Love on the Third Rock | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Love on the Third Rock | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Ram Sarangan |Updated: January 5, 2019 2:16:25 am

Love on the Third Rock

An exquisite tale of the push-and-pull of desire in a world that is in constant flux.

Nothing in the book is set in stone — not even stone itself. Rain, tsunami, earthquakes, mountains that sink and peaks that grow — all serve to indicate that change (chaos) is constant.

Latitudes of Longing
By Shubhangi Swarup
HarperCollins
344 pages; Rs 599

The heartbeat of the earth, forests and oceans set the narrative pace for Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, her debut novel which studies love and passion as connections that weave through humans and nature to create a living, breathing whole.

The book can be said to be loosely composed of four novellas, and the characters at the heart of the story are Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi — two people with startlingly different perspectives towards life, brought together thanks to a godman throwing a banana peel. Of course, while that might have been the immediate causal event, Chanda tells Girija that they came together in that lifetime as they did in so many earlier ones. That doesn’t make their discovery of each other any quicker, however.

Sequestered away in the Andaman Islands, the couple plant their roots deep into the island even as they study each other and slowly grow together. Girija brings his scientific mindset to bear as they explore the Andamans, even as Chanda decrypts for him the language of the trees and interacts with the many ghosts existing alongside them. As they walk together through life and death, they are joined by Mary, a widow from Burma’s Karen community who had to send her child back to Rangoon as she had no way of caring for him.