A TEMPORARY MATTER opens with the word ‘No', a sound of rejection echoed throughout the memoir.

A 36-year old woman from Delhi, now living in Berlin with her husband Sunny (35) and daughter Izna (2), faces an agonizing choice in her fifth month of pregnancy — abort or wait for a miscarriage. She chooses to abort, a decision that tests her entire existence.

Lying alone in a hospital bed, she takes refuge in her childhood memories of Delhi — inventing games of God, eating clementines with salt, looking for omens in lizards. She recounts her first few weeks in Germany, where for the first time she became Indian outside of India, immediately associated with turmeric powder, Osho, Goa, beedis and ayurvedic herbs. Sunny's journey of grief, on the other hand, takes a different path. The further the narrator slips away from reality, the closer he grips it, — working, parenting, cooking, cleaning, shopping, repeat.

For the first time, she's able to access the pain of her aunt, who was repeatedly afflicted with false pregnancies. She understands the magnitude of her mother's sacrifice who gave away her second child to that aunt. When her gynaecologist says that her body is ready to bear another child, she rejects the prognosis with another ‘No'.

Instead, she chooses to reconcile with Sunny who's masking his pain behind a facade of efficiency and return to Izna who has been neglected in her grief.