A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

The present, we realize, eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing, or this at least is how it usually seems in retrospect, when in the next brief moment of consciousness, the next occasion we are able to hold things still, we realize how much time has passed since we were last aware of ourselves, when we realize how many days, weeks, and months have slipped by without our consent.

It was the fact, above all, that sudden or violent deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.

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.

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.

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, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire’s completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.

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.

In a sense his response to Anjum was no different from that of so many people, men especially but women too, who seeing someone whose external appearance could sustain all their fantasies, proceeded to project everything they desired onto this person, acting surprised when they realized, weeks or months or years later, that the actual person was different from the image they’d formed, that the actual person had a history and an identity of their own that would not remain silent, responding to this discovery with indignation, as if they’d been lied to or misled, sometimes using persuasion, manipulation or force to compel the unsuspecting person to conform to that initial mental image.

Several of the men in their section of the carriage were looking at them, Krishan could tell, a few of them studying him out of a kind of secondary interest, but most of them looking at Anjum, who was, he noted with discomfort, the only woman in the carriage. 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.

Anjum had told him at length much later about what it was like for women to move through public spaces in Delhi, about how the gaze of men in Delhi seemed to lack a kind of shame, there was no other explanation, she felt, for the persistence with which men of all classes would try, simply by staring, to pull the inner life out from inside the woman who was their object of interest. You could feel the gaze of men in cities like Chennai and Trivandrum and Bangalore too, she had told him, but men’s gazes in most other parts of the country, in most parts of the south, for example, felt somehow less relentless, less direct, and less violent, more likely to falter when they were responded to or challenged, as if the gazer, upon being gazed back at, could feel he was doing something wrong and withdrew. In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren’t being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, t...

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.

Krishan had oscillated continuously between these two conditions, between the thoughtless, rapturous, and seemingly endless present that he experienced in physical proximity to Anjum, and the restless, agitated uncertainty that he felt when they were apart.

she was, like the female Tiger cadres he’d read about and listened to in so many articles and interviews, one of those people for whom love, no matter how otherworldly it seemed, was always bound to the so-called real world, a world whose basic structure she could never accept, that she was, in other words, one of those people whose being was so taken up with yearning for another world that no single person, no love or no romantic relationship, could ever fill the absence in her soul.

Ordinary humans were, from the very beginning, slowly and gently exposed to these facts of life, which never subsequently strayed too far from their minds, and they learned to take pleasure in the world despite the contingent and transitory quality of its pleasures, to value small joys and happinesses in spite of the fact that they would not last forever.

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.

memory requires cues from the environment to operate, can function only by means of associations between things in the present and things in the past,

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.

The specific path a life took was often decided in ways that were easy to discern, it was true, in the situation into which one was born, one’s race and gender and caste, in all the desires, aspirations, and narratives that one came thereafter to identify with, but people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.

To desire, in a sense, was to know or think one knew what one wanted, to know or think one knew the paths by which it might be reached, even if those paths turned out to be too difficult to follow, even if the things they led to, the things one desired, turned out not to provide the liberation one thought. To yearn on the other hand was to be lost, to lack bearings in the world because one did not know what one was seeking or where it could be found, so that unable to distract oneself, by frenetic activity or single-minded pursuit, from the painful sense of lack, one’s only consolation was to look out across vast distances, as if surely somewhere in the expansiveness of the horizon, across space and sea and sky, some possibility was contained that could make life self-sufficient and devoid of need, some possibility that could bring an end to time.

any attempt to cure or solve absence would lead, sooner or later, only to death and the extinction of thought.