Anuk Arudpragasm’s A PASSAGE NORTH is a Quiet Resistance Against Time
In his Booker-shortlisted novel A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam masterfully uses stream of consciousness to meditate upon longing and desire, in a country where war and violence slowly recede against the humdrum of everyday life.
Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (2021), opens with a quiet awakening of Krishan, who is jolted into noticing his escaping life “as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our lives”. Krishan’s life is a series of ordinary days and ordinary moments of “time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched”.
Gradually the reader is sucked in to the whirlwind of the character’s mindscape, as we witness a series of remembrances following a call that informs him that Rani—his grandmother’s caretaker—is no more. Through his recollections, the author witnesses a slow unravelling of cultural, political, and personal histories that tether Krishan to Sri Lanka. Arudpragasam masterfully uses stream of consciousness as the narrative tool to meditate upon longing and desire, in a country where war and violence slowly recede against the humdrum of everyday life.
This is Arudpragasam’s second novel, where he again writes about the aftermath of violence, while moving away from the immediacy and urgency that we witness in his debut The Story of a Brief Marriage. In A Passage North—which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize—the character of Krishan makes for an intriguing choice for a protagonist, as he is an outsider to the very history he belongs. Insulated by his privilege, despite his upbringing in Sri Lanka, Krishnan had access to education in India where he was pursuing his higher studies in Delhi University. He had been shielded from the immediacy of the war. Krishan writes his university exams during the final days of the war, aware of the deepening incongruity within him as if “the spaces he inhabited lacked some vital dimension of reality, that his life in Delhi was a kind of dream or hallucination”.
Krishan vicariously immerses himself in the world of war by accessing images, news clips and videos as an attempt to process the growing dissonance. The incongruence is about Krishan’s place in the larger political history; it is also an incongruence of belonging. The dissonance, as if his life in Delhi is a “dream or hallucination”, leads to a longing for the participation in creation of a new world.
As the simultaneous journey takes place, Krishan is naïvely confident that the only unknown trajectory he is traversing is of his mind. Arudpragasam gently drives the point home that it isn’t just intimate inner worlds that expand and shrink; the outer, physical world is also a product of our perception.
Longing, a crucial texture of Krishan’s psyche, underpins the novel’s narrative. The word longing comes from the Middle English word longen and Old English langian, which means to yearn after or grieve for. Our lives compete against the banal, “that there was always walking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends”. Longing is resistance to banality of life, and grief is its by-product. It’s yearning for meaning within a larger social and political context where slow erosion of memories, due to onslaught of time, is inevitable. The longing, and the grief that emanates from it, renders the creation of a private world or a “private shrine”. The longing for a world consolidated as a private reality, the texture and terrain of which only the sole inhibitor of the world is aware of, finds reminiscence in the novel. Krishan through his acts of meticulous reconstruction of the events of the war is reconstructing a private world as a memorial to anonymous lives.
Krishan’s construction of a private reality takes place from a geographic and psychic distance. Through Rani, we witness the creation of this reality as an existential necessity, as she longs for a world which is brutally snatched from her. There is the outer world—the now, the present—colliding constantly with inner worlds which are grasping to make sense of reality, where the markers of war are erased from public spaces and collective psyche. The violence of forced forgetting in the outer world collides with the continuing private grief of the inner. In Rani, Krishan sees the conflict of someone who is committed to remember and also struggling to participate in a present in a world which “bombarded her senses with its emptiness day and night”.
The remembrance of moments that fundamentally wound our lives and psyche also erodes our capacity for living in the present. Slowly, the weight of the past drowns us, making us absent from the world. Grief is an essentially private experience, even when events causing the grief are public and historic. In the larger mosaic of time, the business of living and making a living reduces all historic events as just another event, rendering it banal, as it recedes against the humdrum of everyday life. Faced against the slow erosion of time, the private reality is the quietest form of resistance even when the outer reality insists on violent forgetfulness followed by gradual forgetfulness. The human cost of war lies in the psyche, the inner world which is trying to grasp a chain of events which fundamentally change the course of histories and of one’s life.
The beginning of A Passage North alludes to Krishan’s gnawing sense of “being cast outside time” upon receiving the call from Rani’s daughter bearing the news of her death. Up until then, Krishan had a neatly structured life: a job, and certainties of arrival and departure upon which the world of his grandmother was hinged upon. This call has the impact of making him feel “removed from himself”, or rather the version of his self which was tethered to certainties and numbness provided by time where life slowly passed him by in circular habits of living. As his present sense of time dissolves, the reader experiences time as fluid, where a lifetime is contained in a glance, and decades of remembrance stretched on a walk.
The paradox of time, the past grazing against the present, is shown through the act of simultaneous journeys that are taking place. There is the journey of the inner world of Krishan that recedes deep into his past remembrance as the train hurls us deeper into the North. In one of the most pivotal lines of the book, Arudpragasam writes, “he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but some rather vast psychic distance inside him, that he’s advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own northern reaches”.
Time has a strange way of passing; in some moments we remain completely untouched and some moments in time bruise us, and while scars heal, it leaves us marked, like a gateway into a time, an intimate relationship to a reality that is untouched by the present. Krishan has been simultaneously untouched and marked by time like “clandestine trajectories inside their bodies”.
As the simultaneous journey takes place, Krishan is naïvely confident that the only unknown trajectory he is traversing is of his mind. Arudpragasam gently drives the point home that it isn’t just intimate inner worlds that expand and shrink; the outer, physical world is also a product of our perception.
Krishan’s ability to perceive the Northeast was that of an outsider who had plotted the space as a point on the map without being able to gauge its vastness. It is only upon his arrival in Rani’s village that his perception of Northeast as a vast world of its own starts to take shape. Just when he thinks he has reached the remotest corners of the land he is unexpectedly encounters vastness. It is in these vast lands, unmapped and untouched, the binary of the outer and the inner world starts to dissolve. The outer, physical world isn’t a well-defined solid structure which acts as the backdrop for the inner worlds to take shape. Arudpragasam steers away from this easy binary because the worlds are intimately connected, tugging at each other, and shaping each other. And, ultimately it is the “world’s expansiveness that dissolved them into nothingness”.
The amalgamation of the world becomes evident when the landscape in Rani’s village sparks a remembrance of the landscape as he had witnessed in a documentary based on the female members of the Black Tigers—the elite division of the Tigers—who were known for their precision in executing suicide bombings. Krishan is standing on the same piece of land where he had witnessed, through the documentary, a longing for a future in a homeland even if the future didn’t contain the possibility of the creators participating in it. He stands on the same land, connects with the same longing, the longing that stands in resistance to the banality of life.
Virginia Woolf in her essay Modern Fiction asks the rhetoric question, “Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worthwhile?” A Passage North affirms this question as Arudpragasam’s words are tender and attentive to the human condition. A Passage North is a book of quiet resistance against time that slowly chips away at life that “one can never truly touch the horizon because life goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out to be yet another piece of earth”.
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Priyanka Chakarabarty is a neuroqueer person and law student based in Bangalore. She aspires to be a human rights lawyer. An avid reader of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, she has been writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. She is a bookstgrammer and regularly documents her reading journey on Instagram: @the_prickster.
