Mosaic of Mourning

Vidya Krishnan’s White Lilies: An Essay on Grief is a slender book (chapbook?) that threads love, rage, and cityscape into a stark lament. It is a 98‑page meditation on loss that feels as though the reader has stepped into a chamber where every footfall of memory reverberates insistently.

In one calamitous weekend Krishnan lost her grandmother and her partner to a road accident in Delhi. The book is her attempt to examine the brutality of the bereavement. The result is part memoir, part reportage, part Delhi city‑portrait, and a love letter to the dead.

Krishnan is known for her health journalism, but here she trades medical footnotes for footfalls—quite literally pacing Delhi’s alleys in search of meaning. She finds unlikely companionship in Mirza Ghalib’s poems, those evocative couplets that make room for grief without shame. Delhi, Krishnan writes, is “a city fluent in loss,” and the book lets geography do the emotional work: smog thickens grief, busy intersections magnify the chaos of sudden death, and a stray gulmohar bloom supplies the red that is everywhere after an accident.

There has been mourning material before this, if you are asking, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s slim Notes on Grief. Where Didion diagnosed magical thinking, Krishnan practices “listening,” attuning to the stories the city whispers about grief and endurance. And where Adichie wrote in the raw months of the pandemic, Krishnan writes after a decade of carrying her dead; her grief has muscle memory.  Krishnan’s musings unfurl that grief is not always a hurdle to overcome but also a landscape to learn. The resulting voice is analytical yet vulnerable, like a tremulous wail of a sarangi that accompanies a ghazal’s lyrical verse.

One of the book’s quiet triumphs is how it connects the personal with the political. Road‑accident deaths in India remain staggeringly high, and Krishnan’s professional instinct is to marshal data; still, each statistic is anchored to the personal, like the presence of her partner’s robes or the smell of lilies on his grave. This doubleness of public calamity and private apocalypse and Krishnan’s rage at civic indifference—careless driving, cruel indifference on roads, and clumsy and callous responses by friends—keeps the memoir’s quiet rage burning.

Krishnan also ropes two strands of sorrow: the old Delhi of Mirza Ghalib and the city’s violent collapse when the Mughal Empire fell. She pieces together both the public cataclysm—Delhi seized in blood—and Ghalib’s private bereavement, letting each inform the other. Unlike Ghalib, in the aftermath of her tragedy, Krishnan confesses that she fled the city of Delhi, working, researching, travelling, trying to use distance as a strategy to examine if she could overcome her grief.

The title image, white lilies, works triple duty: funereal flower, Delhi traffic roundabout ornament, and Ghalib’s “lily without a tongue,” the silent witness to suffering. Like plucking a flower, Krishnan examines her options, interrogating faith, civic sense, poetry, and language itself. The book unfolds as a series of brief sequences: its untitled sections are sign‑posted by images—old‑world Ghalib‑era Delhi, weathered gravestones, fallen leaves, and still‑life sketches of gnarled trees and hushed city corners—each one carving out a pocket of silence within the narrative.

Death wears many faces. For some it feels like a quiet release, for others a tightening shackle. It can arrive gently or with sudden violence, and every culture answers with its own chorus of ritual—sometimes clamorous, sometimes hushed.  How we mourn and the premise of loss remains the same: that it should be heard.

Lament, then, is grief’s love language. It could be private tears, public ceremony or call to war or reason. And sometimes as in the case of White Lillies, through words.

For readers navigating fresh loss, the book’s refusal to prescribe is its gift. There is no programme here with five stages, only companionship in bewilderment. For those fortunate enough to read from calmer shores, Krishnan offers a primer in empathy: an invitation to count every fragile pedestrian and think, “here’s someone’s beloved.”

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