• Marginalia: Anuk Arudpragasm

    Kanak Kapur

    07/2024

    For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Kanak Kapur—whose storyLong Sleeves appears in our Spring 2024 issue—delves into A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasm.


    Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North is a novel about distraction. The text, like its narrator’s ruminations, wanders and relives and revisits. Traveling by train to attend the funeral of Rani, his grandmother’s caretaker, Krishan thinks (among other things) about the brutal civil war that for thirty years divided Sri Lanka, a former lover who recently sent him an email, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rani’s death. These distractions have potency; they are more like all-consuming hallucinations. “The present, we realize,” Arudpragasm writes, “eludes us more and more as the years go by, showing itself for fleeting moments before losing us in the world’s incessant movement, fleeing the second we look away and leaving scarcely a trace of its passing.” Krishan’s journey into the Northern Province is a journey deeper into his past—deeper into distraction, and deeper into the pleasure of residing in two places at once, the psyche and the present.

    In the following excerpt, Krishan wonders about his grandmother’s recent decline, which triggered her need for a caretaker:

    It was a condition she remained submerged in during the long days and weeks that followed, days and weeks in which she was unable to string words into coherent sentences, unable to feed or wash herself, urinating and sometimes even defecating on her bed, and thinking of that moment at the airport now as he continued making his way down Marine Drive, Krishan couldn’t help feeling that his grandmother had chosen to abandon her lucidity on purpose upon recognizing them that day, that she’d sensed in that moment that remaining conscious would mean accepting the powerlessness of her situation and decided, in some interior part of herself, that it was preferable from then on to be absent.

    Arudpragasam’s sentences here are winding, clauses stacked on top of each other as thought deepens and inches closer to a possible conclusion—that one’s removal from the present is no accident. Krishan suspects that his grandmother’s absentness was a choice, a safer place to retreat to than to live in and accept her newly-dependent state. In this moment, Krishan gets closer to an analysis of his own escape into distraction than he will at any other point in the novel. The reader wonders what about his own situation makes Krishan feel powerless, and what he might be gaining by, for instance, constantly recalling the first nights he spent with his ex-lover instead of actually speaking to her. There is some empowerment to be found in retreating from reality, Arudpragasam suggests, a protective power in backing into the tunnel of ourselves, that private place where we can be safe from the present and its demands for action just a little longer. Aren’t we the luckiest of animals to be able to do so?

    Reading this novel peculiarly made me, as a reader, take better notice of the world and the flickers of my own mind. I think this is what the best novels do: they reflect the movements of our interior worlds back to us, and thus make us more willing participants in our own lives.

    Kanak Kapur’s fiction has been published in The Rumpus, CodeLit, and Black Warrior Review. She is currently based in Nashville.

    Read More

    Web Design and Development by Riverworks Marketing