by the clear light of day

I began this series by reflecting, in a general way, on what conservatism is. Then I wrote about Christopher Lasch’s ideas about the family. I turned from that to a reflection on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the author’s experiences that shaped and formed that powerfully tragic book. Now I want to meditate on another novel about family — about the forces arrayed against it, and the force that it is.

Whenever people talk about neglected masterpieces, the first book that comes to my mind, always, is Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day. What follows will reveal some key elements of the plot, but I don’t think knowing these things will spoil anyone’s experience of this deep, rich, generously meditative book. It’s the kind of book that gets better with re-reading.

The book concerns the Das family of Old Delhi. As the story begins, a middle-aged woman named Tara returns to her home city. Long ago she had married and moved away, but her sister Bimla had remained in their childhood home, working as a teacher and caring for their autistic, or intellectually disabled, brother Baba. Their older brother Raja — who has often indeed behaved in a kingly way towards them — is a source of tension, especially for Bim, and the two sisters warily circle around that topic of conversation.

At the outset we see events primarily through the eyes of Tara, who notices that the old house has become decrepit. She soon discovers that Bim is even more aware of this than she is, and is embittered by it — indeed, is embittered by her whole life, which has been devoted solely to the care of others. She had always been responsible for her siblings — watching over Baba, nursing Raja when he suffered from tuberculosis — while Tara had looked for some means of escape from what was to her an oppressive home, an escape which eventually, through marriage, she achieved.

The first section of the book is set in the characters’ present. The second goes back to 1947 and the Partition of India — a complicated time for the family, because Raja, under the influence of their prosperous neighbor Hyder Ali, had converted to Islam. But this conversion only slightly widened the gaps that had already formed from strong differences in temperament. And anyway, the greater source of tension involves their aunt, Mira-masi, who cared for them after the deaths of their parents but gradually descended into madness. That was when Bim first had to become the primary care-giver for the others. The third section of the book goes back to their early childhood, when their parents were still alive, but, obsessed by social life, largely inattentive to the children. (Nothing much changed for the Das children when their parents died.) And the fourth section of the book returns to the present, as the two sisters try to come to terms with their past and with the very different people they have become. This four-part structure is deeply and resonantly indebted to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also gives the book one of its two epigraphs.

In this final section the point of view shifts to Bim, whose anger comes to a crescendo when she bitterly asks Baba whether he would be willing to leave the only home he has ever known to go live with Raja in Hyderabad (where Raja had moved during the Partition). Bim is simply lashing out, but — she immediately realizes — lashing out at the one person in her life who has no defenses against her. When she sees Baba’s devastated look, she stammers out an apology, and then retreats to her own room in shock at what she has proved capable of.

And lying there in her darkened room, she experiences a revelation. In the shade of her grubby old room

she saw how she loved [Baba], loved Raja and Tara, and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth with whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would live on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.

(Here we should remember Eliot’s references throughout the Quartets to “the pattern,” the shifting weave, and ongoing rebalancing, of forces in a human life.)

Bim’s relevation continues:

Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect, and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies, and did not extend to all equally. She did not feel enough for her dead parents, her understanding of them was incomplete, and she would have to work and labour to acquire it. Her love for Raja had taken too much of a battering … Her love for Baba was too inarticulate, too unthinking: she had not given him enough thought, her concern had not been keen, acute enough. All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.

Trying to think through what she has experienced, Bim “reache[s] out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and place them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unraveling.” The book that she takes up is one Raja had long ago urged her to read: an early biography of Aurangzeb.

This is what she reads in it:

Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die … He wrote to Prince A’zam … ‘Many were around me when I was born. But now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world … Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back … When I have lost hope in myself, how can I hope in others? Come what will, I have launched my bark upon the waters …’

To his favourite Kam-Baksh he wrote: ‘Soul of my soul … Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’

Reading this, Bim realizes that she has finally taken the right path: not the path of anger or resentment or the accusation of others, but the path of self-cleansing, which is the only path by which she can “mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.”

For a long time Bim has simmered with anger over a crassly arrogant letter Raja had written to her. Now she takes it out and tears into pieces. “Having torn it, she felt she had begun the clearing of her own decks, the lightening of her own bark.”

Surely this is also what the newly-married Mary Ann Cross felt when she got a letter from her brother Isaac, not a dictatorial one but a condescending one, a reaching-out that he could have managed at any time in the previous quarter-century but, being a “Rhadamanthine personage,” made a point of refusing. She could have denounced and repiudiated him, and if she had, one could not say that he deserved anything better. But Mary Ann kept what I have called the calculator of Deserving locked away in a drawer. Instead, as we have seen, she wrote,

It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross

Like Bim, she lightens her bark by casting resentment overboard. She achieves what she calls “the wider vision.” It’s an astonishing thing to manage. I don’t really know how people do it. It is a marvelous grace.