Analysis of Two Religions in Anita Desai's "Clear Light of Day".

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Religion is a part and parcel in the lives of the sub-continental people. Without religion, sub-continent’s people’s lives can’t be imagined. In the novel, namely, Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai is not concerned about religion too much. Her main concern is on the relationship between the brothers and the sisters in a family. By her story, she shows that brothers and sisters can’t harbour resentments and grievances against one another on a permanent basis. It’s the time which destroys and preserves the relationship, as T.S. Eliot states in his Four Quartets: “Time the destroyer is time the preserver”. But, since the religion is unarguably an inseparable entity in the lives of sub-continent’s people, it automatically comes in the writings which are based on the people of the sub-continent. In Clear Light of Day, as it is about the people of the sub-continent, religion came out automatically. Desai couldn’t keep it out of her text. In Clear Light of Day, we find two religions – Hinduism, Islam. At first, we want to talk about a belief of Hinduism – a belief associated with the cow. In the middle of the Chapter 3 of the text, we find an incident which happened within the territory of the Das Family. The incident was the drowning of a cow which happened due to the careless attitude of the Das Family gardener. The gardener left the cow out instead of putting her in the shed at night. In the dark, while everyone slept, she broke the rope that tethered her and wandered through the garden like a white ghost. Her hooves were silent in the grass. She blundered her way through the carvanda hedge at the back of the house, and tumbled into the well and drowned in it. The drowning of the cow was considered by Das Family members as “a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness waiting to re-emerge.” According to them, it was a blot, a black

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