Latitudes of Longing

by Shubhangi Swarup

One of the tea-drinkers, a gold medalist in mathematics and Sanskrit, Chanda Devi, was relieved. Her medals clutched her like a chastity belt. Only a man more qualified would dare marry an intelligent woman. If she could have had it her way, she would have married a tree. She disliked men and women equally, meat-eaters even more, beef-eaters the most. But in 1948, even misanthropes were married off, if only to increase their tribe.

“Standing alone in the face of infinity, it’s not your beliefs but what you have rejected that bothers you.”

During the war, the Andaman Islands would be the first to claim independence from the British, only to be captured by the Japanese. While the white people ate with forks, knives, and spoons, the short people used only two sticks. This simplicity of thought was reflected in their methods of torture. Why shackle someone when you could twist their legs and hands until they broke? Why hang someone when you could behead them with an efficient swish of the sword? And why force the locals to part with their produce when you could drown them mid-ocean to end food scarcity?

In that time, four drunken Karen youth—a community the British had imported from Burma to work their farms—declared themselves supreme rulers of the land and made Goodenough Bungalow their palace. They spent their evenings on the patio, doodling mustaches over King George’s image on the British rupee and fashioning flags from tablecloths. Hours would go by as they debated the national symbol of the free islands.

The life of an equal couple in the latitudes of longing and the longitudes of trepidation has hitherto been a rare, undocumented phenomenon—like a whale giving birth in Antarctica or white elephants mating in south Asia.

“We can’t punish beings for acting out their nature when we are the intruders.”

They have even learned to ignore the ghosts of the present—the living.

There is nothing in nature that nature itself cannot cure, he believes.

For the longest time, the Andaman Islands had been on the fringes of the empire. When the British did arrive, they couldn’t be expected to work with the natives—they didn’t speak English (yet), and anthropology departments in England didn’t teach courses on obscure littoral languages (yet). But like a kleptomaniac left unsupervised in a jewelry shop, the urge to take things over was too strong to resist.

The tree responded to her concern. It spoke to her. “Do you know why you speak to trees?” Chanda Devi didn’t. “Do you know why you sought me out in my final moments?” “No.” “We are the same. You are one of us.” “And him?” “He isn’t. But you have loved him in many lives. Some spirits bridge the gap between different worlds through love. It keeps us all together.”

“We are the same. You are one of us.” “And him?” “He isn’t. But you have loved him in many lives. Some spirits bridge the gap between different worlds through love. It keeps us all together.”

“The most dangerous criminals are those who inspire others to commit crimes yet themselves stand back and watch,”

Blessed are the ones who weep, for her salt flows in their tears. The ocean lives on in their tales as they wander in her ebb and flow…

Life and death are a continuum. No one has studied this as closely as he has. “All of us are burdened by the twin destinies of saying goodbye to our loved ones and departing from our loved ones ourselves,” he writes in a letter accompanying the gift. “Let this not obliterate the greater destiny we all share—the fleeting moments we have together.”

We can imagine god, god’s enemies, ideologies to fight over, but we can’t tell a single story of which we are not the center. That is the root of all the world’s problems, my friend. But you cannot put yourself in someone else’s shoes until you remove your own.”

“It is the same thing that turns life into death,” he replies. In jail, Plato was denied stimulation of any kind—pens, newspapers, tea, conversations, hope. He was denied a life, even that of an ant or a cockroach. By the end, it wasn’t the isolation that got to him but the sheer waste of time. Wrongly labeled a terrorist by Indian intelligence, he is afraid he may become one, if only to avenge the time lost. “Change,” says Plato. “Something needs to happen. Without it, a story is dead. We are dead.”

The pain Plato carried within him had diminished. The grip of the migraine was easing. Chewing food with the left side of his jaw was a possibility again. His bones were at rest, even the disfigured and fractured ones. Opium was the only cure Plato had found to the pounding pain in his groin. Under its influence, time lost its oppressive quality. The present seemed to glide. Either that or Plato himself grew wings, like the mosquitoes in his cell of solitude. “I can forgive them for everything,” he said, crushing years of silence in a second. “The broken teeth, the dislocated bones, the internal bleeding. But not that.” Plato wasn’t sure if their paths would cross again. Spurred on by the light-headedness, he continued, “They took away my dignity….I can never be close to a woman. I will never know how it feels.”

Life is whispering in my ears with its irresistible melody, offering me the water of immortality and the earth of transformation. Far, very far, from the depths of the hollow sky, death is calling out to me in a simple, clear voice.

“She cleans the house a lot. She exclaims something ending with ‘Allah’ each time she catches a bedbug. After bathing, she rubs her hands and feet with walnut oil and sprinkles her face with rose water to fool people with a woman’s fragrance. She removes her scarf to comb her hair. With her hair loose like a witch’s, she reads books. I don’t know what she does, but she holds a pen and stares at pages for a long time. She also spreads a mat on the floor and prays again and again. I have never seen anyone pray so much. Strange prayers, that too. She holds her palms together like an invisible book. Anyone who believes in fairies wouldn’t pray so much. Devils need more pleasing.”

“Some dreams are so beautiful and fragile, Ghazala, they are left unrealized.”