Throughout this story, the process of connection and separation serves as a key theme. We see this in the distance between Shoba and Shukumar at the beginning and then their slowly growing closer to each other only to separate again when Shoba tells Shukumar that she is leaving him. I do think that the way she tells him she is leaving is cruel, snuggling and cuddling with him to give him hope that things will work out only to drop the bomb that she doesn’t want to stay with him anymore.
However, I wonder if she meant to lead him on like that or if she too was lulled into the hope that they could be like they were before their baby died. I did feel a slight satisfaction that justice had been served when Shukumar told her about the baby, but that was quickly squashed by her reaction. I wonder if things would have been different had Shoba known that Shukumar was there to hold their dead baby. In the end, there was definitely guilt on both sides — Shukumar for not being there for his wife and child and cruelly telling Shoba about their child when she couldn’t bear to hear the details, and Shoba for freezing him out for so long, dragging him through all that hope before destroying it and also feeling that she failed somehow at giving life to their child.