A Passage North

Author: Anuk Arudpragasam

• The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.

• Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life.

• It was a naïve idea in a way, since he had no notion what social work in the former war zone would entail, had none of the specific skills or experiences that would help him in this kind of vocation, but unable to bear the thought of waiting impassively as Anjum’s impending departure drew nearer he’d begun to cultivate once more his sense of having a destiny in that place he’d never actually lived, fantasizing about what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create out of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to.

• These images had filled him with a sense of freedom, with the possibility of living a life radically different from his own, but they’d been suffused at the same time with a dreamlike quality that made it hard to think about them in any concrete way, just as the news that arrived each day in the newspapers about shellings and skirmishes, about advances, retreats, and cease-fires, had always been of importance and concern but rarely disrupted the flow of events in his own life in the south of the country, part of the white noise of life that he’d learned since childhood to take for granted.

• It was only much later that events in the northeast began to penetrate more deeply into the pattern of his everyday life, toward the end of the war in 2008 and 2009 when it was beginning to seem, for the first time, that the Tigers might be defeated, and with them the idea of a Tamil-speaking state in the northeast.

• The internet, he realized, was rife with the civilian photographic archives of recent wars around the world, each one a seemingly endless maze of nameless violence, and in the months following the war’s end he’d spent much of his time exploring these archives at leisure, gazing blankly at images of bloated bodies and severed limbs, of molested corpses, burning tents, and screaming children, many of which remained imprinted in his mind with disturbing clarity.

• The internet, he realized, was rife with the civilian photographic archives of recent wars around the world, each one a seemingly endless maze of nameless violence, and in the months following the war’s end he’d spent much of his time exploring these archives at leisure, gazing blankly at images of bloated bodies and severed limbs, of molested corpses, burning tents, and screaming children, many of which remained imprinted in his mind with disturbing clarity. It was impossible to forget these images once they’d been glimpsed, not just because of the violence they showed but also because of their strikingly amateur quality, for unlike the highly aestheticized, almost tasteful shots of war one often came across in books and magazines, the images he found online were of jarringly poor composition.

• They were images, he couldn’t help feeling, that he wasn’t supposed to see, depicting people in positions they would sooner die than be discovered in, the fear in their eyes due less to the terror of the situation than the terror of being captured in states of such intimate agony, their gazes filling him with shame even as he was unable to turn away.

• It was only when the Channel Four documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report giving an estimate of how many civilians had died, that he was finally able to speak about what had happened, to accept that the images he’d become obsessed with were not some strange, perverted creation of his subconscious life, that they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from.

• Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he’d been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he’d been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of a panel of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.

• Nothing around him seemed to register the extent of what had happened—even on the final day of the war life in college went on more or less as usual, everyone immersed in studying for their end-of-term exams—and this incongruity between his environment and what was going on inside him—his growing sense that the world as he understood it had come to an end—led him to feel that the spaces he inhabited lacked some vital dimension of reality, that his life in Delhi was a kind of dream or hallucination.

• It was probably some dissonance of this kind, it occurred to him now, that had led so many Tamils living in foreign countries to such acts of desperation, that led that boy whose name he could no longer remember to travel from London to Geneva so he could set himself on fire in front of the UN building in February 2009, that led tens of thousands of protesters, most of them refugees, to spontaneously gather three months later on one of Toronto’s major highways and bring the entire city’s traffic to a standstill—as if these exiled Tamils were willing to go to any length to force the alien environments in which they now lived, so far from the northeast of Sri Lanka, to come at least briefly to a stop, to reflect or register in some way the cessation of life that they knew was occurring in their place of birth.

• He’d envisioned participating in some kind of dramatic change, in some kind of sudden rising or flourishing after all the pain and grief, but as the months turned into a year and as one year turned into two he began to realize that these visions would never be achieved, that some forms of violence could penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering.

• As his initial urgency and unity of purpose wore away, he began spending more of his weekends in Colombo, making the seven-hour journey back home two, sometimes even three times a month.

• Krishan registered these changes with resentment, as if the city’s sudden modernity was in direct relation to the evisceration of the northeast, but he couldn’t help being drawn to the easy distractions this urban life seemed to offer, and when a position opened up at one of the large foreign NGOs in Colombo—highly bureaucratic, well-compensated, and concerned mainly with applications and reports—he’d decided it was time to return, not for very long, he told himself, just until he’d saved up some money and had a better sense of what his next steps were

• The room was still suspended in the warm glow of early evening, but the shaft of light that fell from the window had moved along the floor, indicating that he’d been standing there for a considerable amount of time.

• Almost everyone told falsehoods, it was true, in order to maintain in their minds a certain image of themselves, but whereas everyone else told these lies skillfully, without exposing the insecurities at their source, his grandmother’s lies revealed that she was capable now of only the most transparent attempts at maintaining her preferred self-image, betraying herself far more in uttering them than if she’d simply kept silent.

• His walks had become an unexpected routine in the previous few months, one of the few effective strategies he’d found for escaping the restlessness that had begun taking hold when he returned in the evenings from work.

• when the sun was setting and the golden yellow light giving way, suddenly and dramatically, first to pink, then to violet, and finally to the lighter and darker blues of night.

• When he returned to the enclosed spaces of his house and room after these walks he was usually too tired to feel the unease that had led him to leave, and getting on his bed, salty from perspiration and the breeze of the sea, a pleasant ache in his calves and thighs, he would lie there in the cocoon of his exhaustion, getting up only when it was time at half past eight to go downstairs and bring dinner up to his grandmother, when it was already dark and the most difficult part of the day, the transition from evening to night, was over and done with.

• The occasion for his return to the habit had come only a couple of months earlier, when stopping at a small snack shop to buy a Milo during one of his walks, he’d observed the man in front of him asking for three single Gold Leafs, paying for them and collecting them from the counter with a self-satisfaction that made him wonder what was stopping him from doing the same.

• He didn’t stop going out in the nights or trying to meet new people, but smoking allowed him to accept that there was nothing more than what was visible before him, opening the present up, making it more expansive but also more inhabitable, so that even when he returned home with none of his hopes for the night fulfilled he was consoled by the certainty of one last cigarette before bed.

• There’d always been a kind of buried tension in Appamma’s face when she was compelled to leave the house and traverse the unfamiliar terrain of public spaces, an anxious strain in her features as she navigated the slender line between shame and danger, shame, on the one hand, of the ungainliness of her body and uncertainty of her feet, of the fact she was slowing down everyone else in the party and becoming an object of pity, danger, on the other hand, of trying

• There’d always been a kind of buried tension in Appamma’s face when she was compelled to leave the house and traverse the unfamiliar terrain of public spaces, an anxious strain in her features as she navigated the slender line between shame and danger, shame, on the one hand, of the ungainliness of her body and uncertainty of her feet, of the fact she was slowing down everyone else in the party and becoming an object of pity, danger, on the other hand, of trying too hard to keep up, of making a misstep and falling, which would of course have only made her even more an object of pity.

• When her daughter-in-law left the room she simply sat there staring at the walker, as if at an unwanted guest she could not send away, and for the next three days she hardly spoke or left her room.

• When relatives came to visit she would demonstrate its different features, how the height could be adjusted by means of the metal knobs on the legs, how the frame that connected the front legs to the back legs could, by swiveling, allow for a greater range of movement when she turned, as though she’d come to see the walker not as a mark of weakness or vulnerability but of strength and capability, as something that postponed and even halted her withdrawal and therefore something she could accept as part of herself.

• Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, drawn-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person.

• Ever since he was old enough to follow the news he’d been hearing of people dying in abrupt and unpredictable ways—in road accidents and race riots, by snakebite, tidal wave, and shards of shrapnel—and it had never really occurred to him that for most people in most places, even Sri Lanka, death was a process that began decades before the heart stopped beating, one with its own logic and trajectory.

• Soon one became even less aware of what was happening to other people in other places, frequenting only a few specific locations, the hospital for checkups and the houses of a few relatives, so that soon, scarcely able to move, one was confined not just to one’s house or flat but one’s room. Interaction with the outside world slowed to a stop, leaving one with no idea what to do or how to pass the time, with nothing to think about but oneself and one’s drastically reduced future, so that when at last it was time for one’s natural death, which was in fact far less natural than a sudden or violent death, being mediated at every juncture by doctors, nurses, tests, and medications, when at last it was time to leave behind what remained of the body, one’s first, most intimate environment, the small section of world over which one earlier possessed full mastery, it was something that one was if not exactly prepared for then not at least surprised by, since it was only, after all, the last stage in a withdrawal that was already long under way.

• The pharmacy always had all the items on the prescription—the antidepressants, the antianxiety medication, the sleeping pills, blood pressure tablets, and liver medication—and usually they stocked multiple brands of both the antidepressants and the antianxiety medication, suggesting a much wider demand for these medicines than he would otherwise have suspected. He’d often wondered after his visits how many other people in the area took medications for psychological issues or mental illness, whether there was anyone else nearby who came to the pharmacy in need of a similarly diverse assortment of drugs, and he wondered now whether there was anyone else who’d moved to the area from the northeast after experiencing a catastrophe like Rani’s.

• The canal was the union of several smaller canals that moved silently through the inland parts of the city, the culmination of a centuries-old drainage system that collected the city’s rainwater, channeled it toward the coast, and cast it out to sea. Its dark green water was calm and leisurely, its motion invisible except around the tips of the ferns that dropped down from the stone walls, pricking its otherwise smooth surface, and making his way along the walkway Krishan felt his quick steps giving way to a longer, more composed stride.

• Listening to its gentle gurgle during the lulls in traffic, he imagined the quietly profound meeting of waters that was taking place beneath the pavement, the slow, placid water of the city giving itself up to the deep, heavy, undulating water of the sea, and it occurred to him that it was perhaps this sense of an invisible but constant renewal taking place below that was the source of the reassurance he so often felt while crossing the canal, the intimation that subterranean processes might be occurring deep inside him too, even when, on the surface of his life, everything remained exactly the same.

• The temple had no official name, but growing up Krishan had always heard it referred to as the Visa Pillayar temple, since it was to petition for the granting of a visa that most people went to pray there, a petition that, in many cases, the Pillayar was said to have answered favorably.

• It was a comment that had clearly been authored by someone who’d lived many years in the area and then moved abroad, perhaps the very same person who’d campaigned to have the temple named on Google Maps, there were so many diasporic Tamils who haunted the internet in such ways, he knew, people who’d left or fled the country and now lived in bitter cold on the other side of the world, people who spent their free time trying to convince themselves that their pasts on this island really had taken place, their memories more than fantasies or hallucinations, representing people and places that really had taken up space on the earth.

• This had been in the mid-nineties, when thousands of Tamils displaced from the northeast had come to Colombo hoping to find a way to leave the country from there, to make it somehow to Canada or the UK or Europe or any other place that could be identified with the possibility of future prosperity.

• He hadn’t asked her more at the time, perhaps because it would have felt too intrusive, perhaps because he simply hadn’t thought to, but thinking of her confession now Krishan wished he had, for there was always something more to how people began such habits, not just with betel or cigarettes but with other, more addictive substances too.

• Addictions were, so often, at the beginning at least, a way of tolerating or managing yearnings that were too intense or too painful, a way of catching hold of desire that floated too freely, without an object to which it could be fastened, functioning for so many people as a means by which desire could be taken hold of and brought back down to the earth, relocated in easily acquired and reassuringly concrete objects like cigarettes, betel leaves, and bottles of liquor.

• It must have been unsettling, Krishan realized as he descended from his three-wheeler, to be seeing Colombo for the first time, to come here after having lived all her life in a small village on the far side of the country, under Tiger control for more than fifteen years. It must have been unsettling to have looked out the window of her bus at the miles of continually built-up area that led, through the densely populated outskirts and suburbs, into the central parts of the city, to see up close the money and power of the state against which so many people she knew had given up their lives trying to fight.

• She smiled in his presence and engaged in conversation with all three of them, though she rarely initiated a conversation herself, and except for her appearance, her darkened eyes and often uncombed, unruly hair, the only sign she gave of being less than well was the way her gaze sometimes seemed to slip away from what was in front of her, as if there were other things on her mind than the work that occupied her hands.

• There’d been so many stories of accidents in the northeast in the years since the end of the war, drownings, fires, mine explosions, and road accidents above all, so many brief second- or third-page news items that noted how some or another unknown person from the former war zone had died in some or another bizarre or unexpected way. Accidents happened everywhere, of course, but these accidents had to have been more than just bad luck, for how could such hardy people, people who’d gone through so much and still come out alive, allow themselves to die so easily now and with such docility?

• Bus drivers were so often in a state of physical tension, their hands tightly clutching the steering wheel and the gearstick, their feet constantly pushing down on the pedals, suddenly accelerating and breaking in the pointless attempt to overtake slower vehicles, attempts borne out of a deep anxiety to finish their routes as soon as possible despite the fact that it was impossible, no matter how quickly they went, to speed up even the longest journey by a meaningful amount of time.

• It was as if, at such times, he was permanently suspended in the blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction, in that region of the self where one is no longer anguished by the absence of something one feels to be necessary for one’s salvation, but not yet saddened by the disappointment that attainment of desire always seemed to bring, for strong desire, desire that radiates outward through all the regions of the body, always seemed to involve the hope or belief that attainment of the object of desire, whether a person, place, or situation, will change everything completely, will end all absence and yearning, all effort and struggle, that it will stem, somehow, the slow, sad passage of time.

• It is as though, after giving what amounts to an extended literary map of half the subcontinent, a vast poetic travelogue of all its great cities and natural wonders, the yaksha realizes he doesn’t actually have much to say to his wife, that words will never bridge the distance between him and her, the geographical but also the temporal and psychic distance, the distance between all that has happened and all that has changed in the time since their separation.

• They talked about various things as the train made its way south and west, what exactly he could no longer say, but after a while conversation seemed to dwindle, as if they were running out of things to relate to each other, which worried him a little, though it also made sense, Krishan told himself, for they would be on the train for almost twenty-one hours, it would be impossible to talk the whole time, a realization that in a way signaled the true beginning of their three-week-long trip together, the moment when silence as a way of being together took precedence over speech.

• In the absence of concrete words and gestures, which had a solidity you could cling to in a way you could not cling to unexpressed feelings, he found himself doubting all his convictions about the time they’d spent together, as if his memory of that time might be wrong or inaccurate, as if that time might not even have taken place at all, as if it might have been nothing more than a dream, the person sitting opposite him a total stranger.

• He’d had glimpses of such people on the metro, in supermarkets, or simply walking down the street, people who seemed to materialize into the midst of everyday life, their faces sharp and angular, their bodies slender, their penetrating gazes directed high above the throng of other humans, as if nobody they saw could possibly interest them, as if everything they needed was already contained in the place they were headed, people who possessed that same quality of seeming to belong to a different, more timeless world that Anjum had, a quality he thought of, for lack of a better word, as beauty.

• It was funny how similar desire was to loss in this way, how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity, leaving you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world.

• There must have been more to it than mere projection or mere idealization, even if he’d known nothing concrete about Anjum after that first encounter, for a lot could be said after all on the basis of a single image, a lot could be learned about a person even on first glance, from the composition of the face, which was shaped not just by bone structure but also by the muscles around the cheeks, eyes, and jaw, each of them sculpted in different ways and to different degrees by the ways they were used, each mood and expression requiring a different combination of flexion and relaxation in the different parts of the face, so that one could learn, if one was perceptive enough, to tell whether a person spent most of their time in a state of attentiveness or indifference, melancholy or exuberance, skepticism or hopelessness or earnestness.

• One could tell by observing the movement of their eyes whether a person spent most of their time feeling shame or self-assuredness or desire or yearning or self-containment, one could tell from the readiness of the smile how vulnerable a person was and

• One could tell by observing the movement of their eyes whether a person spent most of their time feeling shame or self-assuredness or desire or yearning or self-containment, one could tell from the readiness of the smile how vulnerable a person was and from the furrows above the brows how much they were plagued by anger or anxiety, could tell by the posture and the gait and the movement of the hands how lively they were, how open to the influence of others and how ready to influence others, so that perhaps his longing for this person he did not know was due not so much to projection or idealization as to the sometimes almost prophetic nature of a glance, which under the right light and the right circumstances could reveal so many of the possibilities and tendencies of a person’s character, which was also why, perhaps, when everything finally ended between them, this too, in retrospect, had seemed like something he’d known about right from the very start, something he’d already glimpsed in that first, silent, one-sided encounter but chosen, subsequently, to ignore.

• On the first occasions they both looked away somewhat quickly—not too quickly, since looking away too quickly gives the impression of having something to hide or some ulterior motive—but after a while Anjum began holding her gaze for longer periods of time, in what felt like an intentional way, as though challenging him to make clear the intent of his own.

• They looked at her not with that gaze with which men so often looked at women in Delhi, eyes reaching out like hands about to take hold of inert everyday objects, a glass of water or a remote control, but with a slightly more subdued, slightly more respectful gaze, a respect they gave only begrudgingly, Krishan knew, because of his presence beside her.

• What she’d said had helped him understand not just the entitlement with which men in Delhi used their eyes on women but also the amorphous tension that lay over interactions between men in Delhi too, the vague and omnipresent air of threat that sometimes seemed to hover like an electric charge over the entire city, a charge you felt that at any given time and in any given place might coalesce and then explode without warning into a sudden eruption of physical violence.

• Staring down at the floor he could feel the man continuing to look at him, his gaze like a physical weight forcing his eyes down, and he felt suddenly not curiosity or embarrassment but fear mixed with shame, fear for what the man might to do to him, shame for having looked away and for continuing to avert his gaze from this stranger who was, he felt, now intentionally staring him down.

• There was always something so unbearable when two strangers looked at each other for an extended amount of time without obvious reason or purpose, a kind of tension that built up from each person’s sense that the other person could see inside them, into everything you wanted to keep hidden and out of sight, a tension that soon became so uncomfortable you felt compelled to smile or frown or speak, to do anything, whatever it was, to distract the other person from what they might see through your eyes.

• Krishan chastised himself for looking away, which was beginning to feel like an unacceptable act of cowardice, for though he was looking down he could feel the man continuing to stare at him, almost gloating.

• She didn’t really enjoy poetry in English or Hindi, the other two languages she spoke, the emotional valences of the words and images not resonating as much with her as they did in her mother tongue.

• It would seem more and more urgent for each of them to obtain brief moments alone so they could verify that they continued to exist as individuals, so they could attempt, in whatever small ways, to preserve at least scraps of their individuality, one of them going outside in order to buy cigarettes, taking what was obviously a longer amount of time than necessary, the other spending several minutes in the bathroom, answering the various messages that had accumulated on their phones under the pretext of having to use the toilet.

• Watching her as she watched him, the landscape rushing by behind her but aware only of the blinking of her eyes and the beating of his heart, Krishan was grateful that they were part of the same place and the same time, that for now at least they were together in the same moment, a moment that contained not only what was proximate and what was distant but also what was past and what was future, a moment without length or breadth or height but which somehow contained everything of significance, as if everything else the world consisted of was a kind of cosmic scenery, an illusion that, now that it was being exposed, could quietly fall away.

• What for lack of a better word was sometimes called love, he had realized that night, was not so much a relation between two people in and of themselves as a relation between two people and the world they were witness to, a world whose surfaces and exteriors gradually began to dissipate as the two individuals sank deeper and deeper into what was called their love.

• Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled, as the falsities of ordinary life began to thin and dissolve before their eyes, the furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaws, the bright colors and loud noises, the surface excitements and disturbances all dropping away so that what remained—time stripped bare—was the only way the world could truly be apprehended, so that even if this condition did not last, even if it was lost, as eventually it is always lost, to habit or circumstance or simply the slow, sad passage of the years, the knowledge that it has imparted remains, the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.

• There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they’d remained the same while you yourself had evolved, as if other people and places ceased moving once you’d left them behind, as if their time remained still while only yours continued to advance.

• It was not where she was living and what she was doing that he wanted to know but these small details, these small, almost imperceptible changes in habit and manner that could signify, sometimes, a total alteration in a person’s stance toward the world.

• Even if he managed to compose an email he would, like the yaksha in Kalidasa’s poem, be unable to share what he really wanted to share, for how would it be possible to convey all that had happened to him in the intervening years, to convey all the events and all the experiences, one change building upon another, accumulation upon accumulation, how would it ever be possible to really begin or end? What

• Even if he managed to compose an email he would, like the yaksha in Kalidasa’s poem, be unable to share what he really wanted to share, for how would it be possible to convey all that had happened to him in the intervening years, to convey all the events and all the experiences, one change building upon another, accumulation upon accumulation, how would it ever be possible to really begin or end?

• The train was slowing down, the boy on the seat beside him and others in the carriage beginning to stir, and looking outside Krishan saw that they’d arrived in Anuradhapura, the ancient Buddhist center of learning and the last major Sinhala town before the north.

• Through Rani her conception of the world began to expand to include the north and east, parts of the country she’d grown up and spent her married life but hadn’t seen in decades. She learned from Rani about the war and about Kilinochchi and Jaffna, about how things had worked in the areas under Tiger control and how they worked now under government control, and it was because of Rani too that Appamma began reading the newspapers, paying more attention to the evening news, forming political opinions and keeping abreast of political developments, things Krishan had never noticed her caring about till then.

• Krishan had worried initially that Rani’s trauma might actually be worsened by moving from her village to the south of the country, where she had neither friends nor relatives and could speak hardly a word of the majority language, but both he and his mother had sensed an improvement in her condition soon after her arrival, and even the doctor had said as much when she returned to Vavuniya for a checkup after two months in Colombo.

• There was no sudden change in ecosystem between south and north, he knew, both sides of the border region looked more or less the same, mainly scrubland with occasional stands of trees but sometimes denser, more crowded sections of jungle too.

• Growing up he’d associated Buddhism mainly with the Sri Lankan government and army, with the statues they constructed all over the country to remind Muslims, Tamils, and other minorities of their place, and it was only during his time in India, ironically, as he finally began learning more about its history, that he’d begun considering it a religion or philosophy in its own right.

• It was during his time in Delhi that he’d learned that Buddhism was viewed as a religion of emancipation among the oppressed castes of India, that at one time there’d been Tamil Buddhists in the south of India and even in northeast Sri Lanka, that what most Sri Lankans called Buddhism was in fact just one particular version of Buddhism.

• Tossing and turning in the midst of the waves, seemingly on the point of being engulfed, was a small, rickety fishing boat, and in thick red Tamil letters, emblazoned across the center of the image, were the words THERE’S NO WAY: YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO SET FOOT IN AUSTRALIA. The right half of the billboard consisted of a black background with dense white text that Krishan couldn’t decipher at first, though as the train jerked back into motion and his carriage moved past the billboard he was able to make out a few of the lines, which stated that traffickers were trying to profit by cheating people who wanted to move to Australia, that Australia was no longer accepting people who tried to come to the country by boat, that boats attempting to reach the country would be steered back into deep waters by the Australian navy.

• The Australian government had put tens of millions of dollars into such advertisements, not just in Sri Lanka but in other countries with large displaced populations like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, hoping to stem the tide of people from these countries who tried to make the long and arduous journey by boat.

• It was true probably that severe trauma could never be escaped, that you carried it with you wherever you went, but trauma Krishan knew was also indelibly linked to the physical environments in which it was experienced, to specific sounds, images, languages, and times of day, as a result of which it was often impossible for people to continue living in the places they’d seen violence occur.

• Even if they were the only places they’d ever known, places their forebears had lived and that they themselves had never imagined leaving, how was it possible to convince such people not to risk their lives going elsewhere, not to attempt migrating to countries that seemed, in their minds, far removed from these sites of trauma, even if they knew they were likely to die in the process and even if they knew, in their heart of hearts, that most people in places like Australia and America and Europe would never let them live in their countries with full dignity?

• He’d known about Kuttimani since childhood, about his role in the early days of the separatist struggle, his trial, incarceration, and subsequent murder, but it was only during his time in Delhi that he’d actively tried to find out more about the life of that early insurgent, about the circumstances in which he’d grown up, the moods with which he’d lived.

• In 1969, when he was probably in his early twenties, he’d formed, together with Thangathurai, an informal separatist organization that later became the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization or TELO, an armed separatist group that funded most of its activity through the smuggling of contraband and the robbery of state or state-affiliated institutions.

• The freedom that Kuttimani desired, the freedom that perhaps all liberation movements sought, was not just the freedom that came when one could move freely over the land on which one’s forbears lived, not just the freedom that came from being able to choose and be responsible for one’s own life, but the freedom that came when one had access to a horizon, when one felt that the possible worlds that glimmered at its edges were within one’s reach.

• Kuttimani was moved, on being sentenced to death, to Welikada, the maximum-security prison built by the British in Colombo in 1841 and still, seventy years after their departure, the largest prison in the country.

• Armed military personnel stationed within the prison grounds took no action to stop the killings either, apparently on orders from above, and after the attacks these same personnel refused to allow the still breathing Tamil prisoners to be taken to the hospital, which led eventually to them dying of their wounds.

• The TELO were explicitly anti-ideological, in the sense that they had no specific ideas or proposals for what kind of country the people of the north and east would live in when the freedom struggle was finally won.

• Other groups, such as EROS or the PLOTE, were more strongly ideological, most of them socialist or Marxist, with strong anti-imperialist stances and distinct social and political visions of what the Tamil homeland would look like.

• and political visions of what

• The prisoners couldn’t have discussed politics all day, of course, especially since their news of what was happening in the world outside must have been limited, and Krishan wondered how Kuttimani must have spent the rest of his time in prison, whether he read, or wrote, or exercised, whether there was a window in his cell from which the sky could be seen.

• It was strange how sometimes scenes one has never witnessed could appear before the mind’s eye more profoundly than memories from actual life, but looking out over the flat, arid landscape rushing before him, its far edges flickering in the distance like a mirage, the same landscape Kuttimani had no doubt imagined so many times from his cell, Krishan had the strange sensation that what he was seeing now was not exactly his own vision but the superimposition of Kuttimani’s upon his own, the superimposition not just of Kuttimani’s vision but the vision of all those many people from the northeast whose experiences and longings had been archived or imagined in his mind.

• Approaching the house he saw first the band of drummers standing just behind the palm-leaf fence, four men aloof from everyone else in the garden, looking at one another intently as they rapped the small, flat, beautifully constructed drums that hung from their necks—members, he knew, of one of the most marginalized castes in the northeast.

• The band began to drum louder and at a faster tempo as he made his way toward the gate, giving, Krishan realized with discomfort, what was in effect a kind of announcement of his arrival.

• Rani’s daughter paused upon saying this, reflecting on what she’d said in the distinctive manner the bereaved sometimes have when talking to other people, appearing on the surface to be engaging in conversation when all the while speaking only to themselves.

• She had said she wanted to spend time with her granddaughters, and this was no doubt true, but he got the sense from Rani’s daughter’s account that Rani had left more because she wanted to escape her mind and her mental condition than anything else, that she’d left in the same way that so many of those who are chronically depressed move from one place to another or back and forth between different places, hoping that a change of environment will make things better, though at the end of the day they were compelled to take their minds with them wherever they went, like movable, invisible prisons in which they were trapped.

• This more than anything else made him wonder whether his suspicions about suicide might be right, but there was a good chance he was reading too much into the way Rani’s daughter had spoken, he told himself, for there was often a certain kind of regret in the way the bereaved talked about how the people they’d lost had died, as if they believed that the death would not have come about if some small detail had been different, as if they believed that not only the more specific death but also the more general phenomenon of dying itself could have been avoided.

• Coming back out to the veranda, wiping their tears away with their hands or their sleeves, a few of these women seemed to undergo a remarkable transformation, as if having left the presence of the body and the bereaved they were immediately able to regain the composure they’d lost while inside.

• Krishan had always assumed that Hindus cremated the bodies of the dead and scattered their ashes as a kind of acknowledgment of the body’s impermanence, of its vulnerability and transience, and so it was strange for him now, watching as one by one people dropped grains of rice over Rani’s mouth, to think that nevertheless the physical body played such a central role in Hindu funerals, that it was given such prominence in all the mourning rituals.

• The process of letting go of a person was always done in gradual stages, from what he’d seen, from the actual body to a reduced body to a symbolic body that was always kept in the house, an acknowledgment both of the difficulty of giving up the body and also of the fact that the bodies of the ones we love can never be fully renounced.

• And perhaps this was why the symbolic acts of feeding were so important in the mourning rituals, it occurred to him, in the pouring of rice over the mouth of the deceased and in the offering of food to the photograph of the deceased, for it wasn’t surprising that in a culture in which food and the activity of eating were so important, in a culture in which feeding was one of the primary acts of care, in which to ask whether somebody had eaten was to ask whether they were well, in which the question of whom you can eat with and whose food you can eat was a way of enforcing the boundaries between castes, that in such a culture the acts of serving and eating were also the physical processes that the bereaved found most difficult to part with, so that even after the body had stopped consuming and digesting food the bereaved continued to find solace in the act of feeding the deceased.

• The Tigers, though they consisted mostly of men and women who prayed in private to Hindu gods, had always buried their dead instead of cremating them, a practice inspired, Krishan had learned somewhere, by the significant population of Christian Tamils in the northeast.

• Cadres who died on campaigns that were successful in capturing new land were buried in new cemeteries constructed on the land they’d fallen fighting for, while the other dead were buried, symbolically if their bodies could not be recovered, in one of the several massive cemeteries already established across the north and the east.

• All those cemeteries, containing hundreds and thousands of dead fighters, had been razed to the ground by the army after the end of the war, their huge Chinese-made bulldozers mowing down graves indiscriminately, hardly a trace of them left anywhere in the northeast now, hardly a trace of any of those male and female cadres who’d died fighting in anonymity for a future that never materialized, not even of Rani’s eldest son, who, Krishan realized now for the first time, must also have been buried in one of those cemeteries, must also have had his remains destroyed and removed from their place of rest.

• Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed.

• Even if sharing what happened during the war was painful, even if it was easier for most people to pass over these wounds in silence, suppressing their memories of the world they’d helped construct and the violence that had destroyed it, even so people would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists, and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had no other choice, people like Rani who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what they’d lost, people who’d lost their ability to participate in the present and were thus compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside.

• Krishan still couldn’t tell how genuine most of the lamentation was but it occurred to him, as he was pushed toward the center of the room, his feet trampling and trampled by the feet of the others crowded around him, the heat of their bodies and their breathing pressing in against him, that perhaps he was wrong to think of lamentation in terms of sincerity or insincerity, that perhaps the crying and wailing and sobbing all around him was intended not as an expression of emotion but as a kind of service offered to the bereaved, a performance in some sense but a performance that, together with the drums and the rituals, was meant only to help the bereaved with their own lamentation, to ease out, like the calm rhythmic words and firm kneading hands of a midwife during a difficult birth, the tears that the bereaved so often found impossible to bring out by themselves.

• The Black Tigers were the elite, much feared division of the Tigers that specialized in carefully planned and meticulously executed suicide missions—from assassinations of political figures to bombings in public spaces to small but devastating attacks on Sri Lankan army and navy bases—and it had been clear, watching Dharshika talk and move over the course of the documentary, that there was indeed something elite about her too.

• You tended to stop caring about death after joining the Black Tigers, Puhal explained, learned gradually to take the inevitability of your own death for granted. This was the case for all Tigers, of course, but what distinguished Black Tiger cadres from ordinary cadres was that whereas ordinary Tigers could die at any moment, depending on the vicissitudes of battle, Black Tigers knew months before they died the exact location, moment, and method by which they would die, a death for which they trained for months once their mission was assigned and which they planned and visualized endlessly in the lead-up to that final moment.

• Puhal then described how the capsule had to be used in the middle of battle or a mission, explaining that you had to bite into the vial with your teeth so the cracked glass would cut into your tongue, causing the cyanide to enter your bloodstream and kill you immediately. Even if you’d been wounded and were too weak to properly bite down, all you had to do was smash the vial and let a few drops of the cyanide drip onto your wounds, and this would be sufficient to obtain the desired effect.

• Puhal gave a small but triumphant smile as she said this, as though proud to show that she too was willing to kill her best friend for the sake of the cause, then rubbing the tip of her nose she immediately furrowed her eyebrows and looked away, an expression of irritation on her face, though it was hard to say whether her anger was directed at the interviewer recording the scene, at Dharshika for first so brazenly claiming that she would not hesitate to kill her, or at herself for responding in kind.

• She continually asked her friends questions about their thoughts and opinions, their habits and routines, thoughtful, thorough, and disarming questions that came from a generous curiosity about other lives but were also, he sensed, part of a strategy that allowed her to avoid sharing too much of herself.

• He had known from previous relationships how quickly desire began to dissipate when two people became used to each other, how quickly the hope of transcendence with which infatuation begins was replaced by mere comfort and security, the safety of habit and routine, but he realized during their short time in Bombay that domesticity didn’t have to signify the domestication of desire, that it could mean not its dullening and deadening but its deepening and widening, habit becoming something that fortified and buttressed desire without at the same time stifling it, like a glass case that protects the delicate flame of a candle while being open enough to let in the oxygen needed to keep the flame burning.

• Dharshika would not have made such a cruel statement unless she’d actively wanted to wound Puhal in some way, she felt, unless she’d held some secret resentment against her friend that she wished to punish her for. It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who needed each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable.

• The documentary had reminded her, she went on after a moment, about a collection of old Buddhist poems she’d recently read, a collection of poems written between the third and sixth centuries B.C. by Buddhist nuns from all over the subcontinent, collected, translated into Pali, and passed down in the tradition as a single work.

• Several of the poems depicted the situations that led to the conversion of their authors in surprising detail, many of them single women who’d joined monastic life as a way of escaping the compulsion to marry men they had no interest in, many of them married women who’d sought escape from the drudgeries of domestic labor and the unwanted sexual demands of their husbands, from what would now be called marital rape.

• Many of the women, Anjum added, had also joined the order as a way of coping with grief, with the untimely death of a son or daughter or brother or sister, the Buddha’s teachings on death providing the only consolation that really made sense of all their suffering.

• There was some truth to the comparison Anjum was making, Krishan knew, for he’d watched interviews where female cadres talked about how joining the Tigers had helped them escape from certain of the patriarchal tendencies of Tamil society, had read in various places about the fact that many of them had experienced one form of violence or another at the hands of men in occupying forces, that even the Black Tiger cadre who’d assassinated the Indian prime minister in 1991 had been raped as a young girl by Indian soldiers stationed in Jaffna.

• Krishan thought of how Anjum had avoided touching him in the presence of her friends, how she’d introduced him as a friend from Delhi, things she hadn’t seemed to do with any explicit intent or purpose but that had served, nevertheless, to remind him in those moments that he could not take their relationship for granted, that soon she would be moving away and that their time together would soon be coming to an end.

• It was this subject that Anjum was trying to broach now by likening herself to Dharshika and Puhal, Krishan realized, as he looked at the thoughtful, almost brooding expression on her face, not explicitly, since that was not Anjum’s way, but lightly and gracefully, hoping he would be perceptive enough to understand what she was doing without the heaviness of having to tell him directly

• It was their last evening in Bombay and she was trying, gently, to remind him that she was different from him, that her own path in the world had already been staked out and that he would need to find his own, and it was at this moment, turning and looking out over the darkly shifting sea, that he finally felt the inevitability of their parting of ways coming home to him, a kind of sudden, silent shift taking place in the geology of his mind, a fact he responded to not with anxiety now or desperation, as he had in the past, but with the silent conviction that he too had a path ahead of him, that he too had a history and a destiny of his own.

• It had been at that moment, sitting beside Anjum with the ocean before them and the city of Bombay to their backs, having spent all his adulthood, almost seven years at that point, living in India, that the thought first came to him of returning to the country of his birth, of leaving behind his graduate studies and his plans of being an academic, of devoting himself to working in the northeast, a thought that had no doubt been preparing itself in his mind for some time, encouraged by his obsession with the war but also by his time with Anjum, the model she’d provided for a life governed by the vision of another world.

• To their right, curving outward with the coastline into the distance ahead, high-rises rose up to form the skyline, the first of endless lines of buildings that comprised the island of Bombay, buildings that contained within their small compartments tens of millions suffering and striving people from all across the country, a condensation of human life so dense and so rich that it was impossible to believe such a place existed till one saw it with one’s own eyes.

• It was as though, as they walked together holding hands that night, they were being presented with a crystallization of two contradictory possibilities of liberation that existence on earth offered, the possibility, on the one hand, that one felt whenever one came across an immense number of people living in a single place, the possibility of finding among all those millions a person or people with whom one could be happy, and the possibility, on the other, that was felt whenever one looked into the endless, lightless reaches of the night sea, the possibility of liberation that was associated with oblivion, with the cutting of ties and voyaging out into the unknown.

• It was an extinction she’d tried and failed to obtain through shock therapy, through the general anesthetic she took and the electricity that was passed through her brain immediately afterward, an extinction she’d tried and failed to obtain through her various attempts at self-harm as well, hoping perhaps that severe physical pain, which had the effect of reducing all consciousness to the site of injury or laceration, of reducing the world to a point on the body’s surface, leaving

• It was an extinction she’d tried and failed to obtain through shock therapy, through the general anesthetic she took and the electricity that was passed through her brain immediately afterward, an extinction she’d tried and failed to obtain through her various attempts at self-harm as well, hoping perhaps that severe physical pain, which had the effect of reducing all consciousness to the site of injury or laceration, of reducing the world to a point on the body’s surface, leaving nothing else available for thought or consideration, would allow her to forget her other, deeper and less tangible pain.

• Thinking about the possibility no longer made him feel guilty, his brief interaction with her daughter at the funeral house having made it clear that Rani’s death was not something he or his mother or grandmother could have prevented, not something they had caused or been responsible for.

• Rani’s fate had been sealed long before their paths came together, on that day before the end of the war when a shard of shrapnel had sliced through her younger son, as though a fragment from that same shell had pierced her too that day, entering her not through her skin but her eyes, a small but insidious fragment that had entered her pupils like a needle and gradually made its way deeper inside her body over the years, eventually becoming the cause of her death too.

• He could no longer remember any of the specific details of the night, the flat had been loud, smoky, and crowded, populated mainly by English-speaking people in their twenties and thirties, liberal people who said liberal things but became uncomfortable whenever identity or tradition was foregrounded too strongly.

• Increasingly weighed down by their intoxication and from having spent the entire night talking, their conversation soon petered out, each of them losing themselves in their own heavy, swaying thoughts as they looked out over the calm January sea that was making itself visible beneath the pale dawn light.

• It didn’t simply happen when he was out with other people, he knew, he found it hard to go to bed at a reasonable hour even when sober in his room, some part of him always resistant to going to sleep, as though going to bed was a kind of concession or surrender, as though by staying up something might happen that would justify having lived through the day.

• In Delhi, where for the most part he’d had no fixed schedule, he’d frequently found himself trapped in cycles of going to bed later and later every night, waking up later and later every morning, cycles he would attempt to correct by forcing himself at last to wake up early one morning, hoping he would fall asleep early the next evening out of sheer fatigue, cycles that repeated themselves no matter how hard he tried to maintain a consistent schedule.

• It was as though the desire that drew one out into the world each morning in the hope of some small fulfillment or some profound discovery was counterbalanced, for each person, by the disappointment and struggle that moving through the world entailed, as though by the end of each day most people’s longing was equaled or exceeded by the fatigue the world produced, so that at a certain moment each evening they became content to stop searching and return to the comfort of their homes, to yield finally to sleep and the concession to reality it involved.

• Every time he saw Rani watching TV since then he’d wondered whether she was actually paying attention, and the fact she’d been able to watch an entire film without sound the previous night confirmed these suspicions to him now, for there was no way she could have followed the film without knowing what the actors were saying, especially since she wouldn’t have been able to hear the music, which such films relied upon so heavily to set up the emotional valence of a scene, to tell the audience whether they should be sad or hopeful or anxious or fearful.

• What he’d felt at the time was not so much desire as a kind of yearning, for though both desire and yearning were states of incompleteness, states involving a strong, sometimes overwhelming need for something outside one’s life, what was called desire always had a concrete object, a notion of what was necessary to eliminate the absence one felt inside, whereas to have what was often called yearning was to feel this absence and yet not know what one sought.

• That such a possibility didn’t exist he was now old enough to know, but it was a yearning of this kind that had led him here, he felt as he gazed at the pyre burning soundlessly at the center of the ground, that had led him along all the many paths he’d taken and brought him here at last to Rani’s burning body—Rani, whose vividly painful longing contained both the particularity of desire and the directionlessness of yearning, the knowledge of what exactly she needed and the knowledge that it could no longer be found—as though to tell him that any attempt to cure or solve absence would lead, sooner or later, only to death and the extinction of thought.

• It would take several more hours for the burning to be complete, he knew, the human body contained a lot of material, not just flesh and bones and organs but feelings and visions, memories and expectations, prophecies and dreams, all of which would take time to burn, to be reduced to the soothing uniformity of ash.