What does each setting in Bharati Mukherjee's story reveal about managing grief?

One of the central motifs in "The Management of Grief" is grieving. For the main character, Shaila Bhave, grief is both an expression of sorrow and love, and a way of coming into self knowledge. This process is intimately connected to place. Her life as an immigrant in Canada in a way is not a new life; she is still bound by the expectations of her culture, bonds that only begin to break in the aftermath of the horrific airline disaster that claims the lives of her husband and children.

Bhave's journey from Toronto to India and back mirrors her internal journey through the stages of grief. Toronto, where they first hear the news, is a claustrophic environment. Bhave cannot bring herself to express the grief she really feels, as can be seen when she is interviewed by the social worker, who commends her for her calmness. Bhave says that she wishes she could not be calm. In fact, she says, her calmness makes her feel like "a freak."

Later, after they travel to Ireland to identify bodies, Bhave finds a place that is more welcoming:

"The Irish are not shy; they rush to me and give me hugs and some are crying. I cannot imagine reactions like that on the streets of Toronto. Just strangers, and I am touched. Some carry flowers with them and give them to any Indian they see."

The Irish arrange a trip for them to the shore, where they can be close to their dead loved ones. They find comfort imagining that they might still be alive, speaking about their children in the present tense. They float remembrances on the water, in the hopes that maybe they will reach their loved ones somehow. Bhave floats a poem to her dead husband, telling him how much she loves him.

After Ireland, Bhave travels with the coffins to India. There she is transformed again: "In India, I become, once again, an only child of rich, ailing parents." Her life in Toronto, her family and husband, fade away as she is forced back into the role of daughter, and the spectre of returning to Canada, only with a new husband from an arranged marriage, hangs over her. Bhave is "trapped between two modes of knowledge. At thirty-six, I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between worlds."

While travelling in the Himalayas, at a temple, Bhave has a final mourning experience, and her husband's spirit descends to her:

My husband takes my hands in his. You’re beautiful, he starts. Then, What are you doing here? Shall I stay? I ask. He only smiles, but already the image is fading. You must finish alone what we started together. No seaweed wreathes his mouth. He speaks too fast, just as he used to when we were an envied family in our pink split-level. He is gone.

In this place, Bhave begins to find a kind of closure and acceptance. She begins to understand her place in the world, independent of her identity as a wife or as a daughter. She returns to Toronto, to help others, a final expression of her grief.

Name and describe the different settings in "The Management of Grief" by Bharati Mukherjee.

"The Management of Grief" moves from Canada to Ireland to India and back to Canada.

As the story opens, Indians have gathered in Shaila's home, where she has heard the news that a plane carrying her husband and sons has exploded. A person she doesn't know is making tea, while the television and two radios run. The "phone rings and rings." The home is permeated by industrialized culture: a Sony Walkman, talk of "space debris" and "lasers," a girl in a MacDonald's uniform. The scene feels enclosed, unnatural, claustrophobic. 

Four days later, Shaila is outdoors, in Ireland, "on a rock overlooking a bay in Ireland" where bodies from the wreckage have washed up. There are "June breezes." Rather than spend more time in the Irish hospital that has become a central point for identifying the dead, Shaila and some of the others decide to "spend the day by the waters." Shaila ruins her best sari stepping into the warm sea water where she imagines she might have played with her sons, but where now their dead bodies may be. Dr. Ranganathan floats rose petals for his wife in the water, while Shaila tosses out a poem she has written. They are trying to grieve but are stunned. Irish people hug them on the streets. 

From Ireland, Shaila and some of the others move on to India. Here, Shaila realizes she is trapped "between two modes of knowledge," but also finds comfort visiting a temple in the Himalayas. Here, making an offering of "flowers and sweetmeats" to a tribal god, Shaila is visited by the spirit of her dead husband. While much of this India section involves backstory on Shaila's family history and offers some generic descriptions of the family traveling "to hill stations and beach resorts," at the temple we get a specific description of the scene: Shaila's dead husband descends next to "a scrawny sadhu in moth-eaten robes." Her husband wears "a vanilla suit.' The sadhu "tosses petals on a butter-fed flame ... and sweeps his face of flies." This encounter with the spirit of her dead husband is depicted as more real to Shaila than the rest of her trip to India. 

Back in Toronto, the landscape is urban, far different from the remote Himalaya village with the temple, or the clubs and resorts of India. Shaila accompanies Judith to a high-rise apartment to visit an Indian couple who have lost a child and are having trouble understanding how to cope with the government, which wants them to sign papers they don't comprehend so that they can get benefits. Their rooms are "dark and stuffy," lit only with an oil lamp, because their electricity has been turned off. They make tea. The scene is an odd hybrid of Indian and Western culture as Shaila tries to bridge the cultural gap by translating between English and Hindi. The scene is claustrophobic and enclosed, as it was at Shaila's house at the beginning. There's also a sense of enclosure as Shaila rides in Judith's car, "looking out the window." It is only as Shaila makes the decision not to try to help Judith, and asks "let me out at the subway," that she begins to become free.   

At the end of the story, the scenery has symbolic significance. It starts out "grey ... icy." Shalia stays "indoors, watching television." Then the weather changes and becomes warmer, with a "clear blue sky." In this setting, Shaila, finally outdoors in Canada, gets the message from her dead relatives that frees her: "Go, be brave." Outdoors, in an open, liberating setting that reflects her new inner freedom and inner clarity, Shaila begins to walk.