A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  The cloud should begin by announcing to his wife that it has been sent by her husband, he says, which will guarantee that she listens attentively, since to a person separated from their lover, news of the lover was almost the same as being physically united again. The cloud should inform her that her husband is alive and well, that he is wondering how she is doing, and that he cannot stop thinking of her. He sees her image everywhere around him—her arms in the slender vines, her flirtatious eyebrows in the ripples of a stream—and he wonders constantly how to make the rest of his allotted term of exile pass more quickly. He asks her not to become disheartened or grow suspicious of him, promises that he will be back as soon as possible, and with this the yaksha ends his brief message, a message that, after his richly described account of the path the cloud should take on its journey, after his meticulous instructions for how to find Alaka and how, having arrived there, to recognize his home and his wife, strikes the reader as remarkably superficial. It is as though, after giving what amounts to an extended literary map of half the subcontinent, a vast poetic travelogue of all its great cities and natural wonders, the yaksha realizes he doesn’t actually have much to say to his wife, that words will never bridge the distance between him and her, the geographical but also the temporal and psychic distance, the distance between all that has happened and all that has changed in the time since their separation. Having delivered his message the yaksha looks up at the cloud, which has not, of course, said a single thing during his entire monologue, then expresses his hope that the cloud will carry his message without delay, adding that in no way does he consider its silence a refusal. His request is unusual, he acknowledges, but the cloud should take pity on him, and he will pray, in the meantime, that the cloud never be parted in a similar manner from its wife lightning. It is with this last statement that the yaksha ends his speech and the poem too comes to an end, though Krishan could never think about the poem’s last lines without dwelling also on the image suggested so obliquely by its ending, the image of the yaksha looking up from that lonely mountaintop as the monsoon wind blows in from the south, the image of that desperate, homesick, divine or semidivine being watching helplessly as the cloud is ushered north, its edges slowly dissolving as it is pushed farther and farther into the distance, its bodily integrity imperceptibly dwindling and with it the message entrusted with so much longing, till finally, like the dissipation of desire into yearning, it evaporates soundlessly into the nothingness of the horizon.

  Recalling this image of the separated lover as day opened out over the scenes passing by outside, the small, cheaply constructed houses and huts rushing by, the vegetation between them becoming increasingly unruly, Krishan thought once more of the trip to Bombay he’d made by train with Anjum almost four years before, during his last year in Delhi, that short but somehow timeless trip that had been the prolonged climax of the overwhelming months they’d spent together but also, in retrospect, despite having stayed together for some time afterward, the point he first began to sense that their relationship might not last forever. He could still see Anjum sitting opposite him on their berth that day, cross-legged in her beige shalwar kameez, her head propped up on her hands, the mahogany of her eyes brighter and more vivid than usual in the light that seeped in through the window, could still see the way she would glance at him and then look away as she talked about her time in Jharkhand, about the small village where she and the few activists she worked with had been running a workshop on labor rights for women working in the mines. They hadn’t seen each other in three weeks when they’d met that morning outside the station, had hardly spoken or texted either, Anjum not being the kind of person who liked calling or texting unless it was necessary. After just a quick, lighthearted embrace they’d made their way to the platform without further physical demonstration of their feelings, each of them conscious of the other’s physical presence but neither making any attempt to touch or hold the other after that brief contact, as if in tacit agreement that they had to maintain strict distance from each other in that intensely public place. They’d booked an upper and lower side berth, so they wouldn’t have to share the uncomfortable intimacy of a four-person compartment with strangers who’d spend the entire trip trying to figure out whether they were married, but the positioning of the side berths, which ran along the side of the train, still subject them to the gaze of others, put them directly on view to the people in the compartments opposite and to anyone walking through the carriage. He’d tried to listen as Anjum described the village, which was strikingly verdant despite the aridity he generally associated with Jharkhand, as she described the struggles of the women living there and how the right-wing Hindu politicians in the area, suspicious of what was going on, had ordered their people to keep tabs on the workshop. He’d wondered almost every day, while she was away, how she was spending her time there, what she was thinking and feeling and saying and doing in that small village in that state he’d never been to, but sitting opposite Anjum on the berth, finally in her presence after three weeks of separation, he found himself paying more attention to the small movements she made with her body than to what she actually said, to the way she kept running her hands through her short hair, or rotating the ring she wore on the middle finger of her left hand, or pulling up her sleeves, which, for some reason, kept falling back down onto her forearms. It was unsettling to sit so stiffly and so far apart from this person with whom he’d spent so much time in various states of union, this person he was unable or reluctant to disentangle himself from in private, even to go to the bathroom or pick up his phone, and it was because perhaps of this physical distance that they also avoided sustained eye contact with each other as they talked, because their inability to touch seemed to give the small space between their bodies a palpable erotic charge, so that despite and also because of this distance it felt like they were touching each other when they were in fact only looking at each other, as if with their eyes they were reaching out and caressing each other in front of everyone else there, so that even their eye contact became overly intimate and uncomfortable, not just because it alerted their neighbors to the nature of their relationship but also because it exposed the superficiality of all their attempts at verbal communication, made obvious all the ways it fell short of what they really wanted from each other as they sat there opposite each other on that train hurtling heavily through the plains.

  Conversation did become a little easier as the journey went on, as the gazes of the other people on the train fell away and they adjusted to their new situation, reconciled themselves to being next to each other without losing themselves in each other, they had done it before, after all, whenever they chose to meet in some public place rather than in one of their flats, a postponement that often brought its own particular kind of pleasure. They talked about various things as the train made its way south and west, what exactly he could no longer say, but after a while conversation seemed to dwindle, as if they were running out of things to relate to each other, which worried him a little, though it also made sense, Krishan told himself, for they would be on the train for almost twenty-one hours, it would be impossible to talk the whole time, a realization that in a way signaled the true beginning of their three-week-long trip together, the moment when silence as a way of being together took precedence over speech. They ate the greasy samosas they’d gotten at the station for lunch, passed most of the warm, lazy afternoon reading or gazing out at the passing landscapes, listening to the rhythmic clanging of the wheels against the tracks, occasionally breaking their silence to share something from what they were reading or to mention a thought or story that found its way to their minds. Krishan did his best to read the book he’d bought but found it more and more difficult to concentrate as the afternoon wore on, reading and rereading the same few lines as his thoughts drifted again and again to Anjum, to whether she still felt the same way about him as he did about her, the same way she had seemed to feel before their three-week separation. He cou
ldn’t help feeling there was some subtle but noticeable change in her attitude toward him, even if it was true she’d been glad to see him at the station, even if it was true she’d wanted to talk to him about her time in Jharkhand, to share with him at least a significant part of everything that had happened. Looking up at her without trying to hide it—she was so absorbed in what she was reading that she didn’t even notice him looking—he couldn’t help suspecting that her feelings had changed, that she no longer felt the same overwhelming urge to put aside everything else so they could give themselves up to each other, for why, if she did, were they still sitting so far from each other, why were they making no attempt, at least covertly, to touch each other, to let their toes at least graze?

  It couldn’t have been fear of disapproving looks from the other people on the train, Krishan knew, for Anjum wasn’t the kind of person to care about such things, was always ready to confront people who voiced their disapproval about how she dressed or spoke or conducted herself. It could only have been that her feelings had changed somehow, maybe she had met someone during her time in Jharkhand, another activist like her perhaps, a woman or a man whose life was more similar to hers than his and who she could identify with more than she could with him. Maybe she’d never even felt the same way about him as he did about her, maybe he’d been mistaken thinking his feelings reciprocated to begin with, in the four months they’d known each other she’d been reluctant to give their relationship any kind of name, after all, would dismiss any attempt he made to share his feelings with her explicitly, closing her eyes, shaking her head, and smiling in a slightly ironic, playful manner, as if to say he should know better, that there was no need to make such statements, that such statements were always false or cheapening or manipulative. It was a view he agreed with on principle, knowing enough by then to be suspicious of the ready-made expressions and conventional sentiments with which new lovers usually tried to allay their fears, expressions and sentiments which, he knew, if they weren’t deployed with utmost caution, always had the consequence of domesticating love, of containing and constraining its vastness. Anjum’s insistence on avoiding such statements had bothered him though from the very beginning, perhaps because of the single-mindedness with which he could sense that she pursued her convictions, and thinking about their namelessness he began to feel even more anxious as he watched her sitting in front of him, totally absorbed in her reading. In the absence of concrete words and gestures, which had a solidity you could cling to in a way you could not cling to unexpressed feelings, he found himself doubting all his convictions about the time they’d spent together, as if his memory of that time might be wrong or inaccurate, as if that time might not even have taken place at all, as if it might have been nothing more than a dream, the person sitting opposite him a total stranger. Sitting there pretending to be as engrossed in his book as she was in hers he began poring over the past several months, trying to find in that slow cascade of images and sounds some moment that would give irrefutable proof against his doubts, that would allow him to dismiss the distance he felt from Anjum as merely an illusion, no more than the ordinary, temporary impasse that lovers often felt on reuniting after a separation.

  The first time he’d encountered Anjum had been at a panel he’d gone to in Delhi with his roommate Rajiv five or six months before, the subject of which was the relationship between the modern Indian state and queerness, the ways in which Indian nationalists, mimicking the white rulers of India before them, had sought to eliminate or to conceal queerness in the subcontinent. The event had been delayed slightly due to technical issues, and the two of them had been standing in the small garden outside, smoking in silence, when they noticed Anjum walking in through the gate, tall and long-limbed, her skin darkly lustrous, hair cut short, wearing jeans with a large shirt that hung loosely from her shoulders. She’d come with two other people, a girl and a boy, the girl good looking but in a more conventional way, the boy quite average. The three of them had gone inside, then learning the panel hadn’t started had come out to the garden to smoke. Krishan tried to find something to say to Rajiv, to give the impression of being absorbed in conversation, but neither he nor even Rajiv, who was only attracted to men, had been able to stop themselves from looking at Anjum through the corner of their eyes, at the elegance with which she brought her cigarette to her mouth and then drew it away, at her sharp, judgmental features and boyish grace, the strange quality of not belonging to the world that seemed to emanate from the way she held herself and the way she moved. When the panel began she sat down with her friends on the floor in front of the stage, hidden from where he and Rajiv sat toward the back of the hall. Despite being unable to see her Krishan couldn’t help wondering what her response was whenever one of the participants said something of interest, whether she was smiling or nodding or impassive, whether she was furrowing her eyebrows in agreement or indignation, as if his own responses to the discussion onstage would be ill-judged or in poor taste if they didn’t cohere with hers.

  When the panel finished everyone began making their way haphazardly outside, and spotting Anjum in the crowd Krishan tried discreetly to lead Rajiv closer to where she and her friends were standing. Leaning back against the wall in a performance of casualness he did his best once more to seem engaged in conversation, privately devoting his mental resources to discerning the nature of the relationship between Anjum and her attractive female friend, who, he felt sure, must also have been her lover. He lit one cigarette after another, trying not to seem distracted as he spoke to Rajiv’s various friends, glancing back whenever he had the chance at Anjum and the people she was talking to, all of whom seemed far more intriguing and far more attractive than the people he was with. He wasn’t close enough to hear anything she said but could tell that she was aware of the attention she commanded as she stood there, a cigarette in her right hand, her left hand sometimes on her hip and sometimes gesticulating as she talked, her upper body leaning forward as she spoke and moving back slightly when she laughed, her manner full of ease, as though she was at a friend’s home and not in a public or semipublic place. When, midway through his third or fourth cigarette, she and her two friends left with two other boys, it was as if something had been extracted painfully but soundlessly from deep inside him. Everything remained exactly the same as before and yet her silent departure left the scene in the garden feeling empty and arbitrary, the crowd around him suddenly devoid of interest. It wasn’t so much that he’d failed to introduce himself to Anjum or to insinuate himself into one of her conversations, such strategies didn’t suit him, he knew from experience, he was still too shy and too awkward at the time to go up to people he didn’t know in such contexts. What he’d wanted was simply to continue being in her presence, to continue occupying the same space that she was occupying, as if simply by being in her proximity something might happen that might somehow be of significance, in the same way perhaps that in the East Asian tradition of Pure Land Buddhism, which he’d been reading about at the time, devotees who felt Buddhahood to be too great a challenge for them as individuals could attempt, instead of striving to achieve nirvana, simply to be physically near the Buddha, to obtain a place in the strange force field like sphere that surrounded him no matter where he went, a space that assumed the aspect of heaven and that was, according to the tradition, the next best thing to enlightenment that a human being could strive for.

  He’d been unable, in the weeks that followed, to forget Anjum, the stern beauty of her face and her distinctly southern darkness, the way she’d walked in so silently and unexpectedly through the gates of the building and into his mind. Images of her would rise to the surface of his consciousness unannounced at various moments of the day and he would think of the way she’d seemed to move through space that evening, her strange ease and ethereality, as though she subsisted not in the ordinary atmosphere but in some other medium, as though the path she carved through each day was light and effortless, free of resistan
ce, her movement through the world like the long, fluid, unbroken descent that a diver makes through the air before cutting soundlessly into the water, disappearing beneath its surface. He’d come across such people before, of course, not frequently but from time to time, girls but also boys, people who were sometimes strikingly attractive in appearance but who always aroused in him much more than merely an urge to thrust forward or upward with his hips. He’d had glimpses of such people on the metro, in supermarkets, or simply walking down the street, people who seemed to materialize into the midst of everyday life, their faces sharp and angular, their bodies slender, their penetrating gazes directed high above the throng of other humans, as if nobody they saw could possibly interest them, as if everything they needed was already contained in the place they were headed, people who possessed that same quality of seeming to belong to a different, more timeless world that Anjum had, a quality he thought of, for lack of a better word, as beauty. Such people had always drawn his attention, made him stop what he was doing and turn around, made him wish he could follow them to wherever they were going, but watching them disappear into the crowd, a painful twinge in his chest, they would sooner or later leave his thoughts. Why he was unable to stop thinking about Anjum on this occasion, by contrast, it was difficult to say. Rajiv had mentioned that he’d seen her before at other queer events, that he’d been introduced to her briefly once before but had been too intimidated to talk to her, and perhaps she’d stayed in his mind because he sensed they were vaguely part of the same larger circles, that there was a chance he might come across her again in the future. He felt, upon learning her name from Rajiv, that he’d obtained a real, concrete connection to her, a thread that would lead him to her eventually, and the first thing he did was try to find her on Facebook, going through all the listed Anjums as well as the friend lists of dozens of Rajiv’s friends, not knowing at the time that Anjum didn’t use social media at all. He daydreamed of running into her at random places, on his way to or from campus or while out with his friends, imagining these encounters would lead to a life completely different from the life he lived, to a life that lay, in some way, outside time. He believed in the possibility of these encounters so intensely that he actually felt cheated when he failed to encounter her at a bar or party or a political event or panel, deciding with a little bitterness, once he was sure of her absence, that the place had nothing to offer him. It was funny how similar desire was to loss in this way, how desire too, like bereavement, could cut through the fabric of ordinary life, causing the routines and rhythms that had governed your existence so totally as to seem unquestionable to quietly lose the hard glint of necessity, leaving you almost in a state of disbelief, unable to participate in the world. You could follow the thread of habit day in and day out, lost in studies and in work, among friends and colleagues and family, clasping this thread tightly with both hands so as not to lose your way, and then all of a sudden one morning or afternoon or evening, sipping on a cup of tea at work or going to a friend’s house on the weekend, you could come across a person or place or even an image of a person or place that suggested other possibilities, that brought to mind a completely different life, a life you might have lived or might still live, so that suddenly the life you’d been living for the last so many months or years, a life that till that very moment seemed fulfilling, satisfactory, or tolerable at least, became, with the soundless flicking of a switch, empty and hollow, lacking any connection to the person you felt you were or wanted to be.