White Lilies: An Essay on Grief is a meditation on grief. A blend of personal reflections and journalistic reportage, it springs from events that take place in what turns out to be an extraordinary week in the author’s life. A week that took Krishnan to Chennai to mourn her grandmother’s death saw her coming back to Delhi to lose her beloved partner to a road accident. Two deaths in a week! Krishnan turns the lens on to herself measuring her personal loss and emotional wreckage against the loss of a city that has seen grief through centuries, decaying and yet regenerating.
In search of comfort and the desire to seek meaning, Krishnan turns to philosophy and religion but doesn’t find any solace. Finally, she returns to Ghalib, ‘one of Delhi’s famous lovers’ who lamented the loss of Delhi after the mutiny of 1857. To understand the depth of her loss and the absurdity of losing two people most dear to her, Krishnan walks along with Ghalib plundering his poetry to understand her own grief for she feels that ‘never has a writer been matched to a moment more perfectly’. Ghalib’s poetry gives her the frame to articulate her own rage and bereavement. ‘It is in Ghalib that I found loss, not as an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things, but as the point of life itself.’