Latitudes of Longing Read online

  Latitudes of Longing is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Shubhangi Swarup

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in India by HarperCollins Publishers India in 2018.

  Hardback ISBN 9780593132555

  Ebook ISBN 9780593132579

  oneworldlit.com

  Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover illustration: © QU Lan

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Islands

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Faultline

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Valley

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Snow Desert

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  SILENCE ON A TROPICAL ISLAND is the relentless sound of water. The waves, like your own breaths, never leave you. For a fortnight now, the gurgle and thunder of clouds has drowned out the waves. Rains drum on the roof and skid over the edge, losing themselves in splashes. Simmer, whip, thrum, and slip. The sun is dead, they tell you.

  Seeded in the sounds is an elemental silence. The quietness of mist and the stillness of ice.

  * * *

  —

  The newly married Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi have resigned to their fate—strangers in a bedroom damp with desire and flooded with incipient dreams. And Girija Prasad dreams furiously these days. For the rains are conducive to fantasies, an unscientific truth.

  One night, when the downpour suddenly stops, it wakes him up. His ears had adjusted to the tropical cacophony like a spouse to a snoring partner. Rising from a wet dream, he wonders what happened. Who left the room?

  He peeps down from his queen-sized bed to Chanda Devi’s rustic mattress on the floor, where she sleeps facing the open window instead of him. Aroused, he gazes at the curves of her silhouette in the darkness. When the two of them were united for several births by walking around the sacred fire seven times during their wedding ceremony, she followed his footsteps meekly, firm in her conviction that destiny had brought them together once again in a new avatar. Yet in this avatar, he would have to find a place in her heart once again. “Until then,” she informed him on the first night, “I will make my bed on the ground.”

  She’s wide awake, distraught because of the accusatory cries emanating from the other side. It is the ghost of a goat. The ghost escaped countless realms to come wander on their roof. And now its restless hooves have descended to stand under the open window, filling the room and her conscience with guilt.

  “Can you hear it?” she asks. She can feel his eyes on her back.

  “Hear what?”

  “The goat bleating outside.”

  His forlorn erection withers away. He’s alert now to Chanda Devi and the predicament she poses.

  “There’s no goat roaming in our house,” he replies in exasperation.

  She sits up. The bleating has grown louder, as if to tell her to convey to her dreamy husband, “You took away my life, but you can’t take away my afterlife, you sinful meat-eater!”

  “It’s just outside our window,” she tells him.

  “Does it scare you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you threatened by this goat?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps you could ignore it and go back to sleep.” He meant to say “should” and not “could,” but he doesn’t have the courage to be stern. His wife, he has realized, doesn’t respond well to dialectics or coercion. In fact, she doesn’t respond well to most things. If only she were less attractive, he could have ignored her and gone back to sleep.

  “How can you sleep?” she asks. “You hacked the innocent creature, minced its flesh, deep-fried it with onions and garlic, then ate it. And you left its restless soul to haunt our house!”

  If the souls of all the various kinds of animals he had consumed returned to haunt him, his home would be a zoo and barn combined, leaving no space to move, let alone sleep. But mild-mannered Girija Prasad cannot say that. Two months into his marriage and he’s resigned to his wife’s fecund imagination. It is a willful act of hope, attributing her behavior to her imagination and not some mental illness. For the sake of his unborn children and the decades they have to endure together, he announces, “If it helps you sleep, I will stop eating meat.”

  That’s how carnivorous Girija Prasad turns vegetarian, much to his wife’s and his own surprise. For the sake of a few hours of rest, he says goodbye to scrambled eggs, mutton biryani, and beefsteaks forever.

  At the first hint of sunrise, she leaves her bed. She enters the kitchen to prepare an elaborate breakfast. There is new life in her movements and a smile lurking in her silence. Now that the killings have stopped, it’s time to stretch out a white flag in the shape of aloo parathas. Two hours later, she serves them to him and asks, “How are they?”

  Girija Prasad can’t help but feel unsettled, and for all the wrong reasons. The sun is finally out. His wife, who has cooked him breakfast for the first time, has been bold enough to place a napkin on his lap, brushing past his shoulders, spilling her warm breath on his skin. He craves the comfort of grease mixed with flesh, but he can’t find it on his plate.

  “How are they?” she asks him again.

  “Who?” he asks, disoriented.

  “The parathas.”

  “Perfect.”

  She smiles and pours him a second cup of tea.

  Chanda Devi, the clairvoyant one. She feels for ghosts and enjoys the laconic company of trees. She can sense them, his u
nexpressed cravings. But she knows he is better off giving up flesh. The kingdom of flesh is as ephemeral as it is unreliable, especially when compared to the kingdom of plants. Chanda Devi has seen it all, even the rivers of blood that will drain out of her body one day. It makes her obstinate, this knowledge. It makes her a demanding wife.

  * * *

  —

  When Girija Prasad went to Oxford, it was the first time he had left his home in Allahabad by himself. After a four-day journey in horse carriages, ferries, and a train, when he finally sat on the ship that would carry him to England, he’d abandoned jars of pickle, ghee parathas that could outlive human beings, images of assorted gods, and pictures of his family, including a portrait of his mother that he had painted himself.

  While he was relieved to leave the gods behind—especially Rama, the dutiful son who left his wife for no good reason, and the riverbank baba who was no god, just a senile, starving man—discarding his mother’s portrait had seemed impossible to do without breaking down. But so would staring at her face, oceans away. To face the separation, he would have to start a new life. A violently different one, the mere thought of which gave him piles. Lost in an unending ocean, he spiraled into a shell of silence. Stillborn tears expressed themselves as stubborn constipation. A diligent documenter of the plant kingdom, Girija Prasad carried kilos of isabgol husk for this very purpose. He also carried dried tulsi, neem, ginger, powdered turmeric, cinnamon bark, and ground pepper to counter other physical ailments. When he arrived at Dover, the customs officials mistook him for a smuggler of spices.

  Within a day of his arrival at Blimey College, Oxford, Girija Prasad Varma became “Vama,” christened thus by tutors untrained in Hindu names. On the very first evening, he tasted alcohol for the first time and also broke the generations-old taboo of consuming things jhootha, or “contaminated by the mouth of another.” When the colossal mug of beer was passed around among the freshers, he was presented with two options: embrace this culture wholeheartedly or languish forever at the crossroads. There were no portraits or deities on his desk to admonish him. The next morning, he would taste eggs for the first time, nudging at the globe of salty yellow with his fork, watching it quiver. He would soon acquire a taste for how complex and unpredictable life could be.

  * * *

  —

  Girija Prasad Varma, India’s first Commonwealth scholar, came back home after five years with a doctorate thesis that he concluded with two native words: Jai Hind. “Victory to the Indian nation” is how he translated the words for his supervisor. At the behest of the young prime minister of India, he was tasked with setting up the National Forestry Service in the first year of independence, 1948.

  Most evening conversations among the tea-drinkers in Allahabad involved far-fetched theories linking them to the illustrious bachelor. But why would he choose to be posted to the Andamans, the aunties wondered, a place known only for exiled freedom fighters and naked tribes? It was rumored that there wasn’t a single cow on the island and that people had to resort to drinking black tea.

  One of the tea-drinkers, a gold medalist in mathematics and Sanskrit, Chanda Devi, was relieved. Her medals clutched her like a chastity belt. Only a man more qualified would dare marry an intelligent woman. If she could have had it her way, she would have married a tree. She disliked men and women equally, meat-eaters even more, beef-eaters the most. But in 1948, even misanthropes were married off, if only to increase their tribe.

  The task of bringing them together was left to the starving, stooping baba who sat on the banks of the Sangam—the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. The sandy banks were forever crowded with devotees wailing, singing, and praying loudly, fooling local frogs into believing that it was mating season the whole year round.

  Girija Prasad’s ghunghat-wearing mother visited the baba and offered him bananas and a garland of sunshine marigolds. She touched his feet and her worries came tumbling out. Her son was exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally qualified, with an exceptionally bright future. He was exceptionally handsome too. He retained his mother’s features and borrowed only his father’s chin. A prying devotee asked, “Then what is the problem with your son, behenji?”

  “I can’t find him a worthy wife!”

  “But what is the problem?” the baba asked as well.

  Girija Prasad’s mother was about to repeat herself. But when she saw the baba smile, she stopped. Holy men were in the habit of speaking in riddles and half-uttered sentences. He ate half a banana in silence, took the garland, and flung it in the air. It swirled several times and landed around the shoulders of a perplexed Chanda Devi, who had been lost in hymns. And that is how the marriage between the man who studied trees and the woman who spoke to them was fixed.

  “But, baba”—it was Chanda Devi’s father’s turn to complain now—“my daughter doesn’t speak English; she is a strict vegetarian. And this man you’ve selected, he has done a doctorate in the English names of plants and…and…I hear that he has tasted beef!”

  The baba peeled another banana. “Child, you see only the present,” he said, and handed the peel to the father, to confront metaphysical truths with.

  * * *

  —

  The truth is, it was the islands that brought them together. Chanda Devi dreamed of her escape from a stifling household into the company of trees. For Girija Prasad, it was a little more complicated.

  Although the islands gave their name to the surrounding Andaman Sea, that was as compliant as they got. Hens here behaved like pigeons, roosting in mango trees. Airborne butterflies drifted into sleep, floating down like autumn leaves. Ascetic crocodiles meditated on the banks of mangroves. In the Andamans, species lacked names. For the longest time, no one could colonize the islands, for the impenetrable thicket hid more than just natural history. It hid tribes left behind by the original littoral migration across the Indian Ocean. People who preferred to read minds over the obfuscations of language and clothed themselves in nothing but primitive wrath. Who were equipped with only bows and arrows to fend off the syphilis of civilization. Their world was a giant island held together by mammoth creepers, not gravity.

  On this knotted thread of islands, Girija Prasad hoped to live the life he dreamed of: a life of solitude. An intrepid bachelor and a simple academic creature, he addressed every woman as sister, sister-in-law, or aunt. He failed to see that the allure of the virgin forests wasn’t simply one of the unexplored. It was also the allure of consummation. Here, his world experienced an earthquake. Tremors ran through his body on a forest excursion when he saw a tree that was actually two trees entwined. A peepul tree had coiled itself around the trunk of an Andaman padauk, sixty feet high. For the first time, he saw two full-fledged trees growing in a coital position, blocking the sky with their embrace. Parasitic orchids found footing in the entanglement. A cancerous growth high up on the trunk obtruded upon his thoughts with its almost human visage, leading him to believe that the trees were staring back at him. Exposed claw-like roots crept upon the ground like pale pythons. He could feel them inch toward him and halt at his toes. Standing there, Girija Prasad felt like an ant, shuffling around, tempted by the impossible.

  So later, when his mother began searching for a bride for him, he didn’t object. Science had taught him that all creation demanded male and female investment. And the islands seduced him by the beauty of it all.

  * * *

  —

  A month into the monsoons, the four walls and roof that are supposed to keep the couple dry are reduced to a mere symbolic gesture, a warm thought left behind by the British. For the rains have flooded deep into their beings. An invisible wall has caved in, filling them with curiosities and preoccupations from another time.

  When Girija Prasad first came here, he arrived believing in half-truths like “no man is an island.” It has taken him a year to realize that n
o island is an island either. It is part of a greater geological pattern that connects all the lands and oceans of the world. Half a mile away from his home, he found a living plant that was previously only seen as a fossil in Madagascar and central Africa.

  On the day that would later mark the end of the downpour and his trysts with beefsteak, Girija Prasad spent his office hours researching the ancestor of all continents: Pangaea. A supercontinent, a single entity that splintered into all the pieces of land that exist—a possible explanation for the plant near his house, as the Indian subcontinent broke off from Africa and rammed into Asia. He studied the world map spread out in front of him. “An impossible jigsaw,” he said aloud.

  The day’s efforts were rewarded in his dreams that night. The belly of Latin America slept comfortably in the groove of West Africa. The jigsaw fit so perfectly—Pangaea came alive. What in the daytime had seemed like bits and pieces breaking off and floating now felt like a living being. He was ecstatic to see her stretch her arms wide, from Alaska to the Russian Far East, to see her lift her head and stand on her toes, poles apart. Pangaea, blooming with the grace of a ballerina. He was aroused. But when the downpour suddenly ended, it woke him up. Left to ruminate on half a dream, he wondered why the continents had drifted apart in the first place. Water swept into the cracks, a trickle turned into a stream, streams turned into rivers. And then there was no turning back.