A Story I Loved: "A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri
There is something particularly awful about two people who know each other very well becoming strangers. I think most of us imagine the end of a relationship as some tremendous, definitive event: an argument, a betrayal, somebody packing a suitcase and leaving in the middle of the night. But what happens when there is no great argument? When two people continue to live in the same house, eat at the same table, and sleep in the same bed, yet find themselves unable to say anything meaningful to each other? This is the situation Jhumpa Lahiri gives us in “A Temporary Matter,” the opening story of her collection Interpreter of Maladies, and I think it is one of the most quietly devastating things I've read.
The premise is almost comically ordinary. Shoba and Shukumar, a married couple living in Boston, receive a notice that their electricity will be shut off for one hour every evening for five days. Their marriage has been falling apart since the stillbirth of their child, and the two have developed separate routines, carefully arranging their lives so that they hardly have to encounter one another. But the darkness gives them an excuse to sit together, eat dinner, and begin telling each other secrets. At first these are small confessions, the sort of things that might embarrass someone but wouldn't permanently alter a marriage. Slowly, though, the revelations become more intimate, and for a moment it seems that this ridiculous little interruption in their electricity might actually save them.
What interests me most about the story is the way Lahiri makes the power outage do so much emotional work. It is such an unremarkable inconvenience, something that could happen to anybody, and yet it creates an entirely different set of rules for these two people. In the dark, Shoba and Shukumar can speak without having to look at one another. They can admit things that would feel unbearable under the ordinary lighting of their kitchen. I love this idea that sometimes intimacy requires a kind of blindness, that there are things we cannot bear to reveal while watching another person's face change in response.
There is a wonderful irony here, too. The darkness is supposed to be temporary, a minor disruption that the city promises to fix in five days. The damage to the marriage, on the other hand, is something neither Shoba nor Shukumar knows how to repair. As the evenings progress, the reader begins to hope that the return of the electricity will coincide with some return of their affection. Lahiri lets us believe in this possibility for an almost cruel amount of time.
And then comes the ending.
I won't spoil its precise mechanics, because I think the story deserves to be experienced without knowing what will happen, but Lahiri executes a reversal that changes the meaning of nearly everything preceding it. What seemed like a gradual reconciliation is revealed to have been something much more complicated. The secrets that initially appeared to bring the couple closer become evidence of the enormous distances between them. I remember finishing the story and immediately returning to its beginning, trying to locate the point at which I had misunderstood what was happening. The remarkable thing is that Lahiri hadn't misled me at all. I had simply wanted the marriage to survive, and so I had interpreted every small gesture of tenderness as proof that it would.
This is one of the things I admire most in fiction: the ability to make the reader complicit in an illusion. We are so accustomed to stories in which confession leads to understanding, understanding to forgiveness, and forgiveness to some version of happiness. Lahiri recognizes that telling the truth can also be an act of separation. Sometimes what we reveal to another person makes it impossible to continue loving them in the same way. Sometimes we have been holding on to a relationship precisely because there are things we have refused to say.
I also admire the almost complete absence of melodrama in her prose. Consider how easily this story could have become unbearable in less capable hands. We have a dead child, a grieving marriage, a husband and wife who can barely stand to occupy the same room. There are enough ingredients here for a very tragic, very sentimental piece of writing. Yet Lahiri spends much of the story describing meals, groceries, the arrangement of furniture, and the ordinary business of getting through the day. Her characters are allowed to be petty, distracted, and occasionally unkind. Their grief does not make them particularly noble. It makes them tired.
And I think this is important. There is a temptation, especially when writing about loss, to make every detail announce its significance. The untouched dinner plate must symbolize absence; the empty bedroom must represent grief; the rain outside must somehow reflect the sadness of the characters. Lahiri does something much more difficult. She allows ordinary objects to remain ordinary until the emotional circumstances surrounding them make their significance unavoidable. Food is food. A candle is a candle. The couple's suffering does not transform their kitchen into some grand metaphor for the human condition. They still have to eat dinner.
Perhaps what I find most moving about “A Temporary Matter” is its refusal to give grief a particularly attractive shape. Shoba and Shukumar have suffered the same loss, but their suffering has made them less capable of understanding one another. We like to imagine that shared tragedy necessarily brings people together, that love becomes stronger when it has survived something terrible. Lahiri suggests that the opposite can be equally true. Two people can endure the same event and emerge from it with entirely different versions of what happened, neither of which the other knows how to inhabit.
By the final scene, the lights have returned, and the couple can finally see each other clearly. It is an almost painfully simple arrangement, but I think Lahiri earns every bit of it. The story has spent five evenings teaching us how much easier it is to speak in the dark, only to leave us with the consequences of finally having to look.
I love this story because it understands that a relationship can end without either person becoming a villain. There is no convenient moral failure to blame, no single act that explains everything. There are simply two people, both wounded, both capable of tenderness, who have discovered that tenderness may no longer be enough. And perhaps the saddest part is that for five evenings, over dinner, we are allowed to imagine otherwise.
Read "A Temporary Matter" here:
