63 pages • 2 hours read
Interpreter of Maladies
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Story 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1 Summary: “A Temporary Matter”
Shukumar and his wife, Shoba, receive a notice from the city that their street in a Boston neighborhood will have its power turned off for one hour each evening at eight o’clock for the next five days. The couple has suffered a miscarriage in the past six months, and Shukumar was at a conference out of town when it happened and did not return until after the baby was gone. Now the two of them are withdrawn and distant with each other, though they cope in different ways. Shukumar is a graduate student who has been staying home to work on his dissertation, and he does not leave the house for days at a time; Shoba has taken on a great deal of extra work and has stopped taking care of her appearance in the way she used to prioritize.
On the first night of the power outage, Shukumar makes dinner and realizes it won’t be ready in time; Shoba says they will have to eat in the dark. As she showers, he thinks about the ways she used to be organized and prepared, particularly the full pantry she kept and the freezer full of homemade foods, all of which have been used up in the past six months. This will be the first time they’ve eaten at the table, and Shukumar thinks of his nights eating in his office, which would have been the baby’s room.
Shukumar sets the table as Shoba comes down and the lights go out. They only have birthday candles, so they can’t see each other well in the dark, and they reminisce awkwardly until Shoba mentions that, growing up in India, when the power went out everyone had to say something. They agree that they should do that now, and Shoba suggests they confess something they’ve never told each other before. She confesses that she looked in his address book when they first started dating to see if she was in it; he thinks about the time they went to see poetry and he was bored but instead tells her about forgetting to tip a waiter on their first date because he was so distracted by his belief that they would marry.
The next day, Shukumar is excited about sitting in the dark with her again, and he goes out to buy candles. They eat early, though, and he is crestfallen, until Shoba says they should sit outside during the outage. As they sit, an old couple passes on their way to the bookstore to browse, and Shukumar feels anxious about what Shoba might confess to him—he thinks he knows everything about her, having seen her in banal moments and at the height of her grief. Finally, she confesses that she went out for drinks with a friend when his mother was visiting. He confesses to cheating on an exam. They hold hands in the dark until the power comes back on.
For the next two days, Shukumar thinks all day about what to tell his wife, then confesses in the dark, first to returning a sweater she bought him and then to tearing out a picture of a woman from one of her magazines when she was pregnant. He thinks the darkness allows them to be open with each other, and on the fourth night, they make love.
On the fifth day, they receive notice that the repairs were finished early, and Shukumar feels depressed. Still, he plans a nice meal, and Shoba comes home looking more polished than usual. They eat in the dark by candlelight, and Shukumar thinks they have survived a difficult period of their life together. Then, Shoba turns on the light and reveals to him that she’s found an apartment.
Shukumar is disgusted but relieved when he realizes this was the point of their game. He thinks about something he promised never to tell her: that he held their son after he died; she didn’t want to know anything about the child after he was gone and does not even know it was a boy. He tells her now, and in her sorrow, she turns out the lights and sits at the table. He joins her, and they weep together.
Story 1 Analysis
“A Temporary Matter” is fundamentally a story about grief and the way it blinds people to each other. Both Shoba and Shukumar are recovering from an intense trauma—a late-stage miscarriage—but they are going about the process of dealing with that grief in different ways. Shoba has stopped taking care of herself and the household, choosing instead to throw herself into her work; meanwhile, Shukumar has withdrawn from the world and is making no progress on his graduate thesis. They have also withdrawn from each other, as is evident in the way that Shukumar dreads the perfunctory goodnight that Shoba gives him every night.
Their behavior toward each other is jarred loose by the imposition of the power outages, and the plot of the story appears to be leading toward a reconciliation; the “temporary matter” of the piece would initially appear to be their unshared grief. The reveal that Shoba has been preparing to move out and has been using the confessional game as an exit point is a plot that runs parallel but unseen to Shukumar’s warming toward his wife. The author uses detail and backstory to fill out this subtext so that it’s surprising to Shukumar but not unforeseen—Shoba has been saving her bonuses in a separate bank account, echoing the way she prepared for their life together by storing up homemade food, and on the final night of the game she comes home still in her work clothes, with her makeup freshly touched up. Shukumar doesn’t see this because of his belief that all the worst things she could confess to him would be things that have already happened, perhaps because of the final confession he has been holding back (that he held their deceased son), which is both a heartbreaking betrayal of trust and a moment that could have brought them closer together.
A failure of empathy is at the core of this story and will become a common theme in the book. The self–other distinction is a popular term in phenomenology and postcolonial theory that came to prominence in the decade before the publication of Interpreter of Maladies; it posits that a person’s preconceived idea of the “other” (another person) informs how they approach and understand the other. In its most rigid interpretation, true empathy would be impossible, as all interaction would occur through the filter of a person’s idea of the other they are interacting with. Lahiri is working with this idea in Shoba and Shukumar: Shukumar is thinking of his wife on his previously understood terms and thinks he knows everything about her, despite the confessional game revealing new things. The moment of epiphany or surprise in this and other stories in the collection is rooted in the concept of the other crumbling for a character, as it does when Shoba announces she is leaving.
Another point of difference between them that bears mentioning is their relationship to their Indian heritage. Shoba has a natural connection, having spent more time in India as a child, whereas Shukumar was sheltered from visiting India in his childhood and has approached India as a subject of study rather than a homeland (with disinterest, even, as indicated when he reveals he cheated on an exam that covered types of poetry popular in South Asia). This relationship is tied to their ideas about marriage and family, as well; Shoba engages easily with traditional Indian roles of womanhood in the way she invested her time in storing up homemade Indian foodstuffs. Shukumar, meanwhile, displays anxiety about fatherhood even before the miscarriage, only beginning to feel good about the prospect right before the baby is lost. Shoba’s mother admonishment of him—“But you weren’t even there” (9)—carries added weight when considered in the light of Shukumar’s own disconnection from family, heritage, and traditional roles that are expected of him.
The destructive power of grief proves too much for Shoba and Shukumar, and that grief turns the things that could have brought them closer together into moments in which they are working at cross purposes: A game built around confession and intimacy becomes one of separation, and a tender moment of Shukumar holding his deceased child becomes the last weapon he has to hurt his wife. When their conceptions of each other finally fall away and they can see each other clearly, it’s already too late.
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By Jhumpa Lahiri
