Clear Light of Day

The well in which the cow drowns is the site of a traumatic memory shared by the two sisters and is referenced throughout the novel. It is a dark and claustrophobic space that represents both literal and figurative death—the place where the mother cow died, leaving behind a calf that starved to death for lack of its mother’s milk. For the girls, the calf’s abandonment symbolizes their own—as their parents were often too ill or too busy to care for them. When the girls accidentally wander into the forbidden part of the garden, they are horrified, imagining the bones that were left behind from the rotting corpse even though there is no longer anything to see. The well waits for them at the bottom of the garden, “bottomless and black and stinking” (121).

For Aunt Mira, the well represents the depth of her alcohol addiction, and it beckons her in her nightmarish dreams, in which her white widow’s sari becomes a straightjacket holding her captive, “swaddled and bound” while the children feed on her body (93). She crawled to the edge of the well and “whimpered for that drink” (93) which awaited her at the bottom. The alcohol was simultaneously the release from her imprisonment and ultimately the cause of her death. The image of death in the well haunts Bim too, for night after night she dreams of her aunt’s body floating in the water like that of Ophelia (103). Yet Ophelia had died by suicide, and suicide was viewed as the ultimate sin:

The well then contained death as it once had contained merely water, frogs

and harmless floating things. The horror of that death by drowning lived in the area behind the carvanda hedge like a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness waiting to re-emerge. It was a blot, a black and stinking blot (111).