The Management of Grief

This story concerns a bereft immigrant community and its narrator, Shaila Bhave, who travels all over the globe, from Canada to Ireland to India and back again. Bhave’s voyages, however, are as much internal as they are external. While Judith Templeton tells Bhave that grief moves in a straight line, passing through stages along the way, Bhave’s own experience of grief is circuitous and unpredictable, doubling back on itself in much the same way that her travels do. She has frequent visions of her dead husband and two sons, while also rejecting the traditional Indian spirituality of her friend Kusum. Bhave follows the counsel of Templeton in some ways—moving out of her house and into her own small apartment, involving herself in charitable work—but rejects it in others. While visiting her parents in India, she states, “Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between two worlds” (189). She is referring specifically to the tension that she feels between Indian and Western values and traditions but is also referring implicitly to the tension between the living and the dead.  

Bhave’s already complicated voyages are further complicated by the fact that she does not find spirituality and rationalism in the expected places.