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“Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions—the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves. The following day Shukumar thought for hours about what to say to her.”

This quote near the end of the story tells how the nightly confessions turn into a sort of ritual that Shukumar looks forward to after the first night. Shukumar and Shoba seem to feel relieved with each secret they reveal in the dark of the power outages. Shukumar takes the project very seriously, spending hours thinking about what to tell her. This doesn’t so much imply that he has many secrets to choose from, but rather that he cares about this newfound way of establishing intimacy with his wife.

“He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital. He had held him until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise.”

This quote comes after Shoba’s shocking confession that she is leaving Shukumar. In stunned silence, he decides to tell her the one thing he swore to never reveal: the sex of their stillborn child. Shukumar knew they had a son, but Shoba never wanted to know so he kept the painful secret to himself. Now that she is leaving him, he realizes that he made the promise to himself when he still loved his wife. With the love between them dissipated, he can tell this last, final secret.

“As he watched the couple the room went dark, and he spun around. Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew.”

At the very end of the story, after the biggest secrets have been revealed, Shoba turns the lights off in the kitchen to recapture some of the safety the couple experienced during the power outages. They weep together over what they have learned about each other. In the story, this is the first time they grieve for their child together. While the secrets of the first few nights helped them remember why they fell in love with each other, the final two secrets help them understand why their relationship is falling apart.

Previous section The Finality of Loss

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