Clear Light of Day

by

Anita Desai

Tara Character Analysis

Tara is the third Das sibling, and the novel revolves around the memories and family conflicts that arise when she travels back to India to stay with Bim and Baba in the family house in Delhi, then attend Raja’s daughter Moyna’s wedding in Hyderabad. Part I and Part IV of the novel primarily follow her perspective and note her changing perspective on her family relationships, childhood, and major life decisions. As a child, she is timid and vain; she struggles to fit in at school and Raja and Bim tease her relentlessly, but she grows closely attached to Aunt Mira. After Aunt Mira’s death, she starts spending most of her time with the Misra sisters, then takes the first opportunity to marry Bakul and leave India. In adulthood, she is outwardly successful and takes pride in raising her daughters Mala and Maya, but her relationship with Bakul is cold and unsatisfying. She also resents Bim’s defiance and resistance to change, just like Bim resents Tara’s elitism and weakness of will. But at the end of the novel, the sisters overcome their differences, apologize for their past errors, and agree to work toward a new, more fruitful relationship.

Tara Quotes in Clear Light of Day

The Clear Light of Day quotes below are all either spoken by Tara or refer to Tara. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

“But you wouldn’t want to return to life as it used to be, would you?” Bim continued to tease her in that dry voice. “All that dullness, boredom, waiting. Would you care to live that over again? Of course not. Do you know anyone who would—secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self—really prefer to return to childhood?”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened lone ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs the Khiljis the Sultanate, the Moghuls—that lot.” She snapped her fingers in time to her words smartly. “And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back.”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Baba, Bakul
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

[Tara] was prevented from explaining herself by the approach of a monstrous body of noise that seemed to be pushing its way out through a tight tunnel, rustily grinding through, and then emerged into full brassy volume, making the pigeons that lived on the ledge under the veranda ceiling throw up their wings and depart as if at a shot.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:

The ice-cream did have, she had to admit, a beneficial effect all round: in a little while, as the students began to leave the house, prettily covering their heads against the sun with coloured veils and squealing as the heat of the earth burnt through their slippers, the gramophone in Baba’s room stirred and rumbled into life again. Tara was grateful for it. She wished Bakul could see them now—her family.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Bakul
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

“I still keep it in my desk—to remind me. Whenever I begin to wish to see Raja again or wish he would come and see us, then I take out that letter and read it again. Oh, I can tell you, I could write him such an answer, he wouldn’t forget it for many years either!” She gave a short laugh and ended it with a kind of a choke, saying “You say I should come to Hyderabad with you for his daughter’s wedding. How can I? How can I enter his house—my landlord’s house? I, such a poor tenant? Because of me, he can’t raise the rent or sell the house and make a profit—imagine that. The sacrifice!”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Raja
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

She needed protection. She wanted help. She reached out for the hand that would help her, protect her …

… Here it was. Here, in this tall, slim coolness just by her hand, at the tips of her fingers. If she got her fingers around it, its slender pale glassiness, and then drew it closer, close to her mouth, she could close her lips about it and suck, suck little, little sips, with little, little juicy sounds, and it would be so sweet, so sweet again, just as when they were little babies, little babies for her to feed, herself a little baby sucking, sucking at the little trickle of juice that came hurrying in, sliding in …

And she sucked and laughed and sucked and cried.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Aunt Mira
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:

“Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others—to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.”

Related Characters: Dr. Biswas (speaker), Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, Aunt Mira
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

Usually the mother did not take exercise. She either sat up at the card table, playing, or lay very still on her bed, with a suffering face tilted upwards in warning so that Tara did not dare approach. Even now she kept her distance. She paced slowly, obediently, her arms folded, her chin sunk into her neck, as if considering a hand of cards, while Tara, in her nightie, skipped and danced after her, her bare feet making tracks through the misty dew on the grass.

Related Characters: Tara, The Das Mother
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

No one could help noticing how slow he was to learn such baby skills as turning over, sitting up, smiling in response, talking, standing or walking. It all seemed to take an age with him. He seemed to have no desire to reach out and take anything. It was as if his parents, too aged, had given birth to a child without vitality or will—all that had gone into the other, earlier children and there had been none left for this last, late one. […] His mother soon tired of carrying him about, feeding him milky foods with a silver spoon, washing and powdering him. […] “My bridge is suffering,” she complained. There was the ayah of course, Tara’s ayah made nurse again, but she could only be made to work twelve hours a day, or sixteen, or eighteen, not more. She could not stay awake for twenty-four.

Related Characters: The Das Mother (speaker), Tara, Baba, Aunt Mira, The Ayah
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

The girls […] looked through the green tin trunk once again for some remnant of her wedding, of her improbable married life. And there was one: a stripe of crimson and gold edging an untouched Benares silk sari. Since it was white, she had been allowed to retain it, and now it was yellowed like old ivory. The strip of crimson and gold made it impossible for her to wear: taboo. It was wrapped carefully in tissue and laid away like some precious relic. […] It contained Aunt Mira’s past, and the might-have-been future, as floating and elusive as the musk itself. But she would not touch it. When they became insistent, she said, laughing, “All right, when I die, you may dress me in it for the funeral pyre.”

Related Characters: Aunt Mira (speaker), Tara, Bim
Page Number: 108-109
Explanation and Analysis:

They grew around her knees, stubby and strong, some as high as her waist, some rising to her shoulders. She felt their limbs, brown and knobby with muscle, hot with the life force. They crowded about her so that they formed a ring, a protective railing about her. Now no one could approach, no threat, no menace. Their arms were tight around her, keeping her for themselves. They owned her and yes, she wanted to be owned. She owned them too, and they needed to be owned. Their opposing needs seemed to mingle and meet at the very roots, inside the soil in which they grew.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, Aunt Mira
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:

The water at the bottom was black, with an oily, green sheen. […] The cow had never been hauled out. Although men had come with ropes and pulleys to help the gardener, it had proved impossible. She had been left to rot: that was what made the horror of it so dense and intolerable. The girls stared, scarcely breathing, till their eyes started out of their heads, but no ghostly ship of bones rode the still water. It must have sunk to the bottom and rooted itself in the mud, like a tree. There was nothing to see—neither hoof nor horn nor one staring, glittering eye. The water had stagnated and blackened, closing over the bones like a new skin. But even the new skin was black now and although it stank, it gave away nothing.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, The Cow
Related Symbols: The Well
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

The girls became infected with something of Raja’s restlessness. It made Bim more ambitious at school […] She was not quite sure where this would lead but she seemed to realize it was a way out. A way out of what? They still could not say, could not define the unsatisfactory atmosphere of their home. They did not realize now that this unsatisfactoriness was not based only on their parents’ continual absence, their seemingly total disinterest in their children, their absorption in each other. The secret, hopeless suffering of their mother was somehow at the root of this subdued greyness, this silent desperation that pervaded the house. Also the disappointment that Baba’s very life and existence were to them, his hopeless future, their anxiety over him. The children could only sense all this, they did not share it, except unwillingly.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, The Das Mother, The Das Father
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“I shall earn my own living—and look after Mira-masi and Baba and—and be independent. There’ll be so many things to do—when we are grown up—when all this is over—” and she swept an arm out over the garden party, dismissing it. “When we are grown up at last—then—then—” but she couldn’t finish for emotion, and her eyes shone in the dusk.

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Baba, Aunt Mira, Misra Sisters (Jaya and Sarla)
Page Number: 140-141
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4 Quotes

She had always thought Bim so competent, so capable. Everyone had thought that—Aunt Mira, the teachers at school, even Raja. But Bim seemed to stampede through the house like a dishevelled storm, creating more havoc than order. […] Tara saw how little she had really observed—either as a child or as a grown woman. She had seen Bim through the lenses of her own self, as she had wanted to see her. And now, when she tried to be objective, when she was old enough, grown enough and removed enough to study her objectively, she found she could not—her vision was strewn, obscured and screened by too much of the past.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Aunt Mira
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

They had come like mosquitoes—Tara and Bakul, and behind them the Misras, and somewhere in the distance Raja and Benazir—only to torment her and, mosquito-like, sip her blood. All of them fed on her blood, at some time or the other had fed—it must have been good blood, sweet and nourishing. Now, when they were full, they rose in swarms, humming away, turning their backs on her.

All these years she had felt herself to be the centre—she had watched them all circling in the air, then returning, landing like birds, folding up their wings and letting down their legs till they touched solid ground. Solid ground. That was what the house had been—the lawn, the rose walk, the guava trees, the veranda: Bim’s domain.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Bakul, Misra Sisters (Jaya and Sarla), Misra Brothers (Brij, Manu, and Mulk), Benazir
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:

She had not known she was going to say that till she had said it. She had only walked in to talk to Baba—cut down his defence and demand some kind of a response from him, some kind of justification from him for herself, her own life, her ways and attitudes, like a blessing from Baba. She had not known she would be led into making such a threat, or blackmailing Baba. She was still hardly aware of what she had said, only something seemed to slam inside her head, painfully, when she looked at Baba.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja
Page Number: 163-164
Explanation and Analysis:

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 and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, The Das Mother, The Das Father
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

“Shall I tell Raja—?”

“Yes,” Bim urged, her voice flying, buoyant. “Tell him how we’re not used to it—Baba and I. Tell him we never travel any more. Tell him we couldn’t come—but he should come. Bring him back with you, Tara—or tell him to come in the winter. All of them. And he can see Sharma about the firm—and settle things. And see to Hyder Ali’s old house—and repair it. Tell him I’m—I’m waiting for him—I want him to come—I want to see him.”

As if frightened by this breakdown in Bim’s innermost self, this crumbling of a great block of stone and concrete, a dam, to release a flood of roaring water, Tara unexpectedly let go Bim’s hand and fell forwards into the car.

Related Characters: Tara (speaker), Bim (speaker), Baba, Raja, Hyder Ali , Mr. Sharma
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 175-176
Explanation and Analysis:
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Tara Quotes in Clear Light of Day

The Clear Light of Day quotes below are all either spoken by Tara or refer to Tara. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

“But you wouldn’t want to return to life as it used to be, would you?” Bim continued to tease her in that dry voice. “All that dullness, boredom, waiting. Would you care to live that over again? Of course not. Do you know anyone who would—secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self—really prefer to return to childhood?”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened lone ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs the Khiljis the Sultanate, the Moghuls—that lot.” She snapped her fingers in time to her words smartly. “And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back.”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Baba, Bakul
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

[Tara] was prevented from explaining herself by the approach of a monstrous body of noise that seemed to be pushing its way out through a tight tunnel, rustily grinding through, and then emerged into full brassy volume, making the pigeons that lived on the ledge under the veranda ceiling throw up their wings and depart as if at a shot.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:

The ice-cream did have, she had to admit, a beneficial effect all round: in a little while, as the students began to leave the house, prettily covering their heads against the sun with coloured veils and squealing as the heat of the earth burnt through their slippers, the gramophone in Baba’s room stirred and rumbled into life again. Tara was grateful for it. She wished Bakul could see them now—her family.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Bakul
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:

“I still keep it in my desk—to remind me. Whenever I begin to wish to see Raja again or wish he would come and see us, then I take out that letter and read it again. Oh, I can tell you, I could write him such an answer, he wouldn’t forget it for many years either!” She gave a short laugh and ended it with a kind of a choke, saying “You say I should come to Hyderabad with you for his daughter’s wedding. How can I? How can I enter his house—my landlord’s house? I, such a poor tenant? Because of me, he can’t raise the rent or sell the house and make a profit—imagine that. The sacrifice!”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Raja
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

She needed protection. She wanted help. She reached out for the hand that would help her, protect her …

… Here it was. Here, in this tall, slim coolness just by her hand, at the tips of her fingers. If she got her fingers around it, its slender pale glassiness, and then drew it closer, close to her mouth, she could close her lips about it and suck, suck little, little sips, with little, little juicy sounds, and it would be so sweet, so sweet again, just as when they were little babies, little babies for her to feed, herself a little baby sucking, sucking at the little trickle of juice that came hurrying in, sliding in …

And she sucked and laughed and sucked and cried.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Aunt Mira
Related Symbols: Baba’s Gramophone
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:

“Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others—to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.”

Related Characters: Dr. Biswas (speaker), Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, Aunt Mira
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

Usually the mother did not take exercise. She either sat up at the card table, playing, or lay very still on her bed, with a suffering face tilted upwards in warning so that Tara did not dare approach. Even now she kept her distance. She paced slowly, obediently, her arms folded, her chin sunk into her neck, as if considering a hand of cards, while Tara, in her nightie, skipped and danced after her, her bare feet making tracks through the misty dew on the grass.

Related Characters: Tara, The Das Mother
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

No one could help noticing how slow he was to learn such baby skills as turning over, sitting up, smiling in response, talking, standing or walking. It all seemed to take an age with him. He seemed to have no desire to reach out and take anything. It was as if his parents, too aged, had given birth to a child without vitality or will—all that had gone into the other, earlier children and there had been none left for this last, late one. […] His mother soon tired of carrying him about, feeding him milky foods with a silver spoon, washing and powdering him. […] “My bridge is suffering,” she complained. There was the ayah of course, Tara’s ayah made nurse again, but she could only be made to work twelve hours a day, or sixteen, or eighteen, not more. She could not stay awake for twenty-four.

Related Characters: The Das Mother (speaker), Tara, Baba, Aunt Mira, The Ayah
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

The girls […] looked through the green tin trunk once again for some remnant of her wedding, of her improbable married life. And there was one: a stripe of crimson and gold edging an untouched Benares silk sari. Since it was white, she had been allowed to retain it, and now it was yellowed like old ivory. The strip of crimson and gold made it impossible for her to wear: taboo. It was wrapped carefully in tissue and laid away like some precious relic. […] It contained Aunt Mira’s past, and the might-have-been future, as floating and elusive as the musk itself. But she would not touch it. When they became insistent, she said, laughing, “All right, when I die, you may dress me in it for the funeral pyre.”

Related Characters: Aunt Mira (speaker), Tara, Bim
Page Number: 108-109
Explanation and Analysis:

They grew around her knees, stubby and strong, some as high as her waist, some rising to her shoulders. She felt their limbs, brown and knobby with muscle, hot with the life force. They crowded about her so that they formed a ring, a protective railing about her. Now no one could approach, no threat, no menace. Their arms were tight around her, keeping her for themselves. They owned her and yes, she wanted to be owned. She owned them too, and they needed to be owned. Their opposing needs seemed to mingle and meet at the very roots, inside the soil in which they grew.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, Aunt Mira
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:

The water at the bottom was black, with an oily, green sheen. […] The cow had never been hauled out. Although men had come with ropes and pulleys to help the gardener, it had proved impossible. She had been left to rot: that was what made the horror of it so dense and intolerable. The girls stared, scarcely breathing, till their eyes started out of their heads, but no ghostly ship of bones rode the still water. It must have sunk to the bottom and rooted itself in the mud, like a tree. There was nothing to see—neither hoof nor horn nor one staring, glittering eye. The water had stagnated and blackened, closing over the bones like a new skin. But even the new skin was black now and although it stank, it gave away nothing.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, The Cow
Related Symbols: The Well
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

The girls became infected with something of Raja’s restlessness. It made Bim more ambitious at school […] She was not quite sure where this would lead but she seemed to realize it was a way out. A way out of what? They still could not say, could not define the unsatisfactory atmosphere of their home. They did not realize now that this unsatisfactoriness was not based only on their parents’ continual absence, their seemingly total disinterest in their children, their absorption in each other. The secret, hopeless suffering of their mother was somehow at the root of this subdued greyness, this silent desperation that pervaded the house. Also the disappointment that Baba’s very life and existence were to them, his hopeless future, their anxiety over him. The children could only sense all this, they did not share it, except unwillingly.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, The Das Mother, The Das Father
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“I shall earn my own living—and look after Mira-masi and Baba and—and be independent. There’ll be so many things to do—when we are grown up—when all this is over—” and she swept an arm out over the garden party, dismissing it. “When we are grown up at last—then—then—” but she couldn’t finish for emotion, and her eyes shone in the dusk.

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Baba, Aunt Mira, Misra Sisters (Jaya and Sarla)
Page Number: 140-141
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4 Quotes

She had always thought Bim so competent, so capable. Everyone had thought that—Aunt Mira, the teachers at school, even Raja. But Bim seemed to stampede through the house like a dishevelled storm, creating more havoc than order. […] Tara saw how little she had really observed—either as a child or as a grown woman. She had seen Bim through the lenses of her own self, as she had wanted to see her. And now, when she tried to be objective, when she was old enough, grown enough and removed enough to study her objectively, she found she could not—her vision was strewn, obscured and screened by too much of the past.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Aunt Mira
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

They had come like mosquitoes—Tara and Bakul, and behind them the Misras, and somewhere in the distance Raja and Benazir—only to torment her and, mosquito-like, sip her blood. All of them fed on her blood, at some time or the other had fed—it must have been good blood, sweet and nourishing. Now, when they were full, they rose in swarms, humming away, turning their backs on her.

All these years she had felt herself to be the centre—she had watched them all circling in the air, then returning, landing like birds, folding up their wings and letting down their legs till they touched solid ground. Solid ground. That was what the house had been—the lawn, the rose walk, the guava trees, the veranda: Bim’s domain.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Raja, Bakul, Misra Sisters (Jaya and Sarla), Misra Brothers (Brij, Manu, and Mulk), Benazir
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:

She had not known she was going to say that till she had said it. She had only walked in to talk to Baba—cut down his defence and demand some kind of a response from him, some kind of justification from him for herself, her own life, her ways and attitudes, like a blessing from Baba. She had not known she would be led into making such a threat, or blackmailing Baba. She was still hardly aware of what she had said, only something seemed to slam inside her head, painfully, when she looked at Baba.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja
Page Number: 163-164
Explanation and Analysis:

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 and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.

Related Characters: Tara, Bim, Baba, Raja, The Das Mother, The Das Father
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

“Shall I tell Raja—?”

“Yes,” Bim urged, her voice flying, buoyant. “Tell him how we’re not used to it—Baba and I. Tell him we never travel any more. Tell him we couldn’t come—but he should come. Bring him back with you, Tara—or tell him to come in the winter. All of them. And he can see Sharma about the firm—and settle things. And see to Hyder Ali’s old house—and repair it. Tell him I’m—I’m waiting for him—I want him to come—I want to see him.”

As if frightened by this breakdown in Bim’s innermost self, this crumbling of a great block of stone and concrete, a dam, to release a flood of roaring water, Tara unexpectedly let go Bim’s hand and fell forwards into the car.

Related Characters: Tara (speaker), Bim (speaker), Baba, Raja, Hyder Ali , Mr. Sharma
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 175-176
Explanation and Analysis: