A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  Krishan had been greatly moved by the story of Siddhartha’s disillusionment, which despite having heard so many times growing up he was only then fully considering, and dwelling on it now as he was borne toward Rani’s funeral it occurred to him how similar, in a way, Siddhartha’s disillusionment was to Rani’s, how similar what he’d gone through must have been to the experiences of most people who’d lived through the end of the war. Just as Rani’s life and the assumptions on which it was founded had been exploded over the course of the few short months that left both her sons dead, so too had Siddhartha’s life and his assumptions that sickness, old age, and death did not exist, that the body and the world could go on living in harmony forever. Just as the end of the war had left Rani irretrievably traumatized, so that again and again images came to her of her two dead sons, the younger one especially, in flashbacks when she was awake and in nightmares when she was asleep, leaving her unable to return to ordinary life afterward, so too had Siddhartha been traumatized by what he’d seen on his three excursions, sights so fundamentally at odds with everything he’d come to believe over the course of his life that he simply could not go on as before. His youth, if Ashvaghosha’s account was anything to go by, had been very different from the childhoods of ordinary people, since most people were, from their earliest days, continually exposed to old age, sickness, and death. Ordinary humans were, from the very beginning, slowly and gently exposed to these facts of life, which never subsequently strayed too far from their minds, and they learned to take pleasure in the world despite the contingent and transitory quality of its pleasures, to value small joys and happinesses in spite of the fact that they would not last forever. Siddhartha by contrast had been systematically and intentionally blinded to the existence of sickness, old age, and death, had never even considered the possibility that the pleasures he indulged in might one day dissipate or disappear, that the life he was leading might one day end. His sudden and vivid exposure to these facts over the course of a few short weeks could only have resulted in shock so great as to be traumatic, in the strict, medical sense of the word, for what else could have explained his desire to so abruptly leave behind his father, wife, son, friends, and lovers, to so mercilessly reject everything that constituted the world he knew? What else could have explained the years of rigid austerities and unfathomable deprivations, the violence he inflicted on himself in search of a life free from what he’d seen on his excursions, what else could have explained any of it except a pathological response to a profoundly shocking event, a condition that had been treated, in Rani’s less fortunate case, by regimens of electroshock therapy that left her hands and feet in a state of constant spasm?

  The train was slowing down, the clanging of the wheels on the tracks becoming more dispersed, and noticing the small huts and houses that lined the tracks, the weathered posters for various Tamil political candidates pasted on their corrugated steel walls, Krishan realized that they’d arrived at last in the Northern Province. The train made its way a short distance through the town and then into the station, grinding slowly to a stop as it passed the board labeled VAVUNIYA at the head of the platform. A few of the passengers still remaining in the carriage stood up—a young Tamil couple with a child, a middle-aged Muslim man, and two soldiers—and collecting their things they made their way out onto the platform, which was empty except for the stationmaster, a soldier, and three armed policemen. Looking out through the opposite window at the other platform, where a small group of people were waiting for the train headed south, Krishan noticed a large, freshly pasted billboard on the far end, its left half depicting a rough sea under dark clouds that seemed on the verge of erupting. Tossing and turning in the midst of the waves, seemingly on the point of being engulfed, was a small, rickety fishing boat, and in thick red Tamil letters, emblazoned across the center of the image, were the words THERE’S NO WAY: YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO SET FOOT IN AUSTRALIA. The right half of the billboard consisted of a black background with dense white text that Krishan couldn’t decipher at first, though as the train jerked back into motion and his carriage moved past the billboard he was able to make out a few of the lines, which stated that traffickers were trying to profit by cheating people who wanted to move to Australia, that Australia was no longer accepting people who tried to come to the country by boat, that boats attempting to reach the country would be steered back into deep waters by the Australian navy. He’d heard similar advertisements on Tamil radio stations and TV channels, usually aired in prime-time spots in the late evening and night, but this was the first billboard he’d seen and it was no accident, he knew, that it had been put up at Vavuniya, the first station in the Tamil part of the country. The Australian government had put tens of millions of dollars into such advertisements, not just in Sri Lanka but in other countries with large displaced populations like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, hoping to stem the tide of people from these countries who tried to make the long and arduous journey by boat. It was difficult to say whether the advertisements actually worked, for most of the people who made the journey chose to make it despite the exorbitant sums they had to pay the middlemen, knowing very well the danger of crossing thousands of miles of deep sea in dilapidated fishing boats, tightly packed for weeks with other asylum seekers in nearly uninhabitable conditions. Such people made the journey knowing their chances of reaching Australia were slim, that even if they did survive the boat trip they were likely to be kept in illegal offshore detention centers for years. The majority of them were people who’d lost everything during the war, people who, even if they hadn’t been detained, bereaved, tortured, or raped, had seen untold amounts of violence, for whom life in their homeland had become more or less unbearable. It was true probably that severe trauma could never be escaped, that you carried it with you wherever you went, but trauma Krishan knew was also indelibly linked to the physical environments in which it was experienced, to specific sounds, images, languages, and times of day, as a result of which it was often impossible for people to continue living in the places they’d seen violence occur. It was often hard, he’d read somewhere, to convince a person who’d had a serious car accident to get back into a car, many such people preferring to take other modes of transport whenever they could from then on, and if this was the case with car accidents then how much harder must it have been to convince people to remain in places they’d been bombarded by shelling, places they’d come face-to-face with punctured bodies and severed limbs? Even if they were the only places they’d ever known, places their forebears had lived and that they themselves had never imagined leaving, how was it possible to convince such people not to risk their lives going elsewhere, not to attempt migrating to countries that seemed, in their minds, far removed from these sites of trauma, even if they knew they were likely to die in the process and even if they knew, in their heart of hearts, that most people in places like Australia and America and Europe would never let them live in their countries with full dignity?

  It always made Krishan a little uncomfortable that he’d chosen to return while so many Tamils were willing to risk everything to leave, a choice that had only been possible, he knew, because of the fortune and privilege of his circumstances, the safe distance of his own life from the violence and poverty of the northeast. It was true that his father had been a casualty of one of the Tiger bombings in Colombo, that he had in this sense been deeply affected by the war, but the fact was that he’d grown up in comfort, in a house of his own far away from the actual fighting, that he’d never had to experience violence directly, neither gunshots, shelling, nor displacement, nothing more than casual racism here and there, threatening interrogations by police and soldiers on the street. The idea of doing social work in the northeast would have never even occurred to him, probably, had he not been so insulated from the traumas of the war, and in a way his departure after two years had only underscored how different his life was from those who’d spent their lives in the northeast, those for whom coming
and going wasn’t simply a matter of choice. Krishan looked at the scenes passing outside as they left the town, the outlines of the trees in the distance distorted by the intensity of the heat, and feeling a little restless he took out his phone and looked at the time. They were less than an hour from Kilinochchi and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself, whether to try reading or listening to music, neither of which he felt like doing. He didn’t want to remain seated, had been sitting for several hours and felt an urge to stand up, then realized that he hadn’t yet smoked that day, that it would be nice to leave the carriage and have a cigarette now that he was finally in the north. He reached down and took out his lighter and pack from his bag, glanced around quickly to make sure no one happened to be walking through the carriage, then stood up and began making his way along the aisle, holding the seat backs for support till he passed out into the small corridor between the carriages. He waited a few seconds to make sure he was alone, then lighting a cigarette discreetly against the wall he pulled open the train door, latched it to the wall, and leaned outside, his face immediately assailed by a blast of hot, dry wind, his eyes by the penetrating, preternatural brightness of the day.

  Just a stone’s throw from the train he could see the A9 running in parallel with the tracks, veering sometimes closer and sometimes farther away, the air above its smooth black surface trembling from the heat of the tarmac. The highway was hardly a highway, consisting of only a single lane for each direction of traffic, but because it was the main road linking north and south it had assumed a kind of epic proportion in the minds of everyone who’d lived through the war. The southern section had been controlled by the government for most of the fighting, the northern section by the Tigers, each side manning their portion of the border with heavy fortifications and multiple checkpoints, so that for the better part of twenty-five years it had, like the train line, been completely inoperative. It had been reopened finally in 2009, just a few months after the defeat of the Tigers, the military quickly filling up the craters, demining the adjacent land, and repaving the road so it was ready for civilian use, though for a long time soldiers continued checking every single vehicle that crossed the border, going methodically through every single compartment and every single piece of luggage if the passengers were Tamil. The train line had taken much longer to be put back into operation, not only because all the stations on the northern section of the line had been bombed out, but also because every inch of track and every nut and bolt had been stripped away by the Tigers, who’d made use of the iron for weapons, bunkers, and anything else they required in their typically meticulous way. It had taken several years for the government to relay the track, and when the line was officially reopened the previous year it had been celebrated with great fanfare, the government using the occasion to symbolize how the entire island was now back under its control, a marker of their achievement as liberators of the country. That had been in 2014, toward the end of his time in the northeast, when he’d become so used to traveling by bus that he didn’t even think to use the train, and looking at the highway from his slightly different vantage point now, Krishan found himself thinking of all the journeys he’d made between Colombo and Jaffna since returning to the island, the intense longing he’d felt, during those first months especially, as he gazed out from his bus window at these same unending landscapes of brush and palmyra, landscapes so flat and dry and unforgiveable that it seemed sometimes almost miraculous that so many generations had worked life and sustenance out of the earth.

  It was hard to say what it was about the northeast that had drawn him there after so many years abroad, what it was that had taken root so deeply inside him that he abandoned the life he’d built for himself in Delhi in search of another one here. It was true that guilt had played some part, guilt for the relative ease of his life growing up, guilt for the fact that he’d spent so much of his twenties lost in academic texts, but there was also something in the sparse, desolate beauty of the region that had brought him here, he thought as he gazed out the train, something much stronger and more substantial than guilt. He’d spent so many hours looking at images of the northeastern countryside during his time in Delhi, not during his initial obsession with the war’s final massacres but afterward, sensing in those images of sprawling fields and thick jungle something ancient and almost mythical, something that made him dream of a possible fulfillment without knowing how or from what source. Compelled by some need to dwell more on the origins of the war, to understand the nature of the longings that had led to such a devastating conclusion, he’d begun reading about the earlier, more idealistic days of the separatist movement, and it was the story of Kuttimani more than anything else, he remembered now, that had captivated him at the time, that had crystallized the longing to live in the northeast that was just beginning to take hold of him. He’d known about Kuttimani since childhood, about his role in the early days of the separatist struggle, his trial, incarceration, and subsequent murder, but it was only during his time in Delhi that he’d actively tried to find out more about the life of that early insurgent, about the circumstances in which he’d grown up, the moods with which he’d lived. He’d been unable to find even the most basic biographical information, not even his date or place of birth, and the only material of value he’d found were a few scanned newspaper photographs, most of them taken during his trial or just afterward. He could still see two of those images vividly in his mind, both of them black-and-white, grainy and out of focus, the first showing Kuttimani in the courtroom, probably immediately after the verdict had been pronounced, clean-shaven, smartly dressed in a white shirt and sarong, handcuffed arms raised above his head in a sign of victory despite the fact that he was surrounded by policemen and had just been sentenced to death. The second showed him leaving the courtroom after the trial, his handcuffed arms held out in front of him, the side of his handsome mouth curled into a smirk as he looked straight into the camera with his squinting, sun-shaded eyes, his taller, thinner, mustachioed comrade Thangathurai standing beside him, also looking at the camera, though with an expression that was noticeably less triumphant. In both images Kuttimani was fresh-faced and seemingly well in possession of himself, exuding a sense of calm, easy assurance, a bearing that had probably been achieved only with great effort, Krishan knew, for the newspaper article that contained the pictures also gave a long list of the tortures to which Kuttimani, Thangathurai, and Jegan, the third accomplice in the robbery, had been subject by police, a list that included, among other things, being stripped and beaten by batons and rifle butts, being forced to inhale the fumes of burning chili, having metal rods inserted into their anuses, and steel wire inserted into the urethral opening of their genitalia. It could only have been after much inner struggle that Kuttimani found the composure required to present himself in court the way he did, Krishan knew, to make the arguments and the famous last statement that were published the next day on the front pages of all the major newspapers, sending ripples from the south of the country all the way north.