Clear Light of Day

Tara is the younger of the Das sisters. Unlike her older sister, she chooses the conventional path of being a wife and mother, something she has desired since she was a child. Along with Bim, Tara is the story’s second protagonist, and her memories often introduce the reader to an alternative version of their lives as children and adolescents in the decade leading up to Indian Independence. When they are reunited at the beginning of the novel, the grown Tara seems still childlike to Bim, crouching in the garden to better observe a snail, while Bim appears to Tara to have become their mother (8-9). Tara remarks to herself that everything was “exactly as her last visit” and wonders, “Why did Bim allow nothing to change?” (18). Although Tara has chosen the traditional life of wife and mother, she has married a modern husband who is a diplomat in Washington, DC. There they live in a flat that is “neat” and “china-white” (26) unlike their old and untidy family home in Old Delhi.

Tara’s marriage and domestic life might appear clean and orderly from the outside, but her husband is generally dismissive of her when he is not trying to control her thoughts and actions. Yet she finds safety in his world, an escape from the chaos of her childhood, and when confronted with this chaos, as she often is on family visits, she wants “only to turn and flee into that neat, sanitary, disinfected land in which she live[s] with Bakul, with its set of rules and regulations, its neatness and orderliness” (33).

Tara’s husband and sister often underestimate her, imagining that she has no inner life and cares only about comfort. In reality, she is a sensitive individual who suffers guilt from having fled the family web to pursue her own happiness. This guilt manifests itself in her obsessive memory of the bees that once that swarmed her sister in Lodi Garden when they were children. In Tara’s memory of this incident, she ran away, abandoning her sister to the bees. Bim remembers it differently and cannot understand her sister’s guilt. The sisters realize that they are much more similar than they had realized. Their despair and their desires are reflections of each other, even if they result in different life choices.

Raja is the eldest of the Das siblings. Although an absent presence in the first and fourth chapters of the novel, he remains central to the plot and to the motivations of the other characters, especially his sister Bim. As a child and adolescent, he often claimed that he wanted to be a hero, but it turned out that he was content to follow in the footsteps of others such as his mentor and later father-in-law, the wealthy Hyder Ali. Raja considers himself a moody and rebellious Byronic hero, and his sister Bim shares this image of him. He becomes infatuated with Mughal history and Urdu language and culture, a romantic alternative to the Indian nationalism that is growing around him. He indulges his fascination through hours of study in his mentor Hyder Ali’s private library and by attending literary events in his mentor’s garden. For the young Raja, spending time at the Alis’ house is also a way to escape the shabbiness and perceived strangeness of his own family. Because his family is the only one he knows intimately, he believes it is unique in its afflictions and secrets: “Surely know other family could have as much illness contained in it as his, so many things that could not be mentioned and had to be camouflaged or ignored” (54).

To further immerse himself in his romanticized love for the Mughal Empire era of Indian history, he hopes to attend Jamia Millia Islamia—a Muslim university in Delhi. However, rising tensions between Hindu and Muslim Indians make this impossible. Raja’s actions are often self-serving and insensitive, such as conveniently falling in love with his wealthy mentor’s daughter or sending a letter to his sister in which he describes himself as her new, magnanimous landlord.

Baba is the youngest sibling of the Das family. He has an intellectual disability and does not communicate verbally with others. Like Bim, he seems to have aged prematurely, with translucent skin and white hair, “like a plant undergrown or in deepest shade” (14). Even though his face is youthful, it has a “ghostly” quality that unnerves others (14). He spends most of his day indoors, playing the old-fashioned gramophone that Bim took from Hyder Ali more than 20 years ago. Since he has only the old 78 rpm records that came with the gramophone, he has been listening to the same Western music for decades.

He is generally mild mannered and smiling, even when Bim yells at him in frustration at the burden of family responsibility on her shoulders. The only time he becomes agitated is when someone pressures him to leave the family compound. He then paces frantically around his room and, when he tries to leave through the gate, becomes frozen with fear and collapses. Years earlier, while trying to leave through the gate, Baba saw the cart overturned and the horse being beaten by its owner. This image is seared into Baba’s memory, and as a result the gate terrifies him. The reader is never given access to Baba’s thoughts except during this one traumatic moment of his life. He could be described as both a flat and a static character. He does not illustrate complex emotions or motivations, and he does not change or develop in the story. The narrator even describes his presence as “less than a presence” (66), yet he plays an important role in Bim’s life. She constantly reminds herself and others that she and Baba have remained alone together throughout their entire lives.

Bakul is Tara’s husband, whom she meets at the club she attends with the Misra sisters. Her parents frequent the same club, although they never think to take her there to socialize. Bakul is an ambitious and successful man, having become the Indian ambassador to the United States. He is also a rather superficial man, concerned with appearing sophisticated ensuring that his wife dresses and behaves appropriately. He often ignores his wife when he is not chastising or controlling her. He married her when she was 18—young enough to “train,” in his view—but now he wonders at times if he married the “wrong” sister. Tara has absorbed her lessons so well that Bim tells her “[s]ometimes you sound exactly like Bakul” (47)—a claim that would have delighted her husband, but which Tara finds hurtful.

Bim finds Bakul’s parroting of official positions, in the lead up to independence and in the current day, banal and boring. He is a bureaucrat in the worst sense of the word; someone who follows out the orders of someone else, who is willing to speak of “Mountbatten’s [Viceroy of India] goodwill and integrity” (75), and someone who willingly subjugates himself to the powerful, including the colonizer.