Review By Harsimran Kaur

Rating: 4.5/5

“A Passage North” by Anuk Arudpragasam is an introspection of an individual’s tryst with his own experiences and disillusionment. The book highlights a pensive and cathartic journey of Krishan, imperceptibly unfolding the invidious flattery of life and its implications, making one impugn the paradox.The words of wisdom in the book narrate the expanse of disguised vulnerability of the mind with marvel profundity; the words invasively gathering the past and present like beads of a jewel incarnated together against the skin dilapidated by the perplexities of life.

Our perceptions are a manifestation of our own beliefs and inhibitions. As we bury ourselves in the fragile territory of the anguish, betrayal, dejection and discontentment befalling from the others poignant terrain of deprivation, we learn to hold the barrel of human behaviour with objectivity.

The journey of Krishan is a salvation of his undervalued and wayward mind predisposed to inclinations which are ephemeral until his ears are blocked to the news of the sudden demise of his Grandmother’s caregiver “Rani.” It helps him rail through a black hole of ambiguities to a vast firmament of enlightenment and cognizance.  Reeling through the macabre torment of the civil war that engulfed Sri Lanka for decades, Krishan leaves India to relentlessly work for the North-eastern province of his country occupied by the ghettoized Tamil identities.  He leaves behind a past which slices his inner equanimity; a path he traced with his lady love Anjum to be shattered by ideological differences.

Anuk Arudpragasam has beautifully corroborated life’s insurmountable wounds with atavistic anachronisms, and explicitly concluding how revelations are born the moment any insignificant sight makes our vision behold the significance of its arrival.