The Management of Grief

Voyages are often invoked in this story, both literally and metaphorically. The story involves a number of literal voyages, such as the mourning families’ journeys from Canada to Ireland to India (and, at least in a few cases, back to Canada again). There are also, along with these official group voyages, a number of solitary voyages, as the mourners try in their different ways to cope with their enormous loss. The narrator’s friend Kusum goes to an Indian ashram, even while her estranged daughter Pam moves away from Toronto to Vancouver (having initially intended to move to California. The narrator’s acquaintance Dr. Ranganathan ends up moving from Toronto to Texas, even while he cannot bring himself to sell his old family home. Finally—since this is a story about an immigrant community—there is the original voyage that these families have all made from India to Canada: a journey that underlies and complicates all of their subsequent journeys.

When the narrator states at the end of the story, “I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end” (197), she is speaking on one level about the voyage that she has made with her family to Canada, a place where she now finds herself stranded and alone. But she is also speaking about the spiritual voyage that she has undergone, as a new immigrant widow, and to which she cannot know the outcome. Conversely, when she states of herself in India that she “flutter[s] between two worlds” (189), she is overtly speaking metaphorically, referring to the secular and the spiritual world. At the same time, she is invoking her divided experience as an immigrant. The multiplicity of voyages in this story—individual and collective, spiritual and literal—causes them all to inform and shadow one another, giving each voyage a multiplicity of meanings as well.