Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  After dinner Professor Singh did something unusual. He washed the dishes.

  Nelly retired to her room without wishing us goodnight, and I ended up discussing ‘dimensionless numbers’ all night long with my teacher. By the time I departed, both of us sensed a new layer of relationship sprouting, the layer commonly known as friendship.

  These days the Times often runs profiles of highly qualified immigrants returning to India. Better jobs, better quality of life. Good life in Bangalore or the Los Angeles-style Millennium City, Gurgaon. To me these returns are not even half as interesting as Professor Singh’s decision to return when it was really hard to return.

  ‘Why did you?’ I had asked him that day.

  ‘Perhaps you know the answer. When I hear the national anthem, an electric current goes through me.’

  Often I would go to his office. The walls had developed cracks and the electrical wiring was visible. The left side was covered with awards and commendations and important citations. On the right wall hung a huge black-and-white photo of the so-called great leader, Indira Gandhi. Even then I found her hideous because she had imposed the dictatorial Emergency only six or seven years ago. One day, her bleached hair appeared yellow to me.

  I stopped going to classes for a while (in the final year) because I was sick with jaundice. Everything around me turned yellow (including my shit and urine). While convalescing I felt as if coming into contact with everything for the first time. Objects strange and familiar through surge and flutter of marigold yellow. I almost fell down . . . Stumbling through a meta-stable state of diminishing nausea I walked into the college to collect the handouts I had missed. Professor Singh finished his lectures at eleven on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I showed him my new face then. I remember, too, the faint odour of chemicals in his office. In the cupboard there were four or five dark brown bottles, and liquefaction apparatus no longer in use. One Tuesday morning I was still in the office when a weighty parcel arrived. He unwrapped, in my presence, a yellowish book. The thing had arrived all the way from the New World.

  ‘Do you know where Ithaca is?’ he checked in a husky voice. Up until that day the place Ithaca was merely a Greek myth; I was completely unaware of the names of American university towns. Somewhat hypnotised by his accent my gaze fell on Professor Singh’s tennis shoes. For some mysterious reason he always kept them in the office under his desk. The package was mailed by his friend (a room-mate during the grad-student days) at Cornell. He asked if I were interested in reading the ‘the periodic table’ by a man ‘who belonged to some other world’.

  The author, a complete unknown to me, had organised ‘seemingly harmless’ memories around twenty-one chemical elements. Neither a hardback, nor a proper paperback: the uncorrected proofs. Curious, I borrowed the wondrous ‘book’ of ‘memory and alchemy’ a week later. The friend had inscribed the title page and inserted a copy of his typed review, the one he had submitted to the Times. I have no idea why I still remember the expected launch date, 19 November 1984. First English edition. The reviewer/friend, overly generous, claimed it was an admirable and ‘true’ translation. Little did I know then that the author would commit suicide three years later on 11 April, 1987.

  Chaucer, Tennyson, Manto. Chekhov, Mishima, Maugham. These are the bookmakers I had read so far, men who belonged on my father’s bookshelf. I had even read Joyce’s ‘Hell-Fire Sermon’ in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But I had not encountered anything remotely close to Primo Levi’s alchemy, a voice so restrained and gently ironic and devastating. There were parts I couldn’t comprehend fully, but this didn’t stop me from getting entangled with the twenty-one irradiating elements. It is hard for me now to convey the sheer delight and pain I experienced being exposed to that old-fashioned way of doing chemistry, involving not just the highly privileged sense of sight, but also smell, touch and taste. A few days later, Professor Singh distributed handouts during his lecture. The stapled material included the first two pages from the Italian author: ‘There are so-called gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” Indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition that they do not participate in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries.’ Levi connects the world of molecules to the world of humans, to the world of his own family members, explained Professor Singh. The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases . . . Uncanny as the whole affair appears in retrospect, it was during his advanced elective on cryogenics that I had learned that almost a hundred years ago in 1882, while analysing the lava of Mount Vesuvius, a previously known ‘extraterrestrial’ element was detected for the first time on Planet Earth. Before this discovery it was largely believed that helium existed only in the sun.

  Professor Singh would spend long flickering hours inside and outside the classroom discussing material not directly on the syllabus. Blinking rapidly he would expand those mere footnotes and old-fashioned Kodak slide projector shows (for some reason I am unable to forget the grainy photographs of Giorgio Sommer) . . . Vesuvius, he told us, is best known for its eruption in ad 79. In a single night those ancient, bustling Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under a seventeen-foot-thick layer of dust and pumice pebbles as a result of a catastrophic pyroclastic flow. Toxic gases and extreme high temperatures perished all plant and animal life on the slopes and made the river change its course. Within hours the mountain looked stark naked and its shape changed as if all that weight and volume was really a small lump of Silly Putty in the hands of a titanic god (or – should we say? – a demon).

  When my turn came to ask the IIT doctoral candidate a question I thought of asking something from The Periodic Table. He had not heard of the book. So I posed a question on cadmium, chromium and arsenic. Something connected to the shiny beads of mercury floating on soil samples in central India, and the student figured out the answer, and then I posed a problem even more directly connected to his area, a question about mountains of toxic waste still piled up in Bhopal. How deep into the soil and water have the toxic chemicals penetrated? Especially organo-chlorines. The student paused and I checked my watch. Then he chalked an equation on the board, and I learned something new. The answer was incorrect, but his approach was solid (as they say), and this assured me that the kid knew his stuff, and it also pained me that this bright boy would leave the country and neither clean the soils nor design reaction vessels, some other asshole would do that and industrial disasters would continue to happen. That was pretty much the end of the exam. Afterwards the candidate was asked to step out of the room for a few minutes. We discussed whether he deserved the Dean’s honours list, and the door was opened. Congratulations, Doctor! The committee members took him to the faculty club for lunch. The student invited all of us to a grand party that evening. I declined. I excused myself and walked aimlessly through the campus, and then for a long time stared at my favourite purple-blossomed jacarandas. How voluptuous they looked now that I was back . . . a purple carpet of flowers under the trees, and seed pods, which looked like vaginas. A feeling came over me that if only I had stayed behind in India my life would have followed a different turn.

  For hours I rode the new Metro aimlessly. I had missed the major phases of its construction – the Metro operated now as if it was the most natural thing in the city’s circulation. Rajiv Chowk (new name for Connaught Place), Jantar Mantar and the Old Delhi railway station. Yamuna River, across Yamuna. Remote areas like Noida shrank in time, only ten minutes away. The city had changed in so many ways, and in so many ways for the better.

  How excited I was in the beginning of ’84. My parents lived not far from the recently constructed Olympic-sized Nehru Stadium. We had just won the cricket World Cup, and two Indians were being trained by Russians to go to space on Soyuz or Salyut. I recall my father had bought a colour TV to watc
h the historic moment. So what does India look like from up there? Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had asked. Sare jahan se achha, echoed the astronaut’s voice. Best in the world.

  Just as I was walking around imbibing the sheer energy of the city my cellphone rang. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t want to give the impression I am hounding you.’ The IIT grad student’s voice, not very clear, superimposed by sounds of howling children. Who gave you my number? ‘The Chairman, sir,’ he explained. ‘Please come. You are invited to a gathering at my place. Eightish.’

  ‘Not possible, not tonight, I am occupied.’

  Despite my better judgement I succumbed to his persistence, and decided to surprise him. Cancelling the dinner appointment with Father was easy; I then took a taxi to Jor Bagh. Because it was dark the elite neighbourhood resembled a Western city, no trace of slums, although even here the posh brick walls smelled of male piss. The houses in Jor Bagh were big, however, and majestic, and competed with the ones designed originally by Lutyens during the times of the British.

  The student’s house had real cops posted outside, alert and jumpy, loaded with carbines. Ten or fifteen Mercedes and BMWs and Bentleys chaotically parked by the gate. I asked the driver to wait and presented myself to the guards, who frisked me and then ejected me in through a metal detector.

  Inside I was unable to locate the student or my colleagues. The veranda was densely packed with intermingling people. Not a single familiar face. I made it to the large high-ceilinged room on the ground floor, a dining table in the middle, no chairs, hundreds of bottles of Sula wine, the wine which had made me throw up only a day ago. A woman in a red jacket was looking at the miniatures on the wall. Nude Radha and Krishna. Like most women at the party she was in a skirt and black leather boots. She had the most voluptuous calves.

  Liveried men served kebabs and drinks, and the kitchen was occupied by a maid in a sari. She told me to check upstairs. Chote sahib sometimes goes to the kotha, she said in Hindi. The stairs were steep and up there I found a terraced garden with a pergola, and the suffocating smell of raat ki raani. Something started blinking and shuffling not far from me – an orphan cellphone. I picked it up and placed it on an empty chair, and walked slowly towards the small room at the other end of the terrace; the room, a slab of concrete and glass as if done by Corbusier himself. Dim light, the door ajar. Bookshelves. Russian writers. Music CDs. I walked in. The student I was looking for was there. He was not alone. He was in a position normally described as missionary, the woman’s legs and feet wrapped around him. His skin, darker than hers. His neck turned and our eyes locked for a brief second; after that my gaze drifted to the Russian authors, then I stepped out.

  ‘Thayroh,’ he said in Hindi, then switched to English. ‘Please don’t leave, wait for me, sir.’

  There I surveyed the city at night and its awkward, uncomfortable sounds and smells. Those two minutes have stayed with me, the man’s butt and the woman’s thigh. The way the woman’s mouth had widened, the way the boy-man didn’t seem to care about my intrusion. Slowly I moved down the stairs to the Sula room; the voluptuous woman was no longer there, but there were loud waves of chattering. Floating around, I entered a small dimly lit room with a solitary yellow armchair. Without a third thought that is where I took refuge.

  Often old memories flicker within me on encountering the deeds of the young or the very young. Nothing shocks me any more. Why would someone with his background go for a grad degree at IIT? Mere idealism? His father had enough money and power to send him abroad to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard. I felt as if I were staring at my younger self in a mirror. I, too, didn’t want to go abroad. However, my decision was not as bold as his. I did move to Cornell. Whereas he sits the Joint Entrance Exam, All India Rank: 48. Finishes his undergrad degree, and immediately enrols in the grad programme. But what I saw on the roof terrace was more than a question of enrolment. As if I were looking at myself. Some significant but lost slice of time and space. When I was a young student, I, too, started seeing a woman a few years older than me. The affair started as pure lust, rightly or wrongly, and soon mutated into something special. Something more real. They always do. (But I shall divulge such matters a bit later.)

  That afternoon, right after he had discussed Pompeii and Herculaneum, Professor Singh sent me out of the class. Perhaps I had disrupted the lecture, although I remember this vaguely. As I was leaving he turned to me, smiled sardonically: Kal bhi nahin aana! Later I stood outside his office next to the bare semal tree with blood-red blossoms, then walked in with uncalculated slowness. I didn’t say sorry, and he demanded no apology. As usual, without permission, nervous as hell, I occupied the threadbare chair. He was typing a research paper, inserting a couple of sketches of two stable helium isotopes, 3He and 4He, using that old-fashioned ‘photocopy’ and ‘cut and paste’ technique. ‘So what are your plans?’ he asked. ‘India or the US?’ Those days I was open to working in my own country after graduation. In fact I was also open to sitting the GRE exams. ‘Are you a man with a plan?’ he asked. I told him I had kept both options open. ‘Then you have no plan.’ He gave me a piercing look. ‘Go abroad, but come back.’ It was rare to see him less open to discussion. His mind was already made up. ‘It is too bureaucratic, and too hierarchical, and too feudal here. People have insecurities,’ he explained bluntly. ‘A few years of exile will do you good. You are young and ambitious. You will see the world. You will be better accepted by the powerful – here – after that onion-skin higher degree from the US.’ He didn’t reveal his own details and decisions. I found out later. Most of the staff members in his own department accepted him only after a famous American professor, a Nobel Laureate, praised Professor Singh’s work during a keynote lecture at the academy of sciences.

  The next day the IIT colleague told me he knew nothing about Professor Singh’s family, but he took me through a long corridor to the Chair’s office, who said that Nelly (according to the grapevine) had moved to the hill station of Shimla. A ‘friend’ had come to the office to collect Mohan’s papers ‘but we,’ said the chair, ‘didn’t have the key ready, and even if it had been ready we would not have passed the boxes on to someone who claimed to be a mere friend’. The papers were still in storage until last year in the cryo lab. Early this summer during the annual clean-up, partly due to an oversight and partly due to a stupid clerical mistake, they got shredded.

  Don’t expect me to remember everything. A lot has simply faded away. Also, I am not implying that other teachers were crap and he was the lone phosphorescent giant. Perhaps premature death transforms a teacher in the eyes of the student. Even if the person was unpopular, immensely disliked, he becomes a myth, even mediocre students transform him into a benign myth. Small details, small movements made in the classroom, acquire more weight. Words said and unsaid more significance.

  I figured out only in the final year that thirty or forty minutes before the lecture Professor Singh would lock himself in the office and pace up and down and contemplate, in other words prepare his so-called spontaneity. (This was a pedagogical device and when I started teaching at Cornell I basically emulated the same technique and it delivered wonders and made me somewhat popular with the students.)

  I shall never forget my last visit to his office. The 19th of October, a faultless day like any other. The laburnum quivered in the sun, I recall, so bright it hurt my eyes. I placed the borrowed item on his heavily cluttered desk; sheets and memos spilling over, glacial mountains and ice fields of exam papers and clogged lava flows of lab reports. Still weak, recovering from jaundice, I was in a way rediscovering the world; everything around me felt new and alien. Even the smells I took for granted in the past, and the dewy brilliance of objects. Without wasting words he checked if I had the energy to walk back to the hostel. I nodded. But he insisted on driving me in his white Fiat, which he drove slowly for my sake. On the way we talked about Maxwell’s demons, he was also curious about my recently formed opinions and thoughts on Levi. I was unable
to express myself properly. I said something about Levi’s dark sense of humour. How he made use of snake droppings once to manufacture lipstick! Then we discussed briefly the chapter that left a huge impression on me. How the author had dealt with hunger. What really happened inside the ‘concentration’ camp. Up until that day the words ‘dilute’ and ‘concentrated’ were simply connected to the density of molecules in solutions (and not human beings). The writing had disturbed me, pushed me out of my comfort level. Those pages were set in a world I did not know.

  Soon afterwards our class was divided into two groups for factory visits. The first, led by Professor Acharya, travelled to the Mathura Refinery and the ONGC offshore oil rig in Bombay. This was a five-day affair. All the plain and good-looking girls in our class signed up for this trip. If I had not been sick I, too, would have done the exotic trip, and if I had been fortunate enough I would have held that particular good-looking girl’s hand. But 1984 was not a fortunate year. Special, not fortunate. Professor Acharya was a complete asshole, a postgraduate of Imperial College, London. I am glad I did not accompany him. His sick jokes repelled me, and so did his New Age fixation on Krishnamurti and other so-called gurus. The chairman accepted my request to join the second, relatively small, group instead. This one was led by Professor Singh, the two-day visit to factories up north. We left on 30 October.

  Because I was unwell my father drove me to the station that day. He insisted on shaking hands with my teacher, and Nelly was there on the platform too. Although it was late autumn, her light cotton sari exuded the feel of summer. Her cleavage visible, if one paid attention. The train was to depart at seven in the morning. ‘Is your father an IPS?’ Professor Singh took me aside. I remember his soft voice. ‘He appears to be a terribly important man.’ Father’s uniform made it obvious that he was an elite Indian Police Service officer; however, civilians found it difficult to decode the meaning of the stars and ribbons and medals and other signs. While we were still floating on the platform, when my professor and my good father shook hands I felt strangely proud (and I didn’t bother about ‘what other students would say’). One of my hidden subconscious hopes got realised that day, a perfectly ordinary day like any other. Precisely at that moment I became aware of my ‘double bond’. Blood and friendship – now that I think about it. ‘Please take care of my son,’ my father requested Professor Singh. ‘He has just recovered from jaundice.’