A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  The walker didn’t help her negotiate the staircase, of course, and over the course of the subsequent years Appamma was forced to limit the frequency of her visits downstairs. She would decide to make the journey a full day in advance, and approaching the stairs with intense focus when the moment arrived she would clutch the banister face-on and move not forward but sideways, parallel to the banister, first bringing her lead foot down to the stair below and then, looking down to check that the foot was firmly planted, bringing her back foot down beside it. Krishan or his mother would stand on the step directly below watching every movement, ready to catch her in case she stumbled, and when after several tense, painstaking minutes Appamma made it all the way down she would take a moment to catch her breath, exalting in a combination of triumph and relief. Clutching the walker, which was always brought down beforehand, she would head immediately in the direction of the kitchen, where moving along the counters with renewed vigor she would throw open all the drawers and cabinets, peer inside the various compartments of the fridge, try to take stock of all the kitchen’s contents so she could form some notion of what had changed and what had stayed the same, like an emigrant who returns from exile to visit her native land and is consumed with understanding how things stand. The loss of this knowledge would have been too great to bear, and when the trips downstairs finally came to an end Appamma compensated for her loss of physical access to the kitchen by means of more oblique strategies, the most important of which was to ask, pointedly and unceasingly, as many questions as possible about what was happening downstairs. Appamma had always asked about matters she couldn’t verify directly—why had Krishan been late from work, who’d rung the doorbell, how come her younger brother in London hadn’t called in so long—but she began making these inquiries with much greater frequency and insistence than before, piecing together theories about the external world on the basis of the information she gathered like an injured general who cannot participate in the battle and is forced, as a result, to rely on secondhand reports and satellite images of the fighting. Having little else to do on weekday afternoons and weekends, when there was nothing to watch on TV, she devoted herself to the formulation and development of these theories, coming up with more and more questions to ask as they grew in complexity, since there came, with the increase in theoretical complexity, a need for further, more specific information by which they could be confirmed, disproved, or elaborated. Krishan and his mother found themselves, soon, in thrall to endless questions about a world that neither of them had any interest discussing. They would tiptoe past Appamma’s room, hoping she wouldn’t hear them and call out to them, would cut short their conversations with her as if they had somewhere else to be, Krishan’s mother especially, who was burdened enough having to do all the shopping, cooking, and housework without being forced to justify every banal detail to her mother-in-law. Even as she became aware of their attempts to avoid her Appamma pursued her quest for information relentlessly, asking them both the same questions so as to cross-check their answers for consistency, furrowing her eyebrows and pursing her lips till she had every detail down correctly, as though the continued movement of the world upon its axis hung upon whether the small chili plant in the garden was bearing fruit or whether leftovers remained from the previous day’s fish curry, as though something catastrophic could happen to the transition of day to night and night to day if she failed to properly oversee these matters from afar.

  Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, drawn-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person. It was an obvious fact, in retrospect, but perhaps because of how his father had died, in the Central Bank bombing of 1996, perhaps because of the frequency of sudden and violent death in the country in which he was born, he’d never really stopped to consider the fact that people could also die slowly, that dying could be a process one had to negotiate over the course of many years. Ever since he was old enough to follow the news he’d been hearing of people dying in abrupt and unpredictable ways—in road accidents and race riots, by snakebite, tidal wave, and shards of shrapnel—and it had never really occurred to him that for most people in most places, even Sri Lanka, death was a process that began decades before the heart stopped beating, one with its own logic and trajectory. It was a process that began almost imperceptibly, with the minor changes in appearance that one was inclined at first to regard as merely superficial, the loosening of the skin, the thinning of the hair, and the deepening of the lines of the face, which only afterward began expressing itself in deeper, more unsettling ways, in the stiffening of joints and flattening of reflexes, in the subtle but suggestive deteriorations of motor activity that led sooner or later to constant second-guessing, making it impossible to see what was happening as merely skin deep. Changes occurring deep inside the body began making themselves felt, changes in energy, menstruation, metabolism, and libido that appeared with the force of inevitability, and tests taken, if one had the privilege of taking tests, showed that cholesterol or sugar or blood pressure had increased and that the body’s internal indicators would need to be more carefully monitored, unless they didn’t, in which case the relief that accompanied this news forced one to prepare for the occurrence of such developments anyway. In either case one began to treat oneself differently, in either case one became wary of overexerting oneself, of not eating in the right ways, not sleeping enough, or not doing enough exercise, in either case one began acting with increasing restraint and participating in life more selectively, a decrease in participation that was not so much a personal decision as the defining feature of aging: of the slow, meticulous process by which the same body that once moved so freely and easily between environments begins, gradually, to withdraw from what is called the world. The bones became brittle, the muscles slackened, and soon one could no longer walk at the pace of others; one’s aptitude and reliability decreased, one was less able to do one’s work, whether one’s work was inside the house or outside. Vision worsened and so did hearing, things had to be repeated because they went unheard or were forgotten, and soon one ceased working altogether, venturing out into the so-called real world even less. Soon one became even less aware of what was happening to other people in other places, frequenting only a few specific locations, the hospital for checkups and the houses of a few relatives, so that soon, scarcely able to move, one was confined not just to one’s house or flat but one’s room. Interaction with the outside world slowed to a stop, leaving one with no idea what to do or how to pass the time, with nothing to think about but oneself and one’s drastically reduced future, so that when at last it was time for one’s natural death, which was in fact far less natural than a sudden or violent death, being mediated at every juncture by doctors, nurses, tests, and medications, when at last it was time to leave behind what remained of the body, one’s first, most intimate environment, the small section of world over which one earlier possessed full mastery, it was something that one was if not exactly prepared for then not at least surprised by, since it was only, after all, the last stage in a withdrawal that was already long under way.

  Krishan’s notion of the elderly had always been of people who accepted this condition—some of them only begrudgingly, doing what they could to make the process easier, irritable about their situation but on the whole resigned to its inevitability, others almost gracefully, capable even of laughing at their age-related limitations. Appamma, on the other hand, was simply incapable of accepting her withdrawal from the world, and though there was something childish in this, as if she alone were unable to handle this process that so much of humanity had to experience, it struck Krishan now that maybe there was also something admirable about his grandmother’s response to her situation, something deserving of more than just pity o
r condescension. In a way it was hard not to admire the resoluteness with which she’d fought against what was happening to her, her unwillingness to compromise on what she took herself to be entitled to, even if this unwillingness lacked the grace or the practicality of her peers, even if part of her resistance involved lying to herself and others, even if it was doomed, in the end, to failure. Her participation in the world had never been great—she’d never finished her schooling, had been married at a young age, had never had control or influence over anything but domestic matters—but she’d fought to preserve this participation as single-mindedly as she could, ceding the territory she saw as hers only after defending each inch of it to the utmost of her ability. He remembered how, on one of her final trips to the garden, exhausted from the journey downstairs and her visit to the kitchen, Appamma had walked haltingly over the grass to a pot she’d planted some seeds in a few days earlier, wanting to see whether there was any sign of life emerging from the soil. Two tender little shoots were visible, each of them a bright fragile green, but most of the surface was covered with weeds that seemed well entrenched in the soil, for despite tugging at them several times they didn’t budge. He had been on the verge of going and offering to help when he saw Appamma’s jaw suddenly clenching, her eyes flashing with anger, when he saw her bending down to almost a right angle, taking hold of the weeds one by one, tugging at them with such force and such vigor, her whole body somehow electrified, that they came out together with several clumps of soil. She flung the weeds into the corner of the garden, patted down the disturbed top layer of the soil, and inspected the two delicate green shoots that, miraculously, had remained unharmed in the center of the pot. She regarded them for a while, caressing the shoots with a delicacy totally at odds with her previous action, had then turned toward him and smiled, a luster in her eyes that remained for some time and returned, or so he imagined, whenever he came back to her with a positive account of how her plants were faring. What his grandmother found so captivating in such matters Krishan couldn’t say, but it was mostly to tend to such things that she fought to remain in the small, self-contained spaces that had become for her the world, and he couldn’t help feeling there was something worthy of admiration in this fierce and humble loyalty to life, in the way she preserved and nourished this life however she could, with all the resources at her disposal, even as her body was being inexorably broken down, even as the people around her ceased needing or depending on her, even as Rani, her last link to the wider world, was now gone.

  3

  Flicking his cigarette into the water at the base of the rocks, Krishan stood up slowly and stretched out his arms and legs. He’d planned to be gone just a short amount of time, since he didn’t have his phone and knew that his mother might return his call, but wanting to remain outside a little longer he crossed the tracks, made his way down to the pavement, and resumed his earlier path, watching as the vehicles to his left accelerated and decelerated in spurts, as the walkers and joggers on the pavement pursued their destinations intently in both directions. The section of Marine Drive along which he was walking had changed little since the end of the war, still comprised of the same modest houses and flats, the only additions a few small cafés and restaurants that had sprung up here and there, mostly to cater to the influx of Tamils who’d begun visiting from abroad and wanted to stay near relatives. Among the various signboards Krishan saw the red cross of the small pharmacy he’d frequented in the past to buy medications for Rani, an establishment he hadn’t entered in several months now and which, he realized, he’d hardly even noticed on his recent walks. He remembered the slight awkwardness with which he would slip Rani’s prescription across the counter, the quiet, composed manner with which the thin, dignified pharmacist would read the long list and begin retrieving the items from the shelves. The pharmacy always had all the items on the prescription—the antidepressants, the antianxiety medication, the sleeping pills, blood pressure tablets, and liver medication—and usually they stocked multiple brands of both the antidepressants and the antianxiety medication, suggesting a much wider demand for these medicines than he would otherwise have suspected. He’d often wondered after his visits how many other people in the area took medications for psychological issues or mental illness, whether there was anyone else nearby who came to the pharmacy in need of a similarly diverse assortment of drugs, and he wondered now whether there was anyone else who’d moved to the area from the northeast after experiencing a catastrophe like Rani’s. He continued making his way down Marine Drive, his movement stiff and somewhat forced, and it was only when looking up after a while, seeing that he was nearing the mouth of the Kirulapone Canal, that he felt his body beginning to loosen. The canal was the union of several smaller canals that moved silently through the inland parts of the city, the culmination of a centuries-old drainage system that collected the city’s rainwater, channeled it toward the coast, and cast it out to sea. Its dark green water was calm and leisurely, its motion invisible except around the tips of the ferns that dropped down from the stone walls, pricking its otherwise smooth surface, and making his way along the walkway Krishan felt his quick steps giving way to a longer, more composed stride. Listening to its gentle gurgle during the lulls in traffic, he imagined the quietly profound meeting of waters that was taking place beneath the pavement, the slow, placid water of the city giving itself up to the deep, heavy, undulating water of the sea, and it occurred to him that it was perhaps this sense of an invisible but constant renewal taking place below that was the source of the reassurance he so often felt while crossing the canal, the intimation that subterranean processes might be occurring deep inside him too, even when, on the surface of his life, everything remained exactly the same.

  Resuming his way along the unpaved path on the other side, Krishan’s thoughts returned not to Rani, exactly, but to the trip to London his grandmother had made two years before, the ill-advised journey from which she’d returned in a state of almost total collapse, the ill-fated journey that had been responsible, eventually, for Rani’s entry into their lives. The trip had not actually been his grandmother’s first time abroad, for unlike his mother and him, who’d only been to the UK once in their lives, on an extended trip several years before that took them first to London and then to Toronto, Appamma had actually visited London four or five times over the previous twenty years, each time as the guest of her youngest brother. Her brother, who was actually her half brother and eighteen years her junior, had been raised by Appamma for several years in Jaffna, and despite their different personalities and trajectories the two siblings had remained close, speaking on the phone at least once a month ever since they’d moved to different places. Her brother had joined one of the smaller separatist organizations operating in Jaffna in his twenties and had been forced to leave the country in 1986, traveling first to India and then to Europe before ending up finally with asylum in the UK. He’d already been well into his thirties when he arrived in London, had never finished his schooling and spoke hardly any English, but was handsome and charismatic and had ended up managing a supermarket not far from where he lived. Unable to return to Sri Lanka on account of his former activities, having no wife or children that he needed to provide for, he would buy return tickets for his eldest sister every few years, so she could come and stay with him in London for five or six weeks. Appamma had always looked forward to these visits, in part because of the prestige of flying, the sense of power they gave her, in part because of the reassurance they provided that she wasn’t completely dependent on her daughter-in-law, that there was someone else in the world who wanted to see her and spend time with her. Her brother had none of the scruples her daughter-in-law had, was more than happy to let her wander into the small back garden of his house or spend afternoons in the kitchen preparing lunch, dinner, and various greasy desserts, and the prospect of being in a foreign environment—even if she seldom left the house—was a perennial source of invigoration for her. The idea of
traveling abroad broke the monotony of life confined to her room by giving her something to look forward to, an event in the future around which to organize the otherwise shapeless passage of the months, a longer-term correlate of what her TV programs did for each day and what her Sunday baths did for each week, coming, over the years, to be indispensable to her manipulation of time.