Of Love & Time Travel
OOne way to think of Latitudes of Longing— Shubhangi Swarup’s first novel—is as a cycle of four novellas. A minor character from one leaps into the next as a central character. The sections are united by a shared mood—intense longing. They are also united by, of all things, plate tectonics.
Millions of years ago, the Indo-Australian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate, giving us the Himalayan range, the Arakan mountains in Burma and the Andaman islands. The four sections of Latitudes work their way up along this geological faultline, mirroring the emotional plights and journeys of its characters above.
In the Andamans, a man of science learns to love, and then pines for his wife, a clairvoyant who would converse with trees and animals, and who saw ghosts everywhere. In Burma, a mother waits in the hope of being reunited with her political-prisoner son, whom she last saw as an infant. In Kathmandu, a middle-aged man who lost his entire village to a landslide finds a measure of solace in telling stories to a young dance bar waitress. In a Drokpa village near the Karakoram, two elderly people find love, and a visiting scientist turns out, neatly, to have a link with the first section of the novel.
Swarup is a skilled writer, using tense and foreshadowing to great effect, richly conjuring up diverse settings using relatively few elements. An exquisite passage imagines snowfall in the Andaman islands, for instance. The phrase ‘I love you’, a character thinks, is ‘the contemporary shorthand for expressing an emotion that old people like him had invested a lifetime of silence in’.
Through the book runs a larger vision of individual human lives amidst, in opposition to, and as inseparable parts of the wider natural world. This comes through in a narrative mode composed of a dizzying tumble of sun, sky, desert, ocean, ice, earthquakes, stars, fossils, spirits, ghosts and made-up origin stories. But it’s laid on a bit too thick and too often.
It also seems to seep through to the characters, whose actions and frequently stilted lines of dialogue give the impression they are functioning under an improbably heavy load of cosmic awareness.
Though some portions are better than others, the book is exhilarating in its conception. If one of the roles of fiction is to reframe our view of the world, this is an uncommonly bold and imaginative attempt.
The four sections of the book work their way up geological fault-lines, mirroring the emotional plights and journeys of its characters