Clear Light of Day

The story is told in a third-person point of view, and the narrative perspective shifts frequently from one character to another. Readers are first introduced to the Das family through the eyes of the younger sister Tara, who is visiting along with her diplomat husband, something they do every three years. Because she lives a very different life in Washington, DC, she is looking at the family house through the eyes of an outsider. From this perspective, her siblings Bim and Baba look like a tragic, eccentric pair—largely confined to the crumbling family home, stuck in the past and emotionally dependent on one another.

Life in the family home is chaotic, and the conversation between Bim and Tara is constantly interrupted by Bim’s pet cat and dog, their brother Baba, Bim’s visiting students, and the countless birds and other wildlife that add to the cacophony of the garden. The omniscient narrator moves seamlessly from Tara’s thoughts to Bim’s and from present to past, and the result of this narrative technique is to make clear how powerful a hold the past has on both Bim and Tara and how much they misunderstand each other despite the history they share.

Tara is used to order in her life, even if much of it is imposed on her by her domineering husband, and the chaos of her family home plunges her into unpleasant memories of the past—a past she believes she has escaped, while her sister has become trapped in it. In reality, Bim and Tara have simply responded in different ways to the Struggles of Women in Modern India, making different choices according to their different priorities. Since childhood, Tara wanted nothing more than to escape the disorder and decay of her home in Old Delhi, and she did so, even if it meant marrying a man who is often unkind and controlling. Bim wanted independence, and she worked hard in school and became a teacher so she wouldn’t have to depend on a man. Now, her competence has led the family to depend on her, and she sometimes resents the caregiving role she’s been thrust into.

The relationship between Trauma, Memory, and Silence begins to become apparent as both Bim and Tara struggle with traumatic memories they cannot articulate to one another. While the sisters have shared many events in their lives, they do not always share the same understanding of their memories. Their silence alienates them from each other. The narrator describes Bim as “calmly unaware of any of her sister’s agonies, past or present” (46). Tara, for her part, cannot disentangle her childhood perspective from her present one, and she finds herself “both admiring and resenting her tall, striding sister” as she had as a “small miserable wretch of twenty years ago” (46).

While Tara returns to the miserable past of a home haunted by the ghosts of her negligent parents and the absent presence of her older brother Raja, Bim and Baba have become part of the decaying family home. The decline of the physical house mirrors the disintegration of the family. The decline of the family in turn mirrors that of the bourgeois class they once belonged to. Gone are the evenings at the club or the dinner parties in the garden of old. The Misra sisters have been abandoned by their husbands and must run a school and give dance lessons to pay the bills while their once pampered brothers drink themselves into oblivion. Bim expresses her feelings at the changes by quoting a verse from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land while Tara, less literarily inclined than her older siblings, remembers the death of her Aunt Mira and the earlier death of a cow that drowned in the family’s well. The cow drowned during the tumultuous summer leading to India’s Independence, and the scene becomes a motif, representing different things for different characters. For Aunt Mira, the well represents the inexorable pull of the alcohol addiction that leads to her death. For Bim and Tara, it represents parental abandonment, as the cow’s calf died of starvation after the loss of its mother. It also represents the traumatic memories that they can’t quite face and yet can’t look away from. Bim and Tara initially remember that exciting summer quite differently, but both reach the conclusion that they are relieved that their painful youth is over.