When Shaweta lost her husband during India's second wave of COVID-19, grief turned out to be only part of what she was learning to carry. Alongside it arrived something quieter and harder to name: a set of assumptions, particular to the culture and family she belonged to, about how a widow should look, behave, parent, work, and imagine her future.
Refusing to Live in Black & White moves between the marriage that came before and the years that followed, between memory and the present, without asking either to cancel out the other. It is a book about a son growing up, a mother who stayed, friendships that showed up in unexpected shapes, and the slow, unexpectedly funny, occasionally maddening work of becoming whole again on one's own terms.
At its heart, this is a book about refusing reduction — about insisting that grief and joy, responsibility and freedom, memory and possibility can all belong to the same life, sometimes within the same hour.
