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Vidya Krishnan’s White Lilies: An Essay on Grief is presented in Anjali Chauhan’s review as an account of bereavement that reaches beyond a single moment of loss. Chauhan describes Krishnan grieving two people who anchored her life—her grandmother and her partner Ali—after both died in the same weekend. The review’s reading of the book follows grief through memory, the body and the streets of Delhi, without offering closure as a simple destination.
What is White Lilies about?
White Lilies: An Essay on Grief is a book by journalist and author Vidya Krishnan, published by Tranquebar/Westland, according to Anjali Chauhan’s June 28, 2025 review for Scroll.in. Chauhan describes it as an intimate account of Krishnan’s experience after her grandmother, who raised and cared for her, and her partner Ali died within the same weekend.
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The review foregrounds the rupture between reporting on death as a journalist and facing it in one’s own life. Its central question is what it means to lose the people through whom one learned love—and how memory continues to shape life after they are gone.
How does the book portray grief?
Chauhan reads Krishnan’s grief as embodied and persistent, not as an abstract idea that can be neatly put away. The review quotes Krishnan describing loss as something that returns: “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.”
That passage frames bereavement as a continuing relationship with absence, carried through recollection and ordinary life. Another quotation in the review evokes the bodily force of sorrow: “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.” These are literary expressions of the experience as the review presents it, not clinical claims or medical guidance.
Why is Delhi more than a setting?
In Chauhan’s interpretation, Delhi is part of the book’s way of thinking about loss. Traffic and the city’s histories of death and renewal place personal bereavement alongside wider conditions: class power, inequality and the uneven ways people encounter danger and mortality. The city is not simply scenery around Krishnan’s private grief; it offers a social and physical landscape through which the review understands that grief.
What role does Mirza Ghalib’s poetry play?
The review describes Ghalib’s ghazals as a source of language and companionship for sorrow. Krishnan’s reflection on the poet is quoted this way: “In his lifetime, grief did not diminish him. It expanded his capacity to hold infinite beauty.” In Chauhan’s reading, Ghalib does not resolve the losses; his poetry gives Krishnan a way to approach grief and beauty together.
Does White Lilies offer closure?
Chauhan’s closing interpretation is that the book offers companionship with grief rather than a promise that it will end or be overcome. Its questions—how to grieve, remember and begin again—are treated as ongoing, not as steps toward a guaranteed resolution. That is the reviewer’s framing of the book, rather than a claim that grief follows one universal course.
Who may find the book relevant?
Based on Chauhan’s account, the book may speak to readers looking for literary reflection on bereavement that connects intimate loss with memory, place and social inequality. It is presented as an essay on grief, not as a how-to guide or a substitute for professional support. The review names the publisher as Tranquebar/Westland but does not establish the book’s current editions, formats, price or availability.
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