Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, we are all waiting—for the date to be set—for partition, for independence. It will come any day now.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then there will be trouble,’ he said simply, not liking to dramatize a situation that he himself feared. ‘But you needn’t worry. All steps are being taken to carry out partition smoothly, we hope safely. Refugee camps are being formed. Special trains are being arranged. The police, the army—all are alerted. Anyway, you will be quite safe here, outside the city walls. There won’t be riots here, and the Muslims who live here—’

  ‘Yes, exactly—I’m worried about them. So is Raja. Our neighbours, you know, the Hyder Alis, they have disappeared.’

  ‘Most of them have already left. They have acted quickly, wisely. The Hyder Alis must have done that.’

  ‘But they must still be in the country, somewhere. What will happen to them?’

  ‘They will have police protection. They can go to the refugee camps. It is all arranged.’

  Bim shook her head and was silent while Bakul went on about measures taken by the government, about Mountbatten’s goodwill and integrity, about Nehru’s idealism and integrity, about Jinnah and Pakistan—but Bim felt she was listening to banal newspaper articles being read aloud and she brushed her hand across her forehead and got up. ‘I’ll go and tell Raja what you say,’ she said. ‘He keeps asking for news—he’s anxious about the Hyder Alis.’

  Bakul instantly got up. ‘You must tell him there is no need,’ he said. ‘Please tell him I will go back and make enquiries about them and will see to it personally that they are not harmed.’

  ‘We don’t even know where they are,’ Bim said, giving him an ironical look as she walked away, and Bakul looked puzzled for a moment. He wondered if he had been snubbed—Bim did have such discouraging ways. He was a very junior servant in the foreign service, it was true. In fact, he was still in training. He did not really know what was to be done. Still, he did like everyone to think he did.

  So he sat down again beside Tara and picked up her hand and squeezed it lightly. To Tara he could speak in a different tone. From Tara he got a different response. He smiled at her fondly, like an indulgent father. She smiled back gratefully—she had not had an indulgent father, after all. She wore a white chameli flower in her hair. She was very like it herself. He told her so.

  ‘I must take you with me, Tara,’ he said softly. ‘This place is bad for you—so much sickness, so many worries. You are too young for all this. I must take you away.’

  There was rioting all through the country and slaughter on both sides of the new border when a letter came from Hyder Ali. Bim ran into the room when Raja called, loudly and excitedly. ‘Raja, don’t roar,’ she panted, ‘its bad for you. Dr Biswas said—’

  ‘Bim,’ he shouted, sitting up in bed, with his hair grown long and wild about his flushed face. ‘Look, a letter from Hyder Ali Sahib!’

  She gave a shiver as at a touch of ice. Raja’s anxiety had transferred itself to her, kept her awake nights: both had wondered if the Hyder Alis were not dead, murdered while trying to escape to Pakistan.

  ‘Where are they, Raja?’

  ‘In Hyderabad—quite safe. In Hyder Ali Sahib’s home—his mother lives there, and his sister. They’re all safe. He says there is no trouble in Hyderabad. They are in hiding, but they are safe and well, and they even found a friend to post this letter to me. Bim,’ he said joyfully, ‘wasn’t it good of Hyder Ali Sahib to write to me? To we? He even says Benazir sends her best wishes.’ He handed Bim the letter to share the joy of it with her. She sat on the edge of his bed, reading, and laughing with relief, relief as much for his sake as for theirs.

  It seemed the evening light that came in that day was softer, milder, not so lurid. They listened to the mynahs chattering on the lawn, to Baba playing with his pebbles on the steps, and looked at each other in relief and joy. Raja, sitting upright in bed, looked as if he were going to get well.

  ‘I wonder how they did the journey—he doesn’t say.’

  ‘Of course not—he can’t—it’s not safe to. Only I wish he had told me—he could have trusted me—’

  ‘How could he, Raja? With a plainclothes policeman posted at our gate? And the sort of friends you picked up at college?’

  ‘They weren’t my friends—they were traitors. And he should have known I was never one of them.’

  ‘He knew—that’s why he has written to you.’

  ‘Look, Bim, he has asked me to look up the house—see what has happened to it. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bim, springing up. ‘Has he left anything there? Does he want me to see if they’re safe?’ and when Raja said there were no instructions, nothing specific, she went instantly, calling to Baba to put his pebbles away and come with her. They crossed the road together, her hand on his elbow, to the house that had stood silent and dark across from them for weeks now.

  Lifting the catch of the gate and letting it down again as they entered the garden, Baba turned as if to go back, then drew closer to Bim and although she gave him a little encouraging push, she was affected by his unwillingness nevertheless. It was as if they had walked into a cobweb—they could feel it on their faces, a clinging, slightly moist net which they brushed at with ineffectual fingers.

  The house was so strangely unlit and deserted as it had never been for as long as they had known it—like a body whose life and warmth they were accustomed to and took for granted, now grown cold and stiff and faded. It looked accusing, too, as if it held them responsible. The envied roses still bloomed in the formal beds of precise geometrical shapes but their petals lay scattered and unswept: even the gardeners had gone. Ripe fruit had fallen to the ground beneath the trees along the drive, ripe mangoes and guavas, and lay there rotting, touched by a few birds and then left, mutilated. A long-tailed hornbill swooped out of the tall jacaranda tree by the porch and gave a harsh, croaking cry as it rattled through the air into the trees by the drive, making Baba raise his arm to protect his face, and duck. But Bim held his hand and led him on.

  The fanlight above the door, glowing in the orange evening light, deceived them for an instant into thinking there was a light on in the hall. But when they pushed open the door by its painted porcelain handle and went in, the bulb inside the pendulous glass globe was unlit and there was nothing there but a hatstand with its many extended hooks, empty, and a wilting potted plant.

  All the rooms were unnaturally enlarged by emptiness for all the small objects of ornament and comfort had been taken away and only the large pieces of furniture left, ornate and heavily carved sofas and marble-topped tables that, stripped of cushions and vases and silver boxes and coloured glassware, sulked and looked as accusing as abandoned husbands in the gloom. The squares and oblongs on the walls from which pictures had been removed were marked by brown rims of grime.

  They walked down the tiled passages, opening frosted glass-paned doors to the left and right, peering in, half-expecting to find someone left behind—perhaps an old sick aunt with embroidery spools heaped on her lap and fluttering a ghostly fan, or the kittens Benazir used to play with and cuddle. But there was no one there. A mirror on the wall flashed a blank, empty glare at them—the heathen, unwanted. At the library door Bim hesitated with her hand on the glass knob, wanting intensely to go in and see this room that Raja had for years regarded as his own retreat, his spiritual home, and somehow not daring to violate what he had kept scrupulously private. Would the books still be there? she wondered. She walked past without looking to see—some day Raja could come here about them.

  Only in Benazir’s room there was still a childish, girlish debris strewn across the heavy, carved bed—bits of ribbon and lace, pictures cut out of illustrated magazines, a little velvet bag with gold tassels. Bim curled her lip: Benazir was untidy, she noted, a spoilt only child. ‘Can’t I take them with me?’ she seemed to hear the pouting voice. ‘Oh why can’t I?’ Contemptuou
sly, Bim tried to sweep everything into a heap, tidy up.

  Baba had been silent all through this ghostly tour, keeping close to her except when she made some small, nervous comment, when he gave a start and jumped away from her. Now he pointed his finger and made a little desperate sound like a bell that won’t ring when pressed. Bim looked. ‘What?’ she asked, ‘that?’ Baba nodded, and she went with him to a corner where an old-fashioned His Master’s Voice gramophone stood on a small three-legged table, on the lower shelf of which were stacked the records Benazir and her friends had listened to, in the afternoons when her father was out and her mother asleep and not likely to hear the profane sounds so unlike the music the family enjoyed under the drawing room chandelier or in the flowering summer garden. Bim shuffled through them out of curiosity—it amused her to think of a scholar poet’s daughter listening to these American foxtrots and quicksteps that the World War and the American GIs and British Tommies had brought to India. What would Raja think of her taste?

  ‘Come, let’s go,’ said Bim, turning away. ‘Let’s go and look in the servants’ quarters—there may be someone there.’ But Baba would not go. He stood there fingering the smooth shining metal gadgetry in the green box, his long fingers closing about the curved silver horn, admiringly, lovingly. ‘Come, Baba, come,’ Bim said several times, more and more impatiently, but he was smiling to himself, quite deaf and unresponsive in the enclosed bubble of his dream, till she said angrily ‘Then I’m going alone,’ whereupon he reluctantly let down the lid, closing the box with a gentle creak, and followed her, dragging his foot and looking whipped so that she said in exasperation ‘If you want it, I suppose there’s nothing to stop you taking it. But first let’s go and see if there’s anyone outside, at the back, whom we can ask.’ He raised his chin and gave her a shy, fearful look of hope then and followed her more willingly.

  As they entered the dark, cavernous kitchen at the back, packed full of the smell of coal and smoke, and stained and blotched with the signs of many feasts and much drudgery, they heard a whine. They opened cupboards and looked into coal holes but could find nothing. Then they opened the door onto the back veranda and there, behind the woodbox, found the dog that whined so pathetically, in such a shrunken, faded voice. It was Hyder Ali’s dog, they had not been able to take her with them. Exceptionally sweet and gentle of face, with long, drooping ears and hopeful, tearful eyes that gazed at the visitors in fear, she thumped her long tail in tentative greeting.

  ‘It’s Begum,’ cried Bim in an outburst of relief at seeing something alive in this deserted house. She patted the overcome creature in pity and reassurance while Baba knelt on the ground, fondling her, clasping her dribbling mouth to his chest in gentle protectiveness. ‘We’ll have to take her back with us or she’ll starve,’ Bim said, and Baba lowered his face to the dog’s brow and kissed it in gratitude.

  Their voices and the ecstatic whining of the half-starved creature did flush someone out of the servants’ quarters. At first they were only aware of someone peeping out from the cracks of a heavily barred wooden door but obviously their features and their behaviour were not intimidating to the owner of the eyes for after a moment the door creaked open and one of Hyder Ali’s old servants, the groom who had looked after Hyder Ali’s white mare, came sidling out. He salaamed extravagantly as Bim cried out in surprise, then whispered ‘Please don’t speak so loudly. People may come. They may call the police. I will be taken to jail—’

  ‘Why?’ asked Bim, puzzled. She hated the way the man cringed although the cringing of the dog had only aroused compassion. ‘What have you done?’ she asked coldly. ‘You haven’t murdered the Hyder Ali family, have you?’

  The poor man nearly screamed in terror and his eyes flashed to the left and to the right as if he expected the police to fall out of the guava trees or bound out of the well. ‘They will take me to jail and question me,’ he hissed. ‘They will torture me till I speak. That is what they do—I have heard.’

  ‘But why? What information have you got?’

  ‘None, none at all,’ whined the man, striking his head. ‘Hyder Ali Sahib packed and left so quietly—his friends came to help, sent them cars to take them to the station, and armed guards too. But they did not tell me where they were going. The police will want to know. They will ask. They will think I helped them to escape—’

  ‘Escape?’ Bim said scornfully. ‘What do you mean, escape? They have every right to leave their house in Delhi and go and live in their house in Hyderabad. If they took their belongings with them, well, they were their belongings, it’s not theft.’

  ‘Ah, but they were Muslims,’ wailed the old man, doubling up in front of her and swaying nearly to the ground. ‘We should not have allowed them to go.’

  ‘You had better go away,’ Bim told him in disgust. ‘You had better go to your village. Did Hyder Ali Sahib leave you any money?’

  ‘Yes, yes, Hyder Ali Sahib was always good to me—Muslim though he was. May God keep him—his God and ours. But how can I travel? These are bad times, murderers and thugs are everywhere, and if I meet anyone who knew I worked for Muslims, I will be—’ he drew his finger across his throat and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Then you had better come to our house. Janaki will give you a bed—you can stay till it is safe for you to go home.’ Then, when he looked as if he would really grovel at her feet, she said sharply ‘And where is Hyder Ali Sahib’s horse?’

  He straightened up then and babbled quickly ‘Oh, Hyder Ali Sahib gave her away to Lala Ram Narain who helped them to pack and leave. He tried to send Begum also, but Begum would not leave the compound—she lay on the ground and would not let anyone touch her. She tried to bite me—see.’ He began to roll up his sleeve to show them.

  ‘Then Begum must come with us,’ said Bim and whistled to the dog who crawled after them on bent legs as they walked round to the front of the house, the old man hobbling after them, his sleeve rolled back and his arm still extended as if to show them the bite, or to beg. When Bim went up the steps to the front door to make sure it was shut, Baba suddenly darted past her and disappeared into the house. She stopped to wait for him, wondering at the unusual decisiveness of his movements, and in a little while he came out, staggering under the weight of the gramophone that he carried in his arms, carefully balancing the stack of records on top of it.

  ‘Oh Baba,’ she grumbled, helping him by taking the records off and carrying them for him. ‘Do you have to have this stupid old thing? I don’t suppose it matters,’ she added as she saw Baba’s face fall. ‘Benazir can always write and ask for it when she wants it. Come, Begum, come,’ she called encouragingly to the dog who hung back at the gate, not quite knowing how to act, equally reluctant to abandon her home and to give up these newly-found protectors. Finally she followed them across the road and into their own garden, growing more animated and more upright as she realised she was welcome here.

  Raja was waiting for them on the veranda. Bim ran forward, crying ‘Raja, why didn’t you wait in bed? Go to bed at once. I’ll come and tell you all about it as soon as I’ve found a quarter for Bhakta here and some food for Begum—they’re all we found in the house. It’s quite empty. And oh, this gramophone.’

  ‘Benazir’s gramophone,’ Raja said in astonishment at the sight of Baba so carefully and proudly carrying in his treasure. ‘And records—she used to play those records when her friends came. I used to see them dancing together in her room on my way to the library.’

  ‘She won’t mind Baba having it, will she? You can write and tell her about it. But go to bed now, and I’ll go and ask Mira-masi what to do about Bhakta, and the poor dog—’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, Bim,’ Raja said, soberly. ‘You’d better go and see Mira-masi, she doesn’t seem very well.’

  ‘No?’ said Bim in surprise, stopping short on her way to the kitchen, and then turned and flew down the veranda to her aunt’s room, fear thudding hard at her side.

  Raja h
ad bolted the door on the outside. Drawing back the bolt, Bim threw open the door, then quickly shut it behind her so that no one should come in, for Aunt Mira was in a disgraceful state, a state no one should see her in. She had clawed off her clothes from her body so that her blouse hung in strips from the little shrivelled flaps of her blue-veined breasts and her sari trailed behind her on the floor as she lurched about the room in a kind of halting dance, her feet getting tangled in the torn muslin that lay everywhere, her one hand jerking at her side while the other held onto a glass of what smelt unmistakably like raw, undiluted liquor. Yes, there was the brandy bottle, nearly empty, on the floor by her bed. Bim rushed towards her aunt with her arms outstretched to catch her and enclose her and hold her, but Aunt Mira stepped aside as lightly as a nimble old goat and, making a comical face at Bim’s dismay, sang out in a quavering trill:

  ‘Said the night-in-gale to the ro-o-ose,’

  when her feet caught in a loop of trailing muslin, she stumbled and knocked over the bottle that fell with a clatter and spilt out its reeking liquid. Seeing it leak and spread about her feet, soaking the shed clothes, Aunt Mira stopped in mid-song, clutched her throat, gave a little choked cry and sank onto her bed, whimpering soggily. Her cat, sitting on the edge with her paws tucked neatly together as if into a white muff, watched her with huge eyes of amber slit with black—shocked and disdainful.

  Next door, in Baba’s room, a strange rasping roar started out of the stillness, grew louder like a train approaching through a tunnel, and emerged, not in a whistle, but in a woman’s voice smokily wailing:

  ‘Underneath the lamp-post . . .’

  Life spread in a pool around her, low and bright, lapping at her feet, but then quickly, treacherously rising to her ankles, to her knees. She had to get out of it. She had to lift herself out before it rose to her waist, to her armpits. If only they had not wrapped her in those long swaddlings as if she was a baby, or a mummy—these long strips that went round and round her, slipping over her eyes, crossing over her nose, making her breath stop so that she had to gasp and clutch and tear—