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.