature chart at him and ask for a new prescription but actually invited him to sit down with her on the veranda before he left.

  ‘How much longer do you think it will be before he begins to get better?’ she asked him.

  The doctor, a soft-spoken and awkward young Bengali sent them by their father’s partner and not unlike him—they both went to the Ramakrishna Mission for the lectures and the hymn singing—was so taken aback by her unusual invitation to sit down and talk that his knees gave way and he collapsed onto the creaking cane sofa weakly, then took a few minutes to understand what she had asked him and to notice that her face was drawn and colourless and that her lank, untidy hair had a distinct streak of grey in it, just over her left ear. It seemed to him at least twenty years too early for such an occurrence, and he was shocked. In his family the women washed their hair with shikakai solution and oiled it with coconut oil every morning so that at forty, at fifty even, their hair was black and glossy as a newly-opened tin of shoe polish. His mouth was a little open as he stared.

  Then, in a concerned voice, he urged, ‘You mustn’t worry so much, Miss Das. It is a very mild attack of t.b. These days we can control t.b. with drugs, quite effectively, yes. The drugs, combined with good nursing and good diet, will cure him, yes. Only it will take time, yes. One has to have patience also—’

  ‘How much time?’ Bim persisted. ‘You know, my father—’ she began, then stopped short, wondering how she had let herself go to such an extent. The young doctor’s face, his posture—clutching the bag set on his knees neatly placed together but every now and then giving an uncontrollable twitch or jerk—were the face and the posture of all nonentities, people seen in a bus queue, bending over a table in a tea-shop, huddled in a suburban train, at desks in cluttered offices or at counters in crowded shops: anxious, fretting, conscious of failing, of not managing, and trying only not to let it show. He had nothing to give her. Why did she ask?

  ‘I know, I know,’ the young doctor stammered urgently, shyly. ‘He has passed away. I am so—so sorry. I came to the—the ceremony. You did not see me. I was with Mr Sharma—’

  ‘I know,’ Bim broke in abruptly, untruthfully. ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes,’ gasped the young man, as much to his own surprise as to Bim’s.

  Bim went down the veranda and called ‘Mira-masi, send some tea for the doctor, will you? Tell Janaki to make tea for the doctor.’ Aunt Mira gave an agitated cry in her room and Bim came back to the circle of cane chairs and sat down.

  ‘I see, I see it all,’ Dr Biswas hurried on, staring hard at his shoes, making the most of this unusual burst of courage while it lasted. ‘There are great problems. Your father—the house—the family—Raja’s illness—it is all too much for a young lady. Raja must recover, he must take his father’s place—’

  Bim gave a laugh, or a snort. An ugly sound that stopped him short. In the sudden silence they heard a handful of pebbles fall with a clatter on the veranda steps, making them aware, too, of Baba’s presence. The doctor had not mentioned Baba. Now they both breathed heavily, adding Baba to his list.

  ‘Father’s place?’ Bim mocked, and then stopped: she would not reveal more. The hedges round the garden grew high—to hide, to conceal. She would not cut them short, or reveal. She got up impatiently, restlessly, and went down to the kitchen to call Janaki herself, knowing that Aunt Mira had done nothing about the tea. Janaki gave her a surly look from the yellow smoke she was stirring up out of the coal fire. Bim glared back. Eventually the tea appeared on a brass tray that had not been polished for years.

  The doctor’s bag fell down as he rose with a jerk to accept the cup of tea. He held the cup in one hand, picked up the bag with the other, spilling tea as he did so. Then there was the need to keep his knees together. To be positive and reassuring. To calm himself, he stirred and stirred the tea with a loud spoon. Then he looked up at Bim with timid respect. ‘I see how it is,’ he said, wanting her also to see that he saw. ‘I see what a difficult position—I mean, for you—the problems—’

  ‘No, no, what problems,’ blustered Bim, wanting to clear him out now, be on her own again. ‘Baba,’ she shouted, ‘d’you want tea? Sugar?’

  ‘I think I may reassure you on one point at least—Raja will get well.’

  Bim gave him a quick look to see if he was being honest, or only kind. He had a very honest face, she decided, painfully honest, like a peeled vegetable. But it was also kind, dreadfully kind. She sighed ‘Are you sure? You don’t think we will have to send him to hospital, or to a sanatorium?’

  Dr Biswas stirred and stirred his tea with a crazy clatter, frowning with concentration, making the spoon spin round and round the cup like some mechanism gone out of control. Then he stopped it with his little finger very abruptly so that the tea sloshed over the rim into the saucer. ‘Let us say,’ he said, staring at the puddle of spilt tea, ‘that it is not necessary now because there has been no deterioration. If the position remains stable, then once the cool weather starts, I feel his health will begin to pick up, he will regain his strength. He should show improvement in the winter. If not—if not,’ he repeated with renewed agitation making the teaspoon tremble, the cup wobble, the puddle slop, ‘then, at the end of the winter, when it is no longer cold, we might send him to a sanatorium—in Kasauli, or Dagshai. But’ he added desperately, tearing his mind away from such a possibility and looking up at her with remorse, ‘I have no doubt, no doubt, it will not be necessary, he will improve—’

  But Bim, although she nodded, looked doubtful again, and unsure. Having failed in his effort to reassure her, Dr Biswas raised the cup to his mouth at last and drank the cold tea in one gulp while the cup dripped down onto his knees, and then rose to leave, realising he had not given her what she needed, had not been up to it. As usual, he had not been up to it. The look of failure overcame the look of anxiety.

  When Tara came home with Bakul, she found Bim alone in the veranda, her face so grey and old that the glow went out of Tara’s and she, too, became subdued.

  Bakul did not notice and sat down to chat with the sisters with that bland oil of self-confidence smoothing his voice and giving it a kind of calculated ease that made Tara gaze at him with maidenly admiration and made Bim look away into the shadowy garden in boredom. It was the opposite of poor Dr Biswas’s tone: then why did they equally bore her, she wondered as she watched Aunt Mira’s cat stealing past the flowerpots, stalking something in the tall grass that edged the ill-kept lawn. A cloud of mosquitoes followed her, hovering over her flattened head and the two pointed ears like a filmy parasol Bim watched her her chin cupped in her hand. She was the only thing that moved in the stiff, desiccated garden which, at that time, lay between two gardeners, in transition.

  Bakul had just said something that she had failed to hear—the cat had at that instance pounced on a stalk of grass and a purple moth had fluttered up out of reach, exquisitely in time.

  ‘Bim,’ Tara said, perturbed by such absent-mindedness, ‘Bakul’s posting has just come through.
’

  Was that what he had said? Bim turned to look at them, smiling at each other.

  ‘Tell her, Bakul,’ Tara urged, now that Bim’s attention was drawn to them even if her look were tired and not interested enough to really do Bakul justice.

  ‘I have been told to proceed to Ceylon,’ Bakul told her, somewhat smugly, she thought. ‘Of course it isn’t the country of my choice, but it’s to be only while I am in training. After a year, I expect to be sent to the West since I specialised in European languages and asked for a posting in Western Europe. That was my first preference—not Ceylon.’

  ‘Ceylon?’ Bim responded at last, slowly and quite dreamily, Tara thought, as if it aroused romantic, scented pictures in her mind as it did in Tara’s. But all she said was ‘That will be interesting.’

  ‘Exactly. That is what I told Tara,’ he said gaily, still not noticing Bim’s abstraction, her preoccupation. He smiled at Tara sitting beside her sister and tensely watching her, watching him, and Tara smiled back. Bim gazed at them, at their happiness, as if she were seeing it through a gauze screen, vaguely, not clearly.

  ‘Bakul,’ she said with sudden crispness, ‘what is happening?’

  ‘Happening?’ he asked, turning his handsome profile to look directly at her. ‘But I was expecting it any day—it is the foreign service after all—I had told Tara—’

  ‘No, no, no. I mean, in New Delhi.’

  ‘In New Delhi?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘I mean—about Independence—about Pakistan—’