Latitudes of Longing is the book you shouldn’t miss reading this year. It is Shubhangi Swarup’s tale of intense longing set across landscapes as varied as the Andamans and Siachen. There’s an otherworldly feel to the novel that made me loathe to step out of it. I didn’t want to leave that world, so intricately connected to Nature and the earth. Shubhangi’s words have the rhythm and flow of a seasoned storyteller and this certainly doesn’t feel like her debut novel. Her style of writing is light as a whisper and as soulful as an evening prayer.
There are four different stories, each one exploring the life of a different person and set in a different part of the country. Rather than see it as four separate stories, it makes sense to see it as a continuous thread, one that meanders like a stream through four lives. All four are linked tenuously to each other, but that connection is woven subtly into the narrative. The novel has four sections – Islands, Faultline, Valley and Snowdesert. Each one tells a different story, yet it contains traces of the earlier narrative. The latitudes of longing extend over these four geographical areas traversing the lives of four disparate individuals.
It starts with Girija Prasad’s and Chanda Devi’s story, the one with the most longing in it. “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.”
Set in post-independent India, they have the rarest of marriages in those times- an equal one. They are as different from each other as can be; Girija Prasad is fascinated by the secrets of the earth while Chanda Devi exists on another plane, where she communes with ghosts and understands the language of trees and plants. Yet it is these very same factors which creates a bond between them. Both of them believe in the unseen- she has entry into the realm of ghosts and spirits and he is fascinated by all that the earth hides within it. He searches for the life forms existing deep within the earth and the life force of the earth itself which it hides deep within.
The narrative reflects the personalities of both the protagonists; it has the lightness of air and the earthiness of the soil, like Durga Prasad and Chanda Devi themselves. Girija Prasad loves the beauty inherent in the natural world, the water, earth and animals. Chanda Devi is an expert on unravelling the beauty of the unseen; trees talk to her and she understands the needs of ghosts and spirits. Theirs is a love story at a very elemental level, and displays one of the most unadulterated instances of love I’ve ever come across.
From Andamans the narrative slides smoothly across the Irrawady delta , crossing borders into Burma. This is Mary’s and Plato’s story, the complex relationship between a mother and a son who is tortured by the knowledge that she abandoned him at birth. This is also the story of a student revolutionary who fights the Burmese Junta. Alternatively disturbing and heartbreaking, Plato’s story is nevertheless one of hope.
Now the story jumps to neighboring Nepal, where Thapa the small-time smuggler operates. He gets a taste of normal life, but will he be able to live that life, or will he go back to his comfort zone. This is satisfactorily answered by the author through the most exquisite writing.
The final section is set in a village in the Karakoram mountains, where eighty-seven-year-old Apo stumbles across love. The starkness of their lives forms an apt backdrop for the love between Apo and Ghazala.
Shubhangi is a gifted author. She weaves magic with words and the reader is left breathless in a fantastical landscape with colour and life pulsing all around. I inhaled the rich loamy scent of the earth and the breeze that wafted in was laden with the smell of seaweed and sea. She brings alive not only the ecosystem inhabited by the characters, but also the emotions which courses through them. I could feel the complex feelings churning within Plato – sticky and visceral. There’s a deep intense connection between the world in which the protagonists live and their own internal cosmos.
The women in Shubhangi’s novel lead seemingly ordinary lives, as mother, caregiver, neighbour and grandmother, but they are strong individuals who have the strength of the earth within them. Each of them live within the system yet doesn’t let it snuff out their uniqueness. There are hardly any other characters other than the main protagonists in each story. Yet the narrative has so much happening that nowhere does it feel bare or stark.
Just like the latitudes of longing which run through their lives, there’s also a thread of gentleness and fragility which binds the characters. Plato the Burmese student revolutionary is far removed from the mild mannered Chanda Devi, yet they have a similiar core which makes them unable to mutely witness atrocities on what they hold dear.
Whatever you might have planned for this year, make reading this novel a part of it. You wouldn’t want to miss this remarkable tale of longing and loss.
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