Anuk Arudpragasam

"A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's formerly war-torn north, and into a country's soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. "The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else..." A Passage North begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan, newly returned to Colombo, that his grandmother's caretaker, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances--found at the bottom of the village well, her neck broken. The news coincides with the arrival of an email from Anjum, a woman with whom he had a brief but passionate relationship in Delhi a few years before, bringing with it the stirring of old memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn northern province for the funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the soul of a country. At once a meditation on love and longing, and an incisive account of the impact of Sri Lanka's civil war, this procession to a pyre "at the end of the earth" shines a light on the distances we bridge in ourselves and those we love, and the indelible imprints of an island's past. Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an effigy for the missing and the dead, and a vivid search for meaning, even amid tragedy"--

A Novel

A Passage North

THE PRESENT, WE assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It over- whelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupy- ing, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us some- where else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.

sina (she/her) 

Events take place, moods ebb and flow, people and situations come and go, but looking back during these rare junctures in which we are, for whatever reason, lifted up from the circular daydream of everyday life, we are slightly surprised to find ourselves in the places we are, as though we were absent while everything was happening, as though we were somewhere else during the time that is usually referred to as our life.

Such anxiety was, of course, experienced to some degree by every person newly in love, by every person who finds in another a bliss or rapture that they were unaware till then was possible and that they became terrified, having expe- rienced, of losing.

The trauma Rani had suffered during the war was, for better or worse, part of her ordinary life, something she couldnt help thinking about or reacting to, whether she was waking up, eating, performing her duties, or sleeping, and it had been foolish of him to think it belonged to some separate sphere. Trauma for Rani was something that had to coexist with all the various exigencies of daily existence, and precisely for this reason she couldn't afford to treat it with the same weight or seriousness that he did. 

It was often hard, he'd read somewhere, to convince a person who'd had a serious car accident to get back into a car, many such people preferring to take other modes of transport whenever they could from then on, and if this was the case with car accidents then how much harder must it have been to convince people to remain in places they'd been bombarded by shelling, places they'd come face-to-face with punctured bodies and severed limbs? Even if they were the only places they'd ever known, places their forebears had lived and that they themselves had never imagined leaving, how was it possible to convince such people not to risk their lives going elsewhere, not to attempt migrating to countries that seemed, in their minds, far removed from these sites of trauma, even if they knew they were likely to die in the process and even if they knew, in their heart of hearts, that most people in places like Australia and America and Europe would never let them live in their countries with full dignity?

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