kindle Ö Clear Light of Day Ù Anita Desai
Set in India's Old Delhi CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender warm and compassionate novel about family scars the ability to forgive and forget and the trials and tribulations of familial love At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members It's startling when I collide into a book like this one which silently commands me to follow its gaze into the abyss within and without and then casts a mocking glance my way challenging me to take it apart piece by piece Theme Plot Imagery Structure Backdrop Sociopolitical significance I dare you to deploy words sentences phrases to probe the uncharted depths of my insight into the workings of the human psyche I dare you to remain inoculated against the power of this terrible and magnificent vision I create with these delicate brushstrokes lush colours of a luminous childhood and the smoke grey splotches of thwarted desires it says And I look away in mortification Because how can I? The room rang with her voice then with silence In the shaded darkness silence had the uality of a looming dragon It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate to dominate To escape from it would reuire a burst of recklessness even cruelty It is not a hitherto unencountered feeling This deep reverential love for an author who makes her words throb with a dull suppressed ache for the wounds of humanity and transfer that same stir to a reader's blood and bones And yet I tremble with the childlike joy and disbelief of an enthralled votary confronted with the spectacle of the divine for the very first time Unable to articulate my awe I stare with a kind of inexplicable longing and admiration at this flawless rendering of a way of life long since discontinued Feel the pulse of an agonized city helplessly witnessing the inextinguishable fires of communal hatred consuming its most cherished values Bow my head in silent benediction for a love that spans across years and continents stretches itself to the breaking point yet resiliently staying intact always always aware of its core its root its starting point It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood her youth were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red rugs in the bloated brassware amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames everything everything that she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull uninviting provincial museum Anita Desai's enchanting prose poetry reproduces the perfect musical cadences of Urdu couplets and Eliot's 'Four uartets' seamlessly uniting vignettes from a family's past and present caught up in the swirl of a rapidly altering sociopolitical milieu that mirror the fate of a modern nation struggling to maintain its grip on high ideals in an age of eroding values At once an examination of blood bonds and an elegy for a city futilely resisting the currents of irreversible change this tour de force is also a haunting melodious ode to the inevitability of disintegration to mortality itself It eulogizes the courage of uiet acceptance regeneration in the midst of decay and the marvel of eternity nestled within a moment And offers a libation in honour of those unsung heroines who wander through the disorienting maze of life fearlessly braving storms that wreak havoc unappreciated unloved forgotten perhaps even misunderstood but manage to step out into the clear light of day which purges all the darkness lurking in their hearts and ushers in enlightenment and forgiveness paving the way for a reconciliation however belated with the ones they love and loathe with a baffling intensity 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 in her side that bled then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough and b
Anita Desai Ù Clear Light of Day text
Clear Light of DayNd with children of her own Raja is their popular brilliant and successful brother When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba old memories and tensions resurface and blend into a domestic drama that is intensely beautiful and leads to profound self understanding This is a sad book made sadder by the possibility that such fictional families might actually exist anywhere in the worldA family is one's anchor; sometimes it also becomes the millstone around one's neck filling the one who goes out ahead in the world with chronic guilt and the one who is left behind with lasting resentment Desai's small unit torn apart standing in for a nation partitioned unable to come to terms with its loss The emotional poignancy an astute evocation of childhood making up for the sluggish beginning I warmed up to it only from the third section onwards The writer tries a new spin on the tired old narrative of the all sacrificing elder sister by showing that we don't get to choose renunciation—sometimes it's just thrust upon us35 stars rounded off to 4 because people need to read Anita DesaiSharing some uotesview spoilerNo one’ said Bim slowly and precisely ‘comprehends better than children do No one feels the atmosphere keenly—or catches all the nuances all the insinuations in the air—or notes those details that escape elders because their senses have atrophied or calcified 173She could not help noticing Bim’s excessive meanness—the way she would scrape all left overs onto saucers and keep them for the next meal so that some of the meals that arrived on the table were just a long procession of little saucers with little portions smudged onto them like meals for a family of kittens Tara felt ashamed of them knowing how Bakul’s fastidious nostrils would crinkle at the sight 171The mosuitoes that night were like the thoughts of the day embodied in monster form invisible in the dark but present everywhere most of all in and around the ears piercingly audible Bim could hear Tara’s voice repeating all the cruel things she had so gently said—‘Do you ever see Dr—Dr—what was his name?’ and ‘When one is old one has all kinds of fears apprehensions’— 177Really it was a night of Persian glamour and beauty They should be sitting together in the moonlight looking together at the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being 184 hide spoiler