Clear Light of Day

A Novel

Anita Desai

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780547526294
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Indian Literature
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A "rich, Chekhovian novel" about family and forgiveness from the acclaimed author of Fire on the Mountain ( The New Yorker ). At the heart of this "wonderful" novel are the moving relationships between the estranged members of the Das family ( The Washington Post Book World ). Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface, blending into a domestic drama that leads to beautiful and profound moments of self-understanding. Set in the vividly portrayed environs of Old Delhi, " Clear Light of Day does what only the very best novels can do: it totally submerges us. It also takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won't be able to climb out again" ( The New York Times Book Review ). "Passages must be read and reread so that you savor their imagery, their language, and their wisdom." — The Washington Post Book World "[A] thoroughly universal tale of unhealable family hurts... Distinctively shaded with enticing glimpses of India's Hindu middle-class in shabby decline." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

II

The city was in flames that summer. Every night fires lit up the horizon beyond the city walls so that the sky was luridly tinted with festive flames of orange and pink, and now and then a column of white smoke would rise and stand solid as an obelisk in the dark. Bim, pacing up and down on the rooftop, would imagine she could hear the sound of shots and of cries and screams, but they lived so far outside the city, out in the Civil Lines where the gardens and bungalows were quiet and sheltered behind their hedges, that it was really rather improbable and she told herself she only imagined it. All she really heard was the ceaseless rattling of frogs in the mud of the Jumna and occasionally a tonga horse nervously dashing down the road.

Raja, who had been ill all that year and could not climb the stairs to the terrace with her, groaned with impatience till she came down to tell him what she had seen.

Finding him soaked with perspiration from tossing on his bed in that small airless room on a close summer night, she hurried to bring a wet sponge and wipe his face.

‘What do you think is happening?’ he moaned. ‘Can’t you ask the Misras to go and find out? Did you see a light in Hyder Ali’s house? Where do you think Hyder Ali Sahib could have gone? How could he have gone without sending a message to anyone? Not even to me?’

‘How could he, Raja? You know it is far too dangerous.’

‘He could have trusted me,’ Raja cried.

Bim wanted to remind him he was only a boy, still in college, and that their neighbour, the old and venerable and wealthy Hyder Ali, could hardly be expected to take him into his confidence, but she knew better than to upset him. The slightest upset made his temperature rise. She dipped the sponge in the enamel bowl in which blocks of ice clinked, and dabbed at his head again. Lifting his dark, wavy hair, she trailed the sponge across his white forehead and saw how waxen and sick his white face was, with a physical pang that made her twinge. His face had been heavy once, his lips pouting and self-indulgent: now all was bloodless, fine and drawn. He moved his head aside angrily and the cold drops fell on the pillow, soaking it.

‘Go to his house and find out, Bim,’ he begged.

‘I told you—I’ve just been up on the roof to see. One can see right into the garden from there. There’s no one there, not even a gardener. The house is dark, all the doors are shut. There’s no one there. They must have planned it in advance, Raja—it all looks quite orderly, as if they had planned and organised it all in advance just as if they were going up to Simla for the summer.’

‘They could have been taken away-dragged out and taken away—’

‘Of course not’ Bim snapped. ‘In that case, we would all have come to know, all the neighbours would have heard. We would have seen the mob arriving, seen the lights and heard all the noise. The Hyder Alis could have called for help, we would all have gone to help. There was no sound. No one came. They’ve just gone.’

‘How is it you didn’t hear them go then?’ Raja snapped, equally angry.

‘Raja, they must have done it quietly so as not to let anyone know,’ Bim said in exasperation. ‘Now you must just wait till you hear from them—they are sure to send word as soon as it is safe.’

‘Safe? For Muslims? Here in India? It will be safe after every Muslim has had his throat slit,’ Raja said with great viciousness. He half-lifted himself from the bed and then threw himself violently back again. ‘And here I am—too ill to even get up and help. And the only time in my life that I’ve ever been ill,’ he added bitterly.

Bim was quiet, floating the sponge back and forth in the bowl with wrinkled, frozen fingertips. She felt her exasperation blotted out by wonder at Raja’s ways of thinking and feeling, so different from anyone else’s at that time or day. She could not help admiring what she saw as his heroism, his independent thinking and courage. Raja was truly the stuff of which heroes are made, she was convinced, and yet here he lay, ironically, too ill to play the hero he longed to and, she half-believed, was meant to be. She lifted her eyes to see his chest rising and falling far too fast and excitedly and the twitching of his hands on the bedsheet.

‘If you’re not quiet, Raja, I shall have to call the doctor,’ she said mournfully, and got up from the cane stool beside his bed. ‘Let me read to you—it will take your mind off—’

‘No, it won’t,’ he said explosively. ‘Nothing can take my mind off—but read anyway, read if you like,’ he mumbled.

She went to the bookshelves that lined one wall of the room, straight to a volume of Byron’s poems that she knew, by experience, were what captivated him soonest, most easily swept him away into a mood of pleasure and appreciation. She brought it to his bed and, sitting down on the cane stool again, opened it at random and began to read aloud:

’The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

and Raja lay quiet, his hands gathered together on his chest, stilled by the splendour of this vision, transported by the strength and rhythm of the lines, and Bim gloated that she could lead him so simply into a world out of this sickness and anxiety and chaos that burnt around them and across the country that summer.

All summer she nursed him and read to him. Sitting on the stool by his bed, her hair falling straight and lank on either side of her dark face, her eyes lowered to the book on her lap, she murmured aloud the poems of Tennyson and Byron and Swinburne that she and Raja both loved.

’Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;

The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars

And all thy heart lies open unto me . . .’

Silent for a while, looking up to see if Raja’s eyes were open and staring up at the flies crawling across the ceiling, or closed as he listened, half in sleep, she turned to another book and read:

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no man lives forever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

That was one of Raja’s favourite poems, one he used to recite to her when they were up on the terrace together, reluctant to come down into the house at twilight, trying to prolong the evening and the sense of freedom they had up there under the unlimited sky. But now he would not express his enthusiasm quite so frankly. Now he would sometimes grunt ‘Hmm, very lovely to hear, but—too many words, all words, just words. Now any Urdu poet could put all that into one couplet, Bim, just one couplet,’ and she would pause for him to quote from his beloved Urdu poetry, all of which sounded exactly alike to her only she would rather have cut out her tongue than said so to him. It was always, as far as she could make out, the cup, the wine, the star, the lamp, ashes and roses-always the same. But to him each couplet was a new-cut gem.

’We have passed every day from morning to night in pain,

We have forever drunk tears of blood,’

he would quote in an expiring voice and with a roll of his eyes that she found excessively romantic and embarrassing so that she simply nodded in agreement in order to keep from bursting out in protest.

‘But you don’t understand,’ Raja groaned, clasping his hands on his chest. ‘You don’t know any Urdu, you can’t understand.’

Raja had studied Urdu in school in those days before the Partition when students had a choice between Hindi and Urdu. It was a natural enough choice to make for the son of a Delhi family: Urdu had been the court language in the days of the Muslim and Moghul rulers and had persisted as the language of the learned and the cultivated. Hindi was not then considered a language of great pedigree; it had little to show for itself in its modern, clipped, workaday form, and its literature was all in ancient, extinct dialects. Raja, who read much and had a good ear, was aware of such differences.

‘See,’ he told his sisters when he came upon them, bent over their homework at the veranda table, laboriously writing out Hindi compositions on My Village or The Cow, ‘you can’t call this a language.’ He made a scornful sound in his nose, holding up one of their Hindi copy-books as if it were an old sock. ‘Look, its angles are all wrong. And this having to go back and cross every word as you finish writing it, it is an—an impediment. How can you think fluently when you have to keep going back and crossing? It impedes the flow of the—the composition,’ he told them and they were thunderstruck by such intellectual revelations. ‘Look,’ he said again and wrote out a few lines in the Urdu script with a flourish that made them quiver with admiration.

Their neighbour and landlord, Hyder Ali, came to hear of the boy’s interests. He himself had a substantial library housed in a curious tower-like protuberance built at one corner of his bungalow. Seeing Raja swinging on the garden gate as he was coming back from his evening ride along the banks of the Jumna, he stopped to invite him to visit his library. Raja, appalled at having been caught at the childish pastime of hanging on the creaking, swaying garden gate, dazzled by the impressive figure of the old gentleman with silvery hair, dressed in white riding clothes and seated upon the white horse that Raja had for years envied him, often climbing up the garden wall to watch it being fed and groomed in the stable at the back, quite overcome at being given an invitation that he had only dreamt of in secret, nodded his acceptance in dumbfounded silence at which the old landlord smiled.

He presented himself at the Hyder Alis’ next day, was shown in by a suspicious servant, waved into the library by a preoccupied Hyder Ali in his office room, and let loose amongst the books and manuscripts that were to him as the treasures of Haroun al Raschid. He would sit there for hours, daily, turning over the more valuable of Hyder Ali’s manuscripts under the watchful eye of an old clerk employed by the landlord to keep his books, an aged priest with the face of a white goat who glared, slit-eyed, through his wire-rimmed spectacles at this son of the heathen allowed by some dangerous whim of the rich landlord’s to touch holy manuscripts he should not have come near. The air was so sharp, so pungent with the old man’s distaste and suspicion that finally Raja would become physically uncomfortable and go home, often with several volumes of poetry lent him by the amused and generous Hyder Ali.

Aunt Mira seemed as perturbed as the old clerk by this strange friendship. Sitting on the veranda with her mending, she saw Raja come out of his room with an armful of books to return to Hyder Ali and warned him in an awkward mumble ‘Raja, don’t you think you go there a little too often? Are you sure you are not in their way?’

‘But Hyder Ali Sahib invited me—he told me I could take all the books I wanted, as often as I liked.’

‘That was generous of him. But perhaps he didn’t mean quite so often, quite so many.’

‘Why?’ asked Raja stubbornly. He stood on the steps a minute, waiting for Aunt Mira to reply. When she did not, he went off with a disgusted look.

If Hyder Ali found his visits too frequent and the hours spent in his library too long, he neither said so nor even implied it by a look. He himself was either out on business or in his office room adjoining the library, going through his letters and files with a pair of clerks, for he was the owner of much property in Old Delhi and this seemed to entail an endless amount of paper work. Raja would hear him dictating to his clerks and the scratching of their pens while he himself sat cross-legged on a rug in the ‘tower’ or on a curly sofa upholstered in velvet and backed with painted tiles set in the ornately carved rosewood, reading and glorying in the beauty of the manuscripts and the poetry and in the extraordinary fact of his being here at all.

As he grew older and more sure of himself, he began to take part in Hyder Ali’s family life, for they all grew accustomed to him so that the sharp watchfulness softened into baffled acceptance. Coming out of the library, he would see Hyder Ali’s wife and daughter sitting on a divan on the veranda, cutting up vegetables for pickles or embroidering their coloured veils, and accept a slice of guava held out by the Begum or stop to tell them of his parents’ health or some gossip about the servants demanded of him. In the evenings, tired of his own noisy sisters and peculiar old aunt and still more peculiar little brother, he would wander across to the Hyder Ali’s garden where there was always a gathering of friends at that hour, chairs and divans and bolsters arranged in a circle on the lawn, drinks and ice and betel leaves served on silver trays, and gentlemen discussing politics and quoting poetry. It was an almost shocking contrast to the shabbiness of their own house, its peculiarities that hurt Raja by embarrassing him as he grew up and began to compare them with other homes other families Raja naturally inclined towards society company applause; towards colour, song, charm. It amazed and enchanted him that in the Hyder Ali household such elements were a Dart of their lives of their background. In his own home they were totally alien. He felt there could be no house as dismal as his own, as dusty and grimy and uncharming. Surely no other family could have as much illness contained in it as his, or so much oddity, so many things that could not he mentioned and had to he camouflaged or ignored The restraints placed on him hv such demands made him chafe—he was naturally one to burst out and overflow with enthusiasm or praise or excitement. These possibilities were enticingly held out to him at the Hyder Alls’.

Once he had outgrown his khaki school shorts and taken to fine white muslin shirts and pyjamas, he acquired sufficient self-confidence to join the circle of much older men on the lawn, and wisely sat listening rather than talking, saving up the talk for later when he would return home and tell Bim every detail, however casual or trivial, that glowed in his eyes with a special radiance related to everything that was Hyder Ali’s.

Having angered everyone in his own family by coming home very late one night, long after their dinner time, he lay awake on his cot in the garden and gave Bim a whispered account of the glories of a party at the Hyder Alis’.

‘There was a poet there tonight,’ he whispered, too tense with excitement to sleep. ‘A real poet, from Hyderabad, who is visiting them. He read out his poetry to us—it was wonderful—and Hyder Ali Sahib gave him a ring with a ruby in it.’

‘Was it that good?’ Bim murmured sleepily, exhausted by having waited up so late for Raja to come home and by Aunt Mira’s tearful laments about his bad ways.

‘Good—but I think I could write as good verse. And, you know, Hyder Ali Sahib asked me to recite, too.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, but not my own,’ he said regretfully. ‘They asked me to recite my favourite verses so I read them Iqbal’s,’ and he quoted to the uncomprehending Bim in proud, triumphant tones:

’Thou didst create night but I made the lamp.

Thou didst create clay but I made the cup.

Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests,

I produced the orchards, gardens and groves.

It is I who made the glass out of stone

And it is I who turn a poison into an antidote.’

The words were absorbed by the dusty night garden so brimful of sleep and quiet as to seem crowded and to press upon them with its weight. Then Bim asked ironically ‘And did Hyder Ali Sahib give you a ring with a ruby in it too?’

Raja might have been offended if he had caught the irony in the low voice but all he heard were the voices of Hyder Ali’s guests as they praised his excellent diction, his perfect pronunciation. The poet from Hyderabad had fondled his shoulder, saying ‘He will go far, Hyder Ali Sahib. A mind that can appreciate Iqbal at such a tender age will surely go far.’ Entirely missing the sycophancy behind the words, the gesture, Raja had glowed almost as if he had written the verses himself. Even Bim and the dark garden could not dampen his glow.

But he was affronted when, seeing him write frenziedly all one afternoon that they were locked into the house because of a dust-storm raging outside, she had asked ‘Are you going to be an Urdu poet when you grow up, Raja?’

He felt that she ought to know that he was one already. But of course an ignorant younger sister could not see that. He gave her a bitter look through a haze of cigarette smoke. He had taken to smoking.

The summer his final school examination results came out, his parents were obliged to pay s...