Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  The city was still waiting for the first snowfall of the season. For some unknown reason it didn’t snow during January and February, I was told. Global warming was too easy an assumption or conclusion. The distant mountains, visible from the balcony, still carried the weight of snow of previous years. The Himalayas were higher there. Chiselled peaks (with names like Bangles of the Moon) flushed with strands of orange or flamingo light. My room had a musty, resinous smell and the navy-blue carpet carried white stains along the non-functional fireplace. After that long and exhausting journey I felt like taking a proper shower. But, as expected, there was no soap in the bathroom, so I stepped out to purchase a cake of soap.

  Nelly, if she followed the same profession, works at a library, the IIT Chair had told me, scratching his shock of white hair. Library or the archives. She was trained as an archivist. On a departmental sheet he had scribbled her phone number. ‘So much time has passed by, I am sure the number has changed.’

  After a shower I shaved, then called the number. The answering machine clicked in and I was greeted by a voice choked by years of cigarette smoke, at the same time musical; the voice, darting out of the receiver, almost stabbed me. Not her, it was the voice of a man, a mediocre Indian Leonard Cohen. I left a detailed message for Nelly, and an inchoate apology regarding my failure to get in touch earlier.

  Failure is the right word.

  Shimla or Simla – a city six thousand feet high – was not a bad place to recover, an altermodern sanatorium, but my head pulsed like an overinflated tyre, and I was foolishly eager to locate Nelly. The best bet was to wait. I don’t recall how I spent an entire day in that L-shaped hotel room, but no one returned my calls. Next day, again, I spent the first half in the room, but after lunch, feeling energised, walked a hundred metres to the edge of the hotel. Past the black cast-iron gates at a slightly lower elevation I noticed the directions to an aviary. Smallish and poorly maintained, I could tell from the outside, but something compelled me to go ahead, and so disregarding my better sense I bought a ticket and spent two or three hours inside amid a confusing ensemble of Himalayan birds.

  During the IIT days Nelly would tell me now and then fragments from her past. Listening to her I would try to imagine the shape of my alternative life if a biological accident made me take birth in a Sikh family. She would tell me what it felt like washing her father’s turbans. She did not romanticise the turbans the way I do. She would tell me about her kind but intimidating father, who trained as an agricultural scientist. Almost all his research focused on rice. The old man was never able to resolve the contradictions between science and religion. He knew half of the holy Granth by heart, and would recite hyper-melodious verses from the holy book and Nanak’s poetry on the oddest of occasions. Waking up at four in the morning and in the solitude of his room the rice scientist would hold reasonably loud dialogues between God and Darwin. These sessions lasted a little over an hour. God would win in the end, but Darwin would make sure the dialogues started again the next day. She rarely mentioned her mother. By all standards she had a happy childhood. Nelly, I recall, never learned to swim, and until the age of eight, she was afraid of snakes and water. Her father taught her cycling; often she would ride her red Hero to school (salwar puffed up) with friends. She loved foreign films, the first one she told me was To Sir, With Love. In her college years, Nelly suffered a minor bout of depression. The depression did not last long and getting married to Mohan eliminated the melancholic moods completely. At least that is what she told me. Together they travelled to different parts of the country on trains pulled by steam engines, especially the hill stations. Darjeeling, Dalhousie, Ooty. When I got to know them better my persistence paid off. I found out, if not the cause, the details of that depression. One day she also confided in me a difficult episode from her teen years. She was good friends with their neighbour’s daughter then. Several times Nelly watched a noisy spectacle through the bedroom window – the girl’s mother holding a cane. After the beatings I always felt sad, said Nelly. Sad that my friend’s mother was like that, and more sad because a part of me derived pleasure watching the beatings. Then there was a heavy mist in her eyes.

  Despite a few odd recollections it occurred to me that I knew Nelly less and less. The gaps in my understanding remained despite reading at Cornell library several ‘Sikh’ biographies; in Shimla, looking for her, I felt the gaps more than ever, a tightening sensation as I observed the birds. I had even failed to ask, for instance, how Nelly and Mohan met. I never managed to ask the most essential questions. In my younger days I would dismiss such questions as ‘auntie talk’ (and in my twenties I would dismiss them as Oprah Winfrey). Of all the birds in the aviary, the ones that most caught my attention were a pair of monal pheasants. The female dull, the male flamboyant in metallic blue-red-green plumage, digging deep into the soil with his bill. Bejewelled, tessellated with heavily protruding eyes, trying to locate worms. As if he had never known fear. Observing the male I felt a mild twitching sensation in my left hand.

  Over the next few days I tried another way to locate her.

  Every morning I would drink two or three glasses of bottled water, put on my blue jeans and black Zara jacket, and step out for long walks. I did seven bifurcating walks, whirling around the seven hills of Shimla. The hills or mountains strangely defined, definitely not volcanic; the geometry misleading. Jakho, Mount Pleasant, Potters Hill, Bantony, Prospect, Summer Hill . . . Portions of the ageing hills still covered with trees. Nature had perished on those slopes a while ago; what remained now were simply the traces of the past. Chir pines. Chestnuts. Himalayan oaks with serrated leaves . . . Others crooked, dwarf, twisted, young . . . Himachal University library. No Nelly Kaur there. Another Tudor building on the ridge, the city library. The Cliff End Estate. The state archives. Structures more than a century old, fallen into disrepair. Railway Board Building, a cast-iron cage. In a decaying Catholic cathedral I saw the Virgin of Guadalupe. Snowdon, Medical College, Lakkar Bazaar. Three Kali temples. I even did the slums, and today more than three-quarters of the city is a hideous slum, perhaps the highest in the world, with crying children and incessantly clogged drains. Men in Himachali topis and women in incongruous white running shoes and brash, ill-mannered tourists despoiling the place. Walking around I encountered several concrete and bronze statues, shadows shortening and lengthening; the most impressive one was that of Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, a copy of the Indian Constitution in his hand. His bronze hand and bespectacled head glowed with utopian hopes. The Dalits, inspired by Ambedkar, were challenging old Brahmanical ways of being in the new India, not just economically and politically, but also symbolically, rightfully taking back what was denied to them for so many centuries. I cannot give you heaven, but I can give you a voice. One evening my feet started hurting and I sat at the base of the bronze statue, and thought of the grade-nine poem, ‘Ozymandias’. Ambedkar doesn’t belong to the Ozymandias category, a voice corrected the current of my thoughts. He stood for justice, dignity; an end to humiliation. An end to violence, an end to the poisonous Manusmriti, which says: All women are impure. Which says: Molten lead ought to be poured in the ears of an ‘untouchable’ who aspires to higher education. Ambedkar, who did his grad work at Columbia University, New York, is even more important to this country than Gandhi, who merely patronised the so-called pariahs. There: I contemplated the rest of my so-called sabbatical. My colleague’s pithy statements: ‘So much work, so little time. So much time, so little work.’ In Shimla: I was wandering without a good probability of success, squandering precious days over something unconnected to my research interests and rising-star career status. Locating Nelly had become my new obsession. Why now? Why after so many years? As if I were a freak, accidentally summoned by the demons. I called the IIT Chair. Surprisingly he didn’t scream or yell, but he wanted me to co-supervise a grad student. ‘At the very least introduce the Nobel Laureate Douglas Osheroff. Only you can do that.’ He flattered me . . . I wan
ted the Chair to help me locate Nelly. You are wasting your time, he excoriated. The cellphone connection kept failing; then a crackling disturbance set in and it cut off. The wind grew strong. My eyes watered because of alien particles stirred by its sheer force. I shut my eyes, and my ears alone couldn’t tell if the sound belonged to the rising and falling of the wind or to a body of water as vast as the Arabian Sea. For once I didn’t think in terms of pressure pockets, temperature gradients, boundary layers, dimensionless numbers or aeroelasticity. Vayu, the god of wind; I brought to mind his mythical powers, and even the sturdiest of conifers, in that sparse and austere forest, I feared were going to separate one by one from the root system and fall. She sheared past the agitated branches of a tree, leaning forward, running. Dressed in red and green rags, the woman with wild black hair and wild ravenous eyes, I noticed as the figure approached closer. Not shy at all she sat precariously close, splitting a blade of grass, or staring at her calloused hands, then staring vacantly at the unsteady, swirling mountains as unreal as fog or mist. From a small bag she dug out a red-coloured fruit and let it go. Together we watched the fruit rolling down the slope until it vanished completely. She smiled and twitched, then again, and then her longish, soiled fingers tapped and caressed my shoulder. My jacket was fluttering now. I have the key to happiness, she snapped, and burst out laughing. ‘Do you want to know the secret?’ The cop posted in the square appeared with a stick and shooed her away as if she were an animal. ‘Why are you so unhappy?’ The woman, mad like the wind, chanted from a distance. ‘I will go to the moon, and tell them about you. I will go there and tell the goddess about you. Nine, eight, seven . . . Moon.’

  Then she laughed. ‘Nine, eight, seven. Teen, doh, ik.’

  The cop addressed me as ‘sa’ab’ and advised me and my hallucination to try the old Viceregal Lodge on top of Observatory Hill. He made a stiff but awkward movement in the wind and made a strange remark, which has stayed with me all these years. ‘Now books live where the Lat Sahib used to live.’ Further probing led me to more information. I had read about the lodge but didn’t know that the Scottish baronial castle had actually become the Centre for Advanced Studies . . . In his own limited way he explained that the dark chapter of colonialism was over. I felt like giving the man a small tip, but restrained myself. The cop’s face resembled an isosceles triangle sketched by a naive and mischievous child, something about that Euclidian nose and forehead and his black leather belt transported me to the time when I would accompany my father to remote towns and cities for police inspections (during his deputation posting). When we stepped out for long walks, uniformed men (posted throughout the city) would salute me. How delusional my childhood years were because I walked a little ahead of my father! The cop told me that the institute had a huge library of its own. Naturally I assumed I had almost found Nelly. And the archives? I checked. What is that? I didn’t press further and followed the steep path, which looped up to the green posts. As I climbed up I felt a cool and green dampness in the air.

  Over a hundred years ago when the British built the castle they thought the Empire would last forever. The sun would refuse to set, and the wheels of history would always move forward (for them). Those at the very top planned a giant ‘non-perishable’ machine assembled out of mere sandstone and limestone. The aspirations of the imperial architects matched the grand aspirations of the Empire, and its absurd rationale for plundering the colonies, the so-called white man’s burden. Lord Dufferin himself oversaw the construction of the flamboyant structure, which began in 1884. His wife, the Vicereine, wrote long letters to family and friends in England about the interiors done in the most English of chintzes, reassuring the readers all along that finally there was a building in Shimla worthy of their high rank, and in no danger of slipping over a mountain.

  I have a confession.

  When I rounded the road to the library and first saw the building I felt sorry for the British; momentarily it dispelled some of the sadness I carry around. Once inside the building, I bought a ticket to the guided tour (led by a sprightly man in his twenties). Most tourists parked themselves and listened quietly as if this was the most significant moment in their lives. Unable to stand still, the engineer within me made quick calculations related to materials, volumes and surfaces. Pacing up and down and tenuously attached to the obedient tourists, I marvelled at the massive electrification problems. Structural challenges. Calculations about the entire throbbing mechanism. How many faceless, voiceless men ran the grand imperishable machine? The main collection of the library is housed in what used to be the Viceroy’s ballroom, with its tall windows and Gothic arches. Some very powerful and wealthy sahibs and memsahibs danced there. In the Empire’s dining room there are shelves on history, archaeology and emotions. In the leaky pantry: law, technology and religion. Downstairs in the vaulted room: Indian languages and translation. The archives are in the gleaming cabinet room where the Viceroy determined the fate of millions of subjects. Research fellows from India and abroad inhabit the colonial building now. The tour was exceptionally well researched, but over in twenty short minutes. On the noticeboard by the entrance I saw announcements for upcoming conferences on Memory, Forgetting, History, Truth and Reconciliation.

  It was closing time. I lingered around the pebbled path by the entrance. The pebbles, sharp and striated, did not belong there. Neither did the castle with its many architectural associations. Glancing sideways, I noticed some movement. A woman looking much older than her age stepped out of the main entrance, the so-called porte cochère, and walked to the solitary bench under the tulip tree planted by Lord Curzon. Most of her colleagues seemed to be in the mood to compete with the speed of light as they disappeared towards houses and bazaars down the hill. She was the only one on the bench, visible from where I stood. Salt-and-pepper hair. Monkeys around her; not too close. Those creatures didn’t look different from Kipling’s monkeys, the ones he sketched for his kids during time spent in undulating Vermont.

  She was wearing a loose salwar kameez, black boots, a chunni round her neck. I walked on the crunchy pebbled path very close to the bench. It was clear this person had never dyed her hair. She noticed me, her mouth half open. I had no idea how to begin, so I stammered, ‘By any chance are you?’

  The face was still beautiful. But it had started to ruin. The mole below the lower lip drew unnecessary attention. Distorting symmetry. Some faces are difficult to describe using models and metaphors. One looks for traces of the old self, but all one sees is loss, and what remains feels like an unsettling fiction or a perfectly settled disguise. Let me just say that she, the woman in front of me, had the aura and grandeur of an ageing beauty.

  Imagine a piercingly attractive actress who (for the sake of her role) makes an attempt to look old. Using a special wax and make-up she allows extreme undulations to appear on her forehead. Also a scar on the right cheek, and another hint of one on the brow. Such was the face I saw.

  ‘Yes, I am Nelly Singh, I mean Kaur,’ and then she looked at me for a long time.

  ‘Raj?’

  She stood up, almost hugged me, but some mysterious force made her change her mind.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Your hands are very cold.’

  She asked me about things that had happened in my life, and I told her briefly about my years in Ithaca, my thesis topic, etc.

  ‘Are you married? Children?’

  The shock and excitement of having actually located her was only now penetrating my body, and I could hardly say a meaningful word. I even forgot to ask about her children. There was a book in her hand, a dusty red cuboid of light.

  ‘How did you recognise me?’

  ‘I knew you would come.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Got your phone message.’

  ‘But you didn’t call me back, Mrs Singh.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Peterhof. I mentioned the hotel when I left the message.’

 
; ‘Sorry.’

  She smiled. With some difficulty I scanned her face again. The oval. Big, beautiful eyes. Her nose striated, as if the make-up artist had stretched a rubber band and run it repeatedly on the young woman’s skin just below the bridge.

  ‘Mrs Singh?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I invite you . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘May I invite you to dinner this evening?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I don’t have a lot of time.’

  Her chunni fluttered in the wind.

  ‘In that case, shall we eat at the restaurant at the Peterhof?’

  ‘OK. I know what to order. But we must do it right away.’

  For several years now she had worked at the institute, six years as a chief archivist.

  ‘You have come during so much chaos.’

  Nelly didn’t spell out the exact reason. It was an early retirement. Her lips quivered as she spoke. She had had the ‘good fortune’ to assist innumerable distinguished scholars, visiting research fellows from abroad. Dr Uberoi of Australia. Dr Aung San of Burma. ‘You know, Dr Raj Kumar –’ she used my complete name – ‘a few speeches will be made and then the director will praise me, my contribution to the collection, and ask me to say something before handing me the gift box. Standard procedure.’

  The streets to the Peterhof were dirty with political posters stuck by the Hindu Party, as they were about to have their annual brainstorming session in the city, and they had chosen that fossil of a hotel as the main site. Nelly told me something I didn’t know. The Peterhof was the High Court before it became a hotel. That is where the trial of the zealot (Nathu Ram Godse) took place, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. The assassin belonged to the same Hindu Party.