Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave/ Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind/ Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave/ I know. But I do not approve/ And I am not resigned.
These lines from Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem Dirge Without Music echo the theme as well as the elegiac tone of A Passage North by Sri Lankan Tamil author Anuk Arudpragasam. One may predict that, like his debut work, The Story of a Brief Marriage —winner of the DSC Prize and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize—his second novel, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, will get its share of honours.
While the earlier work was about a day in the life of a newly-wed couple in the thick of the island’s bitter, long-drawn civil war, this story tries to bring coherence and structure to the collective trauma a society has to deal with after the fighting ends. Though the huge, impossible sacrifices that a full-scale war demands are over, a new kind of strength is then needed—to acknowledge defeat, to admit the thought that though one may rebuild, one can never reclaim what was lost, especially the young and tender lives of one’s children. For some of those who have survived terrible things, from that mourning there is no rescue.
Told from an intimate, third person perspective, the story begins on a day when two things connected with the past intrude in the life of an NGO worker, Krishan, living in Colombo. The first, a call informing him that Rani, his grandmother’s former caregiver, has died after falling into a well in her village in the north—leaving the question open of whether it was a suicide or an accident. The second, an email from his ex-girlfriend, Anjum, with whom he’d shared an intense but brief relationship while living in Delhi four years earlier.
Prompted by a vague sense of survivor’s guilt—for those were the years he spent away from Sri Lanka even as he followed the ongoing war with obsessive interest—Krishan journeys for Rani’s funeral to the north, where the conflict was at its worst and where its legacy remains strongest. Thus, twin strands of remembrances, of trauma and loss, are used to string a narrative that intertwines present and past landscapes. It presumes that any effort towards rebuilding will remain hollow because of the ghosts of ashes—the souls of the loved ones—that can never be reclaimed.
For the author, the novel may be a shrine to a tragic past; for the readers, it is an invitation to witness a full disclosure of the psychic wounds of trauma, the unending scream it leaves. This witnessing is, perhaps, necessary because it leads to an important acknowledgment—there are wounds that time cannot heal.
This, indeed, is the hard stuff of life, but it is made slightly easier for us by the measured, incantatory prose that heightens the intensity of suffering but also guides us to the end with calmness. Though it allows space to register, recognise and reflect on the losses that every conflict brings to those who are the worst affected, in this case the women, it does not offer any silver lining of hope against the overall nihilism.