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In June, I described a trip that Pascal and I took to Sri Lanka in 2004. I reprinted my journal's description of our ascent of Adam's Peak.
I'm sure that during our tour throughout the southern portion of Sri Lanka, we were aware of the continuing struggle of the Tamils in the Northeast for independence, and of the terrorist actions by both the Tamils (mostly Hindu, some Christian and others) and the Sinhalese majority (Buddhist) in the south. I don't recall being concerned about the struggle, even though we spent a couple of days visiting the ruins at Anuradhapura, which is near the south's border with the Tamil north. I may have been lulled into a sense of security by the fact that a formal cease fire -- often violated -- existed between the government and the Tamils from 2002 to 2007. After the cease fire ended, the government achieved total military victory in 2009.
This is all prelude to my having read a novel, set in the present, by Sri Lanka author Anuk Arudpragasam: A Passage North (2021). It's an unusual novel, containing far more impressions and contemplations than plot. But it offers a vivid image of life in Sri Lanka and among Sri Lankans, and an interesting illustration of the life and thoughts of a contemporary, intelligent Tamil.
Krishan is a Tamil who was born and raised in Colombo, the predominantly Sinhalese capital in the south. He grew up in the same household as his mother, his grandmother Appamma, and Appamma's Tamil caretaker and eventual friend Rani, who had come to Colombo from the north to provide that care. Krishan attended university in India, in the more cosmopolitan capital of Delhi, where he met and fell in love with an Indian student, Anjum. He breaks up with Anjum, who is far more focused in her interests than is the somewhat dreamy Krishan. Krishan's life is complicated when Rani, to whom he was somewhat attached, falls into a well during a visit back to her home village in the north and dies -- possibly but not conclusively a suicide.
Although set in the present, the characters' lives and thoughts are haunted by the violence of the war. Rani had lost both of her sons to war -- her eleven-year-old younger son killed before her eyes by shrapnel in the waning days of the war. She is kind and friendly with Appamma, but suffers from progressive depression and emotional detachment from the world about her. Krishan, growing up in Colombo, had been shielded from personal contact with the war, but while a student in Delhi finds himself obsessed with accounts and photographs of its horrors, and a sense of survivors' guilt for not having shared his people's sufferings.
Much of the novel is given over to Krishan's thoughts and daydreams -- erudite passages that reflect Krishan's intellect and academic orientation, but also perhaps the concerns of the author. Krishan gives a detailed and lengthy description of a Sanskrit "poem of yearning": The Cloud Messenger, a tale of a divine spirit (yaksha) who had been punished by exile from his home and family, and who pleads with a passing cloud to carry a message to his beloved wife. The poem describes the wife's city as a place where flowers of every season bloom at once, which Krishan construes as proof
that all seasons were collapsed there into a single season, that time itself stood still or that all times were contained in a single time -- as though, the narrator was suggesting, in ordinary life we are pulled in different directions by our contradictory desires, so that what we imagine as heaven is a place where these conflicting longings are somehow reconciled, in which the separate and seemingly incompatible times of their fulfillment are brought together, uniting our otherwise divided souls. .
Krishan, contemplating the ecstasy of being together with Anjum, concludes that it is only in such moments that one experiences reality, where the falsity of daily life becomes obvious .
Krishan was grateful that they were part of the same place and the same time, that for now at least they were together in the same moment, a moment that contained not only what was proximate and what was distant but also what was past and what was future, a moment without length or breadth or height but which somehow contained everything of significance, as if everything else the world consisted of was a kind of cosmic scenery, an illusion that, now that it was being exposed, could quietly fall away.
Krishan decides that, even when love dies, this knowledge that one acquires through love remains:
...the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.
The entire final section of the novel -- over a quarter of its length -- is devoted to Krishan's travel to the north to be present with Rani's Tamil family and fellow villagers at her funeral, and to witness in striking detail the cremation of her body. He watches the smoke rising and dissipating into the sky, like a message to another world that would never be received. Like the love-sick yaksha's cloud-borne message to his wife in the Sanskrit poem.
Summarized, the novel sounds abstruse and perhaps boring. In reality, I found it gripping and fascinating. The author, in attempting to follow Krishan's thoughts, describes his surroundings and his actions in great detail, bringing to life the often strange (to us) world of Sri Lanka life, a world that is often strange but in some ways very familiar as well. A book worth reading slowly, and -- although I haven't yet done so -- reading a second time.
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