Product Description

To the family living in a shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim coping endlessly with their problems, there is renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120124 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Clear Light of Day is an examination of contemporary India and a family history in which two sisters, Bim and Tara, learn that, although there will always be family scars, the ability to forgive and forget is a powerful ally against life's sorrows. Twenty years ago when Tara married, she left Old Delhi and a home full of sickness and death, while Bim continued to live in the family home taking care of their autistic brother, Baba. Now Tara has returned, her first visit in 10 years, for their niece's wedding. Bim refuses to attend; she can't visit their brother Raja who, like Tara, left her many years ago. Instead Bim dwells bitterly on her feelings of abandonment and the impact on her of her country's recent history: the violent conflict between Hindus and Muslims, the death of Gandhi and the ensuing struggle for political power and the malaria epidemic that killed so many. In Bim's presence, Tara once again feels "herself shrink into that small miserable wretch of 20 years ago, both admiring and resenting her tall striding sister", while "Bim was calmly unaware of any of her sister's agonies, past or present". With language that describes both the harshness and beauty of family and the land, Anita Desai takes the reader with Tara and Bim on their struggle to confront and heal old wounds. --Alex Freeman, Amazon.com

Review
Evokes the traumatic history of India after the departure of the British in a story of a Hindu family in Old Delhi and the relationships among four people. (Kirkus UK)

Though set in Old Delhi and centering in part on the Hindu/Moslem tensions of 1947 India, Desai's second novel is really a thoroughly universal tale of unhealable family hurts; rather than E. M. Forster, the echoes here are of Chekhov, even of Arthur Miller (especially The Price). The story begins circa 1970 - as pretty Tara, long-married to sleek, patronizing diplomat Bakul, returns to Old Delhi to visit older, gray-haired sister Bim (a teacher at the local college) and younger brother Baba (a simple-minded near-mute who plays 1930s pop-song records all day). "Why had nothing changed? She had changed - why did it not keep up with her?" And while Tara tries to persuade Bim to come along to the wedding of their niece - daughter of prosperous brother Raja in Hyderabad - Bim remembers the family history that led to her isolated state, to her scornful anger at Raja. Back in the late 1940s, Father had an insurance company, Mother was a semi-invalid diabetic - and when little Baba was born, Aunt Mira came to help care for the four children (to Tara, "she smelt of cooking and was made of knitting"). But when Mother and then Father died, Aunt Mira (an alcoholic, suicidal madwoman) merely became another of the responsibilities to fall on Bim's young shoulders. . . while Tara escaped to early marriage and Raja, a tubercular Hindu teenager stubbornly hooked on Islamic culture, yearned to join the evacuated family of their landlord - a wealthy Muslim whose fortune survived India/Pakistan partition. So plain-faced Bim was abandoned, left to care for helpless relatives, to be limply courted by a mother-dominated, Mozart-obsessed doctor; and - the coup de grace - Raja married the landlord's daughter, becoming Bim's oh-so-generous absentee landlord. ("Because of me, he can't raise the rent or sell the house and make a profit - imagine that. The sacrifice!") Assailed by these memories, in the present tense once again, middle-aging Bim turns bitter ("They had come. . . to torment her and, mosquito-like, sip her blood"), takes out some of her anger on poor Baba, but then arrives at a sort of catharsis: "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. . .then it was only because her love was imperfect" And - though "Nothing's over. . . . Ever" - she'll compromise: she won't go to the wedding, but she will invite Raja to come for a visit. . . . Occasionally a bit overwrought, with not quite the ideal balance between flashback and foreground - but a small, poignantly detailed family drama nonetheless, distinctively shaded with enticing glimpses of India's Hindu middle-class in shabby decline. (Kirkus Reviews)