A temporary matter : halt, avoidance, silence and disintegration.

The free indirect disperse begins with a notice that is delivered to the couple. No formal introduction of characters, no background details : Lahiri just pushes the reader right into the middle of the story. Though as the story unfolds, the past is very methodically amalgamated into the present.

On a very shallow ground, plot-wise the first short story is about a couple, where the wife has recently had a miscarriage and how their fairy –tale wedding has turned into a torturous routine. Both the man and wife have been described almost completely, a little more attention paid to the detailing of the lady, as the narrator fluctuates between third person and Shukumar, the husband. They have a house, she has a job, he is a phd student, she had a miscarriage, he is working on a thesis, she is earning, he cooks and she gyms. One normal day, they get a notice that their lights will be cut out for an hour in the night and it is during these nights that they start opening up to each other again, till the point that they have nothing more to hide and can peacefully part.

If one reads carefully, it is very easy to notice that language becomes an emotional tool for Lahiri. Their marriage is disintegrating, just like the language of the text. And the disintegration, from the characters seeps into to their household, into their daily lives. Shoba, in happier days planned ahead of her time, whether it be that extra toothbrush for an unexpected night guest, the endless food supplies , or the savings from her promotions into a separate bank account for the rainy days. But after the tragedy, she not only physically disintegrates : “looking at 33, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble” or “she looked like that sometimes…on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy”, but allows the disintegration to slowly settle in into a monotony : the late coming from work, the casual littering of things around and the late payment of bills.

It begins with subtle avoidance : the “no-longer looking into each other’s eyes” , the “not reaching out for each other before sleeping”,  the "not having dinner together", the "avoiding of friends" and the avoidance reaches to the extremity of not talking to each other. And the avoidance soon grows into indifference.

As the couple get self-conscious and engrossed in to their own lives : him with the cooking and her with the work, we can feel the disintegration settling in. With Shukumar, the same is depicted through his cooking. Food is a prominent theme in most of the nine short stories, and in this one, Lahiri very beautifully evokes the olfactory sense with the smells and sights of the Indian cuisine. The dishes are well prepared which makes the reader want to believe that the husband is still hoping to salvage the relationship but the description of the running out of food supplies, the quick-fix techniques he has to use to put together a nice dish, provoke a strong sense of a calamity at short hand.

The strong feeling of disintegration is reinforced with silences of the characters. A lively young couple, with curiosity unbound, turned into mute figures of hopelessness.

The reader is fooled into believing that their one-hour dark conversations every night might save them, but as they slowly confide into each other, their secrets, the illusion of re-union is very delicately shattered. So yes, the story has a sad undertone. Lahiri seems part modernist, with a subtle description of reality and no malice in the text : no false hopes and no fairy tale endings.