Anita Desai has widely been praised as the finest Indian writer of her generation in the English language. (She was in fact born to a Bengali father and a German mother, but grew up in Delhi hardly aware of her mother being a foreigner, as she wore sari and cooked Indian food. When her mother died, Anita and her sister gave her a cremation and immersed her ashes in the river; it did not occur to them till later that they could have considered a burial.) Anita's daughter Kiran Desai is also an accomplished writer and has incidentally just won the Booker Prize with the novel The Inheritance of Loss. That should be next up in my reading list then, but anyway I want to talk here about a novel by Anita Desai I have just finished reading, namely Clear Light of Day, from 1980. (It happens to be one of three novels by her nominated for Booker Prize, all without any luck though.) It tells the story of three or four siblings who grew up in the years of India's independence and partition. The narrative structure is somewhat interesting, as it virtually runs in reverse time order from adulthood to childhood. It opens with an old family house in Delhi in the present day, when the elder sister Bim, a teacher with grey hair, has a visit from the younger sister Tara who since long ago has married and moved abroad with her husband working in foreign service. Part two deals with their teenage years when they had their first romances and their brother Raja was rebelling against the family with his interest in Urdu literature and eventually left for Pakistan. The third part goes back further in time to their naive childhood with all the happy times but also petty fights. The novel returns to the present only in part four, not with a big melodramatic reunion but a reconciliaton among the siblings symbolically.

The novel is not just about the decline of a family's fortunes or the love-hate relationships among siblings. It is also a story about compromises between dreams and reality in life, a theme made more poignant by the reverse time order. As children, Raja used to say that he would want to be a hero when he grew up and Bim said she wanted to be a heroine; they laughed at Tara who said she wanted to be a mother and knit for her babies. Their aunt Mira had to console Tara by saying: "There, there, you'll see you grow up to be exactly what you want to be, and I very much doubt if Bim and Raja will be what they say they will be." It turned out to be so true, as Tara eventually found escape from the family's dwindling fortunes by marrying well. Bim on the other hand rejected a great potential romance in her younger years and got stuck in the family house living a largely solitary life. The young Raja liked to fancy himself as a poet ever since he struck up a friendship with a neighbouring Muslim family and started reading Urdu poetry apart from English. His used to impress guests of the Muslim family by reciting the great Urdu poet Iqbal's verses: "Thou didst create night but I made the lamp/Thou didst create clay but I made the cup/Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests/I produced the orchards, gardens and groves/It is I who made the glass out of stone/And it is I who turn a poison into an antidote." His dreams would inspire him to enrol in a college for Islamic studies, to violent objections from his father, who said Hindus would be after his blood and Muslims too since they would not trust him. Those were the days of impending partition and indeed Raja soon witnessed the house of his neighbour Hyder Ali go up in flames.

Raja was ultimately to abandon his family and move to Hyderabad in search of his like-minded friends, an act that his sister Bim held against him throughout their adult years. As Bim would remark to Tara, he never became much of a poet despite his attempts. His poems just seemed very derivative to Bim whenever she took them out of her drawers to read. "He had made no effort to break the iron ring of cliches, he had seemed content to link them, ring to ring ... ... One could see in them only a wish to emulate and to step where his heroes had stepped before him." Nevertheless, Bim continues to cherish the memory of Raja sharing his joys of poetry with her. The last pages in the novel make a beautiful conclusion to the themes of friendship and bonding, pursuits of the arts and life in general, with a description of Bim at a concert where an old singer is accompanied by the tabla and so on. His voice is a little cracked, "inclined to break, although not merely with age but with the bitterness of his experiences, the sadness and passion and frustration". "He sang like a man who had come, at the end of his journey, within sighting distance of death..." Suddenly she recognised something the man was singing: "Your world is the world of fish and fowl. My world is the cry at dawn." She was filled with excitement. Iqbal's, she whispered, Raja's favourite.