The Management of Grief

Judith Templeton is not exactly an antagonist in this story but is a frequent foil for the narrator. Her character contrasts sharply with Shaila Bhave’s, and serves to throw Bhave’s qualities into relief. She is also a character whom we see only from the outside and in a limited role, so—unlike with Bhave—readers have little sense of her human complexity. She comes across as a brash and simple character, where Bhave is a quiet and complicated one.

A white government bureaucrat assigned to deal with a group of bereaved Indian immigrants, Templeton is well-meaning and earnest, but she is also blundering, condescending and tone deaf. It is not merely her failure to speak Hindi that limits her communications with the Indian mourners, but also her dogged rationality. This rationality does not allow for spiritual experience, or even for secular expressions of anger and shock. Introducing herself to Bhave, Templeton tells her (with a typical combination of diffidence and self-importance) that she “has no experience dealing with a tragedy of this scale” (183). Bhave then quietly interjects, “Who could?” (183). It is Bhave who is the voice of common sense in this exchange, but Templeton fails to see this.

While Templeton is a character, she is also a kind of symbol. She represents many aspects of the modernized Western world that Bhave finds off-putting and that she must learn to navigate. At the same time, Templeton’s rationality can be seen as her own sort of religion: a mirror image of the Indian ashram to which Bhave’s friend Kusum retreats. Like Kusum’s newfound asceticism, Templeton’s reliance on formulas and templates is an overly clear and tidy way of dealing with the more complex and unmanageable parts of life, and Bhave ultimately rejects both worldviews. 

Kusum is Bhave’s neighbor, and like Judith Templeton is a simpler character than Bhave. Bhave, however, sees Kusum in a more sympathetic light than she does Templeton. This is partly because Kusum is Bhave’s friend, as well as her neighbor—their intimacy is seen by the fact that Bhave refers to her by her first name—and is also because Kusum has been through the same ordeal as Bhave, having lost most of her family in a plane crash. The fact that she has rejected Pam, her rebellious surviving daughter, shows the narrowness of her piety, but Bhave does not judge her even for this blind spot. She has been brought up in the same culture as Kusum, and she can understand Kusum’s disappointment in being left with the “bad” daughter and having lost the “good” one: “The younger one, the goody-goody one according to Pam […] she was on that plane. She was going to spend July and August with grandparents because Pam wouldn’t go” (181).

Kusum is the character who first delivers the news of the plane crash to Bhave, running across the lawn in her bathrobe: a sight that to Bhave is initially comical, even while a part of her understands that there must be a serious purpose behind it. In some ways, this early view of Kusum seems definitive, even with all of the changes that she later undergoes. Unlike Bhave, she gains no perspective on her experience, only a physical distance from it. Some part of her remains that raw, shocked woman, stumbling across the lawn in her bathrobe.