A Temporary Matter

A Temporary Matter Summary | Detailed Summary

"A Temporary Matter" traces the deterioration of a marriage. Over the course of 1 week, during which the husband believes a chance exists to rekindle their love, Shukumar recalls the problems that have caused changes in the way that he and his wife relate to each other.

At the beginning of the story, Shukumar and his wife, Shoba, receive a notice from the electric company telling them that their electricity will be shut off every day for an hour during a 5-day period. The notice calls this a "temporary" problem that will allow the electric company to repair the power lines that went down during the last snowstorm in March. Each night, the electricity will be turned off from eight to nine o'clock. The couple realizes that the repair period will begin that night. Shoba tells her husband that it's a good thing that the electric company informed them about the repairs.

Shoba is 33 years old. She is wearing sweatpants, white sneakers, and a raincoat. Her makeup could use touching up. Although she swore that she would never look like this, she looks this way because she has just returned from the gym. Shukumar thinks about how Shoba looked in the past after they went to a party or a bar if she had been too tired to remove her makeup when they came home.

Shoba thinks the repairs should be done during the day. Shukumar disagrees. He is working on his dissertation on the agrarian revolt in India, and he has worked at home since January. .

Shoba looks at a calendar to be sure about the repair days. She reminds Shukumar that he has a dentist's appointment on Friday. Shukumar runs his tongue over his teeth and realizes that he has forgotten to brush his teeth that day. It isn't the first time. He hasn't left home for days. The more Shoba goes out or works late at the office, the more he wants to stay home.

Six months ago, Shoba encouraged Shukumar to go to an academic conference in Baltimore to develop contacts to use when he enters the job market next year. Shukumar didn't want to go because Shoba was pregnant. Shukumar remembers her waiting with him for the cab that would take him to the airport. During the drive to the airport, he thinks about how large the cab is compared to their car and imagines that one day he and Shoba will have a station wagon to drive their kids around. Before today, Shukumar had anxiety about being a parent because he was 35 years old and still a student. . Today was the first time he welcomed the idea of children.

At the conference someone handed Shukumar a phone number. He knew right away it was the hospital. Shoba had gone into labor 3 weeks early. When he returned to Boston, he found out that the baby was stillborn. Shoba had had a Caesarean, but it was not performed quickly enough. The doctors told them that Shoba would be back on her feet in a couple of weeks, and there were no signs that she would have trouble having children in the future.

Since the death of the baby, Shoba is already at the office by the time Shukumar wakes up. In her downtown office, Shoba edits textbooks. She has promised to do this for Shukumar's dissertation when it is ready.

Shukumar is envious that Shoba has such a specific skill. He is a mediocre student who absorbs details without further curiosity. He had been dedicated before, but after the baby died he lost his motivation. He is in his sixth year of grad school but nothing seems to push him. Since the death of the baby, he and Shoba have avoided each other, which Shukumar initially thought would pass quickly.

At 7:30 that night Shukumar is preparing dinner. He tells Shoba they will have to eat in the dark because dinner won't be ready until eight o'clock. She suggests they use candles and tells him she is going upstairs to shower before the lights go out. Shukumar moves the bag and shoes that Shoba left lying on the floor. Shoba used to be very tidy, but now she treats the house like a hotel.

Shoba is still organized, though. She tries to prepare for unexpected surprises like sudden guests. When she sees a skirt or blouse she likes, she buys two in case something happens to the first one. She is always careful about putting money away in savings. Shukumar likes this about her. When his father died, his mother fell apart. She abandoned the house Shukumar grew up in and went back to Calcutta, leaving her son to settle everything.

Every other Saturday Shoba and Shukumar went shopping to stock up on an enormous amount of food, but the food never went to waste. When guests visited, Shoba served them meals that seemed like they required half a day's preparation because she used frozen or bottled food. Labelled mason jars line the kitchen shelves with items that Shoba has prepared and bottled. Shukumar went through their supplies steadily as he prepared meals for the two of them. Each afternoon he would go through Shoba's recipe books.. Each recipe was dated, recording the first time they had shared that dish together. He had no memory of eating these meals.

Nevertheless, Shukumar liked cooking. It was the only thing that still made him feel productive, and he knew that if he didn't cook, Shoba would probably eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. Tonight, because there were no lights, they would have to eat together. For months Shukumar had been eating alone in his home office while Shoba ate in the living room as she worked.

Shoba always came to visit Shukumar in his office before going to bed. She would tell him not to work too hard. This was the only time of day that she sought him out, and Shukumar dreaded it because he knew she had to force herself to do it. The office haunted Shoba because it was supposed to be the baby's room. They had decorated it and built a crib for it before Shoba went to the hospital. Shukumar disassembled everything before she returned home from the hospital, but Shoba still disliked the room. The room didn't bother Shukumar. He turned it into his office in January. The room soothed him, partly because Shoba avoided it.

Shukumar tries to locate candles in the kitchen. All he can find are birthday candles from when Shoba threw him a surprise party last May. There were 120 people at the house, friends and acquaintances that they now avoided. Shoba was in her fifth month, and she and Shukumar held hands all night as they walked among the guests. Since September Shoba's mother had been their only guest. She stayed with them for 2 months after Shoba returned from the hospital. She helped them with cooking, washing clothes, and buying groceries. A religious woman, she would sit before a small shrine and pray twice a day for grandchildren in the future. She worked at a department store in Arizona. She never talked to Shukumar about Shoba. She blamed him for not being at the hospital.

Shukumar finds it strange that there are no candles in the house. Shoba prepares for so many things. Why would she have not prepared for such an ordinary emergency? He looks for something to put the birthday candles in. He finds a pot of ivy and places the candles in the soil. He pushes aside the clutter on the kitchen table, remembering the first meals he and his wife ate there when they were first together and excited to be married. He sets the table, places the ivy pot in the middle, turns on the clock radio, and tunes it to a jazz station.

Shoba comes downstairs wearing a t-shirt, sweatpants, and a robe. It is almost 8. Shukumar puts the food he has prepared on the table. The lights go out, and the radio falls silent. Shukumar lights the birthday candles with a book of matches and opens a bottle of wine. Shoba says everything is lovely. She says it is like India, where the power current disappears for hours at a time. Shoba says that she once went to a rice ceremony in the dark, and Shukumar realizes that their baby would never have this ceremony. Suddenly, he feels irritated that he can't go upstairs and sit at his computer. He struggles to find something to say. There is awkwardness between them, and they were never like this before.

Shoba says that during power failures at her grandmother's house everyone had to take turns speaking, like telling jokes, poems, or facts about the world. Shukumar had not spent as much time in India as Shoba had. His parents, who lived in New Hampshire, left him with his aunt and uncle went they went back to India. The one time that Shukumar went with them, as a baby, he almost died of amoebic dysentery, and his father was afraid to take him again. Shukumar wasn't interested in going to Calcutta until after his father died when he was in his last year of college. Now he wished he had his own childhood stories of India.

Shoba says they should say something to each other in the dark, like tell each other something that the other doesn't know. Shoba tells him that the first time she was in Shukumar's apartment, she looked through his address book to see if he had added her phone number. He hadn't. Shukumar thinks about their first meeting 4 years ago. They met in a lecture hall in Cambridge where Bengali poets were giving a recital. They sat side by side, and Shukumar got bored quickly because he couldn't understand the literary diction in the poems. Shoba was making a grocery list on the back of a folder.

Shukumar tells Shoba that the first time they went out he forgot to tip the waiter. He took a taxi back to the restaurant the next day to leave the tip with the manager. Shoba asks why he forgot. He says that by the end of dinner he had a felling they might get married and it distracted him. The birthday candles have burnt out, but Shukumar pictures Shoba's face in the dark. The beauty that had once overwhelmed him was fading each day. Her cosmetics seemed necessary now, not to improve her, but to define her.

The next night Shoba comes home earlier than usual. Shukumar bought candles that day for when they have dinner together. They eat before the lights go out at 7. After dinner, Shoba stacks the plates up. Shukumar tells her to not worry about the dishes, but she says that it's almost 8 so it would be silly not to do them.

Shukumar's heart races. He has been waiting for the lights to go out all day. When the lights go out at 8, Shukumar lights the candles. Shoba suggests that they should sit outside. They sit down on the steps of the front porch. There are still patches of snow on the ground but everyone in the neighborhood is outside. The Bradfords, an older couple, walk down the street. The old man calls out to them, asking if they would like to go with them to the bookstore. Shoba and Shukumar say, "No, thank you." Shukumar wonders what Shoba will tell him tonight in the dark. He thinks of the worst possibilities, like she had an affair or that she didn't respect him because he was still a student, but he knows these things aren't true.

Shoba tells him that when his mother was visiting them, she said she had to work late, but she was really having drinks with her friend Gillian. It was Gillian who drove Shoba to the hospital when Shukumar was in Baltimore. Shukumar tells her that he cheated on his Oriental Civilizations exam in college. His father had died a few months before, and during the exam he could see the blue book of the student next to him, so he copied. He feels relieved for having told her this. She turns to him and looks at his shoes, old moccasins. She says he didn't have to tell her that. The Bradfords come back and wave at them. Shukumar and Shoba hold hands as they get up and go back inside the house.

The next day Shukumar spent hours thinking about what he would say to his wife that night. He thinks over his small secrets and shares these with Shoba over the next 2 nights. She shares more of her secrets, too. When the house is dark, they are able to talk to each other again. On the third night they kiss. On the fourth night they have sex for the first time in months.

On the fifth morning Shukumar gets another notice from the electric company. It says that the repairs are ahead of schedule, and there will be no more power outages. He is disappointed. He no longer feels like cooking the dinner he had planned. It isn't the same knowing that the lights will not go out. Nevertheless, he buys the cooking supplies and two bottles of wine. Shoba comes home at 2:30. When Shukumar sees her reading the notice, he knows that it has all come to an end. She says he can still light candles if he wants to. Shoba is wearing a suit instead of her gym clothes, and her makeup has been touched up recently.

Shoba goes upstairs to change. Shukumar pours the wine and plays a jazz record that Shoba likes. At dinner they eat quietly and drink the first bottle of wine. Before Shukumar can open the second bottle, Shoba blows out the candles. She says she wants him to see her face when she tells him what she is going to tell him. Shukumar is nervous and thinks she might be pregnant again. She says she has been looking for an apartment and found one. She signed the lease today before coming home. She needs some time alone. Shoba won't look at him, but he stares at her. Shukumar feels sick with the knowledge that she has been making these arrangements all this time. The past four evenings she had been preparing for life without him. This was the point of her game of telling secrets.

He tells her the one thing he kept from her when he still loved her. When he arrived at the hospital he saw their baby. It was boy. He describes the way he looked, his hair and weight. The look on her face shows her sorrow.

Shukumar stacks up the plates from dinner and carries them to the sink, but he doesn't run the water. He looks out the window. The Bradfords walk down the street arm in arm. He watches the couple, and the room grows dark. Shukumar turns around. Shoba has turned the lights off. She sits back down at the table. Shukumar follow her and sits down, too. They both weep for the things they now know.