Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

  They walked in silence up a knoll to one of the smaller tombs and stood uncertainly gazing at its blackened walls and thought of sitting down on the grass outside by themselves, but a boy in striped pyjamas and a cricket cap hung about the small porch, leaning against a pillar, watching them while he tossed a pebble from one hand to the other. After a moment’s hesitation, they chose the uninviting dark inside and the dizzying stench of bats that it contained.

  The boy must have flung the pebble after them. They heard a small dull thwack as it hit something soft but it was followed by a sinister crepitation that began to stir in the corners of that octagon of pitch darkness, began to swirl invisibly about them, the humming growing louder and more menacing, at the same time descending towards them till they realized what it meant and, with yelps, pushing into each other in their hurry, ran out together.

  Tara catapulted out and went hurtling down the grassy slope, her head bent and her hands pressed over her ears, screaming like a whistle as she went. At the foot of the knoll she turned to look for Bim and saw that she was still at the top—she had not got away, the swarm had got her. They had settled about her head and shoulders till they had wrapped her about in a helmet of chainmail that glittered, gun-metal blue, and shivered and crept over her skin, close-fitting, adhesive. Bim, too, had her head bent and her arms crossed over her face but she was not screaming—she seemed locked into the hive, as if she were the chosen queen, made prisoner. The whole hillside, the brilliant cobalt sky, the honey air, the grassy slope and flowering creepers were covered with the pall of bees, shrouded by them as by a thundercloud. It was a bees’ festival, a celebration, Bim their appointed victim, the sacrificial victim on whom they had draped the ceremonial shawl, drawing it close about her neck as she stood drooping, shivering under the weight of their gauzy wings, their blue-black humming.

  What was Tara to do? Helplessly, she ran back up the hill a little, but instantly the bees rose, hummed a warning, swayed towards her, and she screamed to see them approach so that Bim, spying her out of her swollen eyes, cried in a thick, congested voice ‘Get away, go—run, run!’ and Tara ran, ran down the knoll back to the Misras, screaming for help.

  They heard her at last—or, rather, at last connected the frenzied screams they had heard with Tara’s running, maddened figure—and leapt to their feet, left the paper cones and radios and songs behind, and came at a gallop to see what it was all about. Tara was conscious, as she half-stood, half-crouched, shivering, of Jaya and Sarla flying up the knoll and flinging Jaya’s pink veil over Bim’s head, the men tearing off branches and beating them in the air, someone lighting a rolled newspaper and sending its smoke coiling through the air like a whip, and the young boy who had thrown the stone being dragged across the grass to be thrashed.

  Then they were all bustling out of the park and into the waiting cars, and Sarla was dabbing at the bee stings with some lemonade out of a bottle and Bim was sitting with her head in her lap, growling ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!’ She was swollen to a great size, and tinted a strange shade of plum-blue, quite unrecognisable. Tara, squeezed into a corner of the overcrowded car, very small and meek, whimpered to herself. She had one bite to nurse, on her knuckles, but although the sting was still embedded in it like a needle in a pocket, she dared not ask for any attention or sympathy—she knew Bim deserved it all.

  That whole episode was an accident that ought to have been followed by a thorough investigation, a cure, each sting withdrawn, put away. But in the uproar that followed, it was all somehow bundled out of sight, hurriedly. Tara had not the opportunity, nor found the courage, to go to Bim and say ‘Bim, I’m sorry I ran away—I wasn’t brave—I didn’t come to help you. I am ashamed—I shall never forgive myself. Forgive me.’ Nor did Bim ever care to explain what she meant when she growled at her sister ‘You couldn’t help it—if you’d stayed, you’d have been stung, like me—you had to run.’ Only Raja raged openly ‘You nitwit. Why didn’t you stay and help Bim to beat them off?’ Aunt Mira said instantly ‘Tara’s just a baby—what could she have done?’ and there was the powerful ammoniac stench of vinegar to bring tears to their eyes as she poured out a bottleful onto a napkin and doused Bim with it. The old ayah shook her head over such inefficacious treatment and fetched her betel-nut box and dipped her finger into the jar of lime paste and smeared it on Bim’s stings till she looked as if she had dabs of cotton wool stuck to her, or a strange, erratic growth of feathers. Whenever Tara smelt vinegar or tasted lime paste in a betel leaf, her flesh crept, she shivered, she recalled the zig-zag advance of threatening bees emerging from that dark, stinking tomb to capture Bim and leave her bloated and blue like a plum. Aunt Mira and the ayah between them treated Bim and drew out all her stings, but Tara kept hers hidden.

  Tara began to avoid both Bim and Raja. Aunt Mira did not provide sufficient defence—so thin, so scrawny, she could no more hide Tara from them than a thin reed. She began to shut herself away in her room, or slip out by herself, quite often to the Misras’ house next door.

  The Misras had been their neighbours for as long as they could remember (theirs was not a neighbourhood from which people moved—they were born and married and even died in the same houses, no one ever gave one up) and yet the friendship between the two families was only a token one, formal and never close. Bim and Raja, especially, were so scornful of the Misra children that Tara dared not admit openly that she herself did not judge them or find them lacking. Now she found neither Bim nor Raja holding her back—studying hard for their examinations, they hardly noticed Tara any more and had no intention of pursuing her or bullying her—Tara found herself free to edge closer to the warmth she felt emanating from them, from their large, full, bustling household. The two Misra girls who had been to the same school as Bim and Tara, although they were a few years older, responded to her touchingly hesitant advances in a kindly, patronising way that almost developed into a friendship, the closest certainly to friendship in Tara’s forlorn experience.

  What attracted Tara was the contrast their home provided to hers. Even externally there were such obvious differences—at the Misras’ no attempt was made, as at Tara’s house, to ‘keep up appearances’. They were so sure of their solid, middle-class bourgeois position that it never occurred to them to prove it or substantiate it by curtains at the windows, carpets on the floors, solid pieces of furniture placed at regular intervals, plates that matched each other on the table, white uniforms for the house servants and other such appurtenances considered indispensable by Tara’s parents. At the Misras’ string beds might be carried into the drawing room for visiting relations, or else mats spread on the veranda floor when an influx of visitors grew so large that it overflowed. Meals were ordered in a haphazard way and when the family smelt something good cooking, they dipped impatiently into the cooking pots as soon as it was ready instead of waiting for the clock hands to move to the appointed hour. The chauffeur might be set to minding a fractious baby, driving it up to the gate and back for its amusement or dandling it on his lap and letting it spin the steering wheel, while the cook might be called out of the kitchen and set to massaging the grandmother’s legs. Elaborate arrangements might be made for a prayer meeting on the lawns to please an elderly relative and then suddenly set aside so that the whole clan could go and see the latest film at the Regal. Theirs was a large family of many generations spread through the city, and there was constant coming and going, friends and relations perpetually under one’s feet. The Misra girls complained to Tara how difficult it was to study and prepare for exams in such circumstances, and sometimes brought their books across to work in Tara’s room, but never for very long since their interest in academic work was weak and wavering at best, and often they would abandon it and set out shopping for clothes and bangles or to attend a family festivity like a wedding or naming ceremony, leaving school-work undone and Tara abandoned and envious.

  But now they noticed Tara standing on the edge, watching, with kindly eye
s, and often swept her along. Although she was consumed with shyness and embarrassment at finding herself in a society to which she realized she did not belong, she enjoyed the break in routine, the change of scene, and came back flushed and excited, too excited to sleep even if the outing had been no more than a visit to a tailor or a jeweller in the city.

  Once she wandered across on a bleak winter day with an old woollen coat drawn over her school uniform that she had not changed out of through laziness, to find the whole family on the lawn, posing for a photographer who kept darting out from behind his black cloth and cyclopean instrument to marshal them into straight rows, some on chairs and some on their feet, little ones in front, big ones at the back. Tara backed away, hoping to disappear through the hedge, but the Misra girls spied her, broke rank and darted at her, dragged her along to stand beside them and be photographed. That was their kindliness, their easy, careless hospitality, and the result was the incongruous appearance of Tara, bundled into her grey woollen coat and looking like a mouse with a bad cold, standing along with the ranks of Misras in their silk and brocade finery posing for a family photograph. Whenever she saw it silver-framed up on the cabinet in their hall, she looked away in embarrassment. Had she been a little younger, she might have attempted stealing it and cutting it out, but she was too big for such adventures now, she was quite big enough for adventures of another kind.

  The Misra girls realized that, in their prosaic, accepting way, and often invited her to come to cinema shows with them, or to the Roshonara club where she sat on the lawn, sipping lemonade, listening to the band, stiff as a puppet in her consciousness of being looked at by young men returning from the tennis courts or the cricket field or standing around the bar. It was a novel experience for Tara whose own parents sat playing bridge in the green-lit, soundless aquarium of the card-room, unaware of their daughter’s presence outside, and to whom it had never occurred that the child was now a young girl and might like to be taken out with them. The Misra girls themselves found the Roshonara club too boring—they did not play tennis, they did not dance, they knew all the Old Delhi families spread over the verandas and lawns in clusters of cane chairs, had known them all their lives and knew they could not offer them any novelty, any excitement.

  Besides, they were already engaged to be married—the picnic at Lodi Gardens, so disastrous for Bim and Tara, had reaped a different harvest for Jaya and Sarla—and life did not hold out the shadowy promises and expectations that it still did to Tara. They enjoyed seeing Tara perch, trembling, on the edge of her chair, casting her eyes quickly around the prospect, then dropping them, half-frightened by what she saw. They gave her Vimto to drink, lent her bits of jewellery to wear, introduced her to the families they had known all their lives but who had been screened away from Tara by the particular circumstances of her home and family. They were touched to see Tara blinking as she looked about her—it made them feel matronly and condescending, experienced and wise.

  It was to their engagement party that Tara wore her first silk sari—a pale shell-pink edged with silver that Aunt Mira had thought suitable for her youngest niece. There were two parties thrown on the same day—an afternoon affair for all the women of the family and the two sisters’ girl friends, to be followed by a formal evening affair. Bim and Tara were invited to the first, their parents to the second. Bim was forced to accompany Tara and sat glumly on the carpet at the far end of the room, bored and irritated by it all—the musicians who had been invited to play and sat grouped decoratively on a white sheet spread over the carpet with their instruments before them, the songs sung by the ladies and the young girls, invariably mournful ones of heart-break and romantic yearning—till she could stand no more and, beckoning sternly to Tara, got up and slipped out into the garden where gardeners and electricians were at work on strings of lights and pyramids of potted plants in preparation for the evening party. A group of workmen, staggering under the weight of a long table, shouted to them to keep out of the way and as they turned they bumped into a servant hurrying up with white tablecloths and silver vases stuffed with papery zinnias and gomphrenias.

  ‘Let’s go up on the roof, it’ll be quieter there,’ said Bim, and Tara was forced to follow her up the stairs to the terrace. Tara felt they might as well have stayed at home if this was all they were going to do at the party, and Bim leant on the balustrade and looked across the hedge at their own silent, already darkening house as if that were exactly what she wished she had done.

  They watched the workmen scurrying about the lawn, dropping a ladder, setting up a branched tree of electric lights over the porch and draping tangled strips of fairy lights on the domed trees along the drive with the maximum possible amount of argument and contradiction and muddle. The Misra boys were standing about on straddled legs, shouting orders and abuse in their lordly, uncivilised way that made Bim direct dark looks at them.

  ‘I don’t know how those two girls are going to study and pass their finals with all this going on,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think it matters to them,’ said Tara, picking at flakes of blackened lichen on the balustrade sulkily. ‘They’re getting married afterwards anyway.’

  The Misra boy standing below shouted ‘Donkey! Fool! Look, you’ve smashed another bulb. D’you think they belong to your father that you can go smashing them up as you like?’

  Bim gave a snort of disgust. ‘I don’t know why they’re in such a hurry to get married,’ she said. ‘Why don’t they go to college instead?’

  ‘Their mother wanted them to be married soon. She said she married when she was twelve and Jaya and Sarla are already sixteen and seventeen years old.’

  ‘But they’re not educated yet,’ Bim said sharply. ‘They haven’t any degrees. They should go to college,’ she insisted.

  ‘Why?’ said Tara, suddenly rebellious, impatient to go back down the stairs, get away from Bim and join the women who were now streaming out of the house, laughing, calling to each other, flocking to the long tables on which platters of sweetmeats, pink and yellow and topped with silver, had been placed between the silver vases with the zinnias and gomphrenias, while a waiter in a white coat with something embroidered in red across the pocket, frenziedly uncapped bottles of lemonade and stuck straws into them and handed them out with automatic efficiency. The hired band arrived just then in an open lorry and began jumping out of it with huge instruments of shining brass clutched in their arms. The Misra brothers rushed up and began to bawl at them for being late. They hurried off into a brightly striped pavilion that had been set up at the far end of the garden. The Hyder Alis’ dog was barking as though in pain at all this noise and confusion.

  ‘Why?’ repeated Bim indignantly. ‘Why, because they might find marriage isn’t enough to last them the whole of their lives,’ she said darkly, mysteriously.

  ‘What else could there be?’ countered Tara. ‘I mean,’ she fumbled, ‘for them.’

  ‘What else?’ asked Bim. ‘Can’t you think? I can think of hundreds of things to do instead. I won’t marry,’ she added, very firmly.

  Tara glanced at her sideways with a slightly sceptical smile.

  ‘I won’t,’ repeated Bim, adding ‘I shall never leave Baba and Raja and Mira-masi,’ making Tara look away before her face could betray her admission that she, closely attached as she was to home and family, would leave them instantly if the opportunity arose. Bim did not notice her. She was looking down, across the lighted, bustling garden to her own house, dark and smouldering with a few dim lights behind the trees, and raised her hands to her hair, lifting it up and letting it fall with a luxuriant, abundant motion. ‘I shall work—I shall do things,’ she went on, ‘I shall earn my own living—and look after Mira-masi and Baba and—and be independent. There’ll be so many things to do—when we are grown up—when all this is over—’ and she swept an arm out over the garden party, dismissing it. ‘When we are grown up at last—then—then—’ but she couldn’t finish for emotion, and her eyes shone
in the dusk.

  In the garden below, the little blue buds of lights in the trees bloomed suddenly to the sound of excited twittering from the guests.

  IV

  Bim was correcting papers at the dining table, her own desk being insufficient for their size and number. All the doors were shut against the dust storm raging outside so that they could only hear the sand and gravel scraping past the walls and window-panes but not see it. It seeped in through every crack and opening, however, so that every surface of wood or stone or paper in the room was coated with it, yellow and gritty. It coloured the light too, made the daylight so pallid that they had to have the electric light on and that was turned to a lurid shade of orange which, far from being festive, was actually sinister.