Hope, Duty, and Despair Theme Analysis

The phrase “a parent’s duty is to hope” comes up multiple times throughout the story. Dr. Ranganathan first says it when he suggests that Shaila’s sons, and others on the plane, may have been able to swim to safety. “It’s a parent’s duty to hope,” he says, and Shaila is flooded with relief. She later says that she packed the suitcase she brought to Ireland, where she has gone to identify the bodies of her husband and sons, “with dry clothes for [her] boys.” That action—bringing dry clothes for her sons, even though all evidence suggests they have already died—conveys not just the love Shaila has for her lost family members, but also a kind of hope that tethers her to her lost family members and keeps them alive to her when their fates remain unknown. 

That same phrase—“a parent’s duty is to hope”—comes up again when Judith and Shaila visit the Sikh couple to try to persuade them to sign papers so they will receive government benefits. Judith thinks that signing the papers is important for the couple because it will help them afford food and pay utility bills. But she also sees signing the papers as a kind of emotional imperative for the couple because signing will, in her view, enable them to accept the death of their sons and begin “reconstructing” their lives. When the couple decides not to sign the papers, Shaila wants to explain their refusal by telling Judith, “In our culture, a parent’s duty is to hope,” meaning that it is not right to ask this couple to abandon hope that their sons will return alive. Abandoning that hope would mean, for them, to abandon a central duty of being a good parent. By repeating the phrase “a parent’s duty is to hope throughout the story,” and by having that idea play a central role in Shaila’s decision to leave Judith, the story suggests that hope not only buoys people in crisis, helping them remain above the surface of despair, but that it also enables people in grief to stay meaningfully connected to their loved ones, even when all obvious or tangible reasons for hope have been exhausted. In this way, attempting to sever that connection, or argue against that hope, is grievously misguided.