A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  How long he sat there looking out the window it was hard to say, immersed in the darkness of the world passing by and simultaneously lost inside himself, but at some point, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour after she’d said good night and withdrawn for the night, Krishan heard the creaking of Anjum’s berth directly above him, the sound of Anjum moving on her bed. He assumed at first that she was simply shifting or rolling around, since Anjum moved constantly from one side to the other as she slept, but a few seconds later he noticed the flapping of the curtain on the far side of his berth, the momentary entry of the carriage’s amber light into the enclosure. A hand parted the curtain and he saw Anjum’s face looking in, her eyes squinting as she tried to locate him in the darkness of the berth. She was trying to determine whether or not he was awake, he realized, and quickly drew in his legs to let her know he was up. Parting the curtain more widely, letting more light in, Anjum glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then entered the berth and drew the curtain so the enclosure was once more shrouded in darkness. She moved toward him on her hands and knees, her movement confident despite the berth’s narrowness, and he slid down so that he was lying on his back and she was able to move closer. Their bodies weren’t touching but her head was directly over his, their eyes trying to distinguish each other in the shadows, neither of them moving, neither of them, he could feel, breathing. They didn’t need to speak, he could sense why she’d come and now that she was there felt no surprise at all, as if he had in fact been waiting for her to come all the while. He could smell the light perspiration on her skin, which he had not been this close to in three weeks, and despite feeling an urge to wrap his arms around her and bring their bodies together he remained unmoving, arms by his side, partly to preserve the self-possession he had just been feeling, the sense of not being in need of her or anybody else, but partly also to prolong his anticipation of the contact he felt certain was going to come, the loss of self he knew he was going to give into and that he wanted more than anything else despite, just moments before, having felt so self-possessed. He traced Anjum’s thigh lightly with his right hand, wanting to draw her body closer to him but still wary of more solid contact, and Anjum lowered her head down and brushed her lips against his. Her mouth hovered above his for a moment, the warmth of her breath on his skin, then moving to his neck she began not to kiss him exactly but to caress him with her closed lips, making her way up from his neck to the side of his face, across his forehead and then down to his mouth, where again she did not kiss him so much as touch her lips to his, the rest of their bodies taut as this brief contact was made. A shaft of silvery blue light entered the berth through the window and then disappeared, and raising her head up to look outside Anjum became still. They were passing a station probably or perhaps some small town, nothing to worry about it seemed, and as another shaft of light passed into the enclosure, filling the berth with a soft, electric glow, she turned back and their eyes found each other wordlessly, she looking down at him and he up at her. Their faces were illuminated only for a moment but it seemed much longer to Krishan, as if in that brief silver light he could see every detail of Anjum’s face simultaneously and with great clarity, the stud on her nose, the lashes over her dark brown eyes, the soft fuzz of her earlobes, like a dark room lit up by lightning so that everything is taken in as an instantaneous whole, each detail of her face imprinting itself so vividly in his mind that when the light fell away and they were engulfed again in darkness he continued to see her just as she was in that brief moment, their eyes locked, their bodies tense, still keeping their distance in case the train came to a stop and people began to enter or leave. The carriage continued rocking from side to side, the berth and the windows vibrating from the hammering of the iron wheels below, and breathing out softly Anjum lowered herself down again so their bodies were in full contact, each of them drawing deeper and more immersed in the other, each of them losing awareness of everything that existed outside the movement of their limbs and the smell of their skin and their hushed groans and murmurs as they were borne aloft together through the anonymous night.

  They remained there for some time, each of them breathing slowly in and out, saying nothing for a while, receding back into their own separate worlds as they emerged slowly from their cocoon. Krishan asked whether she wanted to smoke a cigarette, a habit of theirs after having sex, and Anjum whispered back that yes, a cigarette would be nice. She went out first, and waiting a couple of minutes he began making his way down the darkened carriage himself, taking care to move quietly despite there being little chance that anyone was up. Opening the carriage door and going out into the small space between carriages he was met with a rush of cool air on his face, and squinting in the fluorescent light he found Anjum standing on the left, looking out through the open door at the passing scenes. He put his hand gently on her shoulder, and turning around immediately she unlatched the heavy iron door from the wall, closed it to stem the flow of wind. She reached into her pocket and took out her pack of cigarettes, offering him one and then taking one herself, lighting both cigarettes in the stillness of the enclosed space. Opening the door again and latching it to the wall, she resumed her earlier position as the wind rushed once more into the carriage, leaning against the doorframe in silence and looking out. He looked over her shoulder at the wide expanse of land they were passing, the silhouettes of occasional trees and scattered brush, everything engulfed in the seemingly endless night. It was cumbersome to smoke with Anjum immediately in front of him, and wanting to be by himself for a moment, to make sense of everything that had just happened, Krishan squeezed her lightly on the back of the neck and went to the closed door opposite. Pulling down on the handle, opening the door, and latching it to the wall so that he too could lean out into the landscape, he took a drag of his cigarette and watched as the foreground rushed past while the lightless horizon in the distance remained still, the wind buffeting his face, the thin steel floor trembling beneath his feet. They could have been anywhere in the immense stretch of land between Delhi and Bombay, could have been anywhere in that endless country that he’d always associated with both the beginning and end of human time, and staring out at the silvery outlines of trees and electricity pylons that punctuated the land’s flatness he suddenly felt drawn again to Anjum, an urge to wrap his arms around her and tell her how much he loved her, how much he wanted her, to confess how sad he’d been while she was away. He finished his cigarette and flicked it out, watched as its fire glinted for a second before disintegrating into the receding darkness, then turned around toward Anjum, who sensing his gaze perhaps threw out her own cigarette and turned toward him. She stood there unmoving in the doorframe opposite his, her body leaning to the right, one hand still gripping the bar along the wall, the large shirt she’d changed into billowing in the wind. In the white light that fell from the ceiling her face was starkly visible, her eyes squinting slightly, her thick eyebrows furrowed, a tired, peaceful smile softening her sternly beautiful face. Behind her vast tracts of unlit land passed by each second, miles and miles of unknown places containing people living unknown lives appearing and vanishing every moment, but continuing to look at her, not taking his eyes off her as she gazed back at him, it felt like the two of them were lost in that distant night that the train was hurtling through, as if those vast distances were contained right there in the space between them, as if what was distant and what was proximate had collapsed somehow into a single space. He was unsure what was going to happen between the two of them, could tell in the clarity of the hour and the mild intoxication of the tobacco that nothing was certain, that as long as he continued to be with Anjum he would continue experiencing those rapid, unsettling transitions between rapture and disquiet. Watching her as she watched him, the landscape rushing by behind her but aware only of the blinking of her eyes and the beating of his heart, Krishan was grateful that they were part of the same place and the same time, that for now at least they were together in the same moment
, a moment that contained not only what was proximate and what was distant but also what was past and what was future, a moment without length or breadth or height but which somehow contained everything of significance, as if everything else the world consisted of was a kind of cosmic scenery, an illusion that, now that it was being exposed, could quietly fall away. What for lack of a better word was sometimes called love, he had realized that night, was not so much a relation between two people in and of themselves as a relation between two people and the world they were witness to, a world whose surfaces and exteriors gradually began to dissipate as the two individuals sank deeper and deeper into what was called their love. Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled, as the falsities of ordinary life began to thin and dissolve before their eyes, the furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaws, the bright colors and loud noises, the surface excitements and disturbances all dropping away so that what remained—time stripped bare—was the only way the world could truly be apprehended, so that even if this condition did not last, even if it was lost, as eventually it is always lost, to habit or circumstance or simply the slow, sad passage of the years, the knowledge that it has imparted remains, the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.

  It had been almost four years since that trip, since that moment standing opposite each other on the overnight train to Bombay, and sitting now on this other train, traversing the length of his country of birth, Krishan thought once more about how much time had passed, about how much had happened and how much had changed. He’d thought several times, since reading Anjum’s email on Friday afternoon, about what kind of message he might send in response, how much or how little he should share with her of the life he was now living, how earnest or aloof he should try to seem. He’d imagined telling her about what he’d been doing since his return to Sri Lanka, about his two years in the northeast, the initial fervor and subsequent disillusionment, about his recent time in Colombo, the books he’d been reading and his walks in the evenings. He’d wondered what her response would be as she read what he wrote, had imagined her impressed as she learned about everything he’d seen and done, as she saw how much more he understood now about himself and the world. She would respond not immediately but after an interval of perhaps a week or two, her response would lead to the growth of a slow, thoughtful, and somewhat confessional correspondence, and finally the two of them would meet at some halfway point, he fantasized, where she would be quietly taken aback to see him in person after four years, surprised by the way his body had grown into itself, his shoulders a little broader, his arms and legs stronger, his cheeks more hollowed out, by the confidence with which he now spoke and carried himself. The idea of writing such a letter had given him some hope on Friday afternoon, as if an unexpected possibility was opening itself up to him, the possibility of reconnecting with a past he’d left behind and perhaps even of reunion with Anjum, but thinking again about writing to her he began to second-guess these thoughts, to feel they were somewhat naïve. There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they’d remained the same while you yourself had evolved, as if other people and places ceased moving once you’d left them behind, as if their time remained still while only yours continued to advance. The tendency in general was misleading, people and their situations were always changing, but with Anjum especially it was wishful thinking, Krishan knew, for Anjum especially was too quick and too active to remain the same, always inclined toward what was unknown, ready to absorb and assimilate it if she found it worth her while. She would probably not be too surprised or impressed by how he’d changed, for she too had no doubt experienced much over the last four years, she too had no doubt grown and developed, not just in opinions and outlook but probably in habits and mannerisms too. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know whether she still tilted her head back in the same way when she laughed, whether she still had that habit of rotating the silver ring on her middle finger when she was thinking about something, whether she still even wore that ring at all. It was not where she was living and what she was doing that he wanted to know but these small details, these small, almost imperceptible changes in habit and manner that could signify, sometimes, a total alteration in a person’s stance toward the world. He wanted to know whether she too had felt the weight of things increasing upon her in the last few years, whether she too had become just a little more fatigued with the passing of time, but it was precisely these answers that couldn’t be communicated via email, precisely these answers that couldn’t be given or asked for in words sent through the void. Even if he managed to compose an email he would, like the yaksha in Kalidasa’s poem, be unable to share what he really wanted to share, for how would it be possible to convey all that had happened to him in the intervening years, to convey all the events and all the experiences, one change building upon another, accumulation upon accumulation, how would it ever be possible to really begin or end? What was the point of trying to account for all the time that had passed like a river between them, gone and impossible to retrieve, what was the point when all that writing could accomplish was to remind them how much they’d once shared, when the only way to respect what had existed between them was to remain apart, to acknowledge that no words could bridge the vast distance between them?

  The train was slowing down, the boy on the seat beside him and others in the carriage beginning to stir, and looking outside Krishan saw that they’d arrived in Anuradhapura, the ancient Buddhist center of learning and the last major Sinhala town before the north. Almost half the passengers in the carriage got off as the train came to a stop, almost all of them Sinhalese from what Krishan could tell, so that with the exception of a few neatly dressed, clean-shaven men with buzz cuts—soldiers who were returning to their various bases after having spent their leave in the south—it was mainly Muslim and Tamil passengers left now in the carriage. The station master sounded his whistle after a while, the train hesitated, then resumed moving with a jolt, and leaning his head against the window Krishan adjusted his gaze to the scene that opened up as the train left the station and town. The landscape had become flatter and drier, still a lot of vegetation and still occasional paddy fields but no longer the lush, overabundant growth of the south, no longer the same thick density of ferns and flowering plants, the dense clusters of bright green paddy shooting out of silvery water. The profuse foliage had been replaced by fields of tall grass interspersed with quiet stands of trees, and the villages they were passing too seemed emptier and sleepier, small single-story houses and huts deserted except for the occasional old man or woman sitting on a plastic chair, watching with boredom as trains passed by on the tracks. Krishan remembered that his mother had asked him to call when he reached Anuradhapura, and though he didn’t really feel like talking, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed her number. His mother picked up after a while, her voice lower and more somber than usual, and he told her they’d just passed Anuradhapura, that they’d probably get to Kilinochchi in the next two hours. He asked whether she’d heard anything from Rani’s daughter, which she had not, then asked how Appamma was doing. She was not doing so well, his mother told him after a pause, she’d gone to her room in the morning and found her sitting with her face buried in her hands, the TV turned off even though one of her favorite programs was on. Her eyes were wet, she’d obviously been crying, and his mother had been at a loss for how to comfort her, since it was so rare to see Appamma cry. Krishan aske
d whether Appamma had been sobbing or just tearing up, to which his mother responded that she didn’t know but that it seemed like she’d been crying a good deal. She hadn’t wanted breakfast in the morning, she added, and had neglected to take her weekly head bath too. Krishan tried to inquire further but his mother became irritated with his questions, dismissing Appamma’s state as a natural response to what had happened, a response that would eventually pass. They talked a little longer, his mother repeating the directions for how to get to Rani’s village, asking whether the money he was taking with him was safe, then bringing the call to an end.