Latitudes of longing, p.16
Latitudes of Longing, page 16
“Like you. She sent you this.”
Plato’s hands tremble as he goes through the contents. Wrapped within a longyi is a shirt, a soap, and a toothbrush.
“Where was she all these years?” he asks.
“On the Andaman Islands. She worked as a maid for an Indian family.”
In the sweaty heat of the room, Plato shivers uncontrollably.
“Why did she abandon me?”
“She was afraid you wouldn’t forgive her.”
“Then why did she leave me in the first place?”
“She left you because she killed your father. He would get drunk and beat her. He kicked her when she was eight months pregnant. She wanted to save your life.”
Thapa remembers Mary’s agitated face. He remembers her words.
“Plato, your father wasn’t a monster. Your mother isn’t a murderer.”
Plato stares at the table. The trembling gives way to a catatonic silence. He barely seems to be breathing.
Before getting up, he asks, “Then why did it happen?”
Thapa has thought about it a lot. He fears an educated man like Plato won’t see the truth, so obvious and simple.
“Why did it happen?” Plato repeats, as if thinking out loud.
“Hunger,” Thapa replies.
* * *
—
On a hot, suffocating May night, Plato dreams of red again. It isn’t as fluid as a sea this time but thick, like sand. He is a fly caught in tree sap the color of blood.
As the resin grazes his hair, it comes alive for all his senses. It has a bitter taste, a strong, smoky smell, and is viscous to touch. He can’t extricate himself from it. His wings tremble under the fluid’s weight as his legs buckle under the pressure. Red sweeps his vision. The resin covers his compound eyes. Eyes that reflect light in the colors of the rainbow. He kicks and flails to avoid the petrification, but it is just a reflex. He has already let go.
Plato opens his eyes with a start when he hears someone scream. He has hit his neighbor, another prisoner. He sits up. He moves his hands and legs to rid his body of the paralysis.
A cockroach nibbles on his finger. It must have crawled all over the sleeping inmates, seeking subsistence. A praying mantis jumps in from the ventilator. Once inside, it searches for life to feast on. Plato watches the mantis attack the cockroach. At first, it struggles with the enormity of its kill—then embraces it. The mantis leaves the way it had arrived. It pauses between the bars of the ventilator for a moment. Ahead lie nocturnal struggles and freedom, but no rest.
* * *
—
After getting married, Plato’s father had sent his parents a photograph of him and Rose Mary. Inherited from his grandparents, it was the only actual image Plato had of his parents. A sepia-toned one, taken in a studio.
His father had his hair oiled and parted on the side. He was clean-shaven. His longyi and shirt were neat, without creases. He was beaming. His teeth were stained from chewing betel nut. Even his eyes seemed to smile. It was infectious. His father’s smile would make Plato smile. Was he comfortable around women? he wondered. Or was he tongue-tied in her, his wife’s, company? Did he prefer the kingdom of thoughts to the slavery of odd jobs? Did he also shiver and tremble unexpectedly?
The man remained a stranger. Sometimes he felt like a well-meaning uncle, sometimes an elder brother. As Plato grew older than his father in the photo, he looked upon him as a jovial junior in college. But never as a father.
She stood apart. Her gaze lowered, fixed on a point somewhere between the camera and the ground. She was shorter than her husband. She looked like an adolescent, but her expression was guarded, beyond her years. She didn’t smile. She didn’t look like a wife, let alone a mother. Plato couldn’t grasp her, even in a photograph.
The photograph itself remains pressed between the pages of his notebook, which lies, labeled as anti-national propaganda, in some official storehouse. But the image is gone. The praying mantis ate it up before it left the cell.
* * *
—
Somewhere, in the distant certainties of the future, Plato is a free man, roaming the jungles of Namdapha as an armed insurgent. He confronts his preoccupation with death when he holds a piece of amber in his quivering palm. Embalmed within the resin is a gecko, immune to decomposition. When the Burman had kicked his mother, her womb could have hardened, the amniotic fluid drained out and Plato petrified into a fossil himself, all before he could open his eyes.
The amber belongs to the Kachin rebel who helped Plato cross into India, circling around the Lake of No Return and over Pangsau Pass, into the jungles connecting the two nations. For decades, the border has belonged to the Kachin Independence Army more than it has to any country. The amber is part of the Kachin’s heirloom, extracted from a mine in his native Hukawng Valley. Burmite, the Burmese amber, is considered harder and older than all other forms. Yet such pieces, dull in appearance, blemished by fissures and dirt, are only good for curiosity. The Kachin boy’s family possesses a trough full of fossil-bearing amber. They contain an entire world as it stood back then. Bees, insects, flies, flowers, dirt, bark, wasps, shells—but nothing human. Humans didn’t exist, because humans weren’t found entombed in amber.
At the time of World War II, the Allied forces constructed a road to connect eastern India to China, via northern Burma. It brought sunburned Americans to the Kachin’s doorstep. A beetroot-red officer, on seeing the trough full of fossils, offered to give his grandfather silver coins in exchange. The grandfather thought about it. In uncertain times such as this, the silver coins could ensure his family’s escape, if not their future. He agreed.
The officer never returned with the coins. He was beheaded and his head strung up on a tree beside the road. His body was chopped into pieces and thrown into the Lake of No Return, it was rumored. Countless planes had already crashed into the lake. Not satisfied with scraps of metal, it demanded blood.
Though headhunting and mysterious vengeance weren’t new to the Kachins, this particular instance affected his grandfather deeply. A white man’s head, when drained of blood, was the palest thing he had ever seen. The sunburned skin had peeled off, revealing translucent flesh and slippery veins below. What’s more, the skull, his grandfather swore, held a pig’s brain. Even the bees and wasps trapped within amber were luckier than that bodiless head, he concluded. Death hadn’t destroyed their physical integrity. He resolved not to part with the pieces of amber again. “All wars are fought for the right to die with dignity,” he would tell his children later.
One summer night, the boy stole a piece from his grandfather’s trough. He would have given it back readily, had he been asked. But he didn’t inform anyone before he left. He couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye before he left to join the insurgency.
The amber on Plato’s palm is his favorite, he tells him. It carries within it an infant gecko, probably a newborn. It is the only creature that belongs as much to this world as the one long ago. It makes the past ordinary and familiar, like the matted walls the geckos love to walk on. Somehow, it also makes what the future holds bearable.
Burma, the country they are fighting over, is blessed with all the precious gemstones and metals of the world. Amber, emeralds, jade, pearls, gold, platinum, even the world’s biggest sapphires and rubies.
“It isn’t human nature that makes us fight,” the Kachin boy remarks as he plays with the amber, “but nature itself. It is a fight over resources.” His army controls the jade mines and narcotics trade across the northern border. If they lose the mines, they lose the war.
For Plato, these are all excuses—communism, ethnicity, democracy, even resources. Excuses that change with the changing times. As a student, it was communism he’d fought for. As an ex–political prisoner, it is democracy. It is the only way the Indian government will support the insurgents. Perhaps in the near future, he too will fight to control the narcotics trade in the Golden Triangle. To him, the value of gemstones—the consistency of imperial jade, the malleability of gold, the hardness of diamonds, and the vibrant pigeon blood that colors rubies—lies in metaphor. The rocks attain their beauty and hardiness through profound violence. Like the scars on his body, his broken teeth and internal hemorrhages, the gemstones too are evidence of transformations at the core. Purged to the surface from faultlines far below, aren’t they scars and clots from the land’s deepest wounds?
For the five months of the joint operation, Plato spends all his spare time playing with the amber. When he rubs the piece, the fragrance transports his mind to other lives and lands. At times, it conjures up a lifetime spent decorating altars with flowers and incense, surviving on alms and meditation. Often, the inebriating fragrance brings her, the one who whistled, back to him. Once again, she is seated right next to him, where she belongs.
At first, the amber seems dark red. But when you hold it against the sun, it reveals shades of the morning sun and brown stripes. It is turbid with bubbles. Fractures as delicate as strands of hair pierce it in places. When it’s held against a clear sky, the gecko inside is distinct and intimate. Plato imagines it to be deep in hibernation. The head, almost as big as the body. The eyes, disproportionately big. The eyelids seem like they’ve never opened. If he focuses hard enough, Plato can discern the infant’s mouth. It cannot possibly bare its teeth. It is way too tiny. Its tail is the size of a human eyelash.
Tree resin must have trickled onto the gecko only moments after it hatched, which is why the creature didn’t struggle. The gecko died without a chance to open its eyes or mouth. With no taste, vision, smell, touch, not even a memory to hang on to, the gecko must have had the most blissful life and death possible on this earth.
What was the world like, Plato wonders, when the gecko was born? Human beings, he had read, were fairly recent in the history of the earth. Did that mean lizards ruled the planet at the time of the gecko’s birth? Was this infant destined to be their philosopher king? What will the world be like when the philosopher king finally opens his eyes, ready to rule over the future primordial?
* * *
—
On rare occasions, when crossing a high peak or a narrow pass, wandering lost among ancient trees or rooted to a spot, Plato finds himself in the heart of an unexpected fog. When trapped in a cloud in the mountains, or when there are ripples above him in the valley as if the forest is floating, Plato is seized by an involuntary trembling. His entire being spasms, for this isn’t an errant cloud he is amidst. Plato has wandered into a daydream. The land he inhabits is a dreamer like him.
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 valley’s recesses. The two sit in silence as they distill and inhale opium over the fireplace. The hut’s 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.
In prison, Plato was electrocuted twice a day until he lost count of the days. A bloodstained towel was used to cover his face and stuff his mouth. To him, it was no ordinary blood. Going by the smell and taste of it, it belonged to them—all the tortured and the extinct.
* * *
—
The resin dripped from a tree bark at its own pace, indifferent to the speed of transformation around it. The faster the landscape changed, the slower, in contrast, the resin’s journey to the ground looked. Like a rock, the resin seemed unmoved. The insects, leaves, particles of dirt, and bubbles of air trapped inside—magnified debris of the past in an ever-changing present.
The resin found a temporary grave in a layer of chalk-like limestone below the soil. It lay there for centuries, at the northern edge of Burma, then an island surrounded by shallow seas. Gradually, it was pushed onto the seabed as amber. The water’s force transformed it from an angular block to a translucent egg. Only an infant gecko remained inside.
Somnolent currents pushed the amber off the bay’s shelf, into the ocean, and onto a mass grave of shells and spores, ancient truths, and the recent dead. Buried beside the gecko was an aged ammonite, spiraling in shades of rust and gold. The creator of its own world, the ammonite had once floated blissfully, cherishing the visions of a receding paradise. For India’s northward journey had begun to close in on the seas.
Then the collision happened. The amber found itself on land once again, amidst a confusion of shale, sandstone, and limestone. A struggle between the ghosts of land and sea ensued. The sea recaptured it. The land grabbed it back. Eventually, the island’s edges all rose in the shape of mountains, sheltering the amber in a valley of imperial jade.
The collision also created rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds. But the amber predated them by an epoch. Trapped within it, the gecko bore witness to one of the most violent events in prehistory. An event that pulverized, hacked, crumbled, slit, and ultimately transfigured the landscape into the unimaginable. No land or ocean was spared the escaping cracks that grew with a life of their own. Flung from great heights to great depths by tectonic transgressions and regressions, it never once opened its eyes. The amber lay in a valley of faults.
If the evolution of life was guided by survival, the movement of continents was guided by an imagination that no life form would be capable of comprehending.
THE SAGAING FAULTLINE didn’t push the land apart, nor did it pull it down. Some say it transformed it, as if after hours of meditative tedium.
Placed in solitary confinement for smuggling an English dictionary into prison this time, Plato, like the gecko trapped in amber, experiences the seismic waves that cause the rice fields to rise and fall in ripples with his eyes closed. The darkness comes to life with a subterranean, gut-wrenching wail. The land, reeling from the horror of having its bones crushed and flesh charred, flings him from wall to wall.
Part of the ceiling caves in, presenting him with an escape route. It is his third time in solitary confinement. By now, Plato prefers silence over the company of others. For he has seen all his fears and faith dissolve into the darkness. In their absence, freedom feels like an unwarranted complication.
This room is his shell. One created from his blood and bones, for him to retreat into. The earthquake leaves him to mend the cracks and nurse his bruises.
* * *
—
Mary would often enter Girija Prasad’s library on the pretext of cleaning, only to sift through her master’s sketchbook, filled with attempts at bringing Chanda Devi to life. That is all they were—attempts. When he got the nose right, the eyes were too small. Mary could recognize Chanda Devi’s silhouette in profile, but she couldn’t recognize her face. Chanda Devi had peculiar hair. In the monsoons it would curl up, and in every other season it was perfectly straight. Mary noticed how Girija Prasad had matched the texture of her hair with the color of the sky. But, somehow, the portraits never came together.
Memory was life reflected in a shattered mirror. Ever since the Burman’s death, Mary had held on to him only in shards. Though the features were clear enough in her memory, she could never see the face in its entirety. The small sharp nose, the soft lips, the discolored patches of skin on his back, the sunken cheeks, the scant chest hair, the immaculately clean fingernails, the belly bloated with toddy, the unexpected curve of his spine, the ridiculous way his hair stood up even in his shadow…In shards, she saw his nervous smile and eyes glazed with sadness. She could hear his whistle, perpetually out of sync with his footsteps. She could see the rolled lips and the carefree hands grazing the branches as he strolled. She could smell the betel nut on his breath and the cool touch of his sweat on her own skin. But she couldn’t see him.
Mary yearned for him to return, if only as a dream. The Burman had once told her that everything we took from someone, we owed back—even a breath. Before he’d died, Mary had drawn her nostrils close to his and inhaled his final breaths. The Burman had to return, if only to claim the breaths she had stolen.
* * *
—
Mary finds herself at the Shwedagon Pagoda earlier than usual. There is an empty spot right up front. She approaches the statue’s feet. She closes her eyes. Her attempts at praying turn into the obsessive rambling of a madwoman. Injured dogs and birds come before the safety of her son. Often, she has the urge to take a broom and sweep the halls herself, unable to bear the errant balls of hair and dust that float around, grazing her feet.
