The Management of Grief

This story concerns a bereft immigrant community and its narrator, Shaila Bhave, who travels all over the globe, from Canada to Ireland to India and back again. Bhave’s voyages, however, are as much internal as they are external. While Judith Templeton tells Bhave that grief moves in a straight line, passing through stages along the way, Bhave’s own experience of grief is circuitous and unpredictable, doubling back on itself in much the same way that her travels do. She has frequent visions of her dead husband and two sons, while also rejecting the traditional Indian spirituality of her friend Kusum. Bhave follows the counsel of Templeton in some ways—moving out of her house and into her own small apartment, involving herself in charitable work—but rejects it in others. While visiting her parents in India, she states, “Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between two worlds” (189). She is referring specifically to the tension that she feels between Indian and Western values and traditions but is also referring implicitly to the tension between the living and the dead.  

Bhave’s already complicated voyages are further complicated by the fact that she does not find spirituality and rationalism in the expected places. Her Indian parents are Western-style rationalists, her mother having grown up in an oppressively religious environment. Conversely, Bhave’s immigrant friend Dr. Ranganathan—who has lost his entire family in the plane crash—retains a subversive spirituality, despite his overtly pragmatic, scientific outlook. He throws roses upon the ocean off of the coast of Ireland, an Indian-style homage to his dead family, while also counseling Bhave that they must not discount the possibility that some of their relatives may have been able to swim to safety. By the end of the story, he has moved from Toronto to Texas, but he is still reluctant to sell his old family home: “The house is a temple, he says; the king-sized bed in the master bedroom is a shrine” (191). Even Pam, Kusum’s rebellious surviving daughter, has her own way of mourning her lost family. Her plans to move to Hollywood and to open an exercise studio may reflect her transient Western values, but her rejection of her traditional Indian upbringing is perhaps not quite as complete as she believes that it is. She remains in touch with Bhave even after having moved away, and her very moving away reflects the more overtly spiritual peregrinations of her estranged mother, who has never returned from India.

Ultimately, Bhave cannot commit fully either to Indian or to Western values—and styles of grieving—but must instead chart her own path between the two, one that is not without a mysticism of its own. This mysticism has less to do with easy consolations than with a kind of alertness and an acceptance of the unknown; it is akin to a spiritual pilgrimage and is inseparable from Bhave’s complicated destiny as an immigrant. As she states it, she must “[c]omplete what we have started […] I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end” (197).