Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s new book, Loss, is a reminder of the crushing reality that boys in our society are raised to be men who can walk through the world pretending that nothing moves, hurts or destroys them. They are discouraged from weeping in public or showing anything that looks like too much emotion. It is a sign of weakness they are told in stern unforgiving tones of disgust and dismissal. Their job is to wear an invisible armour, and to fight a lifelong war against vulnerability. To take it off would mean acknowledging defeat.
These rotten ideas in our society must be challenged frequently because they damage not only boys and men but people of all genders who have to live with them. To mourn, and to grieve, are ways of naming and recording our loss before we are pushed into the urgency of coping—which looks neat and palatable enough for the world to recognise and engage with. To deny these experiences is cruelty of the highest order but it is commonplace because people do not know what to do with a man in tears. It registers as unnecessary ugliness.
“Between 2008 and 2018, I lost my father, my mother, and my dog,” writes Shanghvi in his introduction to this collection of essays bursting with pain and beauty. He bears witness to the loss he had to embrace, and invites readers to confront their own with the gentleness and compassion that all beings deserve. The world he creates in this book is messy and complicated, unlike his elegant prose which is so finely woven that one wants to feel its texture and behold the artistry of the craftsman who laboured over this with so much love.
Shanghvi holds up each memory like an heirloom, revealing the nature of his relationships with those who have passed away but continue to live on in the traces they have left behind. He remembers them with affection, humour, curiosity, and occasionally, an admission of belated understanding that is possible only with some distance. He writes, “My father’s post-dinner stories revealed to me, also, how people care for us in sublime, silent ways, the ways that we don’t always recognise or honour in the hour, but which we come to in time.”
This book is about the fictions we create to comfort ourselves, the lessons we learn when we watch loved ones wither away, and the new selves we fashion out of the voids that no one can fill because some presences are irreplaceable. It is about the power of literature and music, which gives us strength when science fails to end our suffering. It is about prayer, the kindness of strangers, the stillness that dogs and trees bring into our lives, and the hope that flows through our veins when we know that we can learn to survive.