At the time of our conversation, the anniversary of the end of the war-a day that Arudpragasam, along with the rest of the Tamil community, commemorates each year-was fast approaching.

When we spoke over Zoom in early May, he was in Paris, where he is working on his third novel during a yearlong fellowship with the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. There are currently about three million Sri Lankan Tamils, Arudpragasam told me, nearly half of whom live outside of the country. Arudpragasam jumps from novels to the politics of caste to philosophy to Sanskrit poetry to Tamil-language writing and back again with ease, drawing on stories, texts, and cultural history to illustrate his thinking. This came through in our lengthy conversation, which lasted nearly two hours. While the war and its legacy are central to his work-they are “an obsession,” he says, and he looks forward to the day that he can write about something else-so, too, are the realms of literature and ideas. The contemplative nature of A Passage North makes sense-Arudpragasam wrote the novel while studying for a Ph.D. Through the particularities of Krishan’s experience and inner life, Arudpragasam seamlessly unfurls ruminations on intimacy, trauma, and the passage of time.

A Passage North, an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of this magazine, follows Krishan, a Tamil man who grew up outside of the war zone, as he makes his way north from Colombo to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. Though Arudpragasam’s second book is more removed from the bodily experience of violence as portrayed in his first, the war still hangs heavy over the scope of the new novel. The Story of a Brief Marriage depicts Dinesh, a sixteen-year-old Tamil man-and yes, at sixteen Dinesh is in many ways a man, forced into a premature adulthood-in a refugee camp toward the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. It is no exaggeration to call Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel absolutely devastating.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam