A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  It was during these walks that he’d once more begun smoking, at first if only because smoking a cigarette at the halfway point allowed him to justify his otherwise purposeless walks, to feel he wasn’t just walking because he had nothing to do or nowhere to be. He’d smoked casually since going to India for college, where most of his friends smoked too, but it had only become a serious habit later, when he started spending time with Anjum, who smoked frequently and with an elegance he found himself wanting to emulate. He’d given the habit up on moving to the northeast, mostly because of how harshly smoking was viewed in the environments in which he worked, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, his disavowal also had to do with Anjum, with the more general attempt he’d made to distance himself from her after they parted ways, to eliminate not only the various traces of their relationship that remained on his phone and computer but also the various gestures and phrases he’d picked up during their time together, most of which continued displaying themselves in his body despite his efforts to discard them. He hadn’t felt the need to resume smoking upon returning to Colombo, not wanting to deal with hiding the habit from his mother while living at home, had limited his consumption initially to cigarettes he scrounged when drinking or joints he smoked with his friends. The occasion for his return to the habit had come only a couple of months earlier, when stopping at a small snack shop to buy a Milo during one of his walks, he’d observed the man in front of him asking for three single Gold Leafs, paying for them and collecting them from the counter with a self-satisfaction that made him wonder what was stopping him from doing the same. He’d asked for a Gold Leaf and a box of matches when it was his turn, had walked for a while with the cigarette tucked carefully in his shirt pocket, bringing it up to his face every so often to savor the smell of the tobacco. Crouching at the corner of a small, deserted lane, he’d struck a match and put the flame delicately to the tip, taking pleasure in each of the various motions, in ashing the cigarette with a sharp tap of his index finger, in bringing it leisurely back to his lips, listening to the burning of paper as he sucked in slowly and watching the smoke waft up in the air as he exhaled. He smoked a cigarette at the halfway point of each of his next few walks, soon began buying not one but two, one for smoking immediately and the other for before he went to sleep, transporting the extra cigarette with care in his shirt pocket, taking pains to ensure it remained crisp and unbent, going out to the balcony later in the night when no one else was awake to smoke in silence under the stars. The number of cigarettes he smoked proliferated in the weeks that followed, so that soon he started buying packs instead of singles and replaced his matchbox with a lighter. Smoking became a way to help time pass, an activity he could look forward to in the intervening periods, something that made the present more bearable even when he wasn’t smoking because it meant the present was leading to something good. Unlike the prospect of going out in the nights, which engendered hopes and expectations that were ultimately illusory, the pleasure of smoking a cigarette was a real one, a pleasure, however modest, that was itself and nothing else, that contained no false promises, and that he knew he could rely on as long as his supply of cigarettes remained steady. He didn’t stop going out in the nights or trying to meet new people, but smoking allowed him to accept that there was nothing more than what was visible before him, opening the present up, making it more expansive but also more inhabitable, so that even when he returned home with none of his hopes for the night fulfilled he was consoled by the certainty of one last cigarette before bed.

  Looking up Krishan saw that he was coming to one of his preferred spots for smoking, chosen because he could sit there by the water without being visible to pedestrians on the road. Veering right from the pavement he made his way up the grassy mound to the railway tracks, paused to make sure there was no train coming, since there was a news story almost every month about a pedestrian or cyclist being knocked down somewhere or other by a train, then crossed to the other side. He walked down to the slender outcropping of rocks that formed the boundary between land and sea, where making his way to a section that was relatively free of rubbish, he took out his pack of cigarettes and lighter and lowered himself down. There was a young couple sitting a good distance to his right, their bodies not touching but their heads leaning together as though sharing a secret, while far off to the left a few men in tattered clothes were fishing on the rocks closest to the water, appearing and disappearing among the thick clouds of spray. Krishan turned and looked out at the silver-gray sea that stretched out calmly in front of him, at the golden-gray sky, backlit by the sun, suspended like a canopy over the horizon. Drawing a cigarette from the pack he rotated it slowly between his fingers, as if surprised by its insubstantiality, then turning away from the water and hunching to guard against the breeze, he lit the cigarette and took in a long first drag. He tried to direct his thoughts toward Rani, toward the unexpected and slightly absurd nature of the way she’d died, the strikingly mechanical tone of her daughter as she’d relayed the events over the phone, but found himself dwelling, for some reason, not so much on Rani or her daughter as on the scene he’d glimpsed through the keyhole of his grandmother’s door, the sight of his grandmother so unknowingly, helplessly asleep. Why the sight of her sleeping bothered him so much was hard to say, especially when there was something far more urgent and important to think about, but gazing out at the water that extended from the rocks at his feet, his eyes drifting across its shifting gray surfaces, all he could think about was the vulnerability that had emanated from her sleeping body, a vulnerability that should have been obvious but had caught him by surprise, as if the real condition of his grandmother had been invisible to him all this time, as if he himself had been complicit in keeping it hidden.

  His grandmother’s withdrawal from the world had begun, of course, long before he was born, but the event that first made him conscious of its inevitable trajectory, Krishan could remember, the event that first made it clear to him that she would not remain in his life forever, had occurred when he was twelve or thirteen, when his grandmother must already have been seventy or seventy-one years old. She’d been working in the garden that afternoon, according to what she told them afterward, plucking out weeds from a spot in the corner where she planned to plant a few bitter-gourd seeds she’d obtained. It hadn’t been strenuous work but she’d found herself, as she came up the stairs afterward, panting in a heavy, alarmingly hurried way, and despite going straight to her room and sitting down on her chair to rest the panting had become more pronounced, followed shortly afterward by a kind of shivering that radiated out from deep inside her chest. They’d taken her at once to the hospital, where a battery of tests run in quick succession indicated that one of the arteries near her heart was clogged. She hadn’t exactly had a heart attack or a stroke, the doctors said, but she was in fact in danger of both, and it was advised that something called a bypass surgery be performed, an operation in which the length of a vein that ran from her right ankle to her right calf would be extracted and used to replace the problematic artery near her heart. Of the days that followed, Krishan could remember only his surprise at how easily his grandmother seemed to submit to everything that took place, how willingly she seemed to give her body up to the authority of the doctors and nurses around her. When she returned home after the two weeks of monitoring that followed the surgery, seemingly healthy and flattered, clearly, by all the attention being lavished upon her, she’d given no sign of seeing the events of the previous month as anything but a brief, almost refreshing interruption of her daily existence. With a satisfaction she hardly concealed she furnished all the relatives who visited her in the following days with a detailed account of everything that had happened, from the initial panting and shivering, which she always clarified was not a heart attack or a stroke, to her final discharge from the hospital three weeks later, dwelling at length on the quality of the various meals she’d been served before ending her account by lifting her sari to display
the operation scar on her right leg, as if to provide evidence that all she’d described really had occurred, that nothing had been fabricated merely for the sake of her audience’s entertainment.

  It had been his habit, at the time, to go to her room in the nights to talk to her before she went to bed, and he could remember how, in the weeks and months after the operation, as the nervousness and excitement of the event were finally absorbed back into the mundane exigencies of daily life, Appamma’s conversation during these nighttime visits came more and more to center on the subject of her health. Her health was something his grandmother had always talked about to some degree, but it became now the topic toward which every conversation with her invariably converged. He would go to her room just as she was turning off the lights, around nine o’clock when the last TV show she followed for the day had finished, and lying on the bed next to her in the darkness he would listen as she discussed how many times she’d walked up and down the hall that day for exercise, how she still cooked and cleaned and was therefore fitter than other people her age, how any medical professional who met her for the first time was always astonished when she revealed how old she was, since she looked much younger, they never failed to tell her, than any other person in their late sixties they knew. He would speak from time to time during these conversations, either to show his grandmother he was listening or when it was obvious she wanted him to confirm or verify something she said, but mostly he remained silent, detecting in the way she spoke something that made him hesitant to change the subject or interrupt her, a kind of confessional quality in her voice and the room, as though what she was sharing with him were not something she would share with anybody else, a kind of fear or anxiety that she was reluctant to communicate directly but which, as they lay next to each other in the darkness, their faces invisible to each other, he could sense in her body beside him. Only rarely did this fear or anxiety enter the actual words she spoke, usually only after she’d been talking for some time, when she’d established to her satisfaction that she was still as healthy as before despite having needed the surgery, which, in her view, was nothing but a precautionary measure. She would mention at these times, lowering her voice as though making a parenthetical remark or an unimportant aside, that so long as she could take care of herself she would be fine, that the only thing she didn’t want was to become incapacitated, to be unable to walk or dress or bathe herself, to be confined to her bed, a nuisance and a disturbance to others. Not knowing what to say at first Krishan responded to these admissions with silence, but as he grew accustomed to them he learned to tell his grandmother that she was wrong, that she wouldn’t be a nuisance or a disturbance to look after, that he at least would take care of her happily, without any sense of obligation. It was a response she appreciated but usually chose to ignore, preferring to focus instead on the possibility that she would never be immobile or confined to bed, that she would always be able to take care of herself and would never have to worry, therefore, about being a burden.

  The years that followed had brought with them various signs of deterioration, the first appearance of the swelling that eventually beset both her legs, the discoloration of the small patch of skin just above her collarbone, the jarring whiteness of which none of the ointments she applied could efface. Most of these developments Appamma dismissed as either temporary or irrelevant, and it was not till five or six years later, when relatives were visiting from Toronto and they’d decided, on the last day of the visit, to go to a nearby Indian restaurant for dinner, that she was once more forced to confront the fears and anxieties that had surfaced in the months following the operation. There’d always been a kind of buried tension in Appamma’s face when she was compelled to leave the house and traverse the unfamiliar terrain of public spaces, an anxious strain in her features as she navigated the slender line between shame and danger, shame, on the one hand, of the ungainliness of her body and uncertainty of her feet, of the fact she was slowing down everyone else in the party and becoming an object of pity, danger, on the other hand, of trying too hard to keep up, of making a misstep and falling, which would of course have only made her even more an object of pity. Krishan always tried to slow down in such situations, letting the rest of the party go on ahead while he walked in step with his grandmother, pretending they had the same natural pace so she would feel less pressure to keep up with everyone else, sometimes also offering her his own arm for support, though this was a gesture she usually rejected, thrusting his hand aside as if it were an insult. These offers to help were, in fact, mostly unnecessary, but it was at just such a moment, approaching a part of the restaurant where the floor was very slightly raised, wanting to show their relatives she was capable of walking without help, that rejecting his hand with a flourish Appamma had tripped and fallen facedown, striking the floor in a strangely soundless fashion, as if the impact had been absorbed wholly into the soft mass of her large body. In the sudden rush to help often witnessed at such times—the immediate scrambling of the rest of the party, the quick, purposeful strides of waiters moving toward the scene of the accident, the scraping of chairs as diners stood up and tried to express concern on their faces—in the sudden rush Appamma struggled to assert herself, to smile dismissively despite being visibly shaken, to get up on unsteady legs and continue moving toward their table. Someone immediately brought over a chair and she was made to sit down right there in the middle of the restaurant, given a thorough examination while all the waiters and diners looked on uncomfortably, unsure whether or not to retain their postures of concern. She’d managed somehow to avoid the hard edges of the tables and chairs on her way down, but despite her protests and to her great embarrassment—it had been just a little fall, she argued almost indignantly, the kind that happened to everyone from time to time—it was decided that they should ask for takeaway and have their dinner at home.

  It was partly at the instigation of the relatives who’d witnessed the fall that Krishan’s mother had bought the walking stick, a somewhat costly purchase that Appamma reacted to with an irritation bordering on hostility. She refused to use the walking stick despite all her daughter-in-law’s attempts to persuade her, and because she’d become noticeably more cautious after the accident, moving more circumspectly around the house, clutching the furniture and walls for support, her daughter-in-law’s insistence eventually fell away. The walking stick assumed a more or less permanent position in the corner of her room next to the TV, like a souvenir from a trip or a memento of a special event, and the question of her mobility was forgotten until a weekend three years later, when standing in front of the gas cooker in the kitchen, frying the sardines Krishan ate for lunch—the only real cooking she was allowed to do by that point, and which she insisted on doing so he would feel indebted to her in some way—Appamma had once more collapsed to the ground. Once more she somehow managed to avoid striking her head on the way down, and when she was rushed to the hospital immediately afterward it was discovered that her heart had stopped beating for a few seconds while she was cooking, as a result of which she’d lost consciousness and fallen. The natural signaling system that was responsible for the regular beating of the heart sometimes weakened with age, the doctors explained, more to Krishan and his mother than to Appamma, who looked on powerlessly from her wheelchair as they discussed her condition among themselves. If, for whatever reason, a signal didn’t go through properly, the heart could skip a beat, which could sometimes lead to dizziness or fainting. The only way to prevent a more serious accident happening in the future was to install a small battery-operated device called a pacemaker inside her chest, which, by producing its own electrical signaling, would keep the heart beating steadily even if its natural signaling system failed momentarily or broke down.

  Appamma had feared she’d be forced to use the walking stick upon returning home, and buoyed by this unexpected diagnosis, which indicated that she wasn’t to blame for the fall and that it wouldn’t happen again if a pacemaker were i
nstalled, she energetically assented to being operated upon a second time. Sensing that her daughter-in-law would probably try to make her use the walking stick regardless, she began rehearsing arguments she could use to defend herself, that the unusual curvature of the walking stick’s handle made it difficult to hold, that the walking stick actually increased the likelihood she would fall, that it was in fact safer for her to walk holding the walls and furniture for support. She returned from the hospital ready to negate her daughter-in-law’s efforts, feeling as strong and vital as ever, as if with the aid of the battery-operated device installed in her heart she was now invincible. Entering her room she found, waiting for her next to the bed, not the walking stick that had been bought three years before but a new apparatus, a walker consisting of four hollow, rubber-tipped aluminum legs, joined at the top by a U-shaped frame with foam grips on each of the three sides. Caught off guard by this new device, Appamma’s feeble attempts to object were easily countered by Krishan’s mother, who was prepared this time to put up a fight. She’d already been lucky twice, his mother argued, and if she fell again, for whatever reason, she could be bedridden for the rest of her life—if that happened it was she, her daughter-in-law, no one else, who would have to bear the burden of looking after her. Appamma immediately fell silent, pierced by the thought of being reduced to an obligation. When her daughter-in-law left the room she simply sat there staring at the walker, as if at an unwanted guest she could not send away, and for the next three days she hardly spoke or left her room. Krishan’s mother wondered whether she’d been too harsh, whether she should relax her demand or find some other way to appease her mother-in-law, but then after lunch on the fourth day Appamma emerged from her room clutching the walker tightly with both hands, her eyebrows pinched in concentration as she inched her way matter-of-factly into the hall. She didn’t say a word as she sat down in her usual place on the armchair in front of the TV, as if there were no significance in the fact she’d come out of her room with the walker, as if there’d been no adjustment or concession to reality in her decision to use the new apparatus. Sensing her reluctance to acknowledge the change Krishan and his mother exchanged sidelong glances but pretended not to notice, and from then on, as if she’d gone through a kind of metamorphosis over the three days cocooned in her room, Appamma used the walker whenever she needed to go anywhere. She would push the walker forward a short distance, lean her weight on it, then take a step forward before repeating this sequence of movements, which soon became so second nature that it was hard to imagine her moving differently. When relatives came to visit she would demonstrate its different features, how the height could be adjusted by means of the metal knobs on the legs, how the frame that connected the front legs to the back legs could, by swiveling, allow for a greater range of movement when she turned, as though she’d come to see the walker not as a mark of weakness or vulnerability but of strength and capability, as something that postponed and even halted her withdrawal and therefore something she could accept as part of herself.