outside reading part 1

"Shoba looked at him now, her face contorted with sorrow. He had cheated on a college exam, ripped a picture of a woman out of a magazine. He has returned a sweater and got drunk in the middle of the day instead. These were the things he had told her. He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of a hospital. He had held him until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise." This passage is the tragic rush of feelings and realizations that Shuckumar goes through after his wife Shoba tells him she is leaving him. The passage describes all of the secrets he has shared with her when the power was off leading up to the most painful secret of holding his dead baby. The significance of Shuckumar holding his son in a darkened room is that it makes the reader think back to the other secrets that Shoba and Shuckumar have shared with each other while the lights had been turned off. Darkness is also a symbol of pain and creates an image of emptiness which they had gone through with the loss of a child and now the loss of love for one another.