Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Bim, stubbing out her cigarette in the square white ashtray and immediately reaching for another one from the pack Dr Biswas had placed on the table. ‘I didn’t have one.’

  Dr Biswas looked at her vaguely, as if he had not heard, his thoughts were on another continent and moved to a different tune. Just then the band returned from the retiring room, tiredly mounted the small stage at the far end of the hall, picked up their instruments and then, turning on professional smiles as if at the lift of a puppeteer’s strings, began to play a medley of Strauss waltzes. The waltzes spun and staggered from table to table like exhausted bees. Dr Biswas’s head drooped.

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘that is what we have here—the band in Davico’s playing “medleys” as we drink tea.’

  ‘I have finished,’ said Bim, having quite lost interest in Dr Biswas’s story which was not quite as interesting as it might have been, and also in the unaccustomed setting of Davico’s restaurant which had entertained her for a while in the beginning—the arched doorways with the red velvet curtains, the thick pile carpet smeared with icecream and smelling of cigarette ash, the plates of meringues and cups of vanilla icecream balanced by graceful waiters, the long windows that looked out onto the leafy trees in the centre of Connaught Place, the red buses that trundled loudly by in the dust, the violet dusk falling out of the murky sky onto the home-going crowds from shops and offices all around, and the sweet treacle of music that the band spread over it all, slowing everything down till it seemed stuck. ‘Now we must go,’ she urged, ‘I’ve never left Raja alone for so long, or Mira-masi.’ They had been to the concert at Freemasons’ Hall before coming to Davico’s.

  He stood up at once, apologetically saying ‘But that is why I brought you out—oh yes, for the pleasure of taking you to hear this little orchestra, but also to give you a change. You can’t always be at home, nursing your family—you will fall ill yourself.’

  Bim laughed with more scorn than humour. She had no patience with weakness, she thought, none. ‘I could have been a nurse—or a matron—in a plague hospital. I can handle it all.’

  ‘Have you really thought of nursing?’ Dr Biswas asked, hurrying after her down the mirror-lined passage and the marble stairs to the dusty, crowded street below.

  ‘It is all I do,’ she snapped at him.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he stammered, flushing. ‘I meant—but we must go round this corner to the No. 9 bus stop. I must get you home before the curfew. I meant—have you considered it as a profession? You do it so—so excellently.’

  ‘No,’ she assured him. ‘What I think I shall do—I mean when Raja is well again and I have the time—I think I’ll go back to college and finish my history course that I dropped when my aunt too fell ill, and when I get my degree—I might teach,’ she ended up in a rush, the idea having just come to her as in a natural sequence of affairs.

  He was all admiration. In the bus going home, while Bim gazed out of the window at the violet globes of the street lamps casting their harsh light on the passers-by below, at the shops being lighted up and filled with after-office crowds, at the pavement stalls with their paper and plastic and tin goods, and the beggars and their individual and flamboyant ways of attracting attention and small change, he talked again of his student days, of his professors who had invited him home for fruit wine and biscuits, and his landlady who had brought up seven children on her own, her husband being a cripple, and how inspiring it had all been and how much he owed them all, how they had made him what he was.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bim turning to him briefly, ‘You are lucky, Dr Biswas.’

  ‘Lucky?’ He stopped short in his patter of reminiscence. ‘How am I lucky, do you think?’

  ‘You have known such glories—such joys.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and folded his arms across his chest and looked gloomy. ‘Yes.’

  He did not speak again, only shook his head stubbornly when she asked him not to bother to see her home. The bus lumbered on past the city walls and the massed jungle of rag-and-tin huts that had grown beneath them, housing the millions of refugees who were struggling in across the new border. Here there was no light except for the dull glow of small cooking fires, blotted out by smoke and dust and twilight. They swarmed and crawled with a kind of crippled, subterranean life that made Bim feel that the city would never recover from this horror, that it would be changed irremediably, that it was already changed, no longer the city she had been born in. She set her jaw and stared into its shadowy thickness, wretched with its wretchedness.

  Dr Biswas’ lips, too, were pinched together, although his silence had a different reason, she felt. Silently, he accompanied her all the way to her bus stop and then walked down Bela Road to her gate. There he stood, with the insects frizzling in the green light cast by the street lamp onto the gate and the bougainvillea, while Begum barked hysterically from the veranda. ‘Miss Das,’ he said, clasping the catch of the gate, ‘Miss Das, I want to tell you—thank you for having given me such—such pleasure. It was the most beautiful evening I have had since coming back to India. I wish that you—’

  ‘Now,’ laughed Bim, uncomfortably, ‘you are prompting me to say the things I should be saying to you. I am the one to say thank you, surely.’

  ‘No,’ he cried in anguish, gripping the catch so that Begum, thwarted, howled more piteously. ‘You don’t know—you can’t possibly know what it has meant to me. Only, please do come with me again—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ cried Bim in a panic, and pushed at the gate so that he had to let go of the catch to save his fingers. Hurrying through, she shut the gate between them. ‘It’s really not right for me to have been out for so long—with Raja ill—and my aunt—you know my aunt—’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you can’t be a slave to them. I can’t be a slave to my mother. We must be ourselves. We must go out, have a little rest, some refreshment. Miss Das,’ he gulped, ‘come and meet my mother, please.’

  This was worse than anything she had feared. Growing darkly red, she said hastily ‘Yes, but I must run—I must see if Raja—and my aunt—you know my aunt—and Begum is barking. Begum, stop!’

  Dashing up the drive to the veranda, she quietened Begum with a quick pat on the head and then flew up the steps to where Raja was sitting in the dark, watching. She sank down on a basket chair beside him, put her face into her hands and grimaced as hideously as she knew how while Raja laughed.

  ‘Did he play you the vi-oh-lin, Bim?’ Raja demanded. ‘Diddly-dum, diddly-dum? No? Then did he sing you a Tagore song?’ When she raised her face and shook her head, smiling, he placed one hand on his heart and quavered ‘O mango flower, fall into my lap! O lamp, flicker in the dark!’ which made her laugh and protest ‘Oh Raja, you don’t know a word of Bengali. You’ve never read Tagore.’

  ‘I don’t have to know Bengali—all you do is pronounce ‘s’ as ‘sh’ and roll the vowels like round, sweet rossogollas in your mouth,’ he said airily. ‘O mango flower . . . Has he asked you to meet his mother? Has his mother sent you her home-made rossogollas, Bim?’

  But now Bim stopped laughing. Crossly, she got up to go to her room. As she went, followed by Begum, she heard Raja sigh dramatically ‘Ach, so Mozart!’

  It was a long time before Dr Biswas could persuade her to come out again. It was true that Raja improved steadily now that the cold weather had come, with dew on the lawn early in the mornings and beds of coloured flowers blooming in the sunshine, and he could sit out in the garden, wrapped in Bim’s pashmina shawl, eating oranges and nuts and alternating between reading letters from the Hyder Ali family and composing Urdu verses for them. He looked unusually bulky and compact, and when he removed the shawl or his thick pullover, both brother and sister were startled to find that the bulk adhered to him, not to the woollen garments. They stared at each other in disbelief. It was all the rest, and the milk and the butter, they saw, and shook their heads in amazement.

  Still, Bim
had her hands full with Aunt Mira. She had made good her promise to herself and gone back to college to complete the course in history, and she had also picked up a hint dropped by Dr Biswas and gone to help in a clinic for women in the Kingsway Camp for refugees. It was close to the University and she could go there after the lectures and help hand out vitamin drops to pregnant women and mix powdered milk for the babies, but it took up all afternoon and she came home after dusk and regretted it for when she was out of the house there was no one to keep an eye on Aunt Mira who grew rapidly more difficult.

  To begin with, Raja and Bim had told each other Aunt Mira was going through the bottles left in the sideboard by their father. But as time went on and Aunt Mira spent fewer hours in sobriety and slipped off to her room more frequently—guiltily and desperately—coming out only rarely and then stumbling and brushing her hands constantly over her face as if she felt a cobweb growing across it, her tongue slipping thickly from one bit of nonsense to another as if from one cup of drink to another, they had to admit those few bottles could not still be providing her. She was getting her supply of liquor from somewhere. Bim had taken over the household accounts from her a long time ago and old Janaki did not appear to be charging more than usual. It could not be her connivance that kept Aunt Mira floating and splashing in drink. Who was it then?

  ‘I suspect that old Bhakta I brought across from the Hyder Alis, Raja,’ Bim said, striking her head in dismay as they heard Aunt Mira drop a glass in her room and shriek as it shattered. ‘He gives me such an insolent look when I glare at him for sitting idle outside the kitchen all day, just waiting for Janaki to bring him his meals—as if he had a secret that made him superior to me. I’m sure it’s him.’

  ‘How can you say that when you have no proof?’ Raja answered. He could bear no criticism of anything or anyone who had to do with the Hyder Ali family.

  ‘No proof—just instinct,’ said Bim, and rushing off to clean the mess in Aunt Mira’s room, found that she had cut her hands and was crying and bleeding all over the bed, more over the spilt drink and the splintered glass than over the strips of blood that hung from her spidery grey fingers in scarlet webs and which she barely noticed in her lament. It was Bim who cried over them.

  Dr Biswas came and handled Aunt Mira with such gentleness and compassion that, watching him from the foot of the bed, Bim softened to see him wrap bandages around Aunt Mira’s childish wrists and hear him give her such kindly, good-humoured advice that Aunt Mira lay back on her pillows and weakly glowed with pleasure and gratitude like a very small dim bulb with a fine, weak filament. Bim realised with a pang that she had not seen such a happy look on the old lady’s face since before the troubles of last summer began. Holding onto her aunt’s small-boned and cold feet, she saw now what her aunt had suffered through their parents’ deaths, through Raja’s illness Tara’s going away and the perpetual sorrow over Baoa. It was all scored over her face, about her quivering mouth and watery eyes, and Bim had not cared to see it. Now she was lying back calmly on her pillows smiling at the young doctor smiling guilelessly and ourely as a baby relieved from discomfort Clasping those knuckled ankles, Bim wished she could remain such a baby in a cot innocent and malleable.

  Seeing out Dr Biswas, she said, quite humbly, yes, she would come to tea with his mother next week.

  She was soaked, clammy wet cloths bound her. They had bound her. She had thought they were bandaging her wounds, stemming the blood, but actually they had bound her so that she could not get free, could not get her hands free and reach out. Swaddled and bound, she was suffocating in this mass of cloth. If she could only tear it off, or tear herself out—then she could reach out and touch, trembling, and grab. But they would not let her. They would come and stand over her and press her down into this soft, cottony mass, deep down. Sleep baby, sleep, they sang to her. She had sung to them in their cots, rocking them gently. But they were not gentle to her—sleep baby sleep, they roared at her, and kicked the side of her cot. They had grown so loud, so big. They were bigger than her, they loomed over her and threatened her if they saw her wriggle one finger out of the cotton bandaging towards the tall shining bottle in the dark. She had held out the bottle to them, held it to their lips and chuckled to see them drink. But they threatened her and pushed her back into the grey suffocating cell and denied her.

  A drudge in her cell, sealed into her chamber. A grey chamber, woven shut. Here she lived, here she crawled, dragging her heavy wings behind her. Crawled from cell to cell, feeding the fat white larvae that lived in the cells and swelled on the nourishment she brought them. The cells swarmed with them, with their little tight white glistening lives. And she slaved and toiled, her long wings dragging. The air was filled with the angry buzzing of the queen bee. It bored through her ears and zoomed through the greyness like a lurid meteor, making her shut her eyes and burrow down into her cell, into her cotton swaddling, hiding. When it receded, she peeped out with flickering eyes. Where was the bottle? Where was its laughing, sparkling gleam in the dark, winking at her, beckoning to her? They had hidden it.

  If she could only reach out and fetch it, then draw it close to her mouth—she whimpered with want. Just a sip, she whimpered, it was time for a drop. Time for milk. The children must have their milk—and leave a little for me, please, just a drop.

  But there was no milk, the cow had died, drowned in the well. In that well, deep and stony and still, in which all must drown to die. The navel of the world it was, secret and hidden in thick folds of grass, from which they all emerged and to which they must return, crawling on their hands and knees.

  She crawled towards it, dragging the cotton wings. When she reached the edge, she would peer in, then lower her head and go tumbling down, and at some point, at some time, strike the shining surface and break through to the dark and secret drink. She opened her mouth to drink. She whimpered for that drink.

  The tea party was of course a mistake and Bim scowled and cursed herself for having softened and let herself in for what was a humiliation and a disaster for everyone concerned.

  Had Mrs Biswas dressed for it? Bim had never seen anyone so dressed. So bathed, so powdered. She seemed to be dusted all over with flour. Perhaps she had fallen into a flour bin, like a large bun. But she smelt so powerfully of synthetic flowers, it must be powder after all. And her white sari crackled with starch, like a biscuit. And her hair gleamed with coconut oil, and flecks of gold glinted at the lobes of her ears and in the ringed folds of her neck. Altogether a piece of confectionery, thought Bim.

  She was given a platter with all the goodies already heaped on it—neatly counted out, so many biscuits, so many pieces of mithai, so many fritters and a spoonful of chutney. Similar plates with exactly the same number of goodies were handed to Dr Biswas, one kept by her. They ate.

  A china cabinet against the wall watched them. It stood on four legs and housed little plaster figures from Germany—a miniature beer mug, Hansel and Gretel skipping in a meadow, a squirrel dressed in a daisy chain. There were Indian dolls, less travelled but more worn, tinsel garlands flaking off onto red organdie saris and gold turbans. There were clay toys in cane baskets—yellow bananas, green chillies. A parrot. A cow. A plastic baby. And they all stared at Bim munching her way through the goodies. Dr Biswas stared at his brown shoes, so highly polished. He ate nothing.

  His mother sighed. ‘Eat a little, Shona,’ she coaxed in a discontented mutter like a pigeon’s. He did not and she took the plate away from him with a sigh, limped to the table to put it down. Earlier she had not limped: it was his not eating that brought on her limp. Now she cast a suspicious look at Bim who still ate, who ate on and on, blaming her.

  Why blame me? thought Bim, her mouth full of syrup.

  But then the old lady sat down, sighing, to complain. It was not her son and his poor appetite she complained of: she began with her husband who was dead, and went on to her arthritis which was painful and for which there was no cure—he said there was no cure—and
ended up with the servant boy who had run away that very morning on being told there was a visitor coming to tea. Lazy, that was the trouble. Too lazy. And you? she questioned, her small eyes like raisins in the large soft bun of her face. How many servants? What do they do? What do you pay them?

  ‘Ma,’ Dr Biswas gasped, pressing down with all his weight on his toes so that the new shoes shrieked.

  The little raisin eyes gave him a quick sharp look. Then the puffy white hand waved him away. ‘He—he is the only one who knows what work is,’ she went on. Work, work, nothing but work. Did any man ever work so hard? He was killing himself.

  Sitting back on the sofa with the pink-flowered cushion behind her, she talked and talked—quite often in Bengali which gave Bim time to glance at Dr Biswas with some curiosity, wondering how she could have overlooked so many virtues, such glorious and unique qualities. His mother made it seem he was Apollo in disguise. His degrees in medicine—his dedication to his profession—the love his patients felt for him. And his music, too. Here the mother clasped her hands together, wrung them almost as if in despair. ‘Play your violin,’ she even said, ‘for Miss Das. I don’t understand all this Western music he plays, but perhaps you can. You are a college girl? What degree?’

  Bim’s mouth was full of crumbs. They were even more difficult to get through than the syrup. While she coughed and choked, the mother went on, about the violin, the music. What was it all about—could the college girl explain? ‘I don’t understand. He wants someone who understands—’

  ‘Ma,’ Dr Biswas broke in hastily, perspiring even. ‘Perhaps Miss Das would like to hear you sing. Mother sings Tagore’s songs, Miss Das—she has a trained voice. Would you like to hear?’

  Now Bim began to feel annoyed. Let them play and sing to each other as much as they liked, she felt, why must I listen to them too? I listen to enough as it is, from everyone. Putting down her plate with several of the goodies still untouched—unfortunately they were the very ones Mrs Biswas had spent all morning cooking, but how was Bim to know that?—she listened to mother and son arguing more and more heatedly, the old lady on the brink of tears, determined to sacrifice herself for his sake, he somewhat maliciously as if to punish her for this embarrassing scene. Then Bim decided it was enough, and rose to her feet, saying brusquely ‘I must get home before dark.’