ROLE OF MUSIC IN CLEAR LIGHT OF DAYTo the three dimensions of space, time and character, music adds a fourth. It gives Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day a cohesive imprint and effects the amalgamation of the diverse elements of her fiction. Desai’s technique of stream of consciousness renders her novel a psychological flavour. This is best appreciated when we focus on the musical background that foregrounds the theme. It also colours the novel with a sensibility that vibrates through its hidden spaces. The verbal aspect of the fiction is recreated and brought into life with the layers of music that surrounds it and also pierces it.

CLD opens with the singing of Koels. The ever expanding voices calling each other and echoing through the vacant spaces of time set the tune of the novel. It also closes with the musical rendering of Iqbal’s poetry which serves to integrate the divergent elements within and without.

The novel centres round the Das family. Bim and Tara, the two sisters, meet after years. It is through their reminiscences that we are introduced into the complex relationships that make the very texture of the novel. Left alone with Baba, his autistic brother, Bim struggles through the course of her life which appears to be a dull and monotonous continuity. The emotional chasm with her brother, once so close to her, has a cancerous hold on her and parallels the national history with the cleavage of a single nation into two distinct identities.

Music becomes a panacea of all these deeper disturbances and aligns with each character in its own terms. Baba is introduced through music of the forties evoking the period in which the novel is set. The numbers he plays point to a trap that he is enmeshed in due to his disability. His old records with scratches and his mysterious silence in the enclosed bubble of his dreamy world evoke the spectacle of the decaying old Delhi.

Desai weaves in the strain of neo-colonialism which runs as a reality in the post-independent India. The East- West encounter is depicted by her through music. Biswas loves Western classical music and his mother loves Rabindra sangeet. Similarly, in the Das household, we hear Western songs and in their neighbours—Ali and Misra’s—we hear Indian Classical music. Whereas, Baba draws the sustenance of his life through music, for the Misras it is both a source of entertainment and livelihood.

The main theme of the novel is brought out most effectively in the last scene when Mulk Misra, one of the Misra brothers, and his ageing guru sing ‘at a soiree’. Bim and Baba are invited and they attend it. Bim realises that the harmonious relationship between the old and the young, the guru and his young disciple establishes a possibility of a meaningful interaction between past and present, old and youth. She perceives continuity in history which gave them the soil in which to hand down their roots. Music thus, in the course of the novel, integrates the individual with the family, society and culture and synthesizes the divergent elements that lie within and without. It becomes symbolic of the intuitive understanding of oneself, and of the reality that lies submerged under appearances.