For wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving

Approximately 105 people die every minute globally. This is nothing but data until in some specific wretched minute, someone dear to us adds a plus one to that digit. When those we love die, their losses dig enormous holes in our beings. Though invisible to the physical eye, these freshly cut hollows ache like any deep wound would, they bleed out more blood than we carry in our veins. A severe soreness spreads over us without any remedies, without offering us a recovery timeline. There is no telling when grieving ends or if it ever actually does.

It is in this unending and often shapeless experience of grief that Vidya Krishnan's White Lilies finds its ground. Vidya's nonfiction essay, divided into four parts, explores death and grieving in ways that are at once deeply personal and sharply observational. About a decade ago, she lost her grandmother to old age and her partner to a road accident in Delhi, all in the same life-shattering weekend. Vidya, a journalist and an author, writes about her often blind and at other times illumined navigation through that dark week, and many weeks, months, and years which followed. She tries to make sense of this grand tragedy as she scrutinises and synthesises her reality along with the world's. And through these years she performs an autopsy of the dead-alive city she blames as the perpetrator—Delhi, the city of rage and grief, revolution and destruction, old and heavy yet so ready to take on more marks of deaths on her walls.

This focus on the city as a character resonated with me in a particular way. I have a special weakness for books which explore spaces and objects as characters. Perhaps because my birth city Dhaka is a very living and breathing entity for me. A city which is not merely bound by her old rivers and endless traffic jams, Dhaka's pulse is as thick and audible as one wants it to be, as ancient and melancholy as one feels on any given day. In her book, Vidya combs through Delhi's landscape, its wrinkled bloody creases with an unforgiving precision while carrying the heart of the city's most beloved poet, Mirza Ghalib. She digs into Delhi's road rage, mercilessness, injustices, age old patterns of suffering and violence, making me return to the narratives around my chaotic Dhaka. White Lilies left me wondering how our cities can be the reason for our griefs, while grieving with us. A repository of eternal agony, a graveyard of nameless and named martyrs and everyday women and men. Vidya writes "No story about Delhi is complete without rage turned inwards," and "I believe Delhi hurt him [Mirza Ghalib] into poetry. Delhi remains hurtful still because poetry does not change anything. It simply survives."

From here, my thoughts moved towards a broader reflection: for centuries, poets and writers have penned their versions of grief and grieving, yet there remains a lack of books on the subject. I wonder why it's so. Is it that I have purposely forgotten such narratives on mourning? After all, who wants to remember details of other people's sorrows? Or is it that we don't find a specific balance in storytelling when it comes to grief. Nonfiction narratives on grief can either be too dramatised or around a quest for reasons–spiritual or scientific. However, in White Lillies Vidya has found a poise between her right brain and left, a juxtaposition between realism and lyricism. With a journalistic manner she blends history and personal opinions, while adding raw, honest, heart-aching confessions of her journey of bereavement. In the end, her agony is so mixed and paralleled with Delhi and all its sufferers that the reader is humbled with the understanding that individual grief cannot be measured. There are no instruments to document lamentation. It's all a ball of fury and a jumbled up, defeated cry.

Which is why, even though Rumi has become a cliché in recent years, I can't help but repeat his lines when thinking about who should read White Lillies. It is here I turn to: "Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair." If you have known grief personally; if it has lived with you for days or decades; if you come from a place or have left a place where mourning is/was a common element; if you have seen the face of brokenness, in the mirror or around you; if your body has felt chills for bygone shadows, its heaviness or even lightness; if you have not forgiven and don't plan to or you are searching for a reason to forgive—someone, someplace, something; if you want to admit that you are not alone in your grieving; and if you are willing to cry for yourself, and be brave enough to cry for others, then this book is for you.

Iffat Nawaz is a Bangladeshi-American writer based in Pondicherry, India. Her first novel, Shurjo's Clan, was published by Penguin India (Vintage) in 2022, and was shortlisted for the "Best First Book" Award by Tata Lit Live/Mumbai Literature Festival in 2023.