Latitudes of Longing

by Shubhangi Swarup

SILENCE ON A TROPICAL ISLAND is the relentless sound of water.

The day’s efforts were rewarded in his dreams that night.

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

A staunch academic, he fears turning into a specimen himself.

He doubts the strength of his own hand when he offers it to her.

his wife is accused of being a man by virtue of her knowledge.

Chanda Devi, her husband has discovered, is a complex study that demands the skills of a botanist, an ornithologist, and an astronomer combined.

In the presence of a purple sun, the nature of solitariness itself seemed to expand until it included everything on the island, all the life forms, mountains, rivers, lagoons, beaches, forests, even the boulder peering down from Mount Harriet’s peak into the rain forest’s abyss. It was the solitude of an archipelago.

Seeking solitude, only to find in it the value of companionship. Sowing seeds, only to uproot. The purpose of life, Girija Prasad had hypothesized early on, was to be purposeful.

Playing man of the house is an act that has broken him down.

That rains can turn into fossils, ones that can only be heard not seen, is an interesting thought. It is worth dreaming about.

One cannot judge the natural world by human laws.”

“Who governs time? Why does the meridian pass through England, shunning its colonies?”

The gap between generations would turn into a gulf between people who inhabited different maps.

Disbelief, it turns out, is belief of its own kind. It is a river that flows against the overbearing currents of time and truth to make the opposite journey.

Nostalgia, it seemed, was a being with short-term memory. It yearned for things that were quickly receding but rarely for the distant past.

Everything here, including the sea, belongs to the ocean and will be claimed in due course.

The core of the earth remains a mystery and, with it, the reasons that compel us all to wander, drift, sink, and surface.

Her gaze wasn’t otherworldly. It was that other world itself.

Reality seldom bows down to fantasy.

They are lost. The present has come crashing down, pulled by the gravity of the past.

“It isn’t human nature that makes us fight,” the Kachin boy remarks as he plays with the amber, “but nature itself. It is a fight over resources.”

the movement of continents was guided by an imagination that no life form would be capable of comprehending.

Memory was life reflected in a shattered mirror.

“Perhaps that’s how time is for some of us. It doesn’t fly. It sits still.”

Sometimes, the past is an incomprehensible beast and the future its unrealized shadow.

The snow desert shows no signs of belonging to this earth. It hovers somewhere above.

Compared to all the glorious lives one can lead, the human one is quite a chore.

“Madam, mountains and clouds, truth and visions, all are reflected alike on the skin of water. So are the past and the future. They are all attributes of the present, like the rumbling and the stillness you speak of. Water is an element full of possibilities. It is the present.”

“Who am I?” she asks. The man slips into silence.

Your violence and your wars are like gangrene to the earth’s flesh. You possess gadgets that can take you to the moon, yet you are blind to the mountains and rivers right in front of you.

Apo dreamed of the ocean each time he saw her. That is how he, a landlocked nomad, grasped her enormity.

Even as Rana made the preparatory sprint, he knew he wouldn’t make it. The relief of his right foot landing on the other side was broken by his fall into the chasm.

“Nature doesn’t adhere to the laws of science in the way scientists do.

Ghazala blushes. She is afraid her happiness may betray more than she is willing to.

The night outside is a phantom, a figment of the snow’s imagination.

It is at this magical hour that a primal thought enters an ancient womb. A new world is conceived, entirely different from this one. And in this new world, there are no stars, satellites, planets, constellations, and celestial dust to litter space. Devoid of tectonics, evolutions, and all other inexorable transitions, emptiness is all that exists. An emptiness outside the reach of this expanding universe and the relentless grip of time. And within it, the possibility of you and I.