Vidya Krishnan's book White Lilies deals with Delhi's road rage

The Hindu

21-05-2025

In her new book White Lilies published by Westland, author Vidya Krishnan chronicles her grief of losing her husband in a road accident in Delhi and urges people to fact-check myths about the cities they live in. .
The book, born from the pain of losing her spouse in a tragic accident, is less of a memoir and more meditative in quality. The author tries to make sense of a life turned upside down.
During a chat with filmmaker Shaunak Sen at The Bookshop in Delhi recently, Vidya highlighted how road rage in Delhi is intrinsically connected to every individual's repressed feelings and emotions. The duo discussed death and trauma, and how we as a society fail to implement solutions that could minimise road accidents.
'We are constantly feeding lies to ourselves,' she says, adding that the book took shape as she began writing as a way to cope with grief. 'Writing did not reduce my grief per se but helped me make sense of the emotion. I was actually rage-typing, pouring out my feelings on an empty paper.'
Shaunak Sen describes Vidya's book as a 'trans-historical rant of the city' that weaves itself around Mirza Ghalib's misery, something that the author totally identifies with. Vidya seeks refuge in Ghalib's poems; it works as an antidote to her own pain. Her book interweaves the city and the poet as Vidya visualises Ghalib as someone who is a 'broken' man. 'The halo around Ghalib doesn't mask his flaws. Delhi as a city hurt Ghalib and he took to poetry,' she says.
Talking of Delhi normalising accidents, Vidya said the problem is in the citizens' refusal to acknowledge it. 'Dilli dilwalon ki is a myth. In every city, peoplelive in their own bubble; be it Mumbai's delusional story of resilience, Bengaluru's traffic, or Delhi's toxic positivity and pride. None of it makes sense as they do not address the core issues of our shared reality; how people try to escape the trauma of crimes.
'You truly belong to a place if you have buried someone there,' says Vidya, underlining her grief. Her book mentions the unsafe roads and how run-of-the-mill it is to die on the city's roads and how pedestrians are always at the receiving end.
Vidya grapples not just with sorrow, but anger too, which is not explosive but slow-burning, reflective and deeply human. 'Without rage there cannot be change,' she says.
'I hope the book will make people talk about their feelings, rather than being repressed,' she adds.
White Lilies is not a book about healing in the conventional sense. It is about carrying grief with grace, about learning to speak in a world that often tells us to be quiet.
Rounak Khare and Seelva Mohanty