Summary
Tara is wandering around the garden of her childhood home, noticing the neglect and dust. The only unscathed part is the rose walk, which she delightedly points out to her sister Bim. Bim is heavy, grey, and looks like their mother did. Bim is disapproving that Tara, a married woman with children, seems delighted by a snail and the wrinkled roses.
Bim thinks of lines of T.S. Eliot but does not say them aloud because she does not wish to conjure that summer long ago when she nursed her sick brother. Instead, she asks Tara how she slept. Bim’s dog Badshah begins to bark loudly and she laughs at his theatrics.
Tara remarks that everything goes on and never changes here. Bim wryly asks if she wanted it to change. Surprised, Tara says not at all. Bim wonders if she would actually want to go back to childhood—the dullness, the boredom.
Bim says she never went anywhere like Tara and her husband Bakul, and wonders what they must think coming back to see her and their other brother Baba. All they would need is their old aunt to complete the picture, and maybe Raja reading Lord Byron. Tara is quiet. Bim states that there is a danger in coming back to Old Delhi because it only decays and does not change; it is the backwater and anyone who isn’t dull and grey leaves.
Tara ventures that she keeps coming back and she likes to come. She awkwardly says Bakul thinks it is important to represent his country. She then asks if Bim and Baba are coming to Raja’s daughter’s wedding; she hopes they will, and it can be like a family reunion.
Bim is distracted by her beloved cat, and bitterly tells Tara she knows she is thinking that old spinsters care about their animals only because they wished they had children. Tara recognizes this as the moment Bim goes too far, as she always did in childhood.
Loud noise fills the garden and Bim laughs that it is Baba and his old records. Tara asks if he ever wants new ones but Bim says he likes these.
Bim offers Bakul, who is sitting in a lounge chair, some milk. He looks sulky.
Baba comes out for tea. He is pale and has a young-looking face and white hair. Everyone tries to adopt an expression that will not make him uncomfortable. Both men seem dehydrated and empty while the women are quietly tense.
Bakul finally states that it is their first morning in Delhi, and to Bim’s surprise Tara smiles at this as if it were a profound statement. Bim says she has some of her students coming over. Bakul says he will visit some relatives in New Delhi and Tara gets up to get ready. Bim is surprised at her quick movements, as she used to be slow.
Bim asks Baba gently if he is going into the office today. Baba only smiles. Tara is surprised she bothers to do this, as it is completely futile.
In their room, Bakul tells Tara it would have been easier to stay with his relatives in New Delhi. She replies that she wants to be here with her brother and sister and do nothing, and she does not want to go to New Delhi at all. Bakul replies sharply that she must.
Tara looks around at what used to be her and Bim’s room when they were children. She thinks about her own daughters coming to visit and how cosmopolitan they are. She listens to Baba’s familiar music and feels a bit perturbed. Part of her is sinking back into the familiar and she wonders why this pond is so stagnant and muddy. Why hasn't anything changed?
Tara ventures into Baba’s room and watches his serene, fine face as he listens to his music. She wonders at this and wishes she could tell him that there is so much more music in the world than these old records. She decides to ask Baba if he wants a ride and when he squirms awkwardly she blurts out that he should go to the office. The silence roars. There would never be this silence with her husband and daughters; they are all to be precise and frank. Here, though, things are unsaid.
Tara feels guilty that she caused Baba this distress but she feels like she must ask, must not let things stay the same here. But is there really any solution? Finally, she tells Baba that Bim will decide, and that calms him.
Baba’s needle gets stuck in the groove and distresses him. He panics and runs outside. Tara sees this but does not know if it is okay or not for him to go out.
Baba, alone outside, is terrified. He is having bad memories of trouble he’d had outside as a child. He knows Bim and Tara want him to go so he walks, bobbing and swinging his hands. A man with a horse-drawn cart crashes to avoid him and the driver is irate and beats the horse. Baba is traumatized by this and stumbles back home. Tara sees him and asks if he is hurt, seeing the dust and tears. Baba shivers and shrinks down.
Bakul enters and notices nothing, chastising Tara for not being ready. She says she will not go and expects Bakul to be angry, but the heavy heat of the house precludes this. Bakul sighs that she has been back one day and is the same hopeless person. He thought he’d taught her a different way of life, taught her to be strong and decisive. He sighs that maybe he ought to take her away. He tells her that she isn’t happy here and that he can show her how to be happy and busy.
Tara shakes her head; she has followed him enough. Bakul leaves and passes Bim and her students on the way out. He admires her way of working with them and thinks that though she was and is plain, maybe she was the better of the two sisters.
Later that afternoon an ice cream man comes by and Bim laughs that she will have to get some cones for her students. Tara is persuaded to get one and delights in the sticky sweetness. The afternoon becomes much more pleasant and Tara wishes Bakul could see her family now.
Bakul comes home and takes a nap in the heat. Tara tries to write a letter to her daughters but thinks it is too soon. She feels the heavy boredom and dullness of childhood and how everything she hated seems preserved here. She wonders where she ought to escape and if sleep would help. The afternoon is hot and bare and open. Bakul always boasted of mastering a climate but here it does not seem possible for Tara to be active and organized.
Tara remembers her parents and their incessant bridge-playing and how she used to retreat into Aunt Mira’s room. She remembers watching her father steal into her mother’s room and inject a syringe into her, and even though later Raja and Aunt Mira told her what it was for she’d spent her whole life wondering if her father had killed her mother. She has a strange feeling of ghosts coming out of their door.
It would be hard to say Bim had the same childhood as Tara in the way she moves briskly about. Tara lazily looks at the nearby river Jumna and marvels to Bim how anyone used to play there. Bim chides her being snobbish and says that is the river where her own ashes will be spread and where Mira-masi’s ashes were spread and where they used to play as kids. Tara corrects her that it was Bim and Raja who played, and Bim pauses to think about this. She remembers Hyder Ali on his white horse and how Raja was so affected by his princely mien.
Tara adds that she remembers Raja reading his glorious poems he’d written to them. Bim bitterly says his verses were terrible. Tara is shocked, for the family always said Raja’s verses were great poetry. Bim sneers that his work was nauseating and embarrassing. Tara feels like Bim is “cruelly and willfully smashing up that charmed world with her cynicism, her criticism” (26).
Bim stands and says she’ll go find some if she hasn't torn them all up. She also points out to Tara that this terrace is where she cut Tara’s hair and made Tara so furious. She leaves. Tara would prefer to stay out here dreamily remembering in the dark heat even if it’s painful rather than clattering around inside. She has to go inside, though, and she does.
Bim is rifling through their father’s study and pulls out a letter Raja wrote written in Urdu. Tara reads it, and it says that Hyder Ali has died and that Benazir, his daughter and Raja’s wife, has agreed to let Bim and Baba keep living there under the same rent and Raja will always take care of her. Tara is shocked at this but sees how old it is. Bim stiffly says that Raja is now her landlord and her brother and she is just his poor tenant.
Tara sees the messiness here and wishes she could retreat. She asks why Bim doesn't just go to the wedding and end this but Bim refuses. She says she refuses to get down on a knee and thank Raja for not turning them out. Tara begs her to shred the letter but Bim will not; she needs the bitterness.
Bim suggests they visit their neighbors, the Misras. The two sisters and Bakul leave their property and walk up the driveway to the Misra house. They hear the sound of lessons held by the spinster sisters. Bim joins their aged father and Tara and Bakul talk to the brothers. The sisters finally come out, gray and drooping.
The father, whom Bim calls “Uncle,” is telling a story of his youth and fate. He chides Bim that she works too hard and that she doesn’t enjoy life. He points out his lazy sons and their bad business strategies. Mulk in particular only delights in his music. Uncle bemoans the sons and then the fact that he cannot have hookah anymore.
Jaya, one of the sisters, comes to fetch Bim and says Papa ought to sleep. One of the brothers is asking Bakul about what he as a diplomat says to foreigners about the situation in India. It is dark and Bim lights a cigarette. Bakul pauses before he says he talks only of the best, not famine and drought and caste wars. Bim suggests the Taj Mahal and Bakul assents, saying he mentions that and the Bhagavad Gita and music and such. Bim muses that it is easy to talk of those things because they do not live there; they can ignore bribery and corruption and red tape.
Tara is annoyed and Bim laughs that she provoked her sister. All the men watch Bim appreciatively and Tara realizes that her sister can be deemed handsome and appealing. Is it that Tara is married and cannot flirt but Bim is unmarried and can?
The brothers ask about things like scotch and Bim is amused to see that Tara wears her cosmopolitanism uncomfortably. Mulk, the musical brother, calls for his instruments. He is a disheveled, dirty man, Bim notes. He begins to fight with his sisters because they sent his accompanists away because they did not have the money. He is drunk and whiny, saying only music sustains him.
The visitors sit there in silence. Mulk screams that he gives his sisters money all the time. Finally, Bakul intervenes and calms Mulk down. The sisters apologize and ask them all to stay for dinner. Bim will not, though, remembering the last time there was a “potluck” and how pitiful it was.
On the walk home, Bakul asks about Hyder Ali’s house. Bim says only a poor caretaker lives there now.
Baba is asleep at home. He looks thin and serene, like a marble statue. He was born to his parents late in their lives and it was as if they “had no vitality and no personality left to hand down to him” (40).
The neighborhood is silent. The stars are out and the flowers smell redolent. Bim starts to remember their aunt and how she died, and she quotes T.S. Eliot. Tara yawns to cover a sigh; she’d heard Bim and Raja quote so much poetry in their youth.
Bim continues, thinking about maybe Mira-masi lingering on because she hadn’t gone through all the stages. She murmurs that life seems not to flow like a river but goes in jumps. There are long stretches and then a flood, like the summer of 1947. They think of the fires and both sisters are glad their youth is over.
Analysis
Anita Desai was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in the writing of Clear Light of Day, and one of the most conspicuous ways that influence is felt is in the division of the novel into four parts and the movement from present to past and back again. In this first section, which is set in the present, Tara and her husband Bakul are visiting Tara’s older sister Bim and her younger brother Baba. From the first pages, it becomes clear that this is a family that revels, for better or worse, in conjuring up old memories. The things they see in the house and garden reverberate with associations from their childhood and youth; comments they make to each other result in waves of recollections and concomitant emotions. Though the reader doesn’t often sympathize with Bakul, he isn’t incorrect to see that Tara coming back to this house means she will be immersed in the past and that it will be difficult to extricate herself from that.
The house itself is as much a character as the human beings are, as is Old Delhi. Desai uses words like dull, boredom, ennui, stagnant, languid, heavy, and more to describe the house. She unceasingly writes of the heat and how it is oppressive. With the heat is the dust, which settles over everything. The heat, combined with the heaviness of memory, make Tara feel slow and muddy and she wonders why nothing changes. Bim seems used to the heat but it still makes her pensive and sometimes querulous. Only Baba seems unaffected by the environs, but his situation is obviously a unique one.
In regards to the actual characters, Desai depicts them vividly and sympathetically. She does not spare the reader accounts of the sisters’ flaws or cruelties, but she does indeed reveal them as fully human and worthy of compassion. First, there is Tara, the sister who was always considered more beautiful and who has the husband and family and glamorous life abroad. However, her husband is patronizing and self-absorbed and does not see why Tara wants to spend time in Old Delhi with her family. He calls her “weak-willed and helpless and defeatist as ever” (17) now that she is in her childhood home, and while she certainly embodies some aspects of that insult, she is more individualistic than people give her credit for. Bim also finds it easy to criticize her sister, albeit passively aggressively, calling her snobbish and delighting in crushing all of the things that the family had cherished for so long. Tara is a much kinder and softer person than Bim is, and has an impulse towards both the avoidance of conflict and the bringing about of peace between the siblings.
Tara has somewhat of a hard time being home because her childhood wasn’t always pleasant. She remembers the “dullness and the boredom” (20), her fear that her father killed her mother, the exhausting heat, the “morbid, uncontrollable fear of [the door] opening and death stalking out in the form of a pair of dreadfully familiar ghosts” (23). As the novel progresses, it also becomes clear that she was often left out by her older siblings, felt her younger one replaced her in the family’s esteem, despised school, and simply wanted to escape, either in Aunt Mira’s room or into marriage with Bakul.
Bim is very different than Tara. First of all, she remains unmarried by choice and has a fulfilling career as a teacher. She never traveled, took care of Aunt Mira until her death, and still takes care of Baba. She is brilliant but cynical and bitter, holding onto her anger at her beloved older brother past the point at which it is rational. She is critical and overthinks a great deal, as well as attributes thoughts to people that they may not possess. In her mind there is no point in being fake, submissive, or dependent on anyone else; she is fiercely independent and always has been. She does evince some mild jealousy of Tara and Tara’s life but the impression is that she is happy where she is. When others, especially Bakul, speak of what they do not know, she does not remain quiet but challenges them in their ignorance. Her resolve and charisma even make her beautiful sometimes, Tara is surprised to note. Bim’s reasons for living her life as she does become clearer in the novel’s sections set in the past, but even in this first section she is rendered as a nuanced, complex character.
Anita Desai was not a professed feminist but her female characters espouse some feminist points of view. Most of them are urban, educated, middle-class, and Hindu and must navigate a world in which men have most of the power. Critic Ruth K. Rosenwasser sees the main issues as “empowerment and choice for women vs. patriarchy; socialization which confines women to subordinate roles through education and role stereotypes; and the devaluation of the female perspective.” Bim advocates education for women and does not see why marriage ought to derail that. She eventually decides she will not marry and live a life of independence and choice. She admires historical figures like Florence Nightingale Joan of Arc, prefers reading nonfiction, and “seeks equality with her brother, Raja, and resents the opportunities open to him and closed to her as they grow up.” Both Bim and Tara experience a sense of freedom and power when they try on Raja’s clothes; “the contrast between men and women’s clothing is the difference between a free, exterior world and a confined, interior one.”
As Bim grows older she becomes frustrated that no one thought she could handle the family business. She tells her students that they can be a new type of woman, and tells Tara that she hopes to have time with her nieces to do the same. She cuts her hair, smokes, wears “careless” clothing, and fashions a life of her own. Ultimately, Rosenwasser writes, “Bimla acts heroically by breaking with the dominant ideology that a woman must marry, by refusing to become a subservient wife like her mother, a vicarious achiever like her sister, or a castaway widow like her aunt, all of whom play stereotypical roles.”
