Clear Light of Day

Bimla, or Bim, is the older sister and, along with Tara, one of the novel’s two protagonists. She is a middle-aged, unmarried woman who teaches history at the local girls’ school. She appears older than her age, and she behaves in ways that strike her glamorous younger sister as eccentric. From Bim’s inner thoughts, readers soon learn that the stress of keeping the house together and caring for the family has caused her to age prematurely.

On the surface, Bim seems like an ideal representative of the “Modern Indian Woman”—an archetype that arose in response to the rapid social changes of the 20th century. She was unmarried, educated, and employed, all signs of her financial and legal independence. Yet she has nonetheless embraced—or been forced into—a traditionally feminized role of care and sacrifice for the sake of the family. As a child and adolescent, she idealized her older brother Raja, wanting to be a hero like him, not realizing that he was merely copying the heroic actions of others. Later, she thinks herself the opposite of her more conventional, married sister Tara, but she comes to realize that the two have more in common than she initially thought.