Title from the Penman Store

Refusing to Live in Black & White

by Shaweta Anand

Shaweta lost her husband during India's second wave of COVID-19. What she was not prepared for was everything that came after: qulet assumptions about how a widow should look behave, parent, work, and imagine her future. Nobody said any of this directly. Almost everybody believed it anyway. Refusing to Live in Black & White moves between the marriage that came before and the years that followed, without asking elther to cancel out the other. It is the story of a son growing up, a mother who stayed, friendships that held more than anyone expected, and the slow, occasionally funny, often infuriating work of refusing to become smaller to make other people comfortable. This is not a book about getting over grief. It is about choosing what the rest of a life can hold when love remains, the person does not, and the world has already decided who you are supposed to become.