Love, Loss and Healing

 

Book Review

 

Title: Learning to Make Tea for One:  Reflections on Love, Loss and Healing

Author: Andaleeb Wajid

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books LLP, New Delhi, 2025

Pages: 224

 

Few experiences fracture a life as completely as the simultaneous loss of spouse and a parent. Andaleeb Wajid’s Learning to Make Tea for One is born from such a rupture, and any reader approaching it must do so with a measure of human sympathy.

The Covid pandemic descended like a doom on thousands of people in the beginning of 2020s. The author of this book had to endure the immeasurable pain of losing her husband and her mother-in-law within a few days. Mansoor, her husband, was only 49 years old when he succumbed to the pandemic.

Having lost her father when she was only 12, Andaleeb had established a very loving bond with her mother-in-law, who was also her aunt. Mansoor was her cousin as well as husband. Such intrafamilial marriages are common in her community, she tells us in the memoir. She was only 18 when she was given in marriage to 25-year-old Mansoor. That is another common practice in her community – marrying girls at young ages.

Theirs was a happy family life. After all, they all knew each other right from childhood. But catastrophe struck the happiness too early. How does one deal with bereavement, especially when two of the closest individuals leave you totally unexpectedly? This book is about that – coping with grief and overcoming it. Not just survive, but thrive, as the author says. That’s important. Mere survival isn’t enough if you want to make life meaningful and happy. Wajid discovered that happiness and meaning in writing.

More than a memoir, this book is a literary act of mourning. True, it also shows us how one has to learn to wipe off the tears and get on with life. “Thriving, surviving, living, all of the above is not easy,” Wajid writes towards the end. “Not when life stretches before you like a blank page and you’re supposed to keep moving on, but not moving on too much either, especially if you’re a woman.”

Being a woman in India, and that too a Muslim woman, has its limits and restrictions. If a woman dies, her husband can find a new wife because a man cannot look after himself and family without a woman. That’s not the case with women, however. Wajid’s memoir does look at such social issues though briefly or even superficially.

Perhaps superficiality is a conspicuous flaw in an otherwise eminently readable book. Wajid’s style is simple and lucid, quite like a gentle stream that flows through a beautiful valley. It is soothing in spite of the theme that is soaked in gloom. The drawback is that the narrative fails to balance personal loss with a commonly shared meaning of such loss. What makes memoirs of grief enduring is the move from mourning to meaning. There is survival in this memoir, even thriving. But it fails to plumb certain depths.

Having said that, I hasten to add that the title’s metaphor of making tea for one is evocative and poignant. It underscores the inevitable solitude that stares at one incessantly after the loss of the most beloved person. This book will resonate with readers seeking companionship in grief, particularly if they prefer smooth narratives.

PS. I received a copy of this book as a prize for a blogging activity organised by a blogger’s community led by Manali Manan Desai and Sukaina Majeed.