A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam
“We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change”
Anuk Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North, traces protagonist Krishan’s journey to the North of Sri Lanka from Colombo, following the news that his grandmother’s Tamil caregiver, Rani, has died unexpectantly. Moments before, Krishan received an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years previously as a PhD student in Delhi. It is a set-up for a deep reflection on life and loss, and what follows is a gentle and profound narrative meandering across time and place, interwoven with religion and mythology, temporally grounded by Krishan’s train journey to Rani’s funeral in the war-torn Northern province.
Lofty, philosophical and discursive, this is fiction that is often essay-like in consciousness, reflecting on memory, love, identity, misplacement and ultimately, being. A Booker-shortlisted work, this is an intensely introspective novel that takes you deep inside yourself. Written with grace, beauty and intelligence, Arudpragasam’s prose wanders and intensifies, coming to profound discoveries with ethereal syntax.
Krishan is a Tamil located across India and Columbo, displaced from his northern roots. While studying in India, he feels his distance from the Sri Lankan conflict intensely and eventually leaves for charity work in Northern Jaffna, with the hope of somehow helping and immersing himself in political struggle, longing and loss. He muses on those so willing to die for the cause, so driven by hopes for the future. While Krishan has made attempts to immerse himself physically in this site of heritage and grief, Rani moves south to Columbo in order to distance herself from trauma and loss. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan army has obliterated all reminders of the conflict, collective memory beginning to wane and fade as citizens are consumed by the necessities of everyday life. Place is deeply threaded with memory and temporality and despite being located in one place, we are divided by our longings for all the possibilities of where we could be or have been.
Via the protagonist’s reflections on the past, Arudpragasam subtly contrasts Krishan, who is divided by his yearnings and desires for life, place and future, his Grandmother Appamma, who is slowly ageing, losing herself, and approaching death and Rani, who is stilted by past trauma and those she lost during and after the Civil War. Arudpragasam alerts us to our inability to be present, to frequently yearn or mourn or age, to consistently feel absence and lack. Both memories of violence and love can fragment our ability to truly see and be. Trauma and desire similarly constrict us. We constantly yearn to be elsewhere.
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