E-Paper
Review: White Lilies; An Essay on Grief by Vidya Krishnan
A meditation on the death of a beloved grandparent and a partner in the space of a single weekend that is also an ode to Delhi
How do you make sense of the death of a beloved partner? How do you think of someone who taught you to “treat herbs with respect” long after their death? How do you make sense of having two of those closest to you be snatched away in the span of a weekend? That is partly what Vidya Krishnan’s White Lilies: An Essay on Grief is about. In 2013, Krishnan’s grandmother died. Later, her partner, Ali, died in a road accident. In remembering the latter, she chooses to begin the book with the city that so cruelly makes everyone feel at once loved and unwelcome, at home and homeless — Delhi.
“If Kolkata is the City of Joy, Delhi undoubtedly has to be the City of Grief,” she writes. She chooses to describe Delhi as female and documents her historiography uniquely; not only through the prism of finding and losing Ali, but also through the poetry of Mirza Ghalib — the “aristo-literary elite”, who “died a bar-room hero, boozing and swaggering, debt-ridden and heartbroken.”
The poet, Krishnan writes, “carried the dead in his poetry, like bloody souvenirs.” “[His] grief did not recede with the passage of time; if anything, it grew keener, sank deeper roots in his poetry.” Through the verses of Ghalib, she looks at this “graveyard of dynasties” where he died, Delhi. One cannot “talk of the city as if we don’t simply live in it” but as if “we live through it,” she states adding that “Delhi knows the things I keep locked up.” This personification of the city as a friend, as a keeper of secrets is not new, but the forging of such a relationship with it makes this slim volume as much an ode to this “City of Grief” as it is an exploration of grieving.
Even as she writes of braving unsolicited advice from well-meaning friends, she returns to the enduring Paati-and-Ali-shaped holes in her life. In remembering them, she happens to notice “small things”, the details that are an aching reminder of those who were intensely loved.
“It was bizarre that [Ali] was … dead. His lawyer’s robe and shaving kit and laptop … and me … everything was waiting for him,” Krishnan writes in lines reminiscent of Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband, John Gregory Dunne’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking. There, the American author writes of being hesitant to do away with Dunne’s shoes because she felt he’d need them when he returned.
But do the dead come back? Or to ask a more pertinent question, paraphrasing Didion, will the dead whom we allowed to die ever come back? Or does the individual helplessly keep recalling that sense of loss, the experience of witnessing their loved ones die? “If you live long enough, you lose them repeatedly as long as you live and they do not,” writes Krishnan. For Ali, in particular, she writes, “Now, that evening comes back to me in hallucinatory flashes so detailed that it scars me afresh each time.” Or thinking of her Paati, she notes: “She was loved. I was bereft. I remember standing in front of her just after, stunned… like one would be after they were robbed on a highway.”
It is interesting how people remember the dead. Loss is an oft-repeated noun that makes you feel like there is a unique calculus to living; that life is an account of what’s gained and lost. “Our story had ended as abruptly as it had begun. I had such little to show for it. Two photos, to be precise. Everything else was on his phone. Which had been stolen, like the life I would have had,” Krishnan writes.
Notice the use of the past participle of the verb ‘steal’ in relation to remembering Ali and what’s left of Krishnan’s life after him. The other word that often shows up in accounts by the grieving is ‘disappeared’. Reconciliation with loss is the last leg. Before that comes two insurmountable beliefs: one’s culpability in the death of the loved one and survivor’s guilt. Krishnan shows these signs too. First, in thinking about why she made Ali keep the dinner appointment he had planned before Paati’s death. “I did catch some sleep that night, and for years, I’d be tormented by the fact that I was asleep while he was dying,” she writes.
White Lilies echoes what Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi noted in Loss: “Grief is not a record of what has been lost, but of who has been loved.” Recording such an account requires bearing witness to what one’s senses capture almost unconsciously right after someone’s death, and what is noticde much later because of the anger that starts to drive the grief. Krishnan finds herself raging at the statistics of people who die in road accidents in India annually: 3,00,000. This discomforts me; to know that my own father’s death in a car accident is nothing but a data point. But the death of anyone, whether it is Ali or my father, doesn’t seem to disconcert anyone; not those driving recklessly or those who run the country. This is the ugly truth.
Krishnan articulately sums it up: Grief is only grief. One can try to negotiate with loss, think of rejecting it, or view it as a problem to be solved. But the fact remains that the one you loved has died and you are alive.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
