Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  Bim’s eyes narrowed as she sat listening to her sister’s outburst. ‘Did you feel that way?’ she asked, coolly curious. ‘I didn’t know. I think I was so occupied with Raja and Mira-masi that I didn’t notice what effect it had on you. Why didn’t I?’ she mused, swinging her leg casually. ‘And that is why you married Bakul instead of going to college?’

  ‘Oh Bim, I couldn’t have stood college—not Indraprastha College, just down the road, no further. And the high walls, and the gate, and the hedges—it would have been like school all over again. I couldn’t have borne that - I had to escape.’

  ‘But was that why you married Bakul?’ Bim pursued, hardly able to credit her little sister with such cool calculation.

  Yet Tara did not deny it altogether. ‘I didn’t think of it that way then,’ she said seriously. ‘At that time I was just—just swept off my feet,’ she giggled a bit. ‘Bakul was so much older, and so impressive, wasn’t he? And then, he picked me, paid me attention—it seemed too wonderful, and I was overwhelmed.’

  They sat together in the dusty, darkened room, running their fingers through their hair with a twin gesture of distracted contemplation, and listened to Baba’s record ‘The Donkey Serenade’ trotting in endless circles and the parrots quarrelling over the ripe guavas in the garden.

  ‘Of course now I do see,’ Tara went on at last, ‘that I must have used him as an instrument of escape. The completest escape I could have made—right out of the country.’ She laughed a small artificial laugh.

  Bim gave her a curious look. She thought of Tara as a child—moody, touchy, passionately affectionate, with the high-pitched voice of a much smaller child, an irritating habit of clinging to Aunt Mira long after she ought to have outgrown cuddling and caresses, a love of lying in bed, clutching a pillow and sucking her thumb—and she shook her head in disbelief. She could not believe that these feelings that the adult Tara laid claim to had actually sprung up in her as a child. ‘Did you think that all out? Did you think like that?’

  ‘No,’ Tara readily admitted. ‘I only felt it. The thoughts—the words—came later. Have only come now!’ she exclaimed in surprise.

  Bim nodded, accepting that. ‘You used to be happiest at home—never even wanted to go to school,’ she reminded her.

  ‘And you were the rebel—you used to want the world outside,’ Tara agreed. ‘Can you remember how we used to ask each other “What will you be when you grow up?” and I only said “A mother” and you and Raja said “Hero and heroine’” She began to laugh. After all these years, she found she could laugh at that.

  But Bim did not. Her head sank low, her chin settled into her neck. There was a dark shadow across her face from which her eyes glinted with a kind of anger.

  ‘Oh Bim,’ said Tara, in fear.

  Bim raised her chin, looked up at her with a little crooked smile—a horrible smile, thought Tara. ‘And how have we ended?’ she asked, mockingly. ‘The hero and heroine—where are they? Down at the bottom of the well—gone, disappeared.’

  ‘What well?’ asked Tara with dry lips, afraid.

  ‘The well at the back—the well the cow drowned in,’ Bim waved at the darkness outside the window. ‘I always did feel that—that I shall end up in that well myself one day.’

  ‘Oh, Bim, don’t.’

  Bim laughed. She got to her feet and made for the door leaving Tara to wonder, in a panic, if she were serious or if she were only acting a melodramatic scene to impress Tara. Either was possible.

  ‘I feel afraid for her,’ Tara said, in a low voice, holding her kimono close about her neck as she sat at the foot of her bed that had been made for the night at the end of the moonlit veranda. ‘I don’t know what has happened to her. When we first came, she seemed so normal and everyday and—contented, I felt, as if Bim had found everything she wanted in life. It seemed so incredible that she hadn’t had to go anywhere to find it, that she had stayed on here in the old house, taught in the old college, and yet it had given her everything she wanted. Isn’t that strange, Bakul?’

  Bakul, in his white pyjamas, was pacing up and down the veranda, smoking a last cigar before lying down to sleep. He was going over all the arrangements he had made for his tour of India after the week-long family reunion in Hyderabad was over. He was mentally checking all the bookings he had made, the tickets he had bought. He felt vaguely uneasy—somehow he no longer trusted the Indian railway system or the Indian travel agencies. He was wondering if it would not have been better to spend the entire vacation in his uncle’s house in New Delhi. And Tara’s rambling, disconnected chatter interrupted his line of thought like the chirping of a single sparrow that would not quieten down at night. Tara was repeating her question.

  ‘She did not find it—she made it,’ he replied sagely, knocking off half an inch of cigar ash into a flowerpot that contained a spider lily. Its heavy, luxuriant scent, feminine and glamorous, combined with the smell of the cigar in a heady, stifling way, stopping just short of the fetid. ‘She made what she wanted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tara agreed, quite thrilled. ‘And she seemed contented, too, didn’t she?’

  ‘Contented?’ he asked. ‘Contented enough,’ he answered. ‘No more and no less than most of us.’

  Now Tara was not satisfied. She wanted the question, the problem of Bim solved and resolved tonight. The light of the full moon was so clear, surely it could illuminate everything tonight. Like snow, or whitewash, it fell upon the house and the veranda and the garden, covering everything with its white drifts except where the shadows lay or the trees reared up, black as carbon. Like snow, its touch was cold, marmoreal, and made Tara shiver. ‘And now she’s simply lost all control,’ she complained to Bakul. ‘So angry and unhappy and upset.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he confessed. Perhaps another travel agency—not the small new one just started by his nephew on the wrong side of Connaught Circus. He would have felt more confident about Thomas Cook. Or he could have taken his wife and children to Kashmir and they could have had a houseboat holiday together. But then Tara would have insisted on Bim and Baba coming with her. She could not free herself of them, of this shabby old house that looked like a tomb in the moonlight, a whitewashed tomb rising in the midst of the inky shadows of trees and hedges, so silent—everyone asleep, or stunned by moonlight.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ cried Tara in that voice of the anguished sparrow, chirping. ‘Haven’t you noticed how angry she seems all the time—how she snaps even at Baba and walks about the house all day, doing nothing?’

  ‘What is the matter with her?’ asked Bakul, realizing Tara had to talk. He had his own suspicions about Bim but thought better of telling them to Tara. ‘Is it that business with Sharma you told me about? Surely it can’t be—she’s been dealing with him for years.’

  ‘It can’t be that then,’ Tara agreed. ‘It seems to be Raja again, as far as I can see.’

  ‘What, haven’t they made up that quarrel yet?’ Bakul asked in a bored voice. Really, the house had an atmosphere—a chilling one, like a cemetery. ‘I can’t even remember what it was about—it was so long ago.’

  ‘It wasn’t really a quarrel—it was a letter—it’s just that Bim can’t forget old grudges. They make her so miserable—I wish I could end them for her.’

  Bakul paid her some attention now. He could always find a solution to any problem, he liked to think. He rather relished problems. He relished solving them for anyone as easily impressed as Tara. He thought how nice it would be to have Tara stop looking so preoccupied and concerned and be impressed by him instead. Really, it was a night of Persian glamour and beauty. They should be sitting together in the moonlight, looking together at the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. Why were they worrying instead about Bim, and Raja? He came and stood close to Tara, his large solid thighs in their white pyjamas just before her eyes like two solid pillars, and his ci
gar glowing between two fingers. ‘You must arrange for them to meet and speak,’ he said in a thick, rich voice.

  But Tara made no response to his presence. She seemed to fly apart in rejection and agitation, the bird that would not be stilled. ‘But that’s what I’ve been trying to do all the time that we’ve been here!’ she cried. She did not sound satisfied or grateful at all.

  ‘Oh, have you?’ he muttered, moving away towards his own bed. ‘I didn’t know, I’ve had so much on my own mind. Must check the girls’ flight arrival time tomorrow. Remind me, Tara.’ He yawned, flung the cigar stub out into the drive and sank, creaking, onto his bed. ‘Another night on this damn uncomfortable bed,’ he grumbled. ‘All the strings loose. Need tightening.’ He creaked and groaned and sighed till he found a comfortable position and then lay there like a bolster.

  Tara remained stiffly upright on the foot of her bed, staring miserably into the brilliant, pierrot-shaded garden. The moon had struck everything in it speechless, even the crickets were silenced by its white incandescence. They sat in the shadows, intimidated. Only Badshah was not intimidated. Excited by the great flat mask hanging over the trees, looking down and mocking him as he sat, shivering slightly, on the whitewashed steps, he bounded up and raced down the drive to sit by the gate and bellow at it as if it were an intruder he had to guard his property against, warning the sleeping household of its unearthly presence. His barks rang out in the night like notes on a bugle.

  On his way to the airlines office next morning, Bakul stopped at Bim’s door and, seeing her sitting at her desk with her papers, said ‘Tara spoke to me about Sharma’s letter to you. Would you like me to stop at the office and find out what it’s about?’

  She answered immediately, brusquely, ‘No, it doesn’t matter. I have decided to sell out.’

  ‘Decided?’ Bakul exclaimed. His face was already wet with the sheen of perspiration. The light was brassy and remorseless as the heat. ‘Now Bim, slow down. Why don’t we sit down, all of us, around a table, and discuss it thoroughly before deciding what to do?’

  ‘Discuss it with whom? Baba?’ Bim laughed in that coarse way that always offended him. ‘He and I are the only ones concerned any more. I have to decide for him.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Bakul, perplexed, and wiped his face carefully with the clean linen handkerchief Tara had handed him that morning. Remembering all Tara had said to him, he went on ‘But why not consult Raja first? He has had a great deal of experience in business, in property—he will know how to get the best deal from Sharma. His advice will be worth listening to, Bim.’

  Bim shook her head positively. ‘No, not Raja,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t care.’ She gave her hand a small wave, dismissing him.

  Tara was ready to appeal to anyone now. When Jaya’s little visit one morning was over, she insisted on accompanying her down to the gate although the sun was already white-hot and they had to cover their heads with the ends of their saris and keep their eyes on the ground. It had burnt everything into a landscape of black and white, of coal and ash. Tara felt giddy under its blaze.

  ‘What strange ideas Bim does have,’ Jaya said.

  ‘Yes,’ Tara agreed, happy to have this opportunity to ask for Jaya’s advice. But Jaya was only referring to their conversation over glasses of fresh lemonade under the cantankerously complaining and squeaking fan of the drawing room. Jaya had herself come for advice. ‘The school is shut for the summer now so Sarla and I thought we’d renovate everything, paint the furniture. What colour do you think we should paint the children’s tables and chairs?’ While Tara pretended to consider the question seriously, Bim answered at once: ‘Red.’ ‘Oh no.’ Jaya was appalled. ‘Not red. Pink or blue—it must be pink or blue.’ ‘Why?’ demanded Bim argumentatively. Jaya had not been able to say, but ‘It must be pink or blue,’ she had insisted.

  Now she appealed to Tara. ‘It can’t be red,’ she complained. ‘Red would be awful. It must be something soft, like pink or blue.’

  ‘What?’ said Tara, not having realized this was what had brought Jaya to visit them.

  ‘The furniture,’ said Jaya, hurt at her lack of interest. ‘The school tables and chairs.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tara. ‘Bim is—is in a strange mood these days,’ she explained, trying to bring in her own anxieties for Jaya’s attention. ‘I’m worried about her, Jaya.’

  ‘About Bim?’ Jaya was scornful. Indignation still burnt in her. How burnt and blackened her skin was, Tara noted, staring at their feet in slippers, making their way through the heavy white dust of the driveway. Jaya’s feet were like the claws of an old rook, twisted and charred. Her voice, too, sounded like a burnt twig breaking, brittle and dry. ‘No need to worry about Bim—she’s always looked after herself. She can take care of herself.’

  ‘For how long?’ worried Tara, holding her white cotton sari like a veil across her face against the blinding light. ‘Bim’s not young. And Baba’s not young either. And here they are, just the two of them, while we are all away.’

  ‘There are two of them—they have each other,’ Jaya’s voice angrily smouldered. ‘Bim has Baba to look after—she has always liked to rule others—and he needs her. Bim’s all right.’

  There seemed no way of conveying her anxiety to Jaya. Tara paused by the gate. Here a mulberry tree cast its shade over them and they stood adjusting their eyes to the shade that seemed pitch-black in comparison with the white heat shimmering outside its dusky circle. Ripe mulberries lay in the dust, blackening. Some had been squashed underfoot, their juice soaked into the earth like blood. Their resemblance to worms made Tara squirm. She tried to keep her feet off them but they were everywhere.

  ‘We’ll be going away to the wedding, Jaya, as soon as the girls arrive,’ Tara said.

  ‘Is Bim going with you?’

  ‘No,’ Tara shook her head mournfully. ‘That’s the trouble—she won’t come. She refuses to come.’

  Jaya gave a horsey snort. ‘Bim has her own mind,’ she said. ‘Bim always did. You were always so different, you two sisters.’ She gave Tara an almost maternal look, both approving and preening.

  But Tara would not accept that. ‘We’re not really,’ she said. ‘We may seem to be—but we have everything in common. That makes us one. No one else knows all we share, Bim and I.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jaya carelessly. ‘That is only natural. But Bim is so stubborn. Not like you. You were never stubborn. I hope you enjoy the wedding, Tara. Give our love to Raja, to Benazir. Thank them for the invitation—we got such a grand one,’ and she went off into the sun’s blaze again and Tara stood amongst the fallen, mutilated mulberries and their smeared juice in the shade of the tree, watching her till her eyes smarted and her head reeled. She would have to go back to the house if she were not to faint from the heat.

  Tara’s concern quivering in the air, like the moist nose of a dog that is restless and won’t lie down, made Bim want to stamp on it and stamp it out, rudely and roughly, just as she would have done when they were children. ‘Must you wear those jingle-bells at your waist, Tara?’ she asked irritably as Tara came in, veiled, from outdoors. ‘All those gold bangles on your wrists—and then all those silver bells at your waist, too. I never thought you’d be the kind of woman that carries a bunch of keys at the waist.’

  ‘Our suitcases,’ Tara explained apologetically, startled into feeling guilty. ‘Our trunks. Bakul gives me the keys to keep.’

  ‘Yes, but how can you bear them jingling so?’ Bim asked querulously, pressing her hand to her head. The electric fan creaked and complained over their heads for want of an oiling. A gecko on the wall let loose a series of clucked warnings. Its tail flicked at the tip, spitefully. Tara edged past it and past Bim at the table, keeping a safe distance from both, her hand pressed against the key chain to silence it.

  But Bim was not appeased. Her anger was as raw as a rash of prickly heat that she compulsively scratched and made worse. At lunch there was a hot curry that Tara could not bear
to eat and tried to pass down the table unobtrusively. Bim pounced on her. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like Janaki’s curry? It isn’t very good—Janaki can’t cook—but one mustn’t fuss. Take some, Tara.’ When Tara shook her head, she insisted till Tara nearly cried and finally took a spoonful, splashing the red gravy onto the plate and onto the tablecloth which made Bim go pale with anger.

  When she swung down the veranda for a baleful afternoon rest, she nearly stepped on a smashed pigeon’s egg and the unsightly corpse of a baby bird that had plunged to its death at birth from its disastrously inadequate nest. The scattered bits of shell, the shapeless smudge of yellow-tipped feathers and bluish-red flesh and outsize beak made Bim draw back for a moment, then plunge on with a gasp of anger, as if the pigeon had made its nest so crudely, so insecurely, simply to lose its egg and anger her and give her the trouble of clearing it. It was a piece of filth—Bim nearly sobbed—not sad, not pathetic, just filthy.

  All afternoon her anger swelled and spread, acquiring demonic proportions. It was like the summer itself, rising to its peak, or like the mercury in the barometer that hung on the veranda wall, swelling and bulging and glinting.

  Then Baba, shaded and sequestered in his own room, played ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ once too often. It was what Bim needed to break her in two, decapitate her with anger. Clutching at her throat, she strode into his room and jerked the needle-head off the record and twisted back the arm. In the silence that gaped like a wound left by a tooth that has been pulled, she said in a loud, loose voice, ‘I want to have a talk with you, Baba. You’ll have to leave that off and listen to me,’ and sitting down in a canvas chair by his bed, she rattled down a straight line aimed at Baba, shocked and confused before her, like a train racing down a line, driven by a mad driver. She would not look at Baba’s widening eyes, more white than black, as she rattled on, straight at him, for he was the target she had chosen to hit—and hit and hit. She was telling him of her idea of selling their shares of the firm to Sharma, using that as a line on which to run. ‘If I sell, it’ll mean the end of that part of our income. It was too small to count anyway, but it did cover some of the expenses. With my salary, I’ll be able to pay the rent, keep on the house, I’ll manage—but I might have to send you to live with Raja. I came to ask you—what would you think of that?’ She was hitting the target now—hitting and hitting it. ‘Are you willing to go and live with Raja in Hyderabad?’