I guess if we all listed our losses, we’d seem like a catalogue of ruin” writes Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi in his latest book Loss (HarperCollins India; Rs 499), chronicling some of the most personal and grief-filled moments of the last decade of his life through essays. There are lines that stay with you long after you close a book by Shanghvi and Loss is no different. The author’s power to enunciate universal emotions in the most sublime manner is what makes him worthy of our collective attention. That he chose to write about loss at a time when the world grapples with the emotion at various levels, only makes the impact of these sentences multiply in our minds.

He writes of his father Dhanvant, his mother Padmini and his dog Bruschetta — the three most important beings in his life and the aftermath of processing grief. For you see, processing of grief is not an act but a journey with the self. While some emerge a different person, some patiently wait for a clarion call from inexplicable sources that act as a ‘sign’ to move on.

There are details from the moments of receiving terrible news that Shanghvi remembers in his essays — the Labrador outside his hotel when he received the news of his father’s demise, the yellow glow of the night lamp in the hospital room during the last few moments of his mother’s life and the exact shade of the sky when he received the awful news of his dog’s death.

What is it about grief that makes one hyper-aware of the physical reality unfolding around us? How does one make peace with condolence messages that appear in plenty but mean just as less? One may not find the answers to such questions in Loss but one does get a peek into a person’s struggle to reach that space of understanding. And when that person is as poignantly articulate as Shanghvi, it becomes a lesson to imbibe. “To write was to help someone else erase some part of their pain,” he writes in one part and we couldn’t help but agree.

I remember the fateful day a couple of years back when on a trip to Goa, I demanded to meet the author who has written The Rabbit and The Squirrel and The Last Song of Dusk over a persuasive email that no polite gentleman would know how to avoid. However, the warmth and open arms with which he invited me into his beautiful home in Moira was the exact same emotion that I felt while reading Loss. Reading is perhaps the only thing we can offer him back in exchange for his generosity of these glimpses. Excerpts from a chat with the author…

Please tell us about the moments and emotions that gathered enough momentum for you to pen and compile these essays into the book that is Loss?

After my father’s death, many people I knew reached out to commiserate. But this was often an insensitive or irresponsible way — they would condole over text, for instance (which I believe should be banned). So many who did this were friends I loved. They had done this perhaps because the language for grief in India is inadequate or formal, and our mourning process is ritualised — we put emphasis on attending a prayer meeting but we often don’t do what is essential at that moment: Cook rice and dal or just show up and sit with them when they allow.

I thought to write Loss as a community book, something to give to a friend when we are overwhelmed or lack the language to convey our grief. This was the starting point of the book, its chief intention.

Since these essays are deeply personal, were there any trepidations you felt before putting them out into the world?

While the conflict between the personal and the public remains an essential struggle for any writer, Loss came from a point of liberation: I chose to present an honest side to the world even as I also chose not to consider what might be said of this expression. It was a risk, of course, but that was the price of admission I paid for being allowed to write this book. Hopefully, people will see it also as a story of their own lives, death being a shared subject.

You have often visited and quoted from literary masters before you to give direction to your thoughts. How did turning to these masters help your grieving process?

They didn’t help with the grieving process; they helped with the time after grief when we begin to put together the pieces of ourselves. I am also unsure what we mean by the ‘grieving process’ except to concede that grief is a continuum — it seems too large and ineffable to address in the beginning but, as we grow into the wound, it threatens us less and less; it becomes a thing of illumination. In grief, you are a warrior who makes up his own shield as he goes about the battle. There was music of Ella Fitzgerald (singing through her pain) or essays by James Baldwin — a great reason for time.

Sourced by the correspondent

Do you feel the dynamic conversations around mental health in present times is going in the right direction?

That we are having a conversation is such a worthy advance; I welcome more of it. I believe we need to de-stigmatise issues we all face around mental health. We should be able to talk about it without either romanticising the anguish or brushing it under the carpet.

If you had an ideal reader and an ideal outcome from that reader having read your book, who and what would it be?

Every reader who reads Loss and derives nourishment from it is the ideal reader.

Did the pandemic and the time alone in Moira change your views about how human beings and you approach grief and loss in life?

Yes, I have to admit, I came to think of a lot of people as essentially horrible. I wish I had some sentimental story of how people all came together and helped each other — but the truth is a different matter. Middle-class India has a lot to answer to our workers — debarring them overnight, forcing them out of livelihood and spurring a mass exodus even as a large percentage of our citizenry was busy baking banana bread. I wish I had nicer things to say.

How do you think we as a society can better ourselves to be better allies to each other and our collective mental health?

By accepting that all of us, at different points, and in dissimilar ways, live with issues related to mental health — anxiety, depression, panic. Relationships with an older generation in my extended family were strife but when I examine many of these older uncles, I see now they were suffering, even their anger and criticism came from a place of anguish. I don’t know whether this makes me ‘forgive them’ but I can certainly set their pain in a larger context of their psychological environment.

What can we expect next from your table?

I wish I knew. I think I’ll leave the result to prayer.