Summary
Tara was a child and her days as the youngest were numbered, for her mother was unhappily pregnant with her fourth. Tara was in the garden near the roses no one knew how to take care of, and thought she saw a pearl but it was only a snail.
The new baby was adorable, but everyone ignored how long it took for him to grasp simple tasks. It was as if the parents had nothing to give to this one. Tara’s ayah was made nurse again, but she was a stupid woman so they sent for Aunt Mira.
Aunt Mira was a poor relation, widowed at fifteen but still a virgin decades later. Her family was happy to be rid of her because she was often ill, a little crazy, and going bald. Mrs. Das warned her children that they must mind their aunt, and they became worried about her presence.
Bim, Raja, and Tara were delighted to see, though, that Aunt Mira had presents for them, and handmade presents at that. The children knew they had power over her but their aunt did not seem to care. She offered to make them fresh mango sorbet.
Tara looked up at her and asked if she was here to only watch Baba. Aunt Mira replied kindly that she was here to look after Baba but wants to play with Tara. Tara was elated.
Aunt Mira played with Baba and taught him games no else ever tried to play with him. The only thing he would not do is talk, but “his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them” (106).
Aunt Mira adopted a kitten, which grew and looked on the household with disdain. She also suggested to Mrs. Das that they get a cow for fresh milk so the milkman can’t cheat them anymore. The ayah and the cook chimed in their agreement and Mrs. Das had to agree.
The cow arrived and for a week she was treated like a princess. One night, though, the gardener did not lock her up and she wandered through the garden like a ghost and fell into the well to her death. Now the well contained death as well as living things, and “the horror of that death by drowning lived in the area behind the carvanda hedge like a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness” (107).
Mira was twelve when she married. Her husband left for England immediately after their wedding, but caught a cold sometime later and died. His family blamed her and she had to pay for her guilt by doing chores. They treated her like trash, and she was eventually turned out.
Bim and Tara were fascinated by Aunt Mira’s one pretty sari and begged her to try it on, but Mira laughed that she could only wear it when she died. The girls were upset, and Mira felt guilty.
Mira was widowed but not abandoned. People in Old Delhi sought her out. Tara had lost most at Baba’s birth and became like a baby again around her aunt. All of the children loved her stories and her constant presence and her love. They did not see her as a “wife,” for a wife was like their mother –someone who chastised and commanded and was soft and sweet-smelling. The children owned her and she them; “their opposing needs seemed to mingle and meet at their very roots” (111). They grew tall and strong, and she was like their tree, soil, and earth.
Mira nursed Bim and Raja when they caught typhoid one summer. Even though she was exhausted, she still played with Tara. Their relationship was affectionate and mutually assuring, while hers with the older children was deep, silent, and instinctive.
The favorite game was “what will you be when you grow up?” Raja said a hero and Bim a heroine, and Tara said she would be a mother and knit for her babies. The other two laughed scornfully but Aunt Mira consoled her and whispered that hers would probably be true (and it did).
The summer was hot and languid. They played games and wandered around on the burning grass under the searing sun. They squirted water at each other and then went inside to collapse on the bamboo mat. Someone asked what the most frightening thing was, and Tara answered a cholera injection. She gasped, though, because privately she knew something worse –her father giving her mother a shot to kill her.
That night Tara climbed in Mira’s bed and asked when her parents would come home from cards. Bim and Raja were there too. Mira said that cards help with the pain, and explained to the children that their mother had diabetes and was trying to lead a normal life. This relieved Tara, now that she knew her father was not trying to murder her mother.
Raja grew older and more impatient with his sisters and his aunt. He learned cycling and wrestling from Hamid, the driver’s son. Now Tara, who always trailed behind Bim and Raja, had more in common with Bim.
Raja was always the leader in their hide-and-seek games and left them to run around in frenzied quest of him. One time they almost caught him and realized they were near the well. Hushed, Bim pushed Tara closer to look. The water as black and oily; the cow was still down there because she was too heavy for men to ever pull her out. The was the essence of the lingering horror. There was nothing to see but the blackness.
The two girls ran away in fear and when they caught Raja and yelled in fury they weren’t actually furious about his escape but the “well that waited for them at the bottom of the garden, bottomless and black and stinking” (118).
Raja growing older was hard on Bim, and sometimes it made her resentful and cruel to Tara. She volunteered to cut Tara’s hair one day because Tara wanted curls, and Tara was miserable with her short cut and proclaimed she could never forget Bim’s meanness.
Adolescence seemed a time of great dullness, greyness, and inconsequence for the three children. They longed for color and light and only Raja got a taste of that sometimes. Raja read and brought things alive for himself, but the girls could not get the same thing out of reading. Only when Bim discovered nonfiction did this change, and she valued knowledge more than imagination.
One summer evening Raja and Bim went to the banks of the sluggish Jumna. Tara was sent to bring them home. As they were all going back, they felt and heard a great drumbeat. They saw Hyder Ali on his glorious white horse, galloping nobly with his dog trailing him. Raja breathed out in awe that he looked like a general and wistfully wished he was a friend of Papa. Bim was unimpressed, but Tara was excited by the spectacle too.
The house seemed to be a place of waiting. Bim only felt purposeful when she was at school. She was vigorous and bright and a natural leader and loved to participate. Tara, though, hated school and was made uncomfortable by it in every fiber of her being. Her peers and teachers assumed she was a snob, but she was just crippled and weakened by it. The elderly missionary ladies who ran the place thought she lacked will and found this deplorable.
School was even more deplorable for Tara on Thursdays when they went to the mission hospital to minister to non-paying patients. The whole situation was agonizing to Tara, but Bim sneered that she thought she was too good for it. Tara only wanted to hide under Aunt Mira’s quilt.
There were two notable episodes at school. Once a mad dog found its way into the latrine and was shot and killed. Tara could not get the squealing and image of blood out of her mind.
The other event was that there was a new teacher who was younger and appealing who apparently had a foreigner boyfriend, which made the other administrators and teachers uncomfortable. One day the students were told she was not coming back and the old lady principal, Miss Stephen, had to take over. The girls were cruel to the principal but Bim yelled at them that she had cancer and that she was brave to be carrying on the school. The other girls were subdued, but Tara, who had loved the vibrant Miss Singh, was bitter.
Over time the girls felt Raja’s restlessness as well. They did not know exactly why they were so disappointed, and very little could keep them entertained. One day Bim and Tara were bored and snuck into Raja’s room. They looked at his poetry and books and then decided to try on his clothes. They felt powerful and different and full of possibility in the clothes.
Bim also gave Tara one of Raja’s cigarettes and they snuck outside. Bim told Tara to smoke one but Tara was afraid. She was upset that Bim always pushed things a little too far—she made their fantasies into uncomfortable reality. Tara took a miserable drag and then accidentally dropped the cigarette into the brush and ran off. Bim had to follow, and they heard Raja coming home. He began yelling at them.
Tara was guilty of actually abandoning Bim one time. This was at an event with the Misra sisters. They were to go to a garden, and two young potential suitors for the Misra girls attended as well. The Misra brothers came, too, and were as loud and jocular as usual. Bim and Tara did not know how to navigate this gathering and chose to walk off into one of the tombs at the gardens.
Once inside, they heard something hit the side of the tomb. In the darkness, something began to swirl around them and, to their horror, they realized it was a swarm of bees. Tara managed to run out screaming first, but the swarm got Bim. They swirled around her like she was a victim at a celebration. Tara felt helpless and did not know what to do. She turned back once but the bees swarmed up angrily and she screamed for help. The men rushed up with veils and lit newspapers to swing at the bees. The boy who threw the stone was thrashed.
Bim sat in stony silence, ordering people not to touch her. She was nearly unrecognizable. Tara tearfully apologized to her and Bim sighed that she couldn’t help it because she would have been stung too. Only Raja raged at Tara but Mira chastised him.
Tara began to avoid both Raja and Bim and spent more time with Jaya and Sarla Misra. It was the closest thing to a real friendship that she’d ever had. She observed how comfortable the family was with their middle-class bourgeois existence and how they did not put on airs. There were always people coming and going and fun things to do. The sisters swept Tara along and she enjoyed being part of their family.
Jaya and Sarla eventually became engaged to the two men from the party. They were happy to feel matronly and wise and to introduce Tara to other families they knew. At their engagement party, Tara was able to wear her first sari, a pink and silver one. Bim was forced to come along, and the whole thing irritated her. She took Tara up to the quieter roof, and Tara was privately annoyed that they weren’t downstairs.
Bim wondered how the girls would pass their finals with all this to-do, and Tara replied that they were getting married. Bim snorted that they should go to college instead but Tara, rebellious all of a sudden, asked why. Bim replied that they might see that marriage was not enough to last their whole lives. Tara was flustered and asked what else there would be. Bim raised her eyebrows and said she would never marry, never leave Baba and Aunt Mira. She looked out into the night and mused almost to herself that she would earn her own living and do things and be independent.
Analysis
Desai takes her readers farther back into the Das childhood than she did in the prior part of the novel. Here we see a young Tara, bemoaning losing her “youngest child” status; baby Baba and the family’s growing awareness that he is not growing as he should; the tensions and defining moments between the sisters; the beginning of Raja’s lionization of Hyder Ali; the tragic story of Aunt Mira; and all of the children’s difficulties with their lackluster and torpid childhood. It is very apparent that the things that happened to Bim, Raja, and Tara when they were children still reside with their minds and their hearts, affecting their decisions and opinions, and occasionally making it difficult for them to move on. Memory and the past are always subjective and weighty for these characters.
The only character for whom the past does not weigh heavily upon is Baba. He is mentally slow (most likely autistic) and does not communicate with words like his siblings do. He seems deracinated, simple, lacking in vivacity; Desai writes that “it was if his parents, too aged, had given birth to a child without vitality or will –all that had gone into the other, earlier children and there had been none left for this late, last one” (103). Though abstractly expressed, this line also suggests the impact parents have upon their children, for if the Das parents were more lively and involved in their children’s lives, many of the difficulties of childhood or of development may have been precluded.
Critic Cindy Lacan looks at Baba’s disability through the lens of post-colonialism, beginning with a nod to Frantz Fanon’s writing on how “Othering occurs on the basis of physical and verbal difference” and the Bakhtinian perspective that “the very grotesqueness of disability has the potential to disrupt hegemonic paradigms and revise cultural norms.” Then there is scholar Homi Bhaba, who writes of the “Third Dimension” –of recognition that the self cannot be contained within a Self/Other binary and that as soon as we see that “the chasm which divides us from them is artificial and reductionist, we move into a place where identity is ambivalent and mutable.” Slippage between the categories of us/them is destabilizing, though, and the “evil eye” that alienates both slave and master “has power because it unsettles the simplistic polarities of Self/Other, because it resists that image of totality so important in myths both of imperial and postcolonial worlds.”
So, then, where does Baba fit in? In Clear Light of Day Desai’s family is a microcosm for larger national concerns; Bim represents Indian values, Tara Western. Baba, though, “represents the naïve dream of detachment from postcolonial negotiations of power.” He moves between identity categories, seen when he listens to Benazir’s American music on the gramophone. Bim and Tara often use his silent, compulsive body as a backdrop on which to negotiate their own understanding of identity.
Both Baba and Mira, who “does not fill a culturally-sanctioned role” and who “hovers at the edge of a ‘new’ Indian society” can be seen as the evil eye because they have subversive potential and resist inclusion. Baba’s silence and Mira’s insanity demonstrate the problematic nature of language as well; they cannot communicate and join the Self or the Other. Finally, Lacan wonders about how progressive Desai’s characterization of Baba actually is, because ultimately he is silent. He has no reconciliation, and he “serves as an Other, an abject outside by which the sisters establish their renewed ties.” Baba is thus both transgressive and still, unfortunately, Othered.
One final thing to note now that the novel has explored three different time periods: clearly, the story moves quite slowly and the characters remain more or less the same as they were at the start of the novel; the majority of the story focuses on their character development through childhood and adolescent years. The climax of the story seems to have little motivation and the conflict arises from the difference in the siblings. If compared to a regular three-element story structure, the conflict of the story rises very gradually and the resolution makes very little difference to the climax. Finally, emphasis on the setting of Old Delhi creates a time-lapse effect, as if the world inside the Das house never changes. It is always dusty and crumbling, except for the garden that is slowly withering away. It also alludes to the mundane life of Bim and its unchanging manner.
