Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  Trying to distract her, quieten her, Bim brought her a glassful of drink and helped her to sip it. While drinking, her head slipped to one side, the glass spilt across her chin, dribbled down her neck into her nightie, and she died, not hideously by drowning, but quietly in her bed, pleasantly overcome by fumes of alcohol. Yet it was as if she had drowned for Bim dreamt night after night of her bloated white body floating naked on the surface of the well. Even when drinking her morning tea, she had only to look into the tea-cup to see her aunt’s drowned face in it, her fine-spun silver hair spread out like Ophelia’s, floating in the tea. She would turn very pale and leave the tea cold in the white cup. Aunt Mira had not drowned, she told herself over and over again—not drowned, just died.

  Bim and Janaki and the gardener’s wife washed her clean and Bim fetched her only silk sari out of her trunk, the white silk that had a broad border of crimson and gold and that Aunt Mira had never worn while she lived, and they dressed her in it like a doll at a wedding, an idol on an altar. Janaki even lit some sticks of incense because of the smell in the room that shamed the family. Then the neighbours came and lifted the string cot on which she lay and carried it out of the house: it was as light as a leaf or a piece of paper.

  Raja rose from his bed and accompanied Bim to the cremation ground. He lit the pyre with a torch and they stood watching, with perspiration streaming in sheets from their faces, the heat tremble and vibrate in the brilliant light of the summer afternoon like wings, or theosophical phantoms, till it was reduced to a mound of white ash on the silver sand beside the river. The earthen pot containing the ash was handed to Bim still warm, and she walked with Raja to the river’s edge to lower it into the water and watch it bob for a while, a wreath of red roses around it, till the grey current caught it and swirled it away and it sank. A washerman, knee-deep in water, straightened up and watched, too. A donkey brayed. A lapwing cried. The river ran. They went home.

  Yet for a long time Bim continued to see her, was certain that she saw her: the shrunken little body naked, trailing a torn shred of a nightie, a wisp of pubic hair, as she slipped surreptitiously along the hedge, head bent low as if she hoped no one would notice her as she hurried towards the well. Bim would catch her breath and shut her eyes before opening them again to stare wildly at the hedge and find only the tassels of the malaviscus dangling there, like leering red tongues, and nothing else. She thought of what she had read in Raja’s copy of The Waste Land:

  ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?

  When I count there are only you and I together

  But when I look ahead up the white road

  There is always another one walking beside you

  Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

  I do not know whether a man or a woman

  —But who is that on the other side of you?’

  At the end, she found a note to say that these lines were suggested by an account of an Antarctic expedition: ‘The explorers at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.’

  Bim caught her lip in her teeth in understanding when she read that, although she could not see the connection between explorers of the Antarctic and her little drunken aunt, but she was sure now that she was that extra person, that small shadow thrown by a subliminal ghost that existed in the corner of the eye. She wondered if she were losing her mind but then she ceased to see this vision, it receded gradually and then went altogether. Perhaps, as the Tibetans believed, the soul had lingered on earth for a while till it was finally fetched away on its long journey. The ship of death, O ship of death, Bim chanted to keep herself calm, calm.

  She kept calm while Raja packed his bags, put away all his things, telling her that now he would go to Hyderabad. Looking up at her as she watched silently, he shouted ‘I have to go. Now I can go. I have to begin my life some time, don’t I? You don’t want me to spend all my life down in this hole, do you? You don’t think I can go on living just to keep my brother and sister company, do you?’

  ‘I never said a word,’ said Bim coldly.

  ‘You don’t have to. It’s written all over your face. Just go, go, take your face away. Don’t sit there staring. Don’t stop me.’

  ‘I won’t stop you.’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Go,’ said Bim.

  When the tonga arrived to take his things to the station and Bhakta was loading his bags onto it, each bag making the tonga dip down so that the horse had to spread its legs to steady itself, he spoke to Bim again. ‘Bim, I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving all my books and papers with you. Look after them till I come back.’

  ‘Why should you come back?’ Bim asked stonily.

  ‘Bim, don’t be so hard. You know I must come back—to look after you and Baba. I can’t leave you alone.’

  She started to say something but then only shrugged slightly and bent to hold Begum back as Raja swung himself onto the tonga, when Bhakta suddenly jumped onto the tonga step, clung to it, pleaded with Raja to take him, too, to Hyderabad, back to Hyder Ali Sahib, and then crouched down at Raja’s feet, and went with him. Begum whined and quivered as the tonga driver raised his whip over his head and got the ribbed yellow nag started with a lurch. Bim stood petting her, quieting her, and when the tonga had lumbered out of the gate, she became aware of Baba coming out of his room as the gramophone ceased to rattle out the jolly rattle of Nelson Eddy singing ‘The Donkey Serenade’, and quietly settling down to play with his pebbles on the veranda tiles.

  Bim sank down onto the steps beside him, sat there in a slumped way, both tired and relieved, her arms hanging limply over her knees and her head drooping. She watched Baba’s pebbles scatter and fall, then his long fingers reach out to gather them together again, and began to talk, more to herself than to him.

  ‘So now there are just you and I left, Baba,’ she muttered. ‘Does the house seem empty to you? Everyone’s gone, except you and I. They won’t come back. We’ll be alone now. But we don’t have to worry about anyone now—Tara or Raja or Mira-masi. We needn’t worry now that they’re all gone. We’re just by ourselves and there’s nothing to worry about. You’re not afraid, are you? There’s no need to be afraid. It’s as if we were children again—sitting on the veranda, waiting for father and mother, when it’s growing dark and it’s bedtime. Really, it’ll be just the way it was when we were children.’ She yawned hugely, her eyes starting out of her head and her cheek bones straining at her stretched skin. ‘It wasn’t so bad then,’ she mumbled, shaking her head sleepily, ‘was it? No. When we were children—’

  But she didn’t say any more. She laid her head on her lap and seemed nearly asleep.

  III

  Every morning, when the dew still lay fresh on the grass, the mother followed the doctor’s orders and strolled up and down the rose walk at the far end of the garden. To Tara it was a long grassy tunnel between two beds of roses. Her father was supposed to have planted them. The gardener was ordered to take care of them. But neither the father nor the gardener knew roses: they put in cuttings and watched them come up, either small, weakly crimson ones or shaggy sick-pink ones, nothing else. Tara sighed, thinking of the sight that met her eyes whenever she peered through the wrought iron gate at their neighbour Hyder Ali Sahib’s house, at the round, square, rectangular, triangular and star-shaped beds filled with roses like scoops of vanilla ice cream, pink ones like the flounced skirts of English dolls, silky yellow ones that had the same smell as the tea her mother drank, and crimson ones that others called ‘black’ and which she always studied with narrowed eyes, wondering why she could not see the blackness but only the rich velvety crimson of their waxen petals. Why could they not have such roses too? Still, this early in the morning, even these negligible pink and crimson buttons gave off a cool, fresh scent. They should have pleased the mother and Tara cried continually ‘Look, Mama, look,’ but she seemed to notice nothing, to be absorbed
in other worlds, as invisible to Tara as the black of the red roses.

  Usually the mother did not take exercise. She either sat up at the card table, playing, or lay very still on her bed, with a suffering face tilted upwards in warning so that Tara did not dare approach. Even now she kept her distance. She paced slowly, obediently, her arms folded, her chin sunk into her neck, as if considering a hand of cards, while Tara, in her nightie, skipped and danced after her, her bare feet making tracks through the misty dew on the grass.

  Suddenly she stopped with a shout: she had spied something under the rose bushes—a gleam of pearly white. Perhaps a jewel, a ring: Tara was always expecting to find treasure, to make her fortune, discover herself a princess. She stooped to part the leaves that hid it and saw the pale, whorled orb of a stopped snail. For a while she stayed on her knees, crushed with disappointment, then lifted it onto a leaf and immediately delight gushed up as in a newly mined well at seeing the small creature unfold, tentatively protrude its antennae and begin to slide forward on a stream of slime. ‘Look, Mama, look what I’ve found,’ she cried, darting forwards, and of course it tumbled off the leaf and when the mother turned to look, there was Tara staring at the slimy leaf, then searching for the lost creature in the mud. Wrinkling her nose, the mother walked on, brooding. She had not chosen to walk here: the doctor had told her to; it was good for her, he had said. If one became pregnant so late in life—and yes, there were strands of grey thickening and spreading in her hair above her ears—and that, too, when one was so severely diabetic, one would have to be careful. She would have to take walks. Sullenly, she walked, frowning to hear the chattering of the mynah birds in the mulberry trees, wincing at Tara’s sudden scream of delight and discovery followed by wails of distress and disappointment. Tara was still the baby of the family. She did not know her days were numbered, that she was soon to lose all her privileges and be removed to a distance, disregarded, as another made its appearance into their lives. That was life—a snail found, a pearl lost. Always, life was that.

  The new baby was the prettiest of all, everyone declared, when they came to see him lying in his crib, so delicately pink, so divinely quiet. Even Tara, ordered to keep away, edged closer to where he lay sleeping and hung over the edge of the cot, wide-eyed and breathing heavily at the miracle of this tiny live thing, whole and complete and alive and yet able to fit, like a child’s toy, into the crook of an arm, or onto a knee, folded into his shawl, so quietly content as if he did not wish to emerge any more than the snail from its shell.

  No one could help noticing how slow he was to learn such baby skills as turning over, sitting up, smiling in response, talking, standing or walking. It all seemed to take an age with him. He seemed to have no desire to reach out and take anything. It was as 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 last, late one. He would lie on his back, gazing at the light that rippled the ceiling, or propped up on someone’s lap, and stare at the ants that crawled industriously by, not even reaching out a finger to them. His mother soon tired of carrying him about, feeding him milky foods with a silver spoon, washing and powdering him. She became restless, spoke of her bridge four; ‘My bridge is suffering,’ she complained. There was the ayah of course, Tara’s ayah made nurse again, but she could only be made to work twelve hours a day, or sixteen, or eighteen, not more. She could not stay awake for twenty-four. For some time the mother tried to train her to but it was impossible—she was a stupid woman and would not learn. She would fall asleep with the child in her arms and the mother never knew how often he rolled off her lap onto the floor because he protested so gently, his cries did not disturb her as she sat playing cards with her friends in the drawing room. But the ayah spoke to her, told her it was time the child sat up, and stood, and talked. She said she could not bear the burden single-handed any more: he had grown too large and too heavy.

  Then Aunt Mira was sent for. Aunt Mira was not exactly an aunt, she was a cousin of the mother’s, a poor relation who had been widowed at the age of fifteen and had lived with her husband’s family ever since as maid of all work, growing shabbier and skinnier and seedier with the years. By then there were more daughters-in-law in the house, younger, stronger and abler, and she was no longer indispensable. So when the mother wrote, asking her to come and stay with them, she was allowed to leave their house and come. Good riddance, they had even said. Aunt Mira had been frequently ill, had aged young, was growing dotty and bald. Useless, but another household might find some use for her, as the worn article, thrown away by one, is picked up and employed by another.

  ‘She’ is coming to look after you children,’ their mother told them. ‘You have become too much for me—you are all so noisy and naughty. She will discipline you. And look after your brother. I don’t know what is wrong with him—he should be walking by now and doing things for himself. She will keep him in her room and look after him. And you will have to learn to be quiet.’

  Led to expect some fierce disciplinarian, a kind of female general equipped with tools of punishment, they stood hiding behind the veranda pillars and peeping to see her when she arrived, and were both relieved and disappointed by her appearance. She was a poor relation, they could see that by the way she was greeted by their mother and the way in which she returned the greeting—tremulously, gratefully. Her luggage was all in bits and pieces, bedding rolls and tin trunks, like the servants’, no better. Yet, when she was shown into her room—‘Show Mira-masi her room, children’—and opened the green-painted tin trunk, they found it was crammed with presents for them. As they stood around in a ring, sucking their fingers or scratching their necks, she drew out the things she had been making for them ever since she had received their mother’s summons—there were paper hats trimmed with parrot feathers, little slippers of felt and velvet for Tara’s dolls, a scrapbook of wedding and birthday cards for Bim, lions and giraffes made out of sticks and straw for Raja. She took more and more stuff out of that battered trunk and they came closer, kneeling beside her, sitting cross-legged by her trunk, quickly growing accustomed to the scarecrow-like appearance that had caused them both disgust and reassurance at first appearance, growing accustomed to the unfortunately protruding teeth and collar-bones, the thin wispy hair drawn over the white scalp into an untidy blob, the myopic eyes that seemed to blink and twitch perpetually with nervousness, and were quite enthralled—no one had ever made them things before, no one had ever had the time. ‘I’m just going to the club, I’m waiting for the car,’ the mother had said irritably when approached, and the ayah would lift her arms out of the wash-tub, dripping, to threaten them as she shouted ‘If you bother me, I’ll thrash you,’ while no one had even considered approaching anyone so unapproachable as the father.

  Now they had an aunt, handed to them like a discarded household appliance they might find of use. They exchanged deep, understanding looks with each other: they had understood their power over her, they had seen she was buying, or begging for their tolerance and patronage. They were not beyond, even at that age, feeling the superiority of their position and of extending their gratitude from that elevated position of power. Perhaps Aunt Mira felt all this, too. But it did not seem to matter to her. She said ‘I saw green mangoes on those trees outside. Can you make mango sherbet?’ They shook their heads, dumbly, wondering if she had been ordered to teach them cooking. But she only said, gleefully sucking in her breath, ‘I’ll make it for you if you fetch me a basket of mangoes from your garden’ and with a yell they streamed out as in wild celebration at this new season in their lives, a season of presents and green mangoes and companionship. She went to the kitchen with all of them dancing behind her, to watch while she cut and sliced and chopped and stirred, and let them taste in little sips from a spoon. The cook watched stonily for a while, then grudgingly gave up the cooking spoon and even began to help.

  When they left the kitchen, T
ara clasped her aunt’s knees, not caring if the shabby sari smelt somewhat of onions and cooking fat, and asked ‘Have you come to look after us? Or are you to look after Baba only?’

  ‘I am to look after Baba,’ Aunt Mira agreed, ‘but I would like to play with you.’ It was not said ingratiatingly. It seemed to Tara that her aunt’s darting eyes and trembling fingers were searching for friends and she was happy to have them. Hope and trust instantly springing up like grass inside her, Tara squeezed the creaking knees and said ‘I’ll play with you.’

  Aunt Mira even played with Baba, teaching him games no one else had tried to play with him, thinking him too hopelessly backward. To begin with, she stopped feeding him those milky sops from the tip of a silver spoon. Instead, she cut up small pieces of bread and let him pick them up and put them in his mouth himself. His sisters and his brother, who had not seen him perform this skill before, stood by, entranced, applauding him. Then she showed him how to slip a button into a buttonhole. They got a great deal of amusement out of that, too. Eventually he could do up his buttons himself and then would stand basking in their congratulations like a duck in a shower of rain. Visitors could hardly believe their eyes when they saw him sitting on the veranda and playing a game of marbles with Aunt Mira—how his fingers got round the rolling globes of glass, how he manipulated them and rolled them back to her: it was a miracle. Baba would lift his head timidly—pale, shining—then drop it in shy triumph. On winter evenings Aunt Mira would place him on her bed tucked up in her plum-coloured quilt and play a game of bagatelle with him on Raja’s old board with its row of heavy lead balls and small baton with which to strike them and send them rambling down a long chute to wander about the board, amidst the nailed enclosures and the lead pits, till they rolled into one or the other or as mostly happened in Aunt Mira’s case, returned to the bottom of the board without running up any marks at all. Then they were gathered up and rolled back into the chute for the next player. Bim and Tara would keep the score and hug their knees with delight when Baba won.