A Passage North

Arudpragasam’s first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, set during the Sri Lankan Civil War, intimately detailed the life of a newlywed couple nurturing a matrimonial bond during a prolonged and violent conflict. Taking place over the course of a single day, the novel illuminated the beauty of our ephemeral existence. Here, Arudpragasam processes the war’s lingering effects through Krishan, who must travel to Sri Lanka’s Northern Province to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. The story unfolds exclusively through Krishan’s memories and musings while he sits on a train speeding through scarred terrain. Ruminating on his family’s experience of the war, the Tamil diaspora and its creation of silent communities of trauma spread across the globe, and his limited knowledge of Sri Lanka’s history, Krishan philosophically ponders the permanence of grief passed down through generations. Arudpragasam’s writing is purposefully dense, intentionally layering tangential stories with minute details to illuminate the interconnectedness of past and present.