Krishan had talked to Rani and Appamma a few minutes more, had gone to wish his mother for the new year, then returned to his room, where despite the tiredness in his eyes and the lightness in the back of his head he was unable to fall asleep at once. Lying on his back with his eyes closed he thought about what Rani had said, the image fixed in his mind of her staying up by herself in that silent room, surrounded by darkness except for the images moving on the screen and the flickering light it cast on the walls. There’d been a similar occasion a few months earlier, when entering Appamma’s room he’d found Rani sitting by herself in front of the TV, the sound blaring this time as some unrealistically dramatic scene, a kidnapping or assault, unfolded before her on the screen. He’d watched beside her for a while and then asked what had happened, what was the cause of the scene’s exaggerated violence, in response to which Rani had looked at him with slight confusion for a moment before telling him, embarrassment on her face, that she wasn’t exactly sure, giving him some vague explanation of the scene that didn’t quite make sense. She’d been sitting there staring at the TV, he’d realized, without actually paying attention to what was happening, had been watching the screen as if it were showing her a sequence of images and sounds without meaning or connection to each other. Every time he saw Rani watching TV since then he’d wondered whether she was actually paying attention, and the fact she’d been able to watch an entire film without sound the previous night confirmed these suspicions to him now, for there was no way she could have followed the film without knowing what the actors were saying, especially since she wouldn’t have been able to hear the music, which such films relied upon so heavily to set up the emotional valence of a scene, to tell the audience whether they should be sad or hopeful or anxious or fearful. She couldn’t have had any sense of the plot, any sense of why something was happening and what consequences it would have for the characters, and if Rani really was content to watch a film this way then it must have meant that its logic and meaning were in some way irrelevant to her, that she was watching it without wanting or being able to inhabit it the way a spectator normally did. The sense of hearing was vital to the sense of participating in a situation, after all, and to watch a film without listening to it was to experience it at a remove, to observe the moving colors and shapes the way you might observe the patterns of passing clouds or the ripples on the surface of a lake. We can direct our gazes toward what lies in the distance whenever we want, toward things that have nothing to do with us and lack the power to affect us, but usually we can hear only what is in our vicinity and has the potential to affect us, so that sound, unlike sight, was associated with the physical presence of a thing and the possibility of interaction with it. It was for this reason perhaps that ghosts and spirits and phantoms were so often depicted as silent presences in films and books, as beings we can glimpse but cannot hear, that can watch but cannot speak, as though to signify that while these beings are in some way present to us they cannot participate in our world, no longer have the power to act and affect us, just as we ourselves are present in some way to them but cannot engage in the world to which they have been cast. What it was like to live in this way, to see but never hear, to be seen but never heard, Krishan did not know, but standing there as the fire grew beneath the casket he couldn’t help feeling that this was what Rani’s life had been like since the end of the war, physically located in a world that was shorn of the people she loved and unable therefore to participate in it, her mode of existence more akin to that of ghosts than humans, even if she’d existed in a body that possessed weight and could move physically through space, even if she’d remained capable of love and pain, laughter and generosity, even if the life inside her had been undeniable to anyone who saw her.
Krishan watched, mesmerized, as the fire engulfed more and more of the pyre, the wood inside crackling and bursting in response to the heat, the flames beginning to lick the bottom of the casket, the smoke beginning to rise up in thick, dark clouds. The director was still adding occasional handfuls of hay to different parts of the pyre, using his knife to prod and nudge the wood inside, but he too was more of a spectator now than a participant, watching the fire as it began to burn of its own volition, as though conscious of its own existence and the need to keep itself alive. The man standing beside him turned and began walking back toward the entrance, and looking around Krishan saw that nobody else from the procession remained now but him, that except for the funeral director and his assistant he was the only person left standing before the pyre. He too would have to leave soon, he knew, the intensity of the light in the sky was waning, it must have been five o’clock or later, and he didn’t want to make his way back to the village in the dark. He remained standing there transfixed as the fire spread to the foot of the casket, as the wooden panels that formed its sides began to smolder and smoke, as the wood above Rani’s feet began to catch flame. Picking up the end of the still burning stem of the palmyra leaf, the director drew the stem out from below the casket and inserted it into the wood above the body. He picked up the bottle of kerosene and sprinkled the oil over the wood, as though impatient for the casket to begin burning, took whatever hay was left in the sack and inserted it wherever he could. Rani was being exposed to the flames directly for the first time, Krishan could tell, and though her body hadn’t started burning yet, though in any case it was concealed from sight, he felt he could hear the fire nearing her, hissing and sputtering as it spread. Listening to these sounds he suddenly felt anxious—it bothered him that Rani remained silent as the flames surrounded her body, that he himself stood there doing nothing, even though there was nothing he could do—and making eye contact briefly with the director, he took a first step back. He wondered whether to make some gesture of obeisance to Rani, but not wanting to seem foolish he turned and began to walk, moving slowly and deliberately back across the ground. He began feeling calmer as the sound of the burning receded into the distance, as though what was happening behind him, no longer audible, was happening in another sphere or medium, and it was only when he reached the entrance, drawn by some lingering curiosity, that he turned to look back once more.
The pyre, much smaller in the distance, was burning densely and brightly in the center of the ground, deep amber-orange in the early twilight, its smoke wafting up and dissipating into the air. Beyond the walls of the ground the pale blue horizon had taken on a gray hue, its vastness interrupted here and there by the palmyra trees dotting the landscape, and looking into this vastness Krishan felt, coming over him, the strange sense that there was nowhere left for him to go. His gaze moving between the soundlessly burning pyre and the landscape of brush and bramble that spread out on all sides he wondered what had brought him to this place so far removed from the world he knew, what forces had led him to leave the life he’d created for himself in India, to come to this place he’d never actually lived, this place that had hardly figured in his life growing up. He wondered what movements of fate had led to his seemingly accidental encounter with Rani in the hospital ward, to her arrival in their home just a few months later, to her unexpected death two days before and his attendance now at her cremation, unable to shake off the sense that his presence in this scene of desolation had been decided somewhere long before, that something inside him had been driving him toward it long before the end of the war, something more than just guilt, something like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was. The specific path a life took was often decided in ways that were easy to discern, it was true, in the situation into which one was born, one’s race and gender and caste, in all the desires, aspirations, and narratives that one came thereafter to identify with, but people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives. It was such a trajectory, se
t in motion by the things they’d seen, that had led so many young men and women to join the separatist movements decades ago, it was such a trajectory that had led Rani and so many people like her to their accidental or intentional deaths in the years after the war, and it was such a trajectory, Krishan now felt, that had led him too, in his own quiet and unremarkable way, to this cremation ground at the end of the world. His own path through life had been decided when he was much younger, not long after the death of his father perhaps, though what came to mind now was not so much his father’s death as a period several years later, his final months of school and the long, aimless months he’d spent waiting for exam results, those endless days and weeks filled with yearning for a life he couldn’t articulate and didn’t know where to find. The cease-fire had been breaking down at the time and the war in the northeast was beginning to resume in full force, as a result of which his mother rarely let him or his brother leave the house by themselves, overly anxious that they would be stopped and interrogated, taken away by soldiers or policemen, overly fearful she might lose a son after having already lost her husband. He’d begun feeling trapped having to spend all that empty time within the walls of their small home, and although he hadn’t understood it at the time it had probably been this sense of entrapment, this loss of freedom, that led him to pass so much time on their roof in those months, climbing up on the balcony railing and then onto the gentle slope, lying there for hours at a stretch in the nights while his brother, mother, and grandmother slept, listening to music while gazing up at the ocean of blue suspended above, at the silvery translucence of the clouds that he’d always felt were carrying messages to him from afar, thinking as he lay there, in that naïve and moving way of adolescents, how large and unknown the world was, how much it seemed to contain.
It had been in those months of waiting probably that he’d first become aware of the absence inside him, the longing for a life that existed beyond the boundaries of the Colombo and Sri Lanka he knew, an absence that he hadn’t felt as an absence so much as a kind of willingness to be drawn elsewhere, an absence that had made him, paradoxically, more present to the world around him, more delicately aware of its surfaces and textures and moods. He’d not had any sense, back then, of what it was that life could offer, hadn’t yet known what it would be like to live in another place, to live by himself and be responsible for his own decisions, to kiss, have sex, or be in love, to make a home for himself somewhere or to move from place to place. He hadn’t yet experienced the objects of any of his desires, whether people or places or situations, his desires at the time no more than images in his mind, abstract objects possessing meanings he couldn’t glean, things to which he attached significance without knowing why. What he’d felt at the time was not so much desire as a kind of yearning, for though both desire and yearning were states of incompleteness, states involving a strong, sometimes overwhelming need for something outside one’s life, what was called desire always had a concrete object, a notion of what was necessary to eliminate the absence one felt inside, whereas to have what was often called yearning was to feel this absence and yet not know what one sought. To desire, in a sense, was to know or think one knew what one wanted, to know or think one knew the paths by which it might be reached, even if those paths turned out to be too difficult to follow, even if the things they led to, the things one desired, turned out not to provide the liberation one thought. To yearn on the other hand was to be lost, to lack bearings in the world because one did not know what one was seeking or where it could be found, so that unable to distract oneself, by frenetic activity or single-minded pursuit, from the painful sense of lack, one’s only consolation was to look out across vast distances, as if surely somewhere in the expansiveness of the horizon, across space and sea and sky, some possibility was contained that could make life self-sufficient and devoid of need, some possibility that could bring an end to time. That such a possibility didn’t exist he was now old enough to know, but it was a yearning of this kind that had led him here, he felt as he gazed at the pyre burning soundlessly at the center of the ground, that had led him along all the many paths he’d taken and brought him here at last to Rani’s burning body—Rani, whose vividly painful longing contained both the particularity of desire and the directionlessness of yearning, the knowledge of what exactly she needed and the knowledge that it could no longer be found—as though to tell him that any attempt to cure or solve absence would lead, sooner or later, only to death and the extinction of thought.
The evening was gathering over the landscape, and standing there at the entrance to the cremation ground Krishan gazed for a last time at the brilliant red glow of the pyre, all of it alight now, the wood and the casket and most likely the body inside too, all of it burning brightly in the lifeless gray light of the evening. It would take several more hours for the burning to be complete, he knew, the human body contained a lot of material, not just flesh and bones and organs but feelings and visions, memories and expectations, prophecies and dreams, all of which would take time to burn, to be reduced to the soothing uniformity of ash. It was these ashes that Rani’s son-in-law would pick up the next day, which would be kept for a month in their home and then dispersed afterward over a body of water, perhaps over the sea on the northern or eastern coast, perhaps over the lake they’d passed on the way to the ground, in either case dissipating, eventually, into the long wide arc of the world. Eventually nothing would remain of Rani’s body, eventually nothing would remain of what she’d thought or felt or seen or heard, though watching as the flames flickered in the distance, shooting out embers into the void, Krishan no longer felt any particular sadness at the thought of Rani’s body being reduced, perhaps because he could no longer hear the actual sound of the burning, perhaps because he understood now that Rani had already left the world. He watched as the scarlet glow of the fire grew brighter in the darkening evening, as the air around it warped with strange clarity in the intensity of the heat, watched as the substantiality of a human life was transmuted, like a mirage or hallucination or vision, into thick clouds of smoke billowing up into the sky, thinning as they rose and then disappearing into the evening, a message from this world to another that would never be received.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel was a more collaborative effort than my first novel, and would not have found its present form if not for the generosity of many people: my editors P.E. at Hogarth and L.B. at Granta; J.B., R.R., and the rest of the team at Hogarth; my agent A.S. at ICM; my sister and first reader A.A.; my longtime mentor P.K.; and my dear friends A.G., A.T., B.M., C.E., G.K., H.B., J.R., L.S., M.L., O.N., S.K., T.M., T.T., and V.S. My thanks also to The Paris Review for excerpting part of the novel in their fall 2019 issue.
The text incorporates a number of works of translation and documentary: the version of Poosal’s story from the Periya Purānam in the first chapter is based on a translation from the Tamil in David Shulman’s Imagining the Real; the version of The Cloud Messenger told in the fourth chapter is based on James Mallinson’s translation from the Sanskrit; the version of the Life of the Buddha told in the seventh chapter is based on a translation from the Sanskrit by Patrick Olivelle; the story of Kuttimani’s death told in the seventh chapter is based on Rajan Hoole’s account in The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder; the documentary described in chapter nine is Beate Arnestad and Morten Daae’s My Daughter the Terrorist; the account in chapter nine of Buddhist women’s poetry is based on a translation from the Pali by Charles Hallisey.
This book is for my mother and father.
A Passage North Page 25