begin to make confessions to each other during that time, and their relationship recovers an intimacy it has not had in a long time. The narrator explains, "Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again." The partners find themselves eager to talk to each other during the dark hour each night, with Shukumar even spending time during the day thinking about what to confess to his wife that evening. Eventually, though, the power is restored. At this point, Shoba tells her husband she is moving out; she has found an apartment. He tells her details he previously swore he would not reveal about their stillborn son. Their "temporary" intimacy and understanding have come to an end, as has their relationship.

The title holds significance on a couple of fronts.  The first would be the "temporary matter" of the power cuts in the evening.  This establishes the basis for the plot of the story.  This is temporary as, by the end, electrical power is restored, while the power of love becomes absent.  Another understanding of the "temporary matter" could be the seeming emotional and physical intimacy of Shoba and Shukumar during the power outages.  It seems as if there is a greater closeness developing between both.  Yet, this is also temporary.  Shoba's rehearsed delivery of breaking up with Shukumar and his disclosure to her as a response clearly demonstrates that the emotional connection that might have been forged or the intimacy that appeared to be formulated was, in fact, temporary.  Finally, I think that  the nature of emotional commitment in the world of Shoba and Shukumar is revealed to be one in which everything is a "temporary matter."  It does not seem as if their relationship was really ever one in which there was a permanent and lasting connection.  The death of their child did not really forge a connection between them, moving them even closer to a "temporary" state.  The fact that Shukumar operates in a state of introverted being while Shoba is more active with her work and being out of the house feeds the idea that their entire relationship was a "temporary matter."  The ending in which both are poised in the dark, weeping with what it is they now know helps to bring to light that the only non- temporal condition in their relationship is the hurt and sadness that will accompany them like a shadow in their own darkness.

I think that one of the significant ideas that comes out of Lahiri's short story is that there is a level of emotional duplicity that is present in relationships.  There is nothing to suggest that Shukumar and Shoba's relationship is ladened with secrets or is predisposed to secrets of deception.  Their relationship is standard.  Yet, the entire game that they play during the power outage is reflective of how much both have kept from one another.  The transgressions are small, to an extent.  Yet, as the game increases in duration, worse elements of deception are revealed and the entire relationship turns in a brutal game of disclosure.  This becomes one of the major ideas that comes out of the story.  The most basic of relationships can contain the most brutal of secrets.  When Shukumar tells Shoba of his secret, it is a reminder of how two people who are not malevolent or evil by any means can display the worst of cruelty to one another.  This deception becomes one of the major ideas of the story, one that reflects how relatively good people can do some terrible things in the name of love of another.

The theme of "A Temporary Matter" is to show how deception, grief, and alienation destroy a marriage.

As the story opens, Shukumar and Shoba are dealing with the bitter disappointment of losing their first child. They avoid each other and barely speak. Shukumar displays his grief by lying in bed and not working on his dissertation as he should be. Shoba has become careless about the house and no longer cooks.

During the course of a few evenings when the power is shut off, they seem to come back together as they light candles and talk over dinner and wine. They begin a ritual of telling each other ways they deceived the other person in the past. These are mostly minor things, and Shukumar, the point-of-view character, hopes the marriage is healing. He is especially hopeful after he and Shoba make love.

But Shukumar is ignoring that their interactions show that their marriage has a history of small secrets and deception. They have had a marriage based on deceptions, and he is deceiving himself about the future he imagines they will have together. He finds that he misinterpreted Shoba's sharing of deceptions as a form of rebirth—she had all the time been looking for and found another apartment. She had been ending the relationship their last few days together, not renewing it.

The story shows that a marriage can fall apart when too much deception, alienation, and grief enters into it and that the wishful thinking of one partner can't save it.