LATITUDES OF LONGING

A promising debut novel sweeps through a series of stories that join human lives to the natural world in South Asia.

The first book of fiction by Mumbai-based journalist Swarup is made up of four linked novellas. Their titles—Islands, Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert—suggest the book’s emphasis on how people connect (or don’t) to their planet. Islands is a strong start, the engaging story of an arranged marriage between two very different people that grows into genuine love. Girija Prasad, India born and Oxford educated, is a man of science. His bride, Chanda Devi, has more education than many Indian women but is also a mystic who routinely speaks to ghosts and trees and can sometimes see the future. In the middle of the 20th century, Girija’s government job takes them to the remote, wildly beautiful Andaman Islands, a penal colony under the British Empire that newly independent India is trying to figure out what to do with. The book vividly recounts their often humorous, sometimes surreal, and ultimately touching relationship. The subsequent three sections are not as well developed. Faultline delves into the lives of Mary, a Burmese woman who was Girija and Chanda’s housekeeper, and her son, a political prisoner in Burma who has renamed himself Plato. Valley branches off from that section to follow Plato’s best friend, a smuggler from Nepal. Thapa is “a man nearing sixty, besotted by a girl young enough to be his granddaughter” whom he meets in a dance bar in Kathmandu. Thapa’s travels lead to the final section, Snow Desert, and the story of Apo, the aged leader of an isolated village in the icy Karakoram Mountains, in the no-man’s land between Pakistan and India. In all of the sections, the author writes of characters’ many visions of geological time and of the web of life endangered by human actions: “In the approaching horizon of the future, the calamity is a certain uncertainty, the greatest one there ever will be. It links them all.” Visions are remarkable experiences that are notoriously difficult to capture in language, and here they fall into ineffectual repetition.

Aiming for a story of human connection to the universe, this novel falters after a strong start.