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 work of a mother and son building a life neither of them had planned for.
At its heart, this is a book about refusing to be reduced to a single word — widow — when a person is always several things at once.
