Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  Two episodes cut through the grey chalk dust of school life with stripes of shocking colour.

  In the first case, it was the colour of blood itself, perhaps not seen but sensed in all its scandalous outrage. It happened when Tara was still in the primary section. Their class was at the end of the building, and just outside, across a dusty strip of playing field, stood a row of tin-roofed, tin-walled latrines. There was something sinister about them that kept Tara away from them even when desperate to go. She would come home quite frantic with the need to urinate or even with her knickers stained damp and yellow rather than go into them in schooltime.

  One day, glancing up from her slate, she saw some unusual activity outside the tin doors: the principal was there, gesticulating excitedly in a way novel to that calm lady, along with a man in a strange costume of khaki shorts, khaki shirt, a large khaki topee balanced on his prominent ears, and a rifle over his shoulder, just like a figure in a cartoon from Kipling’s days. Tara gave a gasp of alarm that made the other children look too and they all began to scream—Tara had for once not been alone in finding a sight sinister. The teacher was torn between her duty to silence them and her curiosity to see what was going on.

  What had happened was that a mad dog had found its way into the school compound and crawled into one of the tin latrines. No one knew who had alerted the municipal dog shooter—nevertheless he was there, with his gun, obviously for the purpose of shooting the dog.

  Hearing the alarm spread through the primary school, the principal left him to his abominable duty and came hurrying to herd them indoors, shut the doors and windows and command them not to see. They did not see but could hardly help hearing the shot followed by the squealing of the dog that seemed to spurt and squelch out of its body like blood till it was silenced by a second shot. Some of the children, made wild by the sounds, ran to see the dog dragged by its legs across the playing field by the comic hunter in khaki, and squeaked ‘Ooh, look, blood—bl-ood all over’. Tara did not see, kept her fingers pressed into her eyes till blue and red stars burst out of them, but she was aware that blood had been spilt and washed over her feet, warm and thick and living.

  Unlike Bim and Raja, she never pestered her parents for a dog. She knew what her father meant when he spoke darkly of the danger of rabies.

  The other episode of colour was the more glamorous one of an adolescent crush of a pupil on her teacher. In this case, an unusually young and somehow appealing woman with strange grey cat’s eyes set in her narrow face, who was soon seen to be a neurotic by everyone, even Tara, but who nevertheless exercised a fascination over the young girls who longed for an element of colour in a life so singularly monochrome. By being different, by being quite obviously unsuitable, the new teacher made people talk. Very soon after she arrived, while Tara was still making tentative introductory gestures of bringing her a bunch of sweetpeas and offering to carry her load of books, there was a murmur, a susurration of scandal. The teacher had been called out of the classroom. She had been summoned by the principal. The principal had accused her of a misdemeanour. No one knew exactly what, but the girls gossiped. A foreigner, a blonde young man with an ascetic face and the saffron robes of a monk, had been seen loitering at the school gates. Miss Singh had been seen rushing out after school. She would come to class in the mornings, her pale eyes glittering, too bright, and laughingly confess she had not had the time to correct their books or prepare the new lesson: should they read some poetry instead? Tara was charmed. The girls said she had a ‘boyfriend.’ What had the principal caught her at? Had she tried to elope? With the blonde Buddhist monk? The gossip grew wilder. Miss Singh came out of the principal’s office in tears. In class, she broke down completely in front of the appalled girls who did not know whether to rush up with their sympathy and handkerchiefs or drop their heads and pretend decorously not to notice. Miss Singh took a few days off. The principal took her classes. She found the girls in an unruly mood, defiant and excited and strangely rebellious. Five hundred lines were given them to write.

  Miss Singh had not been sent away. They found out by standing in the flower bed under her window, trampling the flowers as they lifted each other up to peep in. They saw her lying fully-dressed on her bed, a wet cloth covering her eyes. Her thin wrist dangling helplessly out of the bed aroused their pity. They had read Lorna Doone, they had read Camille. They tiptoed away, awe-struck. They shot accusing looks at the principal whenever she strode past their classroom, swinging the spectacles that hung on a black ribbon round her neck.

  Tara collected a bunch of velvet brown and purple pansies in the garden to take to school next day. But next day Miss Singh was gone. She had left, with her bags, without a word, without a goodbye to a single girl, not even to Tara who stood at the open door of her room, holding the bunch of pansies with their wide-eyed step-child faces. Tara was hurt, offended. She had thought up a plan to help Miss Singh: she was going to offer to carry messages for her, deliver notes to the blonde Buddhist monk or whoever it was who had caused Miss Singh this trouble. Now she could not. One of the big girls swooped down on her, snatched the pansies out of her hand and went laughing away. At home, Bim teased her for moping over Miss Singh so that she burst into tears and ran to Aunt Mira to complain. Bim was scolded for her tactlessness but only stuck out her tongue, unrepentant.

  A great cloud of accusation settled over the principal’s head: the girls refused to excuse her role in this painful affair. Often the resentment verged on near-rebellion. Some of the more lawless played practical tricks on the old lady. There was even a plan to secretly open the bird-cages that lined the length and breadth of her small private veranda and set all her pet budgerigars free. But Bim appeared on the scene of the conspiracy like a wrathful thunderbolt, her eyes angrily flashing, and stopped them (Tara was one of the guilty band). ‘Do you know,’ she hissed at them, ‘do you know that Miss Stephen is dying - dying of cancer?’ The guilty ones shrank back into the hedge, horrified, disbelieving. ‘What do you mean, Bim?’ the boldest stuttered. ‘You’re making up stories. How could you know?’ ‘I know,’ Bim hissed, ‘I know because she goes to see Dr Cherian at the hospital and Dr Cherian told my aunt when they met at a tea party. Miss Stephen is ill. She has cancer. And she will die. And it’s very, very painful. But she’s brave enough to carry on working and running the school,’ she said through her teeth, glaring at each one so ferociously that they turned and fled.

  Miss Stephen faced a strangely subdued assembly the next day. There were no stink bombs, no water balloons, no rude sounds. Instead, the girls bent their heads dutifully over their hymn books and sang Nearer My God To Thee most soulfully. Some had tears in their eyes. Some blew their noses.

  Tara was not one of them. She stood silently, stonily, mourning not the slow death that was settling about Miss Stephen but the abrupt death of romance brought about so effectively by her sister Bim. Back in the classroom, stooped over her needlework, she continued to brood over the figure of Miss Singh lying on the bed, the thin wrist dangling, the blonde Buddhist lingering near the gate—the figures of her first real-life romance—and continued to nurse a grudge against Miss Stephen and Bim till, with time, they faded from her memory, the same dull grey mildew settling upon them as on everything else within the stone walls of the mission school.

  As schooldays with their somehow supernatural elasticity stretched and stretched over the years, the girls became infected with something of Raja’s restlessness. It made Bim more ambitious at school, working consciously and deliberately at coming first in the examinations and winning honours. She was not quite sure where this would lead but she seemed to realize it was a way out. A way out of what? They still could not say, could not define the unsatisfactory atmosphere of their home. They did not realize now that this unsatisfactoriness was not based only on their parents’ continual absence, their seemingly total disinterest in their children, their absorption in each other. The secret, hopeless suffering of their mother was somehow at
the root of this subdued greyness, this silent desperation that pervaded the house. Also the disappointment that Baba’s very life and existence were to them, his hopeless future, their anxiety over him. The children could only sense all this, they did not share it, except unwillingly. To them Baba was the perpetual baby who would never grow up—that was his charm, they felt, and never thought of his actual age.

  When Bim became head girl of her school the principal came to congratulate the parents on her honour. They were not at home, and she had tea with Aunt Mira instead, an Aunt Mira so awkward with joy and pride that she poured the milk into the sugar pot and offered the tea strainer instead of the biscuits, much to her own anguish and the girls’. Then Raja won a poetry prize offered by his school magazine. His poem about the Battle of Panipat was a fine, ringing one with plenty of rhyme and rhythm and nothing to be ashamed of at all—it was recited by his friends and chanted at football games and on bicycle rides. When a teacher referred to ‘the young Lord Byron in our midst’, Raja’s fate seemed sealed, the future was clear. A little crack seemed to open in the stony shell that enclosed them at home, letting in a little tantalising light. The future . . .

  Lying on the bamboo matting on yet another summer afternoon, the game they played seemed quite without savour.

  ‘What would you most like to eat?’

  ‘A watermelon.’

  ‘A piece of ice.’

  ‘What would you most like to drink?’

  ‘Ginger beer.’

  ‘Vimto. No. Aa—agh.’

  They rolled over onto their stomachs in revolt against the flatness, the insipidity of it all. Then, rolling off the matting, they stole barefoot into Raja’s room—he was not back from school. Everyone else in the house was asleep. They could do anything they liked. What should they do that was daring enough, wild and unlawful enough for such a splendid opportunity? They searched. They sniffed and hunted.

  There was Raja’s copy of Iqbal—stained, much-thumbed, marked and annotated—his scattered papers covered with the beautiful script they could not read and which therefore had an added cachet in their admiring eyes. But today they would have preferred to see an unexpected photograph, a stranger’s handkerchief . . . What made the two sisters expect such shocking revelations? Somehow they felt that today such secrets should be revealed, would be in keeping. Squatting, they searched along his bookshelves where Urdu verse lay cheek by jowl with American paperbacks—those long thick flapping American army editions that he picked up second-hand on Connaught Circus pavements: Louis Bromfield’s Night in Bombay, Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Postman Always Rings Twice; also the enormous green volumes containing Keats and Shelley, Blake and Donne; the verses of Zauq and Ghalib, Dagh and Hali in cheap tattered yellow copies—that odd ragbag of reading that went to make up their romantic and inaccessible and wonderful brother.

  But they had sat there, cross-legged, beside the long low bookshelf on countless afternoons, reading while Raja lay on his bed, asleep or half-awake and humming the songs that seemed to be always vibrating inside him like a taut, shining, invisible wire. Today they wanted something more from Raja, of Raja. Finally they opened the cupboard into which he threw his clothes. Here they rummaged, shaking out his shirts and rolling them up again, shoving his socks and handkerchiefs into corners as they searched.

  ‘Look, Tara, I’m nearly as tall as he is now,’ said Bim, holding up a pair of his trousers at her waist.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Tara giggled. "They’re much, much too long.’

  ‘They are not,’ protested Bim and suddenly stepped into them. She pulled them up high above her waist, up to her chest, tucked the bunches of her frock into them, then drew them close about her waist. Reaching into the cupboard again, she found a belt with which to fasten it around her. Tara was doubled over with laughter, stuffing her hands into her mouth, and crying tears of laughter to see the preposterous figure of her sister in the bunched up old khaki trousers over her flowered frock, with her black hair tumbling about her hot, excited face. Then Bim found another pair of trousers, the white ones Raja wore for tennis, and handed them to Tara. Tara had even more trouble than Bim in putting them on over her frock and tightening them about her smaller, slighter figure, yet she managed it more neatly and emerged looking like one of those slight, elegant young boys who play girls’ roles on stage, pressing her hair close to her head to make her face more boyish. They pranced about the room in their trousers, feeling grotesquely changed by them not only in appearance but in their movements, their abilities. Great possibilities unexpectedly opened up now they had their legs covered so sensibly and practically and no longer needed to worry about what lay bare beneath ballooning frocks and what was so imperfectly concealed by them. Why did girls have to wear frocks? Suddenly they saw why they were so different from their brother, so inferior and negligible in comparison: it was because they did not wear trousers. Now they thrust their hands into their pockets and felt even more superior—what a sense of possession, of confidence it gave one to have pockets, to shove ones fists into them as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.

  Carried away by the splendour of their trousered selves, Bim suddenly dashed across to the desk and pulled out the small top drawer in which Raja kept cigarettes. She found an opened packet with a few cheap, foul smelling, loosely packed cigarettes spilling out of it. She pushed it into her pocket, along with a box of matches. She strutted about the room, feeling the cigarettes and matches in her pocket, realizing now why Raja walked with that fine, careless swagger. If she had pockets, if she had cigarettes, then it was only natural to swagger, to feel rich and superior and powerful. Crowing with delight, she flashed a look at Tara to see if she shared her exhilaration and whispered ‘Let’s go out for a walk, Tara.’

  ‘Oh Bim, no!’ squeaked Tara, squeezing into a corner by the desk in alarm at the very suggestion. ‘No, no, Bim!’

  ‘Come on, Tara, no one will see—everyone’s asleep.’

  ‘The gardener might be outside,’ warned Tara as Bim cautiously opened the door to the veranda and peeped out.

  ‘He’s half-blind. He’ll think we’re Raja’s friends,’ said Bim, tossing her mane of hair to show how confident she felt, and slipped out onto the veranda, slightly unnerved by the brilliant glare of the afternoon light. ‘Come on,’ she hissed sharply at Tara who then came scurrying and squealing after her. They tumbled down the stairs into the garden together, then the blank white glare and the brazen heat made them blink and falter. ‘Come on,’ hissed Bim again, and dived into a great bush of magenta bougainvillea that bloomed beside the stairs.

  Here they crept in, rustling, sat down on the upraised roots and mounds of dry leaves, giggling at their own nervousness. To make up for this lapse of confidence—Bim had thought momentarily of going up to the garage, taking out their bicycles and going for a ride, in their trousers—Bim drew out the cigarettes and matches from her pocket. ‘Let’s try,’ she whispered, bending very low because a thorny branch was scraping at the back of her head, plucking at her hair.

  ‘Oh, Bim, no—o!’ cried Tara in fright. Her sister was driving her, forcing her through fear again, as usual. She tried to resist, hopelessly. This was why she distrusted Bim so: Bim never knew when to stop. Discontented with mere fantasy, she insisted on turning their games into reality, usually disastrously. There was always the one sickening moment when she overstepped and began to hurtle downwards into disaster, trying always to drag her sister along with her. ‘Oh no,’ protested Tara, weakly.

  ‘But why not?’ demanded Bim, impatiently. ‘Raja smokes. Father knows he smokes. Mother knows too. We must at least do it once,’ and sticking the cigarette between her lips, she struck a match and lit it in a cloud of stinging yellow smoke, puffing hard so that her eyes stood out and watered. Then she passed it to Tara and lit herself another. But Tara threw hers away wildly after one puff, spluttering with disgust.

  ‘Tara!
’ screamed Bim, seeing the cigarette fall on a heap of dry leaves and grass, and scrambled up to stamp it out before it turned into a blaze. Her hair caught in the bougainvillea, her legs felt suddenly hampered by the trousers that did not fit. She heard Tara struggling to get out of the bush and then someone’s voice raised and the garage door swinging open. So there was nothing for it but to fling the cigarette out into the open driveway and race after Tara, up the steps and into Raja’s room. Someone was coming up the veranda. It was—was it?—it was Raja. Back so early from school—why? Screaming at each other to hurry, they ran into Raja’s bathroom to tear off their trouses. By then Raja was already in his room. They heard the crash of an armful of books as they landed on his desk and scattered. He had heard—or seen?—them! He was at the bathroom door, shouting "Who’s in there? Open!’ But they had bolted it. Trousers off and flung into a corner, their legs feeling naked and exposed, they opened the outer door and fled, leaving him to rattle at the inner door and shout ‘I know it’s you—you rascals! Come out at once, you horrors!’

  It was not spite or retaliation that made Tara abandon Bim—it was the spider fear that lurked at the centre of the web-world for Tara. Yet she did abandon Bim, it was true that she did.

  The Misra family had taken the girls with them to the Lodi Gardens one day in early spring when the bignonia venustra was in bloom, enfolding the dark walls of the Lodi tombs in long cloaks of flamboyant orange. The picnickers lay on the grass in the honey-gold sun, eating peanuts out of paper cones and peeling oranges and urging each other to sing songs. Two young men had been invited as well, possible suitors for Jaya and Sarla, and the picnic had been arranged to give their first meeting an air of informality. Yet everyone’s eyes were on each other so sharply, sharpening on each other like blades, snip-snip-snip, that they made Bim and Tara feel anything but informal. On the contrary, they were deeply uneasy. The Misra girls had become strangely artificial in their speech and manners—Bim and Tara could scarcely recognise them. The two chosen young men were sullen and mostly silent, their dark heads sunk between their shoulders as they gloomily picked at grass and avoided looking at each other. Only the Misra brothers remained themselves, as jocular and loud and coarse as usual, making foul jokes and managing to suggest vulgarities even when they did not state them. Bim and Tara, infected both by the Misra girls’ self-conscious artificiality of manner and the young swains’ deep gloom, did not know how to deal with them or with the Misra brothers—how to defend themselves against their jokes or deflect them by repartee as Jaya and Sarla could do, being more practised. So when the others were fussing over the unpacking of the picnic baskets, they wandered away together, saying they would look at the tombs.