The message revealed nothing of the nature of Anjum’s occasional thoughts of him, Krishan had noted almost immediately, and made no mention either of how Anjum’s own life in the previous years had been, whether the home she’d set up in rural Jharkhand with her activist friends had given her what she wanted, whether she was fulfilled or disenchanted, satisfied or disappointed with what life had brought. It was unclear whether her decision to write now was related to some process of taking stock, of reflecting on other paths she might have taken or might still take, or whether on the other hand it was a matter only of disinterested curiosity, of the ordinary, passing interest that people often had in the lives of their former lovers. She’d written, too, as though their parting of ways had been mutual, as though each of them had been moved in their own directions by their own separate desires and histories, attributing a kind of agency to him that, he knew, he hadn’t actually possessed in the relationship. Anjum had decided to leave Delhi long before she met him, had been planning for some time to make a base in Jharkhand with her friends and other activists she knew, with her comrades as she often put it without irony. The limited nature of their time together in Delhi had been decided therefore from the very beginning, and already from the beginning their future separation was something he’d known he’d have to plan for and expect. He himself had loosely considered the possibility of leaving Delhi before meeting Anjum, of abandoning the life he’d built there over several years and the PhD program he’d recently begun, of returning to Sri Lanka to contribute somehow to the efforts to rebuild and recover after the war. He’d become obsessed, in the years since the end of the fighting, with the massacres that had taken place in the northeast, become more and more possessed by guilt for having been spared, coming to long for the kind of life he might lead if he left the inert spaces of academia he’d become sequestered in and went to live and work in a place that actually meant something to him. This abstract longing to be in his imagined homeland had receded to the periphery of his mind soon after meeting Anjum, for whom, he realized very quickly, he was willing to abandon all his other hopes and plans, so unparalleled was their time together, so unlike anything that had come before or since. He’d hoped as they became closer that Anjum would consider rethinking her own plans, that she would consider including him in her new life or at least giving him access to her once she moved away, but she seldom took up any of the allusions he made to the possibility of a shared future together, implying with a combination of silences and stray remarks that the project she was beginning signified a complete break from her life in Delhi, a break that would be compromised if she remained with him after she moved.
It was their relationship, ironically, that had given content to his abstract earlier notion of return, not so much through conversations they had, since Anjum seemed reluctant to discuss her work in much detail with him, as through the example she herself embodied of what a life organized around a social or political vision could be. She didn’t look down on his academic pursuits exactly, but he could tell she gave them little importance, and the longer he spent in her presence the more respectable his earlier ideas of abandoning academia seemed, the more earnestly he began to wonder whether a life governed by some ideal of collective action was possible for him as well. Anjum’s unwavering dedication to the women’s and labor movements she worked for in Delhi had already been making him feel, almost as a kind of self-defense, that he too needed to devote himself to a cause larger and more encompassing than himself, and knowing that he’d be unable to remain in Delhi once she left, driven by a need to prove both to himself and to her that he had a cause of his own, an independent destiny that would lead him somewhere with or without her, he’d actively begun redirecting his thoughts of the future toward the idea of a life in the northeast of Sri Lanka. It was a naïve idea in a way, since he had no notion what social work in the former war zone would entail, had none of the specific skills or experiences that would help him in this kind of vocation, but unable to bear the thought of waiting impassively as Anjum’s impending departure drew nearer he’d begun to cultivate once more his sense of having a destiny in that place he’d never actually lived, fantasizing about what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create out of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to.
It was strange to think how much had changed between then and now, Krishan thought as he stood there in front of the window, not in any sudden or decisive way but simply with the decision to move back and the slow accumulation of time, how what had once seemed like a distant, inaccessible, almost mystical place was now such an integral part of him. The predominant associations he’d had of the northeast for most of his life had been formed during short trips to Trincomalee and Vavuniya when he was a child and a longer trip to Jaffna during the cease-fire, when he was seventeen or eighteen, from the painfully nostalgic accounts he’d always heard from older relatives living abroad about how idyllic their childhoods in the village had been. For most of his life he’d visualized, when he thought of the northeast, wide landscapes of salt flats and palmyra trees, the copper-colored dirt roads of the Vanni and the tracts of hard, dry earth that made up most of the peninsula, the piercing, lilting rhythms of devotional music rising up from temples during festival season, the sound of people speaking their untainted Tamil loudly and musically, without restraint. These images had filled him with a sense of freedom, with the possibility of living a life radically different from his own, but they’d been suffused at the same time with a dreamlike quality that made it hard to think about them in any concrete way, just as the news that arrived each day in the newspapers about shellings and skirmishes, about advances, retreats, and cease-fires, had always been of importance and concern but rarely disrupted the flow of events in his own life in the south of the country, part of the white noise of life that he’d learned since childhood to take for granted.
It was only much later that events in the northeast began to penetrate more deeply into the pattern of his everyday life, toward the end of the war in 2008 and 2009 when it was beginning to seem, for the first time, that the Tigers might be defeated, and with them the idea of a Tamil-speaking state in the northeast. He’d been in the final year of his undergraduate course in Delhi at the time, in the midst of applying for graduate programs in political science, and he could remember spending days trying without success to work in the blissfully ignorant silence of his college library, anxiously refreshing the news websites he kept permanently open on his computer at the time. There were rumors of vast numbers of civilians being killed by the army, and he’d known very well that the government’s account of a humanitarian rescue mission in the northeast was a falsification, that nothing he read in the newspapers could be trusted. He’d spent hours poring through the internet in English and Tamil, going page by page through blogs, forums, and news sites that shared images and videos taken during the last months of fighting, most of these sites set up by diasporic Tamils who posted material that survivors had taken on cellphones and cameras and managed somehow to send abroad. The internet, he realized, was rife with the civilian photographic archives of recent wars around the world, each one a seemingly endless maze of nameless violence, and in the months following the war’s end he’d spent much of his time exploring these archives at leisure, gazing blankly at images of bloated bodies and severed limbs, of molested corpses, burning tents, and screaming children, many of which remained imprinted in his mind with disturbing clarity. 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 a
nd 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. They were images, he couldn’t help feeling, that he wasn’t supposed to see, depicting people in positions they would sooner die than be discovered in, the fear in their eyes due less to the terror of the situation than the terror of being captured in states of such intimate agony, their gazes filling him with shame even as he was unable to turn away.
For a long time the horror these images elicited remained buried inside him, a morbid reality that he was constantly feeding and yet unable to express, as though unable to fully believe or understand what they depicted. It was only when the Channel Four documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report giving an estimate of how many civilians had died, that he was finally able to speak about what had happened, to accept that the images he’d become obsessed with were not some strange, perverted creation of his subconscious life, that they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from. Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he’d been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he’d been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of a panel of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie. Like most Tamils his age living outside the war zone, whether Colombo or Chennai or Paris or Toronto, he’d watched the documentary and read the report several times, had continued trying to find out everything he could afterward, reading every article and essay that came out in both English and Tamil, watching all the interviews he could find with survivors on YouTube. His initial disbelief gave way first to shock, then to anger, and then to shame at his own easy existence, this shame giving rise, over the months that followed, to an uncanny sense of unreality, as though the world he was inhabiting in Delhi was somehow illusory, his courses at university and future academic plans, the protests and demonstrations he went to almost as a pastime, the various friends, lovers, and crushes who made up his social life. Nothing around him seemed to register the extent of what had happened—even on the final day of the war life in college went on more or less as usual, everyone immersed in studying for their end-of-term exams—and this incongruity between his environment and what was going on inside him—his growing sense that the world as he understood it had come to an end—led him to feel that the spaces he inhabited lacked some vital dimension of reality, that his life in Delhi was a kind of dream or hallucination. It was probably some dissonance of this kind, it occurred to him now, that had led so many Tamils living in foreign countries to such acts of desperation, that led that boy whose name he could no longer remember to travel from London to Geneva so he could set himself on fire in front of the UN building in February 2009, that led tens of thousands of protesters, most of them refugees, to spontaneously gather three months later on one of Toronto’s major highways and bring the entire city’s traffic to a standstill—as if these exiled Tamils were willing to go to any length to force the alien environments in which they now lived, so far from the northeast of Sri Lanka, to come at least briefly to a stop, to reflect or register in some way the cessation of life that they knew was occurring in their place of birth.
Perhaps because he’d grasped the enormity of what had happened only after everything was already over, when there was no longer anything that could be done, perhaps because he’d had no Tamil friends in Delhi with whom he could talk or process his feelings, his own response to the end of the war had taken a more inward direction. Thinking of that period now he was slightly taken aback by the quiet intensity of his reaction, by the unhealthy fervor with which he immersed himself in all the images and videos he found, the diligence with which he tried to reconstruct that situation from which he’d been spared. He’d begun making mental timelines of the displacement of civilians from their villages across the northeast, of the locations of the various hospitals that had come under attack by the government, of the sites of the no-fire zones at which the worst massacres had occurred, studying all the maps of the war zone he could find and learning everything he could about these different places. He did his best to obtain every little piece of information he could, noting the different kinds of shell the army had used and the different kinds of sounds they made as they fell, the weather conditions and soil composition at all the different sites of killing, guessing or inventing all the details he couldn’t verify, re-creating those sites of violence in his mind so meticulously that his intention could only have been to personally inhabit them somehow. There was an element of self-hatred in these labors, he knew, a desire to punish himself for what he’d escaped by exposing himself to it as violently as he could, but it struck him now that perhaps there was also something religious in his devotion to understanding the circumstances under which so many people had been erased from the world, as though he was trying to construct, through this act of imagination, a kind of private shrine to the memory of all those anonymous lives.
Looking out through the window at the empty, endless sky, still golden yellow but streaked now by long, ribbonlike clouds of rose, Krishan thought of a poem he’d read many years before in the Periya Purānam, parts of which they’d had to study in some detail for literature at school. He’d had little interest in old Tamil literature at the time, had spent most classes gazing out through the window at the cricket ground next door, but the story of Poosal had, for some reason, always stayed with him. Poosal, according to the poem, was an impoverished man from a far-flung village who was possessed of unusually intense religiosity. From a young age his thoughts and feelings had always been lovingly directed toward Siva, and his entire adult life had been spent nurturing this instinctive love and trying to make it stronger. For a long time he’d been seeking a way by which he could honor his lord, the poem explained, and deciding after much reflection that the most fitting tribute would be to build a temple for Siva to live in, Poosal had energetically begun searching for all the necessary land and materials. For several months he looked into every possibility, going to every town and village in the area and meeting every important personage he knew, but gradually, after many failed attempts, it began to dawn on him that he’d never be able to obtain the resources needed to build his temple, that he was simply too poor to serve his lord the way he wished. Devastated, he sank into a state of deep despair, a condition of hopelessness he remained submerged in for some time, apparently, till reflecting on his situation one day it occurred to him that he could, instead of building a physical temple for Siva, simply build a temple for him in his mind. Stunned by the obviousness of this idea, Poosal had set to work at once. He found first a perfect plot of land in his mind, then began acquiring in his imagination all the materials that would be needed for his labor, from the smallest, most finely made tools to the heaviest slabs of stone. He solicited, mentally, all the best carpenters, masons, craftsmen, and artists, and then on an auspicious date, lovingly and attentively, laid the imaginary foundation stone deep in the center of the plot of land, following all of the stipulations set down in the relevant texts. With great care and studious rigor he began to work on the structure of the temple, refusing to sleep even at night, first completing the foundation, then adding layer upon layer to the edifice, so that over a period of several days the temple took form in his mind, from the halls and columns to the molding above the portals and the plinths. When all the towers and subsidiary shrines were completed, when the tank was dug and filled and the outer walls at last raised, he put the finial into place, saw to all the necessary details, then finally, exhausted but satisfied by his labor, chose an a
uspicious time for the consecration of the temple to Siva.
According to the text the king of the realm had, at the same time, been putting the final touches to a temple that he himself had been building in honor of Siva, and had happened to choose for the consecration of his temple the very same auspicious day and time that Poosal had. The royal temple was of unprecedented scale, built over many years and at vast expenditure, but the night before Siva’s image was to be installed there, according to the poem, Siva appeared in the king’s dreams to inform him that he wouldn’t be able to attend the ceremony, that it would have to be postponed, since he’d decided instead to attend the consecration of a grand temple constructed in his honor by a man called Poosal, a loving devotee of his from the faraway village of Ninravur. Waking up the next morning, the king was stunned that a common man had built a temple that Siva preferred to the one he himself had built. He set off with his retinue for Ninravur, and when after many days of traveling they at last approached the lush groves of the village, the king ordered the locals to take him so he could see what Poosal had built. They knew who Poosal was, he was told in response, but he was a poor man, and he hadn’t built any temple. The king was nonplussed on hearing this but ordered to be taken to Poosal regardless, and dismounting from his horse out of respect for the devotee he went to his modest dwelling place by foot, where he found an emaciated man sitting cross-legged on the ground, eyes closed and blissfully unaware of anything around him. The king called out to the man and asked him where his temple was, the one that everyone in the world was praising—he’d come to see it because Lord Siva himself had said he was going to be installed there that day. Bewildered by the regal voice, Poosal opened his eyes with surprise and looked up at the man speaking to him, whom he recognized at once to be the king. He recounted humbly how he’d lacked the means to build a physical temple for Siva, how he’d painstakingly thought a temple into existence in his mind instead, and amazed by the devotion of this man who’d lacked any resources and nevertheless managed to honor his lord, the king had fallen to the ground in praise of Poosal, his fragrant garlands mingling with the earth.
A Passage North Page 2