A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

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. The images were grainy and blurred, carelessly framed and focused—a ruptured tube of toothpaste on the ground beside a corpse, a stunned old woman swatting flies from her wounded leg—as though taken on the run or as though the individuals taking them didn’t want to look at what they were capturing.

Solitude in the past had always been a pleasurable way to pass time, a kind of consolation for the demands and disappointments of the world, a tender solicitousness he could obtain simply by withdrawing into himself,

Smoking became a way to help time pass, an activity he could look forward to in the intervening periods, something that made the present more bearable even when he wasn’t smoking because it meant the present was leading to something good.

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.

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.

There was something excruciating about the way her dark brown eyes bore into his at these points, something impenetrable about her own face that made these moments of recognition doubly difficult to withstand, even though they could have lasted at most a second or two, and looking away from her each time he would scold himself immediately for his cowardice, increasingly hopeful, at the same time, that these extended moments of contact were not just accidental, that some kind of silent communication was unfolding between them, that it wasn’t just his desire leading their eyes to meet but hers too.

for it was only in the darkness, after all, that you could look at a person you desired without fear of exposing yourself, which was why parties and liaisons and intimacies and sexual transactions were almost always reserved for the night, the lights kept to a minimum or even turned off completely, so you could see well enough for eye contact to be made but not for your need to be revealed.

it was difficult to be philosophical in the midst of desire, it was difficult to be as removed from the world as religious devotees claimed to be when you were caught up in the bliss of union or in the desperation of being parted.

a meticulous plan wasn’t necessary for a death to have been intended. All it took sometimes was a vague desire for selfdestruction in order for a person to become just a little more careless when crossing the road or leaning out of the train, to become just a little less vigilant when lighting a firecracker or fixing a hole in the roof, all it took sometimes was a silent halfwish for oblivion in order for the line between accidental death and planned death to be blurred,

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.