The Management of Grief

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1988

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Navigating Cultural Divides

As a newly-widowed immigrant, Shaila Bhave must negotiate many large and small cultural differences between her native and her adopted land. Most obviously, there are the cultural differences between herself and Judith Templeton, a brisk young Canadian government official. Templeton’s businesslike demeanor and overly pragmatic conception of “grief management” are deeply off-putting to Bhave, even while she takes some of Templeton’s advice: for example, moving out of her old family home and into her own apartment. At the same time, Bhave also feels assimilated enough to reject the path that her grieving friend Kusum has taken (moving back to India and joining an ashram). She often feels as estranged from Indian ways as she does from Canadian ways, and she must find some middle ground between the two.

Bhave’s status as an immigrant often causes her to view her own behavior from a distance, through the shocked eyes of a traditional Indian woman. Like the tragedy that she has been through, it splits her off from herself. Observing herself and Kusum losing their tempers at a customs officer in an Irish airport, she thinks: “Once upon a time we were well brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet” (189). Later, visiting her parents in India, she observes with a similar wry detachment: “In India, I become, once again, an only child of rich, ailing parents” (189). In this observation there is a tacit acknowledgement that she is different expedient selves in different places, and that she feels no special attachment to any one of these selves.

Many of the cultural differences in this story take unexpected forms. Bhave’s Indian parents, far from being traditional, are adamantly non-religious, due to the excessive religiosity of Bhave’s maternal grandmother. Visiting a temple with her mother, Bhave has a visitation from her husband; she knows that she must hide this visitation from her mother, who has “no patience with ghosts, prophetic dreams, holy men, and cults” (191). There is also the sad irony of Bhave’s newfound mistrust of Sikh Indians, who are rumored to have caused the plane crash. She and her family had moved to Canada precisely in order to escape this sort of strife: “We, who stayed out of politics and came halfway around the world to avoid religious and political feuding, have been the first in the New World to die from it” (195-196).

Tribal Loyalties

There are many different kinds of tribal loyalties in this story, and they are often in conflict with one another. As an immigrant widow and a newly solitary woman, Bhave is in a special position to notice the limits of these loyalties. Most obviously, there is the blind and destructive tribal loyalty that exists among the Sikh terrorists who are rumored to have caused the plane crash. Yet Bhave sees blind spots even among the nuclear families who make up—or who have made up—her traditional immigrant community. She sees, for example, her friend Kusum rejecting her surviving daughter, Pam, because Pam is insufficiently pious and well-behaved. She has also seen the effects of an overly pious upbringing on her own Indian mother, who herself abhors all religious practices and efforts to lead a spiritual life.

At the same time, Bhave understands the need for tribes, even if they are feuding and imperfect. She considers her fellow mourners to be her own newfound tribe—one that is perhaps more tolerant and cosmopolitan than other tribes that she has known—and she can even summon a sympathy in herself for the elderly mourning Sikh couple whom Templeton asks her to visit. She sees this couple’s provinciality and narrowness, but she can also understand the logic of their thinking, an understanding that sets her apart from Templeton. She sees that their refusal to sign a lot of unfamiliar government forms is rooted in a suspicion of Western culture and a stubborn hope that their children will be returned to them, both feelings that she struggles with as well. However, she is unable either to ingratiate herself to the couple or to defend them, afterwards, to Templeton. She can only protest silently: “In our culture, it is a parent’s duty to hope” (195).

Religious Piety Versus Spirituality

In this story there is a distinction between religiousness and spirituality. Bhave has spent her life around religiously observant people and has adopted some external forms of piety herself. She describes herself as having been a modest and “dutiful,” sari-wearing wife. She understands religiousness as going along with social conformity, and as expressing itself only in certain venues (such as an ashram, or a temple) and through certain practices (such as throwing roses on the water to demonstrate your grieving). Viewing a white preacher on television just after the plane crash, Bhave is disgusted by his obvious distance from the world: “You look at the audience, and at the preacher in his blue robe with his beautiful white hair, the potted palm trees under a blue sky, and you know they care about nothing” (180).

This is different from the spirituality to which Bhave awakens over the course of the story. This spirituality is solitary and unpredictable rather than social and ritualized and comes upon Bhave at random moments. While she has a “visitation” of her husband in an Indian temple, she also hears her family speaking to her while she is on a park bench in the middle of downtown Toronto. This spirituality also has less to do with consolation and comfort, and more to do with a kind of alertness and an acceptance of the unknown. Even while she has chosen a secular, Western life, Bhave speaks mystically of herself as being on a mysterious “voyage.” She has decided to follow many of Templeton’s suggestions for “moving on,” but has done so as a tribute to her family, rather than a means of forgetting them: “A wife and mother begins her life in a new country, and that life is cut short. Yet her husband tells her: Complete what we have started” (195).