Shukumar didn’t have the willpower to get up from the bed in the morning. He was preparing his Ph.D. and spending most of the days cooking and staying in the house. “He hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting extra hours at work and taking additional projects, the more he wanted to stay on, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop” (Temporary matter p.). While they were both in the house they constantly avoid each other - he will eat in his study, she will eat in the living room. In the evenings, she would visit him in the study room and he would pretend that he is typing. “It was the one time in the day she sought him …show more content…
“They weren’t like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her proofreading files.” It seems that Shukumar had given up communicating with her” Eventually he gave up trying to amuse her. He learned, not to mind the silence.” The story is told from his point of view and it seems like he is very aware that their marriage is falling apart, but he didn’t make any effort to bring the things the way they were before. He considered that this is just a temporary matter and that they will get over it soon. At the beginning of the story, it seemed that both are deeply affected by the tragic event and both find their own separate way to grief and to continue their lives, but it turns out that Shoba was ready to continue her life without him. The temporary power outage brought them together in a way that now they had to sit together and to talk to each other. Irony in a “Temporary Matter” – “Lahiri increase the ironic quality of the story by setting up a situation in which the emotionally distant couple must interact more closely” (Davi Remi,