Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Anita Desai
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The koels began to call before daylight. Their voices rang out from the dark
trees like an arrangement of bells, calling and echoing each others’ calls,
mocking and enticing each other into ever higher and shriller calls. More and
more joined in as the sun rose and when Tara could no longer bear the
querulous demand in their voices, she got up and went out onto the veranda
to find the blank white glare of the summer sun thrusting in between the
round pillars and the purple bougainvillea. Wincing, she shielded her eyes as
she searched for the birds that had clamoured for her appearance, but saw
nothing. The cane chairs on the veranda stood empty. A silent line of ants
filed past her feet and down the steps into the garden. Then she saw her
sister’s figure in white, slowly meandering along what as children they had
called ‘the rose walk’.
Dropping her hands to pick up the hem of her long nightdress, Tara ran
down the steps, bowing her head to the morning sun that came slicing down
like a blade of steel onto the back of her neck, and crossed the dry crackling
grass of the lawn to join her sister who stood watching, smiling.
The rose walk was a strip of grass, still streaked green and grey, between
two long beds of roses at the far end of the lawn where a line of trees fringed
the garden—fig and silver oak, mulberry and eucalyptus. Here there was still
shade and, it seemed to Tara, the only bit of cultivation left; everything else,
even the papaya and lemon trees, the bushes of hibiscus and oleander, the
beds of canna lilies, seemed abandoned to dust and neglect, to struggle as
they could against the heat and sun of summer.
But the rose walk had been maintained almost as it was. Or was it? It
seemed to Tara that there had been far more roses in it when she was a child
—luscious shaggy pink ones, small crisp white ones tinged with green, silky
yellow ones that smelt of tea—and not just these small negligible crimson
heads that lolled weakly on their thin stems. Tara had grown to know them on
those mornings when she had trailed up and down after her mother who was
expecting her youngest child and had been advised by her doctor to take
some exercise. Her mother had not liked exercise, perhaps not the new baby
either, and had paced up and down with her arms folded and her head sunk in
thought while the koels mocked and screamed and dive-bombed the trees.
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