Shoba's Need for Control

I’m the kind of person who wants to know why people – and characters – do what they do. But what’s frustrating and brilliant about “A Temporary Matter” is that by telling the story from Shukumar’s perspective, Lahiri leaves some of Shoba’s motivations a mystery. Lahiri’s withholding of her motivations makes the story more realistic. After all, however much we try to figure people out, we don’t always understand or correctly apprehend people’s motivations in real life. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to figure out Shoba’s intentions behind at least a few of her otherwise unexplained actions.

I keep puzzling over one of my own discussion questions – was it too much of a coincidence that as soon as the lights came back on, Shoba told Shukumar that she was leaving? Yes, light and darkness may be symbols, as both Bennett and Matt have suggested. But perhaps the light and the darkness merely represent a deal of sorts that Shoba made with herself – a way of procrastinating and delaying the inevitable: “I’ll wait until the lights come back on, and then I’ll tell him.” It places her rather awful task at a set point in time – “five days” (1) – giving Shoba some form of control over something else – the power outage – that happens outside of her control.

That desire for control may explain a rather puzzling statement toward the end of the piece. Speaking of Shoba’s relief not to have known the baby’s gender, Lahiri writes, “In a way she almost took pride in her decision, for it enabled her to seek refuge in a mystery” (21). It’s a beautiful, poignant statement. But why would a woman who has a remarkable “capacity to think ahead” (6), and thus maintain control over whatever she can, and who is obsessed with details to the point that she writes down the days of “the first time they [she and Shukumar] had eaten [a] dish together” on the recipe cards (7) want to “seek refuge in a mystery” – in the unknown, in what can’t be controlled? Perhaps not knowing the baby’s gender allows Shoba to maintain even a little bit of control over a situation that completely didn’t go the way that she expected or wanted. Lahiri writes, “She had wanted it [the baby’s gender] to be a surprise” (21). In a weird sort of way, maybe the “refuge” that Shoba found in the “mystery” was that at least that part of the tragic situation went her way.