Shukumar and Shoba, a married couple, receive a notice from their electric company informing them that for five days, their power will be cut off for one hour from 8:00 to 9:00 P.M. in order to repair a power line damaged in a snowstorm. The couple has grown increasingly distant from one another since their baby’s stillbirth six months ago, and they are now accustomed to eating their meals in separate rooms.
The couple is still overcome with grief from the loss of their child. Shoba suffers from the unexpectedness of the death, and Shukumar from the guilt of being absent from the birth—he’d been at a conference when Shoba went into labor, and hadn’t been there to comfort his wife when their baby was born dead. In the wake of the stillbirth, Shukumar reflects on how Shoba has changed. Whereas his wife was once a careful planner and loved to entertain, she has now apathetically given up on preparing for the future, and the couple has isolated themselves from others.
The temporary power outage forces Shukumar and Shoba to have dinner together, or else eat separately in darkness. The couple chooses to dine together, and at Shoba’s suggestion, they begin to trade secrets back and forth as a way of passing the time until their electricity is restored—a game she recalls from her childhood trips to India when the generator would go out regularly. The game turns into “an exchange of confessions,” with Shukumar and Shoba revealing, in turn, the small ways they’ve deceived and disappointed one another throughout their marriage. Revealing these truths allows Shukumar and Shoba to open up to one another for the first time since their baby’s death, and their relationship appears to be on the mend.
When the electric company sends a second notice the morning of the final day of the blackout informing the couple that the repairs have been completed ahead of schedule and the blackout is over, Shukumar suggests that the couple eats together in darkness one last time. As they finish eating, Shoba reveals that she has a final secret she’d like to confide in Shukumar, but it needs to be told with the lights on. Shoba tells Shukumar that she has found an apartment and intends to leave him. Shukumar realizes that the game of trading secrets was not Shoba’s attempt to repair their marriage, but a means of preparing Shukumar for this final, difficult confession.
Angrily, Shukumar responds with a brutal secret of his own: he reveals the sex of their dead baby, something Shoba wished to never know, and something she’d believed was a mystery to Shukumar, as well. Unbeknownst to Shoba, Shukumar had arrived at the hospital before the baby’s body could be cremated, and he had held their dead child in his arms. Shukumar describes the scene to Shoba in vivid detail. After Shukumar confesses, Shoba turns the lights back off. The story ends as the couple weeps in darkness, “for the things they now knew.”
