Stripping grief of its romanticism

In Learning To Make Tea For One, Andaleeb Wajid compels us to return to a moment in history that many of us have tried hard to forget — the terrifying, deadly, disorienting days of the Covid-19 pandemic. With aching intimacy and a quietly piercing grief, she recounts the personal tragedy of losing her husband and mother-in-law to the virus. But this is not just a memoir of loss; it is a deeply human exploration of love, longing, memory, and the silent labour of grieving as a woman, a mother, a widow and lastly, as a writer.  

The memoir does not sensationalise grief. Instead, it lingers in the ordinariness of it. Wajid takes us through the slow, mundane days after death. What makes this memoir striking is how it resists the temptation of closure or neat moral lessons. Wajid does not claim to have found healing or closure. Instead, she offers us fragments, memories of her husband’s quirks, the early days of their marriage, the rhythms of their shared life, and the rupture that followed. Through these fragments, we come to know not just the man she loved, but the woman she becomes after he is gone.

However, grief does not lend itself easily to narrative. To relive trauma, to put pain into words, and then to open those words to the world is an act of profound vulnerability. Wajid takes that risk with Learning To Make Tea For One, much like Vidya Krishnan does in her recent memoir White Lilies. Both books grapple with themes of loss and mourning, but their tonal registers are strikingly different. Where Krishnan writes with visible rage, her grief sharpened into a political indictment exposing the larger power dynamics of our society, Wajid’s approach is gentler, embedded in the mundane, and more inward-looking. Yet both offer searing honesty, stripping grief of its romanticism and exposing its bare, complicated truths.

What sets Wajid’s memoir apart is the expansive emotional arc she traces. She does not confine her story to the pandemic or to her husband’s death. Instead, she opens the door to her life, beginning with her childhood and her first experience of loss when her father died. She writes candidly about her marriage — a union between two distinctly different personalities who eventually settled into a tender companionship. There is no glossing over the dissonances or difficulties. Wajid explores the various textures of guilt that accompany grief, but also her privileges: the guilt of surviving along with the privilege of having access to medical care when others around her were gasping for breath, the guilt of not being with her husband enough, along with the privilege of retreating from everyday responsibilities while she gathered the strength to carry on after he passed. Her honesty is unsparing, yet never performative. She does not seek sympathy but only to tell the truth as she experienced it.

She writes with rare honesty about the deeply gendered nature of mourning. She is appalled not just by the weight of her grief, but by how swiftly those around her, relatives and well-wishers alike, attempted to reframe her sorrow within a patriarchal script. Their sympathy came laced with expectation: that she must now “live for her children,” as though her own existence were secondary, defined only through the roles she plays for others. Her pain, her personhood, seemed to matter less than the performance of maternal resilience. Wajid reflects, with sharp clarity, that had she been the one to die, the same people would likely have advised her husband to remarry. These double standards lay bare the quiet violence of gendered grief, where a woman’s loss is never hers alone, and her healing must always serve someone else. It is in this moment that the title of her memoir, Learning To Make Tea For One, resonates most powerfully: it marks a turning inward, a reclaiming of self, and the slow, painful practice of making space for one’s own presence, in solitude.

To learn to make tea for one is no small thing. In doing so, Wajid teaches us what it means to hold our own hand through loss. In a world that rushes women through grief, Wajid lingers. Her memoir is a gentle yet defiant act of remembrance, of reclaiming space for sorrow, survival, and selfhood.