Darkness symbolizes interpersonal comfort and communication without vulnerability. When Shoba and Shukumar’s electric company informs them that they will shut off their power each night from 8:00-9:00 to repair a fallen power line, the couple is forced to dine by candlelight with each other. On the first night of the blackout, Shoba initiates a game in which the couple trades secrets back and forth, and this quickly transforms into “an exchange of confessions—the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other.” Darkness allows Shoba and Shukumar to be honest with one another for the first time since the death of their baby. Shukumar notices this change: “Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.” In darkness, the couple can open up and share secrets with one another without feeling the vulnerability that comes with looking someone in the eye. In “A Temporary Matter,” darkness is a safe, alternative reality where Shoba and Shukumar’s fear, grief, and insecurities don’t stand in the way of opening up to one another. In contrast, when the lights are on, Shoba and Shukumar are fully exposed to one another. Without the comfort of darkness, their figurative nakedness makes them feel awkward and unprotected, and Shoba and Shukumar remain distant from one another. When Shoba and Shukumar finally exchange secrets in the light, they are forced to look one another in the eye and reckon with “the things they now [know]” honestly and without the concealing comfort of darkness. Shoba’s final decision to turn the lights back off after both she and Shukumar have confessed final, hurtful truths suggests that the couple may not be ready to resume their life together—ultimately, they still rely on the false comfort of darkness to diminish the wounds inflicted in the light.
Darkness Quotes in A Temporary Matter
“It’s like India,” Shoba sad, watching him tend his makeshift candelabra. “Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch. I once had to attend an entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby just cried and cried. It must have been so hot.”
Their baby never cried, Shukumar considered. Their baby would never have a rice ceremony, even though Shoba had already made the guest list […].
“Are you hot?” he asked her.
“I remember during power failures at my grandmother’s house, we all had to say something,” Shoba continued. […] “A little poem. A joke. A fact about the world. For some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of my friends in America. I don’t know why the information was so interesting to them.”
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The third night after supper they’d sat together on the sofa, and once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her forehead and her face, and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and knew that she did, too. The fourth night they walked carefully upstairs, to bed, […] making love with a desperation they had forgotten. […] As he made love to her he wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would say, the thought of it exciting him.
She wouldn’t look at him, but he stared at her. It was obvious that she’d rehearsed the lines. All this time she’d been looking for an apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of her game.
Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew.
Darkness Symbol Timeline in A Temporary Matter
