The Management of Grief

“I was so well brought up I never felt comfortable calling my husband by his first name.”

This quote shows the strictness and formality (to a Western sensibility) of the narrator’s culture and upbringing; it also calls into question Western ideas about intimacy and expressiveness. For the narrator, love is too serious and important of a concept to talk about freely; this does not mean that she does not love her husband.  

“‘I have no experience,’ she admits. ‘That is, I have an MSW and I’ve worked in liaison with accident victims, but I mean I have no experience with a tragedy of this scale—.’ ‘Who could?’ I ask.”

This exchange between the narrator and Judith Templeton represents the lack of understanding between them; while they are both speaking in English, they are nevertheless speaking in two different languages. Templeton is approaching the plane crash from a practical, bureaucratic perspective; the narrator’s perspective is more empathic. Each woman believes that she is the reasonable one, and there is a sense in which they are both right. 

“‘Nothing I can do will make any difference,’ I say. ‘We must all grieve in our own way.’”

The narrator’s conviction that space and dignity must be given to the mourners is at odds with Templeton’s mission to help these mourners. Their struggles to work together show the difficulty of helping people in trouble, or even establishing what constitutes help. The many varieties of grieving is also a theme in this story, as shown by the different reactions among the narrator’s “new tribe” (191) of mourners, and shows the uselessness of Templeton’s one-size-fits-all template for “grief management.” 

“Kusum says that we can’t escape our fate. She says that all of these people […] were fated to die together off this beautiful bay. She learned this from a swami in Toronto.”

This quote shows the difference between the narrator and her friend Kusum. In her grief, Kusum is hungry for an authoritative and comforting perspective; the narrator is more skeptical and solitary. There is also an irony in this sentiment sounding like one of calm acceptance—as preached by Judith Templeton—when in fact there is desperation and denial behind it. 

“I had heard about the sharks from Dr. Ranganathan.” 

The narrator, like the other mourners, is unpredictable in her grief; she is hopeful at times and fatalistic at others. Here, she surprises a sympathizer by being (or seeming) quite unfazed at the news of sharks preying on the plane crash victims. This quote shows how grief and shock can sometimes make people seem unnaturally hard and tough, as well as poignant and vulnerable.

“My suitcase in the hotel is packed heavy with dry clothes for my boys.”

This detail shows the narrator’s irrational hope, at the heart of her rational, coping demeanor. It is all the more effective for being so simply stated. She wants to maintain the hope that her sons, whom she describes as strong swimmers, have somehow survived the ordeal. However, they are likely deceased.

“Once upon a time we were well brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet.”

The narrator’s grief and anger have made her a frequent stranger to herself; she is unpredictable to herself, as well as other people. In this case, there is an irony in her acting more like an aggressive Western woman than a “well brought up” traditional Indian woman, even while she is defending her Indian community and the memory of her family.

“My parents are progressive people; they do not blame communities for a few individuals.”

The narrator often finds more of an open-mindedness and fairness in India than in Canada. In this case, while she knows her parents’ "progressive" attitude towards the Sikh community to be the right and reasonable one, she also cannot completely share it. Her own emotions around the plane crash are too raw, and she has also perhaps been infected by the suspicions and racism of her adopted country.

“My parents abhor mindless mortification.”

Although the narrator’s parents are traditional Indians, they are also irreligious, based on their own experience of religious extremism. (The narrator had an excessively pious maternal grandmother.) This experience echoes the central episode of religious extremism in this story, that of the plane crash caused by Sikh terrorists. At the same time, the narrator’s parents have their own brand of rigidity—they are closed to and dismissive of spiritual experiences of all kinds—which shows the danger of reacting to extremism with an equal and opposite extremism.

“Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between two worlds.”

The narrator is talking here about feeling torn between the rational perspective of her parents and the more mystical perspective of religiously observant Indians. At the same time, she is talking about other dualities with which she must contend: between her Toronto and her Indian self, and also between the world of the living and the dead.

“Then, on the third day of the sixth month into this odyssey, in an abandoned temple in a tiny Himalayan village […] my husband descends to me."

The narrator has a visitation from her husband in an Indian temple, which is one of the only instances in the story when she feels (or sees) the expected thing at the expected moment. This visitation, however, only complicates the story, rather than ends it. In part, this is because the narrator must hide her sighting of her husband from her mother, who does not believe in such things. It is also because the narrator, unlike her friend Kusum, is too skeptical and complicated of a character to permanently abandon her worldly life for communion with the dead.

“We’ve been melted down and recast as a new tribe.”

The narrator is referring to her new community of mourners: a community that is distinct from her family and her culture, although it encompasses both of these things. The "melting down and recasting" metaphor invokes artistic creation but also desperate survival. It shows the degree to which the narrator feels herself to be transformed by her experience.  

“I remember a time when we all trusted each other in this new country, it was only the new country we worried about.” 

The narrator’s sympathies have shifted with the plane crash, and she now allies herself less with her own people than with law-abiding citizens as opposed to terrorists. At the same time, she is rueful about this shift, and there is a suggestion here that it may have been the "new country" that indirectly caused the plane crash in the first place.