New short stories by Namita Gokhale: A vacation to the mountains reacquaints a woman with her life

The habit of grief can be as insidious as the habit of love. When I was a young girl, I met a young man. We fell in love, we married, we had children, we fought, we stuck together, and now he was dead and I was grieving in an internal way that was leaving me sick, nauseous, raw and corroded. None of this showed on the outside. I looked normal and composed, like anybody you would meet anywhere, yet I inhabited an endless tunnel of night, and I was travelling it alone.

I sensed that there was something cloying, something fetid, in my mourning. In my stubborn refusal to look at sunsets, sunflowers, soap operas or seductive men, there was in fact fear, not grief, fear that my love for him, the only bulwark of my life, might also collapse in the ceaseless flow of the present. My two daughters belonged to the present, they tethered me to Now with a vague, anxious sense of duty and commitment. The three of us shared a disconnectedness. Like three helium balloons bobbing disconsolately against a low ceiling, tangled rather than tied together by our floating strings.

In the vacations, their first without their father,...

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