This is the first story in Lahiri’s first collection. It’s a perfect distillation of what makes her a special writer: the language is spare and precise, filled with emotional tension. The story is quiet and subtle and devastating.
Shoba and Shukumar recently suffered a miscarriage, and they’re each in a deep depression. They barely speak to each other, and each day they just go through the motions. Because of some roadwork, they are told that their power would be off for one hour every night for a week. They pass the time dining by candlelight, revealing increasingly personal secrets to each other. For most of the story it feels like they’re reconnecting and finding each other again, but then devastation happens.
First published in The New Yorker in 1998 and available for subscribers to read here, and collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
A Personal Anthology 