A Temporary Matter Study Guide

Jhumpa Lahiri, born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, was born in London on July 11, 1967 to Bengali Indian emigrants. When she was two years old, her family moved to the United States. She grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father worked for the University of Rhode Island as a librarian. Lahiri earned a degree in English literature from Barnard College in 1989, and would go on to receive an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, all from Boston University. Lahiri’s short fiction was rejected for years until the publication of Interpreter of Maladies in 1999. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Interpreter of Maladies in 2000. In addition to her short fiction, Lahiri has published several longer works, including The Namesake in 2003 and The Lowland in 2013. She published a second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, in 2008. Her works appear frequently in the The New Yorker, and she has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. As of 2019, Lahiri is the Director of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

“A Temporary Matter” is about a couple whose marriage has been destroyed by the grief they incur after the recent loss of their child. The story’s main conflict, then, is whether or not Shoba and Shukumar are ready to move through their grief together. The presence of death and grief in the story makes it useful to have a basic understanding of grief as it figured into American culture in the mid-to-late-20th century. Swiss-American psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the Kübler-Ross Model in 1969 in her book On Death and Dying. The model presents grief as a process consisting of five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. The basic idea of Kübler-Ross’s “stages” is that the journey from grief to acceptance is a multi-step process. If one gets stuck in a certain stage of grief (if one is overcome by depression, say) the grieving process is prolonged. Kübler-Ross’s model was originally based on her work with terminally ill patients, but she would eventually modify it to extend to anybody coping with loss (not just one’s own death, but the loss of a loved one, or the end of a relationship). Although Kübler-Ross’s model was later criticized for its lack of empirical evidence, the idea that grief consists of stages that must be completed in order for one to feel better after a loss gained cultural traction at this point in history, and it’s useful to consider Shoba and Shukumar’s internal and marital conflicts within this context. Shukumar, for example, remains stagnant and alienated because he hasn’t managed to get over the guilt he feels at not being at the hospital when the baby was stillborn. Because he remains in denial of his guilt, he cannot move forward in the grieving process.

Although it is only peripherally apparent in “A Temporary Matter,” much of Lahiri’s work deals with the experiences of immigrants. In this particular story, for example, the symbolic weight of food is enhanced by the cultural currency that food carries for Shoba and Shukumar as the children of Indian immigrants. Thus, knowing that Lahiri’s writing speaks to the experience of immigrants provides the reader with a more nuanced understanding of the story. Other contemporary works about immigrant experiences are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. “A Temporary Matter” also deals with death, grief, and the psychological effects of mourning. Some notable examples of contemporary American literature that tackles death and grief are Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Lahiri’s style of writing—characterized by her ability to craft rich, psychologically compelling characters with deceptively plain, frank language—is comparable to the short fiction of Canadian author Alice Munro, whom Lahiri has cited as an influence on her writing. Other authors whom Lahiri has cited as influences (and whom are known for their short fiction) include William Trevor, Anton Chekhov, and Mavis Gallant.