This Place That Place

by Nandita Dinesh

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In a nameless country under military occupation, two friends prepare to attend a wedding. The young man is from the occupied region ("This Place"), the woman is from the occupying nation-state ("That Place"). The complicated relationship between these two protagonists with unusual professions—he is a Protest Designer and she is a De-programmer—is tested when, on the eve of the wedding, the occupying power, That Place, formally annexes This Place and declares a curfew.



Suddenly finding themselves confined to the same isolated space, the young woman and man try to kill time but inevitably wind up talking about the ways in which the war between their homelands pervades the unexplored and undeniable attraction between them. Will their relationship become another casualty of war?



This Place That Place is an evocative novel that functions as a bold allegory for militarized occupations anywhere. This brilliant literary debut provides new ways to think about the intersections between the personal and the political; between occupier and occupied; between the kinds of bonds that endure, and those that have no choice but to fracture.

Release date: June 14, 2022

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 228

Sample

1:29:40 PM

: I can’t believe that man.
 
:: What else can you expect? He’s been perfectly transparent about his attitude toward us since the election.
 
: Impetuous, I think they call it.
 
:: What?
 
: Him. His actions. I think the word for it is ‘impetuous.’ You know, like… authoritarian… or doing something without thinking through the consequences.
 
:: Those are different things.
 
: What?
 
:: Authoritarian. Or doing something without thinking through the consequences.
 
: I know they’re different things, I’m just saying what I think the word means.
 
:: Impetuous?
 
: Yes.
 
:: Yeah, maybe.
 
: Maybe what?
 
:: Maybe that’s what it is.
 
: What?
 
:: Him! Maybe impetuous is the right word to describe what he’s done.
 
: Right. Well, it doesn’t really matter what the word is, I suppose. He is… who he is.
 
:: Insightful.
   
: It makes me so mad that he is doing this in my name. In our name. It’s a fucking disgrace.
 
:: I know.
 
: It’s just this is… so typical. This mentality. That Place knows what’s good for This Place. He knows what’s good for an entire region and people. Un-fucking-believable.
 
:: It was only a matter of time. The signs were all there. The increased number of troops, the veiled language, the vilification in the media, the increased number of lynch mobs. We knew it was coming.
 
: What’s going to happen now?
 
:: What always happens during a curfew. They’ll shut everything down. The internet. The television channels. The shops. The roads. They’ll do their best to keep us locked inside our homes, isolated from the world. They’ll increase the number of troops on the streets. They’ll suspend, in the name of security, laws that guarantee us some semblance of human rights. But they know. They know that their shutdown will lead to one eventuality. A protest. A shit-ton of protests… which means I’m about to get real busy real soon.
 
: How will you coordinate everything without being able to communicate?
 
:: Each neighbourhood has a spot where people gather at a specific time on days like today. The spots and times shift every week. I just need to look at the calendar and figure out where and when we’ll be meeting this week. Actually, let me find that right now.
 
: : : : :
 
She looks out the window. She loves looking out windows when she is in This Place, because its landscape is so radically different from everything she has ever known. The rugged mountains. The architecture of the homes. Even the light. All of it feels different here.
 
The light in This Place feels like glitter. A glitter that seems to contain glinting particles that could blind a person. Particles that seem to ebb and flow like the waves in the sea. This is not the kind of thing that she has seen in her home, That Place. There, the light isn’t like glitter. There, the light feels more like a haze.
 
It’s almost as if the glitter speaks to the mood of This Place. When things are tense, the particles seem sharper somehow. Like they are made of powdered glass. At other times, when things are good, the glitter has an aura… an illusion that allows the gazer to lose themselves in a shimmery nothingness of optimism and hope — both of which are scarce commodities.
 
She knows she sees This Place and its glitter through the rose-tinted glasses of someone from That Place, someone who doesn’t have to deal with its realities on a daily basis, someone who is predisposed to seeing This Place as, somehow, being “more” than That Place. She knows that she stands the risk of exoticizing This Place by focusing on things like the glitter, if she does not simultaneously pay sufficient attention to the rough edges and shards that underlie it. She knows that narratives about the magical glitter are easy to sell. The narratives of the rough shards, not so much.
 
As she looks out the window, she sees the shimmering shards of glass that, today, are reflecting ominous undertones. A changed Guarantee that now annexes This Place to That Place without question or consensus or debate or dialogue. A changed law that has transformed occupation into colonialism. Or colonialism into occupation. Whichever one better communicates the idea that today, things in This Place have gone from bad to much, much worse.
 
Today, she sees something else in the glitter. Something that she has never seen before. Not once in the twenty-four non-consecutive months spanning seven years that she has spent in This Place, has she seen this particular quality to the glitter. Today, there is something in the particles that she finds disconcerting. Something that makes her scared. Something like… it’s hard to explain. Something that is more menacing and unnerving than the shard-like edges she has seen before. Something that is more… charged.

: : : : :

:: Ok, so here. Look. That’s the meeting place and time for tomorrow.
 
: Are you sure you should be showing that to me?
 
Oh, fuck. Yes. No. I shouldn’t. Sorry. ::
 
: Right.
 
Forget you ever saw that. ::
 
: Right.  I’m so used to yo—you’re like family now. Sometimes I forget that you’re not from here. ::
 
: You never forget that I’m not from here.                                                                                          
                                               
I didn’t mean— ::
 
: It’s okay. I never forget that I’m not from here either.
  
:: I can’t believe it happened today, of all days.
 
: This is not what you want to happen on your wedding day.
 
:: No. It isn’t.

: : : : :

When she is not looking out the window, she watches him play the snake game on his phone. A ritual she knows he follows during curfew. It’s his way of changing time-gears. Of preparing himself for a clampdown that has no determined end-time. So, like most of the first hours of most of the curfews that he has had to experience in his life, she watches him play the game to prepare himself for the shitstorm that he knows is coming.
 
She watches him play the game as a way to think-without-thinking about the logistics that he will have to pull together before heading to tomorrow’s meeting and helping orchestrate what happens next. He moves the snake around the screen, gobbling down blobs of light. And as the pixelated snake gobbles other pixelated blobs of light, the reptile’s body becomes longer and unwieldier. But even though the snake increases in length and, in so doing, consumes more blobs of light, its increasing size is the very thing that makes the snake more likely to crash into the pixelated walls and borders of that phone-sized world. Because, you see, in the world of the snake, the blobs of light are placed in and around barriers. Therefore, zig-zagging the ever-longer snake around the barriers so that it can consume more blobs of light, becomes a more arduous task (well, ‘arduous’ for a game on a phone that is being used to pass the time). Oh, and if the snake hits any of the walls or borders, it explodes. And the player needs to start over. The game transfixes him.

She watches him watch the snake swerve and dance through the walls and borders. She watches him watch the snake gobble blobs of light and grow longer and longer and longer and longer and longer each time. Sometimes the snake rams into a wall and bursts into pixelated flames. At which point she watches him hit ‘restart’ and begin the snake’s journey all over again. She knows that he finds the snake game cathartic, somehow. Hopeful, even. That snake. Trying to consume blobs of light that it doesn’t understand so that it can get longer, only so that it can risk bashing into a wall and decimating its own existence.

She knows that, for him, the snake game is inseparable from curfew. When the phone lines go down and the internet is turned off with no known date of return, the snake game is one of the first things on his to-do list. He has played this game so many times and yet, each time — during each new curfew — he finds the snake to be endlessly fascinating. Its greed. Its consumption. And its eventual self-destruction.
 
: : : : :
 

1:57 PM


: How long do you think it’ll be?  

:: Who knows. An hour. A few hours. A day. More. You know how it is.

  : I hope it’s not more than a few hours…
 
:: The bodies haven’t started dropping yet. As soon as they do, and as soon as word starts getting out about the inevitable casualties, we’re fucked. There’s no way the fighters are going to stay off the streets then. And … well, it’s all downhill from there, isn’t it? If we’re really, really lucky, it’ll be a few hours. But if my read on this situation is correct, this… this is going to be bad. Perhaps the worst yet. Worse than we know to expect. This… this could last for months.
 
: : : : :
 
Months. This could last for months. It’s not like he wasn’t used to it. He was. As used to it as any person could be. But even someone with his curfew practice was used to a couple of weeks at the most. Months would be daunting. Even for him. He wanted to hope against hope that he was exaggerating, that he was overstating the removal of the Guarantee.
 
And yet, even in the first half hour of this curfew, he could feel the difference. This time was different like every time was different, sure. But this time felt like a change in the course of history. A change in the course of possibility. This curfew didn’t feel like a violent roadblock in one community’s struggle for freedom. This curfew felt like a bomb had exploded an entire people’s vision for their future.
 
The Guarantee was the last remaining legal document that shone a beacon of hope for This Place.  The only remaining tangible, internationally recognized law that bolstered the case for This Place’s autonomy. With the Guarantee revoked, That Place could now do whatever they wanted. Whenever they wanted. With absolute impunity. Even more than they already did.
 
As he thought more about it, his forecast of a months-long curfew didn’t seem like an exaggeration or an overstatement. Although he first uttered ‘months’ almost flippantly, with a ‘let’s see how you respond to the intensity of my life’ kind of provocation toward her, he was coming to believe his own poorly intentioned prophecy. He couldn’t stop himself from fucking with people from That Place by saying things like that. Forcing upon them a fear that he wore like a second skin.

If push came to shove though, if he would have to live under curfew for months, he didn’t know what he would do. What he could do. His work would intensify. More protests. More events. More designs. More fighting. But there would also be a lot more sitting around at home with nothing really to be done. More boredom. More lack of communication. More sobs. More timeless(ness). More grazing. More glazing. More genie-ing. More glorification. More gazing. More glowing. More grooming. More — stop. Stop going down this rabbit hole. Today is your brother’s wedding day. Today was supposed to be your brother’s wedding day. Today, all you think about should be related to him and his bride-to-be. Today should be about them.
 
It’s not about you.
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.  It’s not about you. 
It’s not about you.  It’s not about you.
It’s not about you. 

As he repeated this mantra to himself, he could feel her scepticism from across the room. He could feel her consider the possibility of his being hyperbolic. He knew that she’d only ever experienced a curfew for a couple of days. That while a few days — maybe even a week — was in the realm of her imagination, months…? That was an idea that she couldn’t begin to conceive of.

Months. Months of sitting around in rooms. With no internet. No working mobile phones. Limited access to the world outside the doors of your home. No. There’s no way this could happen for months. Not in her imagination.
 
: : : : :
 
: It’s their wedding.
 
:: Yes. Yes, it is.
 
: This shouldn’t happen on someone’s wedding day.
 
:: No. It shouldn’t.

: : : : :

  He thought about quitting multiple times a day. And most of the time, these thoughts coincided with the moment he lit the next cigarette he held between his fingers.  But it was like he couldn’t help himself. He would take a drag of the cigarette and he would find himself blissfully yet guiltily ignoring his thoughts of quitting the habit. He would find himself savouring the ritual — the addiction — that he couldn’t stop feeling guilty about. The kind of guilty pleasure that cannot be explained to someone who doesn’t know it.
 
He hated the smell of it. He really didn’t like having the smell of cigarette smoke on his hair, his fingers, his clothes. But taking a drag of that cigarette…. it just helped. It helped calm him down. It helped him appreciate the glitter again.
 
Maybe that was an excuse. Maybe this line of thinking simply allowed him to use the cigarette as a crutch. To keep using it even when he knew the things that all smokers know when they pick up the habit and continue it and continue to continue it…
 
He knew the risks. Every time he thought about quitting, he would read about the risks. He would study the statistics. He would try to absorb the information into the core of his being, so that he could quit. And, every week, at least once, he thought that — this time — the information had stuck. That this time, it would be different. That this time, his brain really understood the risks and would make the decision to quit.

Despite understanding the risks though, he thought about his addiction as being part of a larger question surrounding his philosophical approach to life. Is longevity really the goal? Or does living a life mean doing things that make the everyday more bearable? If he got sick, he’d just shoot himself, to cut out the suffering and the pain and physical and mental degradation. So, in the time that he had left, did he really want to give up a habit that brought him relief, so that he could live for more time in a truly fucked up world? Wasn’t his mortality already in jeopardy every day, regardless of the cigarette in his hands? Wasn’t he just as likely to be shot by soldiers as he crossed the street, as he was of developing a smoking-related disease? Didn’t simply living in This Place raise his odds of never returning home on a given day?