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SHUBHANGI SWARUP писал(а):The couples presence in social events is marked by a dramatic
entrance, side by side. She doesn't leave him when he joins a
group of men and discusses serious topics like inflation affecting
the islands subsidized rations, or the weather. Nor does he
leave her when she exchanges culinary tips with the ladies. In
fact, he always has something useful to add, like the scientific
name of the herb they speak of and how best to cultivate it.
If Girija Prasad is accused of displaying feminine traits for
suggesting alternative ingredients in recipes, his wife is accused
of being a man by virtue of her knowledge. Their oddities
complement each other. If only they could peer into the Varma
household to see how a marriage of equals thrives in a world
of unequal's. For now they must satisfy themselves with
observations from a distance and wonder: When they eat, does
she serve him before she sits down, or are they brazen
enough to serve themselves? Who decides the menu? It is
whispered that Girija Prasad turned vegetarian to please his wife.
Though it is Girija Prasad who posts the letters to their
families, is it Chanda Devi who writes them? What about the
curtains they recently put up? Who decided their pattern and
why were they put up? Is it to hide what the
soon-to-come-into-effect Indian Constitution will term unnatural
sexual acts? Born of generations interlocked in the missionary,
it seems impossible to imagine sex among equals.
The life of an equal couple in the latitudes of longing and the
longitudes of trepidation has hitherto been a rare,
undocumented phenomenon like a whale giving birth in
Antarctica or white elephants mating in south Asia.
Both Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi are quick to realize that
the phrase falling in love is a euphemism. Romance isn't as
straightforward as diving into cool waters on a hot afternoon,
nor is it instinctive, like learning to walk. Its not a treasure
trove of superlatives like Sanskrit poetry or the sweet sorrow
the Romantics spoke of.
The struggle of an equal couple isn't just the subject of
ethnography. It is multidisciplinary. Intimacy and distance
operate like the tide high during the day, peaking at mealtimes.
The moon is a cup of tea; it pulls them to the zenith of their
interaction. The nights are parched. Unconquered land
separates their beds.
------------------------------------
Girija Prasad has been married to Chanda Devi for almost two
years now. His mother sends him a letter each month, urging
them to move closer to home. Chanda Devi yearns for
motherhood. His department seniors want to see profits, and
his juniors better postings. The elephants in the timber camps
are exhausted, and the teak saplings in the nursery are
malnourished. Yet it is possible for him to call this a state of
contentment. For too long, he had been toying with atheism,
rejecting religion on scientific principle. In this moment, his
reasons are clear. Only when one experiences a moment in its
entirety as a world in its own right, with a unique shape and
axis, a sun and moon, laws and philosophies only when one
encounters all the moments possibilities with contentment, only
then is one left with no reason to pray. Like the parrots, he is
grateful just to return home each day.
It isn’t a lack of courage that prevents him from reaching out
to his wife but gratitude for this moment filled with longing and
contentment. Chanda Devi leans over to tell him something, but
her words are drowned out by the cacophony of birds.
My lady, he says, you are competing with more than five
thousand parrot residents of this isle. You must speak louder.
I'm pregnant, she repeats.
Confused by the birds and the words, he asks, How do you
know? although he realizes it is a silly question. Among the few
things he knows about her is that she knows things
already.
-----------------------------
The most dangerous criminals are those who inspire others to
commit crimes yet themselves stand back and watch, the
judge had proclaimed. The Poet didn't hold a gun, stick, or
bomb. Yet he threatened to bring down the empire with his
thoughts. He had penned the movements most popular slogans
and lyrics.
When the Poet heard the line, he had laughed. The judge had
noted his response. His every verdict was a work of art
dedicated to the cause of justice the text, the performance, the
practiced solemnity. Like all artists, he too was insecure. The
wig made him self-conscious.
Initially, the Poet spent his time meditating. He banished all
memories and, with them, the longing for a world that had
gifted him those memories. He narrowed his willpower into a
knife-edge, razor-sharp and formidable. At knife point, he kept
madness at bay.
He cocooned himself in the reality of Cellular Jail. But all he
could see was injustice. Inmates made to plow in place of bulls,
inmates on hunger strike who died after being force-fed, fetters
that consisted of a single iron rod from neck to feet,
preventing a person from doing anything but standing erect.
The Poet was flooded with inspiration, for nothing inspired him
more than injustice. But he was helpless without pen and
paper. He didnt even have access to chalk and a slate courts
orders.
-------------------------------
By the time he returns, the guest has arrived. It has begun to
rain. But the rain is unusual, unlike the tropical melodrama hes
accustomed to. It is windless, cloudless. Mountain rain! he
exclaims. In high altitudes, it is the mist that carries rain.
He stands amidst the fog in his garden. Bamboo-straight drops
of rain connect heaven and earth, with him standing in
between. They fall in complete silence, so silent that he can
hear himself breathe. They have fed the Himalayan rivers since
their birth, and now its his turn. Tender drops wet his
forehead, his lips, his limbs.
With a single shower, the mountain rains wash the webs he
has built around himself, filling him with an urge to visit the
gods of all mountains the Himalayas. For he is Girija, the child
of the mountains.
IT IS A MONTH of longing and frustration. A month of
braving incessant horizontal rains that arrive from as far as
Polynesia in the east and, increasingly, Zanzibar in the west.
Rains that tell you the sun is dead, and with it all the seasons.
Rains that are a prelude to the oceans taking over.
It is a month of relentlessly mopping the floors, of opening and
closing windows in delirium, of placing buckets under shifting
cracks in the ceiling, of wiping moss with bare hands and
drying handkerchiefs on the stove. A month of talking aloud to
the heavens, lest the monsoons drown out your inner voice.
It is time to acknowledge the reflection in the mirror and join
hands with ones shadow. It is the month Girija Prasad
brought Chanda Devi to the islands. It is the month of June.
--------------------------------
In prison, Plato inquires about the price of smuggling a letter
to the Andamans. Using the post will be easier, Thapa says.
But Plato has no address. All he knows is that his mother lives
with another man on the islands, that her name is Rose Mary,
and that she is a Karen hailing from a village called Webi. It
means hidden, not lost, Plato explains. That is all his
grandmother had told him.
On the night of his arrest, there was a reason why the junta
left him alive in the ditch. They wanted him to break down
without resorting to the elaborate rituals of torture. They had
succeeded. Lying in the ditch, shaking with tears, Plato had a
vision of his mother. Never before had she come to him with
such longing.
Once he's on the Andaman Islands, it isn't difficult for Thapa
to track Rose Mary, now known as Mary, down to a
neighborhood in Port Blair. The Karens on the islands are a
small community. Surrounded by hostile seas, the archipelago's
capital is the farthest they got. In the busy market, a Karen
woman points her out to Thapa as she waits for her turn
outside a millers shop.
--------------------------------
Sea gypsies control these waters connecting the Andaman
Islands to Burma. Traditionally, the gypsies choose the boatmen
on this route for their emotional invulnerability. A seafarers
song glorifies the boatman who can cross this stretch of the
sea impervious as clay, buoyant as rubber, resilient as gold.
For a day spent on the choppy waters can easily turn into a
lifetime traversing the fault line. No one, not even the cyclonic
clouds and deep-sea currents, can escape its elemental pull.
There is a danger of slipping into the earths cleft. It connects
Burma to the islands, like a weeping eye to every disowned
teardrop. Not all pain, certainly not all longings, can be swept
away by the Indian Ocean.
Once a proud continent, Burma was crushed between India
and Asia. India pushed it to the north with its drift; Asia
squeezed it to the east in defiance. A weeping eye was all that
was left of the face, buried under rubble. Burmas aquiline
edges were gouged into unconquerable peaks and gorges. Its
complexion had rotted into damp jungle and dry desert.
-------------------------
Never before has Plato considered a morning in April an
assault. How can it be? Immediately, he grabs the thought by
its throat. In the clarity of isolation, he had stopped categorizing
thoughts as friends or foes. What promised insanity also held
the calm of enlightenment. He had suppressed all memories,
longings, and aversions that would lead him astray in the maze
of time, trapping him in the past or future. Yet he knows that
Thingyan, the water festival, is around the corner, for the tiny
yellow flowers of the golden padauk have blossomed, a sign of
the first summer rain.
-------------------------------
Blinded by the radiance, all he can do is listen. He listens to
the barking, shrieking, and clucking. He observes the soft and
heavy movements, the textures brushing against his skin. He is
paralyzed by their emotions, even as they move on. Plato
re-creates them with colors, contours, and lives. The flying
reptiles, the dawdling birds, the plants that walk and the
python-sized worms, the tusk-wielding carnivores and giant
wading mammals attempting to swim. He sways in the
turbulence of the escaping ripples, relishing their high-pitched
whistles love songs composed for him and only him.
Hidden within the voices and sensations is a premonition of
what is to come. All evolution is guided by the primordial
instinct. The one that set us free to explore the uncertain
geographies of longing, only to stumble upon the bliss of
mortality. The instinct that leads us all to the primordial lake.
Floating as uncomplicated single cells, waiting for life itself to
cease.
Perhaps the circumstances of his birth led Plato to such
realizations. Perhaps such truths led to the circumstances.
He often goes to smoke opium with his friend, a local Mishmi
tribal who cultivates poppies in the valleys recesses. The two sit
in silence as they distill and inhale opium over the fireplace.
The huts walls are a gallery of animal skulls collected over
decades. Here, Plato can identify every animal that calls this
jungle its home wild gaur, leopard, flying squirrel, gibbon, civet
cat. Among them are also skulls of the vanished. Musk deer,
tiger, and rhino have been poached to extinction in these parts.
One day, they will all return.
-------------------------------------
So elated were the mother and son at finding each other, they
didn't notice the fisherman cast his net to catch the turtle.
Swiftly, the fisherman pulled it in. The boat was distraught.
With the next surge in the waters, she capsized. Out fell the
fisherman and his net. She set her son free.
The fisherman thought it was an accident. He swam to the
shore and returned with others to drag the boat back. That
night, as the boat lay on the beach, she looked at the sea with
longing. If only she could swim back into the open water and
be with her son. But the boat could move only in water, not
on land. It prayed to the moon to use all its might and incite
the sea to swell.
The moon said, Why should I help you? It will disrupt my
routine. It is a mothers will and duty to look after her children. If
you help me fulfill mine, nature will bless you with offspring
too.
------------------------------------
Why do you want to hear a story?
When I was a child, I would get bored and give up. My
father would tempt me with his stories. I would finish my food,
fall asleep, comb my hair, wash the utensils all to hear a
story. Now I miss them. Without his stories, life doesn't make
sense.
Its my fault, not yours, Thapa says, searching for the right
words. I don't remember stories anymore. I am a
businessman. I can import and export goods. I cant tell
stories.
Then tell me about you. Tell me your story.
Will it bring them back to life?
Will it kill you?
Thapa doesn't answer. He is left with two options: tell her a
story like she wants, or leave his room and walk for the rest
of the night. But they scare him too, the rains. They breed
longings like the damp breeds fungus.
There is one more option. But it scares him more than the
brass figure he'd confronted earlier in the day. His fingers
twitch and his hands gesture involuntarily as he looks around,
pleading with the walls. Then he straightens the creases on his
shirt and dusts his knees. He takes a deep breath and begins.
---------------------------------------
If only my heart had stopped beating before she arrived, he
sighs. She came here with that good-for-nothing grandson of
hers. The man goes from village to village, selling monstrosities
in the name of the devil. And she looks after him. You are
old, Ghazala, I told her. At our age, it is best to sit still.
Heaven is not what the Quran tells you. It is a sunset in this
very orchard, in the company of trees as ancient as us. The
mans eyes well up.
As ancient as our love, he whispers, as if talking to himself.
Yes, Ghazala. It is true. The longing grows. It grows old with
us. But it doesn't die. In death, it gives root to lifetimes
endured on islands such as these. Islands of sunlight in a
lonely orchard.
Thapa is quiet. Centuries of solitude weigh him down, like a
sea of sediment on a fossil.
-------------------------------
Premonitions of our past Ghosts of our future They are us.
That night, Thapa forgot all about the photograph. He left it
behind, tucked away beside the fireplace. By the time he
returned to his senses, he was already three days away from
the hut. In a way, he was relieved. The photograph made him
sentimental. The faces in the image filled him with a contagious
mix of excitement and fear. On occasions, it lulled him into
surrendering to the ghosts of longing, staring at the image for
hours, imagining how different his life could have been, had it
not been this way.
Plato and Thapa left the Mishmi chiefs village a little after
dawn, putting an end to an opium-soaked night of celebration
and sorrow. The photograph went unnoticed until the
afternoon, when the chiefs granddaughter, a chubby
six-year-old in a tattered dress, pointed out the frame tucked
under a straw mat by the fireplace.
---------------------------------------
A new day begins at sunset for us Drakpos.
She smiles. The two bide their time in silence. She watches him doze, moving in and out of awareness, waking himself up in
fits and starts. He stares at her cross-eyed, imagining the full
moon from its eclipse. Struggling to piece together an epic that
sprawls across millennia, lands, and lives from the shard of a
conversation. This isn't the first time the reluctant souls have
looked at each other with longing, contemplating a free fall into
the abyss. Nor is it the first time they have floundered, out of
sync with the others steps.
Eventually, he speaks. Forgive me for taking up your time.
One must speak the truth. I came here to ask something of
you.
She nods her consent.
What is your name?
Ghazala Mumtaz Abdul Sheikh Begum.
How many names do you have?
That is my entire name, she replies with a smile. People
stopped asking me that question when I got married. Wives,
mothers, and grandmothers don't have names. Apo isn't your
name either.
No. It means grandfather in our language.
----------------------------
After a long time, long enough to be a lifetime, it came to me
at dawn. I was afraid I had forgotten it forever, the name my
ancestors had given me. My mother called out to me with the
first rays of the sun. Tashi Yeshe, she whispered in my ears,
wake up. The sheep are restless; take them with you. When I
woke up, I wondered what your name was. CHANGTHANG, THE SNOW
DESERT, is no ordinary plateau.
Its undulating terrain has confounded the human race ever
since they stepped out of Africa and stumbled upon central
Asia, unable to fly over the bordering mountain ranges like a
flock of geese. What the human mind perceives as an
unvanquished distance is all a matter of height, for the Tibetan
plateau is higher than the highest peaks of all other continents,
and it is still rising. Or so the nomads, the future human
inhabitants of this plateau, believe. The snow desert shows no
signs of belonging to this earth. It hovers somewhere above.
Within the nomad families, more children perish than survive.
Some souls quietly escape the womb even before the mother
can realize she has conceived. Compared to all the glorious
lives one can lead, the human one is quite a chore.
Tashi Yeshe, for instance, has enjoyed previous lives here, in
the snow desert. As the landscape transformed, so did he. He
witnessed a lonely dawn at the end of a hundred years, for
that is how long the sun didn't rise after an asteroid hit the
earth. His life as an earthworm left him humbled. At a time
when three-fourths of all life forms perished, from plankton to
the dinosaurs, he had lived on as a worm. In the ice ages, he
was deeply attached to herd mentality as a woolly mammoth.
During the great melt, he grew courage as a whale, leaving
land to wade into water.
------------------------------
In the land of the imminent present, there is a man who seeks
the glaciers like a sleepwalker following his dreams. He is a
learned man, a man of knowledge. Yet he believes that the
only way he can discover why he is here, on earth and in this
life, is by visiting places he isn't supposed to be. Despite
injuries and misfortunes, he persists.
When the winter reaches its peak, he abandons the path of
good sense. He falters and crawls, tripping over rocks and
sinking into the snow, slipping through the glaciers crevasses
and cracks. An unseen shadow protects him from the
unpredictable moods of the ice.
One day, he sits down, exhausted. He is close to giving up
when he hears breathing, longer and deeper than his own, like
a melody floating in the air. Someone is sitting right behind
him, but they don't turn around to face each other. In the
cheemos company, the mans loneliness turns into solitude. In
the humans company, the cheemos solitude turns into longing.
The two of them sit like a being with two hearts and four
eyes.
Some dreams are so beautiful and fragile, Ghazala, they are
left unrealized.
Ghazala cant sleep later that night, even after two glasses of
rum. The more the old man dreams of her, the further she
feels from both wakefulness and sleep, left to wander aimlessly
in the world of his dreams.
------------------------------
Ghazala has witnessed possibilities of love on various occasions.
Love grounded her as she stared at the crane, as afraid of the
creature as he was of her. It visited her on nights when her
husband recited poems to her as she tidied up the room. It
sat with her as she rowed a shikara into the lake all alone,
allowing the currents to take her where they pleased. But it is
only after hearing Apos stories filled with a longing so intense,
they know no beginning or end that she understands its
expanse. For love is a realization gained over many lives.
She is distracted by a new glow in the orchard. Besides the
odd firefly and the lit end of her cigarette, she notices two
golden eyes. Bigger than any yaks or wolf's or humans. The
eyes burn like lamps. They don't blink; they don't move.
Ghazala stands up immediately. She sits down again. She
removes a handful of dried apricots from her pocket and
stretches her hand out.
-------------------------
This novel is a collective effort. My family, Sunanda, Govind,
Shubhra, Shaili, and Heeraz, are my emotional strength.
Happiness is always a ready option, despite the professional
hazards of doubt and despair, because of Nikhil, my partner. I
am also grateful to all the Swarups, Varmas, and Hemrajanis
for bearing with a family member who's either missing in action
or lost to the world. I owe a lot to the next generation my
nieces, Kaavya and Sivaa, and my daughter, Kalika Swaraj,
soon to arrive. Thank you for being a part of my life.
Receiving the Charles Pick Fellowship was a turning point. I am
grateful to Amit Chaudhuri and Henry Sutton for mentoring
me. The support I have received from the Pick family Martin,
Rachel, and Suegoes beyond the call of duty. I also
appreciate the unconditional support provided by Manu Joseph,
Kevin Conroy Scott, and Rick Simonson for my words.
Latitudes of Longing is set in places where I had never
previously been. The contribution of my hosts in each of these
places is immense, especially since I consistently found myself in
sticky situations. They are: Mr. and Mrs. Syamchoudhury,
Tanaz Noble, Mr. G. S. Srivastava, Mr. Mudit Kumar Singh,
Sumati Rao, Promi Pradhan and Sanjay Madnani, Kalika
Bro-jшrgensen, Col. Smanla and Tahira Smanla, Shubham Saha,
Archana Tamang Lama, and Sharmila Ragunathan. The
Sangam House and Jayanti residencies, and my ancestral
home, Shivdham, gave me much-needed solitude.
A lot of research went into this novel, and I have borrowed
heavily from the experiences, guidance, and company of the
following: ............бу=бу-бу...........
------------------------
SHUBHANGI SWARUP is a writer and educator. Latitudes of
Longing, her debut novel, was a bestseller soon after its
release in India. It won the Tata Literature Live! Award for
debut fiction and was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian
literature. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for
creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also
won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives
in Mumbai.
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