When their power company shuts off the electricity for one hour each night, Shoba and Shukumar are forced to dine together or eat alone in darkness. The couple chooses the former, and at Shoba’s insistence they soon find themselves trading secrets back and forth. As one night dissolves into the next, Shoba and Shukumar open up for the first time since their baby’s stillbirth, and they discover that they’ve kept many secrets from one another over the years. Although the couple initially trades confessions to pass the time, their final exchange forces them both to become vulnerable with one another. This newfound vulnerability allows for the genuine communication needed to move on from their tragedy.
When Shukumar and Shoba talk to one another in the beginning of the story, their words are brief and objective. On the first night of the blackout, Shukumar cooks lamb for dinner. Shoba remarks simply, “You made rogan josh.” She doesn’t offer any follow up, relating merely what is objectively in front of her. Shukumar responds to Shoba with an equal level of objectiveness and brevity, speaking only to announce when the meal is ready. At first, most of the couple’s interactions unfold like this. They exchange brief, inconsequential statements, avoiding vulnerability completely. Their conversations don’t develop into genuine communication: they merely tick away the seconds until husband and wife may retreat to their respective solitudes.
The only way that Shukumar and Shoba can open up to one another—that they can engage in conversation that trades politeness for communicative honesty—is within the safe boundaries of Shoba’s confessional game. On the first night of the blackout, Shoba suggests that they trade secrets, a game she remembers playing during blackouts in her childhood. “We all had to say something. […] A little poem. A joke.” Shoba prefaces the game in this way to make honesty appear harmless and inconsequential. By downplaying the seriousness of their confessions—by viewing them as mere poems or games—she creates an unintimidating atmosphere for them to communicate without consequence. Shoba reveals that, early in their relationship, she’d looked through Shukumar’s address book to see if he’d written in her name; Shukumar shares that he’d forgotten to tip the waiter the first time they went to dinner. The back-and-forth structure of the game allows Shoba and Shukumar to trade secrets without feeling any of the vulnerability that comes with genuine human communication. Because they both know that the other will offer up a similarly low-stakes secret, there is no real risk involved. The blackout’s darkness adds another layer of safety to their structured communication. Unable to see one another’s faces, the couple can pretend that they’re whispering confessions into the void rather than to another person.
By the end of the story, Shukumar realizes that the game was never Shoba’s attempt at bringing the couple closer together; rather, Shoba had structured the game to build up to the moment she would reveal her plans to leave him. On the final night, the power has been restored. Shukumar suggests that they eat with the lights off once more. But Shoba tells Shukumar that she has a final secret to tell him—and it needs to be told with the lights on. “I’ve been looking for an apartment and I’ve found one,” she reveals. The repeated nights of small, safe secrets were all part of Shoba’s larger plans to brace Shukumar for the impact of her final, agonizing confession. As Shukumar states, “This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings.” The game was only another means through which she could safely broach the uncomfortable subject that she intends to leave her husband. The game wasn’t Shoba’s attempt at communication—it was a means of avoiding communication. Shoba didn’t initiate the game to rekindle her relationship with her husband through vulnerable communication—she initiated it to craft a safe, structured space to tell Shukumar that she has no desire to try to rekindle the relationship.
Hurt, Shukumar offers his own final confession. Shoba had earlier decided she’d rather not know their dead baby’s sex, stating, “at least they’d been spared that knowledge.” Unbeknownst to Shoba, however, Shukumar arrived at the hospital before they’d cremated the baby, and held it in his arms. He’d hid this from Shoba, “because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life she had wanted to be a surprise.” Because Shoba’s final confession has left him vulnerable, Shukumar decides to retaliate by revealing the sex of the baby. Shoba hadn’t expected to be caught off guard in a game of her own design, and she breaks down. The couple’s sudden vulnerability breaks down the wall that had grown between them since their baby’s death. Lahiri ends the story ambiguously, with the couple crying together. Although it’s unclear whether they will be able to repair their broken relationship, the fact that the couple has accepted vulnerability suggests that the removal of their respective, suppressed burdens will at least allow them to move forward with their lives—whether or not they do so as a couple is only of incidental importance.
Despite their initial avoidance of communication, Shoba and Shukumar’s final confessions leave them both vulnerable. In sadness, they “[weep] together, for the things they now knew.” Despite the uncertainty of their relationship, their ability to finally connect with one another in a vulnerable way offers the possibility that their renewed communication will permit them to heal and move beyond their grief. The symbolism of Shoba’s choice to turn off the lights (thus returning the couple to the invulnerable safety of darkness) seems to suggest that the couple isn’t quite ready to move forward together—that feeling vulnerable and exposed without darkness’s comfort is too much to bear. Still, their shared moment of vulnerability (however brief) shows that they’ve rediscovered a tool that could allow them to fix their relationship, should they choose to do so.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Difficulty of Communication ThemeTracker
The Difficulty of Communication Quotes in A Temporary Matter
She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble.
He hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop.
Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering. […] As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist appointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of parenthood had troubled Shukumar […] But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the first time.
At some point in the evening she visited him. When he heard her approach he would put away his novel and begin typing sentences. […] He knew it was something she forced herself to do. She would look around the walls of the room, which they had decorated together last summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing trumpet and drums. […] Shukumar had disassembled it all before bringing Shoba back from the hospital, scraping off the rabbits and ducks with a spatula.
“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.
These were the things he had told her. He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital. He had held him until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise.
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.
