About the Book

A FIERCE ACCOUNT OF GRIEF, WRITTEN WITH RAW HONESTY, WHITE LILIES GRAPPLES WITH QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY, PURPOSE AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
‘It makes sense to me that Delhi, with its long history of bereavement, was also home to Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’, who captured grief as perhaps no poet, no one else has.’
Vidya Krishnan lost her grandmother to old age and her partner to a road accident in one devastating weekend. For years, she reeled from the losses, mourning yet disbelieving the uncanny experience that is death. She looked to make sense of it in every way—in her scrutiny of small losses, in patterns, in religion, in science. She tried to write it out of her system, in the stories on road safety she researched and filed.
Eventually, her grief and rage focused on the one thing she could blame: Delhi, with its heartlessness, its history of death and renewal down the ages. And she found a companion in her grief, the greatest poet of the city, Mirza Ghalib.
White Lilies is a devastatingly candid meditation on what it means to confront the absolute, unshakeable finality of death, written by someone who spent years trying to understand it. Through her daily confrontation with the minutiae of grief, Krishnan comes to see it not as a static monolith but as a shifting mosaic. Powerful and moving in equal measure, this is also a book about what it means to endure death and go on loving, and a profound meditation on how to carry one’s dead as one moves forward.

About the Author

Vidya Krishnan is a journalist and writer. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2021. She writes for Caravan magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic.