A Temporary Matter Summary

Two Sad Stories Make for a Happier Reader "Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions…" (18). It was at this point in Jhumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" that I knew I could relate to Shukumar, the husband of Shoba, the two a young couple living in Boston. I could have written the exact same words to describe the night my best friend, turned into boyfriend, broke up with me. Throughout the duration of Lahiri's story, Shoba and Shukumar's lights go out every night due to power maintenance in their neighborhood. Consequently, they eat together in the dark each night, and use the outage as an excuse to finally confront the fact that they have fallen out of love since Shoba's miscarriage, just six months before. The 'confessions game' that Shoba and Shukumar play in the darkness of their home during the power outages is similar to when my high school boyfriend asked me to confess my favorite memory of us in the darkness of his car, just before breaking up later that night. When I came to realize the parallels between "A Temporary Matter"

All throughout reading Lahiri's story, it could relate my own experiences. As I read "A Temporary Matter", the feeling of deep understanding for Shukumar's feelings was indescribably comforting. It's human to feel alone, just as it is also human to feel comforted by shared experiences. What this short story by Jhumpa Lahiri did for me was allow me to understand the magical way in which stories are really just bits and pieces of everyone's lives compiled into a realistic but fictional experience, helping humans further understand how alike we all really are. The characters that authors create are not simply make believe and can be real enough to comfort our very real