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What happens when you lose the one through whom you learned love? And what if you lose not one, but two such anchors? What do you do when you are left with holes of their shape in your heart? How do you move forward when the only desire left in you is the longing to have loved them just a little harder, held them a little longer? White Lilies: An Essay on Grief by Vidya Krishnan is a tender yet aching meditation on these questions – an intimate chronicle of her journey through the terrain of loss, grief, and enduring pain.
An unending loss
In August, when the marigolds were in full bloom, Krishnan did not return to Delhi. Instead, she flew to Chennai to be with her dying grandmother – the woman who had raised her, fed her, and loved her with the quiet fierceness only grandmothers know. As she watched her haemorrhage before her eyes, Krishnan could do nothing but hold her wrinkled hand, the same hand that once comforted her in childhood.
They cremated her on a Sunday afternoon.
By Monday morning, Krishnan was back in Delhi. Grief-stricken and trying to move on, though barely. Her partner, Ali, had dinner plans that evening. He offered to cancel them, but she asked him to go, gently reminding him to bring soup on his way back.
He never returned. A car hit him. And then another.
In the span of a single weekend, Krishnan lost two of the greatest loves of her life – her grandmother to time, and her partner to a random, fatal accident. For years, she reeled from the double blow – mourning, disbelieving, grappling with the sheer absurdity and finality of death. A seasoned journalist long accustomed to reporting on illness, accidents, and loss, Krishnan found herself unarmed when death arrived at her doorstep. “The thing about death,” she writes, “is that the loss you feel the day a person dies is simply an inciting event. If you live long enough, you lose them repeatedly, for as long as you live and they do not.”
In White Lilies, Krishnan brings forth a searing anatomy of grief, laying bare its raw, unyielding presence in the body. She writes about how grief is not simply an abstract emotion, but a physical invader; how it takes root in your memory and personal space, burrowing itself into the very fabric of your existence. It lives in you like a parasite, gnaws at your stomach, and refuses to be sated. The smallest reminders about those now gone only deepen that pit, transforming every corner of life into a shadow of loss.
“No one ever warns you about days like these,” Krishnan writes, “when hell resides in the pit of your stomach, when you must breathe through a bottomless black hole.” Grief, in her telling, is as real as the teeth in your mouth, as tangible and inescapable as the air you breathe. It is not a metaphor, but a relentless force that takes hold of the body, creating a space where memory and suffering converge.
Delhi, the city of Death
She tries to make sense of it in every way she knows – in science, in religion, in recurring patterns, in the minutiae of daily life, in the mysteries of the afterlife – until she finds someone to blame: Delhi. Krishnan writes the city from the vantage point of the inevitable – Death. She lends material weight to the spectral cityscapes of Anisha Lalvani’s Girls Who Stray and Ranbir Sidhu’s Night in Delhi, both of which render Delhi as a city simmering with pain, silent suffering, insecurities, stark inequalities, and a brutal power imbalance – where the rich rule over the poor, and people can die arbitrarily, abruptly. She does all this while grieving.
White Lilies offers a succinct and devastating commentary on the classist nature of Delhi, as seen through its roads, its traffic, and the reckless rhythms of driving. The traffic in Delhi, as Krishnan astutely observes, is not simply a logistical challenge. It is governed by the petty yet insidious dynamics of power. The streets unfold as an intricate “dance of dominance,” where hierarchy hums in every revving engine and screeches through every abrupt brake.
This relentless choreography of movement, filled with anger and disregard for life, reflects the unspoken “class warfare” that defines the city. The powerful navigate the roads with impunity, their status allowing them to bypass the rules, while the powerless cling to fragile aspirations of breaking the rules, crossing lines, in a desperate attempt to taste power, even if just for a fleeting moment. It is in these small, everyday (mis)adventures that the stark inequalities of Delhi’s social fabric are most acutely felt, where the struggle for power plays out on the most ordinary of stages – the road.
Delhi, with its heartlessness, its endless history of death and renewal, stood as the perfect mirror to her mourning. But in this unforgiving metropolis, she also found a companion – a voice that could speak to her grief with a language both bitter and beautiful: Mirza Ghalib. In the midst of her own sorrow, Krishnan found solace in the city’s echoes of Ghalib’s ghazals, as if his poetic legacy held a secret truth she had been searching for. “In his lifetime, grief did not diminish him. It expanded his capacity to hold infinite beauty.”
Krishnan brings Delhi to life through the dead – those who have passed, but whose presence continues to haunt the city’s streets. She traces a historical narrative of Delhi’s own suffering, its cycles of destruction and rebirth. From the Mughals to the East India Company to the British colonial period, and then swiftly to the present, she paints a poetic yet painful account of how much the city, and more so its residents, have endured. Through these centuries of ruin and renewal, Krishnan evokes the city not just as a geographical space, but as a living entity – one that has absorbed and reflected the endless pains of its people, yet has always, relentlessly, risen again.
White Lilies is a devastatingly honest meditation on the unyielding finality of death, written by someone who has spent years trying to make sense of its silences. Krishnan’s exploration of grief is anything but abstract; it is raw, lived, and searing. She meets loss not from a distance, but up close – touching its jagged edges, tracing its contours through memory, regret, and the stubborn persistence of love.
Grief, in her hands, is not a solid entity but a mosaic that is fragile, luminous, and alive. This is not merely a book about death, but about surviving its aftermath, about learning to live alongside absence, and about discovering what it means to live with life, with tenderness, with regard, for oneself and for others. It is an invocation of how to carry the dead within us as quiet companions on the road ahead. Powerful and quietly shattering, White Lilies does not offer closure – it offers companionship. And in doing so, it gently, insistently asks: how do we grieve, how do we remember, and how do we begin again?
White Lilies: An Essay on Grief, Vidya Krishnan, Tranquebar/Westland.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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