Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  Not to panic, not to panic, she whispered to herself. It is a pool, it must not spread. Gather it, contain it. Here, in this bottle. A tall, fine bottle. She had it by its neck, her fingers went round it—almost around it, not quite—but she could, could grasp it—just. She would contain it. Pour it into a glass. See, how it trickled in, colourless, but she could feel it, smell it: it was real, she had not imagined it. When she lowered her mouth to the rim, it leapt up to meet her, went scorching up her nostrils and burning down her throat, leaving it raw and bleeding. She drew back in fright, her eyes leapt quickly in and out of their red sockets.

  That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping. The flames leapt up all around, rising by inches every minute, rising in rings.

  At first they had been only little flames, so pretty in the dark. So many candles at a celebration, a festival. She would hear their voices ringing, as pure as glass, or flame. Raja and Bim, tall and straight and true, their voices ringing out: ‘I will be a hero,’ one had called out from the pure white peak of a candle flame, and the other had echoed back, as in a song, ‘And I will be a heroine.’ But then they had shot up into such tall, towering flames, crackling and spitting, making her shut her eyes and cower. Down at her knees the little Tara whimpered ‘Masi, they say I’m silly. Masi, they called me a fool.’ The child’s fingers stuck to her, waxy and white, and the flames crackled up above them, taller and fiercer every minute. When she put out her hands to stop them, the flames pricked her like pins, drawing out beads of blood so that she dropped her hands with a cry and backed away from them. This made them jump higher. They grew taller and taller.

  They cast huge shadows on the walls around her. White walls, livid shadows, lurching from side to side. ‘Bim and Raja,’ she called desperately, ‘stop it, stop it!’ But the shadows did not listen. The shadows lurched towards her, and the flames leapt higher to meet them. Flames and shadows of flames, they advanced on each other, they merged with each other and she was caught between them, helpless as a splinter, a scrap of paper.

  She could not manage them, she could not cope—they were too big for her, too hot and fierce and frightening. It was no good petting, consoling—they did not listen. They made such harsh, piercing sounds in her ears. She wished they would stop, it hurt so, it was torture. She pulled her white hair about her face, shielding herself. And some soft cloth to stop up her ears, her nose, shut herself up, hide from them. They prowled about, searching her out, menacing her. She moaned in fright. She needed protection. She wanted help. She reached out for the hand that would help her, protect her . . .

  . . . Here it was. Here, in this tall, slim coolness just by her hand, at the tips of her fingers. If she got her fingers around it, its slender pale glassiness, and then drew it closer, close to her mouth, she could close her lips about it and suck, suck little, little sips, with little, little juicy sounds, and it would be so sweet, so sweet again, just as when they were little babies, little babies for her to feed, herself a little baby sucking, sucking at the little trickle of juice that came hurrying in, sliding in . . .

  And she sucked and laughed and sucked and cried.

  There was much for Dr Biswas to do in their house. That summer he was summoned almost every day, if not to subdue Aunt Mira and put her somehow to sleep so that she could not get at the bottle or scream and fight for it, then for Raja whose temperature remained obstinately at the same point, giving him a flushed, unnatural colour and at times raising his spirits to dangerous heights, then plunging them into the deepest gloom, neither of them governable by Bim who rushed from one room to the other in an effort to cope, always to the sound of Baba’s records grinding out on the gramophone one cabaret tune after the other, relentlessly gay, unquenchably merry.

  ‘How can you bear it?’ Dr Biswas once asked her as she stood leaning briefly against a veranda pillar, waiting for him to come out of Aunt Mira’s room while trombones shrieked and saxophones howled in Baba’s room, making poor Begum, who lay at Bim’s feet on the top step, raise her head and gaze into Bim’s face like a sick child pleading for comfort.

  Bim shrugged, too tired to explain how her mind was occupied with far worse problems so that it barely registered the sounds that had become so essential to the calm rhythm and silent contentment of Baba’s existence.

  ‘You do care for music, don’t you?’ persisted Dr Biswas who was always very reluctant to leave although he got no encouragement and hardly any attention from her.

  ‘Do I?’ wondered Bim. ‘I don’t know—I seldom hear any—apart from that—’ she jerked her chin slightly.

  ‘But Miss Das, you should, you must,’ he pleaded seriously. ‘Music is one of the greatest joys we can have on earth. If one has that pleasure, then one can bear almost anything in life.’

  Bim at last paid him the little attention that he craved. ‘Yes?’ she asked in slow surprise. ‘Does it mean that much to you?’

  His eyes shone as he stood there, dark and awkward, his bag in one hand, smelling like a pharmacy. ‘It is almost the only pleasure I have,’ he assured her. ‘Without it, life would be too drab—it would be only drudgery. Miss Das,’ he added quickly, clutching his bag to him, ‘will you come with me to a concert on Sunday, by the Delhi Music Society in the Freemasons’ Hall? They are giving a performance of Brahms and Schubert, and they really play quite well, they are not professionals, they are amateurs, but not bad—and for two hours one hears these beautiful sounds,’ he rushed on, sweating, ‘and one forgets everything—everything.’

  Bim studied him as if he were a curiosity in a museum. But all she said was ‘Sunday? No, quite impossible, doctor. I can’t leave the house—’ she waved her hand in a sweeping gesture, taking in one, two, three bedrooms all opening out onto the veranda where they stood, and containing their one, two, three patients. Suddenly she was struck by the humour of it—it seemed so immensely funny: her standing here with the doctor, guarding these three doors with the three patients behind them, and the doctor inviting her to a concert of eighteenth-century European music in the middle of the riot-torn city—so that she began to laugh and laugh. Collapsing against the pillar she hung her head and rang like a bell with laughter, quite uncontrollably, making the doctor smile uneasily and then murmur good-bye and slide off sideways in a hurry.

  She was still grinning to herself when Bakul brought Tara home. Tara smiled at her with the same small apprehensive smile the doctor’s face had had, and then slipped up the steps and went towards her room, almost guiltily. Bakul stopped beside Bim on the steps, lighting himself a cigarette. ‘You find life amusing, Bim, do you?’ he asked.

  She placed her elbows on the balustrade, her chin on her hands, and looked down on him with her usual sardonic look. ‘Amusing isn’t exactly the word, but interesting—interesting enough.’

  He sucked at his cigarette, regarding her, his eyes openly admiring her. Suddenly he took the cigarette from his lips and exclaimed ‘Bim, why do you have grey hair already? You’re much too young for that!’

  ‘Grey hair? Where? I don’t!’ She stood up straight, feeling her hair, tugging out bits to stare at down her nose. ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Look, here,’ he said, and touched the hair at her temple with his fingers, drawing it softly down her brow to her ear. She took the strand from him, brought it before her eyes and frowned at it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said flatly, even a little proudly, perhaps. ‘It is grey. I didn’t know.’

  ‘You have too many worries,’ he said.

  Bim did not reply. She had already had that kind of conversation a few minutes ago and was bored with it. Bakul did always bore her: it was his smoothness of manner; there was no roughness that could catch the interest, snag it.

  But he would not bore her today. ‘Bim,’ he said again with unusual suddenness, ‘would it add to yo
ur worries or would it lessen them if Tara married me?’

  ‘What?’ She was startled. She had still been regarding the grey hair between her fingers. Now she let it go so that it hung by her ear like a bit of pale ribbon. ‘Oh. Oh, I see. You want to marry Tara. Yes, I thought you did. I think she wants to marry you too.’

  ‘Yes, she says she does but wanted me to speak to you first.’

  ‘Oh, did she?’ laughed Bim. ‘I’m head of the family now, am I? You think so, so I must be.’ She shrugged, looking plain again. ‘I don’t think you need to ask anyone—except Tara. Modern times. Modern India. Independent India.’

  Bakul turned aside. He never liked Bim when she spoke in this manner. He liked nothing abrupt, staccato. He held out the cigarette at a slight angle from him and looked down at the dog stretched out on the step by his foot, studying a flea that crawled past her nose and his toe. ‘I can speak to Raja, of course, if you think I should.’

  ‘No, don’t worry him,’ she said sharply.

  ‘I don’t like you having all the worries of the family.’

  ‘You are lessening them, aren’t you, by taking Tara off my hands?’

  ‘Will I? Or is she a help to you? In that case, I won’t press her now—not till later when Raja is well and Baba settled and your aunt—’

  ‘You’ll be grey-haired yourself if you wait that long,’ Bim interrupted, flatly. ‘There’s no need to wait. Do marry—quickly. But what about your parents?’

  ‘They know Tara. They love her. And since I am to go to Ceylon shortly, they will agree to an early marriage.’

  ‘An early marriage—that is exactly what I’d like for Tara,’ Bim said. ‘It will suit her. And she will suit you. Blessings, blessings,’ she called lightly, and began to laugh again as she saw Tara, half-hidden behind the bamboo screen at her door, listening, waiting.

  Bakul was happier now that she laughed. He waved his cigarette in the air gaily, looking lighthearted and absurdly debonair. ‘I’ll have to buy you a bottle of Blacko for your hair, Bim,’ he teased. ‘I won’t have you coming grey-haired to my wedding. Can’t have such an elderly sister-in-law, I can’t. You’ll have to dye your hair for the wedding, Bim,’ and they laughed together, she tugging at the grey strand in her hair and he drawing elegant designs in the air with his cigarette.

  The dog suddenly pounced upon the flea.

  With Tara married and gone, Aunt Mira more and more confined to her room and secret access to the bottle and less and less sober or controlled, Baba happily watching the records turn on Benazir’s old green gramophone, Bim and Raja were thrown together for company and comfort even more than at any time of their lives.

  Raja was calmer now that he had regular news of the Hyder Ali family and was left alone by the college terrorists who were too occupied in arson, looting and murder in the city to come out to the quiet suburbs and persuade an erstwhile comrade made useless by illness and poetic ideas of heroism and loyalty. He spent more time in reading aloud to Bim as she sat by his bed or, when he felt well enough to be propped up, in writing Urdu verse of his own. This caused him much mental anguish and he would read out every line to Bim as he wrote it, easily grow discouraged and crumple up the papers and fling them on the floor for her to clear away. She was made shy by these verses—something in her cringed at a kind of heavy sentimentality of expression that was alien to her and also, she felt, to him, except when he chose to express himself in Urdu so that she regretted its effect on him while at the same time her admiration for him was too great to allow her to even admit it to herself. Instead, she suggested in a low voice ‘Why not take up a more original subject for your new poem? You know—just for the sake of—originality,’ and that was enough to make him tug at his hair and roar with despair.

  Bim began to wish Raja would not discuss his poetry with her. Why did he not read it to Dr Biswas, she suggested suddenly, quite surprised by the idea herself. Surely Biswas’ soul was a sensitive one and would be more responsive than her own unpoetic one. ‘He plays the violin, you know,’ she informed Raja. ‘He told me.’

  ‘Ugh. I can imagine what it must sound like—the kind of thing that makes Begum raise her face to the sky and howl,’ laughed Raja, fondling the dog’s muzzle that she liked to lay on Bim’s foot or on the edge of his bed when she sat with them. ‘Can’t you just imagine?’ Raja pretended to sweep a bow across some violin strings. ‘O wine and ro-oses, O mo-on and sta-ars’ he wailed, and Bim laughed.

  ‘He plays Mozart, Raja, and Brahms, so he couldn’t be so hopeless!’

  ‘Have you ever heard him? No? Then what makes you think he could ever be a musician? He just hasn’t the guts.’

  ‘He has soul, Raja—soul.’

  ‘Soul!’ Raja exclaimed. ‘Who hasn’t soul? It’s guts you need—like Iqbal had. Now Iqbal said:

  ‘O painter divine, Thy painting is still imperfect

  Lying in ambush for mankind are the vagabond, the exploiter and the monk.

  In Thy universe the old order still continueth.”’

  Nevertheless Bim suggested to Dr Biswas that he bring his violin with him one day and play for them but this embarrassed him so much that he became quite agitated. Dropping his bag, spilling his stethoscope, he fumbled about on the floor, picked them up, mumbling ‘Oh no. Impossible. You won’t—I can’t—you don’t really—it won’t—no, no, no. I can’t play. Miss Das, instead—I will be so honoured—will you come—can you—a concert—you will hear—it will be—I would like—’

  She was so exasperated by his spinsterish nerves that she swooped down on the stethoscope that had fallen again and shoved it at him, saying angrily ‘All right, I’ll come,’ which made him snap his mouth shut in astonishment so that he looked like a fish that had snapped up a hook by accident.

  Raja lay back against his pillows and laughed and laughed. ‘That did for him’, he laughed as Dr Biswas hurried away down the drive. ‘Oh you really put the lid on him this time, Bim. That was great. Like seeing a man knocked down in the first round. You should have been a lady wrestler, Bim—you’re great. Terrific. But poor Biswas. Poor Mozart. Ach, so Mozart!’ he wailed in tremolo, clasping his hands under his chin, and Bim, shamefaced, laughed.

  ‘Mozart,’ said Dr Biswas with great earnestness, leaning forwards with his elbows on the table on either side of a glass of beer, ‘when I first heard Mozart, Miss Das, I closed my eyes, and it was as if my whole past vanished, just rolled away from me—the country of my birth, my ancestors, my family, everything—and I arrived in a new world. It was a new world, a shining new world. I felt that when I heard Mozart for the first time—not when I stepped off the boat at Hamburg, or saw strange white faces and heard the strange language, or drank my first glass of beer—no. These experiences were nothing by comparison. After that there was nothing in my life—only Mozart.’

  ‘Only Mozart, hmm?’ repeated Bim, thoughtfully smoking her first cigarette. It was a more complicated process than she had guessed and required more than a little attention. Also, Dr Biswas perplexed her. She could hardly believe her ears heard right.

  ‘That was the beginning. Then the whole world of music unfolded for me. It was lucky I went to Germany, you know, Miss Das. It is what makes the German nation great—this love, no, not just love, but a belief that music is essential, a part of one’s daily life, like bread or water. Or wine. In every small village you could hear music of the highest standard, and in Berlin—ah, it was magnificent!’ His eyes flashed behind his spectacles, quite electrically.

  ‘I wonder you still had time for medicine once you were so taken up with music,’ said Bim, rolling the taste of tobacco on her tongue, finding it familiar, like something she had tasted before. When? And what?

  ‘Oh, I never slept at all, in those years. No, no—there was medicine, there was music, there was the German language to be learnt, there was no time for sleep. I think I was delirious in those years. I used to walk down the broad avenues, and look at the cherry trees in bloom, and
smell the lime blossom, and hear music at every street cafe, in every park—and, really, I was delirious. I was floating in the air in those days—floating!’ He laughed and his hand trembled as he poured himself some more beer and drank. He had already had a great deal, Bim felt.

  Bim stirred restlessly on the faded velvet sofa. The velvet curtains hanging beside her were so dusty, she felt she would sneeze. She felt they had been sitting here in this almost empty hall of velvet and gilt and blank-faced waiters for a very long time.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said, his eyes fading. ‘I can hardly believe it myself any more. When I came back to India—to my mother and my sister and my practice here—it vanished so completely, nothing was left. It was—gone.’

  ‘But you do still play the violin, you said.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do. That is only an attempt to keep something of what I had in Germany in my student years—I had so much there, I was so rich then! Now I feel very poor, useless. I touch my violin and try to make sounds to remind me of that time. I take lessons from the first violinist of the Delhi Music Society orchestra, and I play to myself and inflict my playing on my mother who is an old-fashioned Bengali lady and likes only Tagore’s songs and suffers in silence because she loves me. I am her only son.’

  ‘She lives with you?’

  ‘Yes, we have a flat in Darya Ganj. My sister married and went to live in Calcutta so now I am an only child. It is a great responsibility, being an only child of a loving mother,’ he sighed, his face darkening visibly.