Role of Time and Memory in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Pages:329-330
Kamal Rani (Department of English, Vaish College, Rohtak, Haryana)

Clear light of Day (1980) is a four-dimensional novel, the fourth dimension being time. This novel deals with the theme of time in relation to eternity, and is inspired by T.S. Eliot’s concept of time as outlined in his Four Quartets from which Desai quotes the well known line, “Time the destroyer is time the preserver”, on the last page of the novel. Explaining the theme of her novel, Desai told Sunil Sethi: “My novel is set in old Delhi and records the tremendous changes that a Hindu family goes through since 1947. Basically, my preoccupation was with recording the passage of time : I was trying to write a four-dimensional piece on how a family’s life moves backwards and forewords in a period of time. My novel is about time as a destroyer, as a preserver, and about what the bondage of time does to people. I have tried to tunnel under the mundane surface of domesticity.”33 Notwithstanding its philosophical leanings, However, the existential concerns seem to run through in it like an under current of water.