"The Management of Grief" moves from Canada to Ireland to India and back to Canada.
As the story opens, Indians have gathered in Shaila's home, where she has heard the news that a plane carrying her husband and sons has exploded. A person she doesn't know is making tea, while the television and two radios run. The "phone rings and rings." The home is permeated by industrialized culture: a Sony Walkman, talk of "space debris" and "lasers," a girl in a MacDonald's uniform. The scene feels enclosed, unnatural, claustrophobic.
Four days later, Shaila is outdoors, in Ireland, "on a rock overlooking a bay in Ireland" where bodies from the wreckage have washed up. There are "June breezes." Rather than spend more time in the Irish hospital that has become a central point for identifying the dead, Shaila and some of the others decide to "spend the day by the waters." Shaila ruins her best sari stepping into the warm sea water where she imagines she might have played with her sons, but where now their dead bodies may be. Dr. Ranganathan floats rose petals for his wife in the water, while Shaila tosses out a poem she has written. They are trying to grieve but are stunned. Irish people hug them on the streets.
From Ireland, Shaila and some of the others move on to India. Here, Shaila realizes she is trapped "between two modes of knowledge," but also finds comfort visiting a temple in the Himalayas. Here, making an offering of "flowers and sweetmeats" to a tribal god, Shaila is visited by the spirit of her dead husband. While much of this India section involves backstory on Shaila's family history and offers some generic descriptions of the family traveling "to hill stations and beach resorts," at the temple we get a specific description of the scene: Shaila's dead husband descends next to "a scrawny sadhu in moth-eaten robes." Her husband wears "a vanilla suit.' The sadhu "tosses petals on a butter-fed flame ... and sweeps his face of flies." This encounter with the spirit of her dead husband is depicted as more real to Shaila than the rest of her trip to India.
Back in Toronto, the landscape is urban, far different from the remote Himalaya village with the temple, or the clubs and resorts of India. Shaila accompanies Judith to a high-rise apartment to visit an Indian couple who have lost a child and are having trouble understanding how to cope with the government, which wants them to sign papers they don't comprehend so that they can get benefits. Their rooms are "dark and stuffy," lit only with an oil lamp, because their electricity has been turned off. They make tea. The scene is an odd hybrid of Indian and Western culture as Shaila tries to bridge the cultural gap by translating between English and Hindi. The scene is claustrophobic and enclosed, as it was at Shaila's house at the beginning. There's also a sense of enclosure as Shaila rides in Judith's car, "looking out the window." It is only as Shaila makes the decision not to try to help Judith, and asks "let me out at the subway," that she begins to become free.
At the end of the story, the scenery has symbolic significance. It starts out "grey ... icy." Shalia stays "indoors, watching television." Then the weather changes and becomes warmer, with a "clear blue sky." In this setting, Shaila, finally outdoors in Canada, gets the message from her dead relatives that frees her: "Go, be brave." Outdoors, in an open, liberating setting that reflects her new inner freedom and inner clarity, Shaila begins to walk.
No comments:
Post a Comment