Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  ‘And you?’ Nelly asked me. ‘Why did you choose the Peterhof?’

  ‘Well, my reason is entirely personal. My parents spent their honeymoon in Shimla. They stayed at the same hotel.’

  I didn’t tell her about the difficulties my parents had throughout their marriage, or my own troubled relationship with my father, or his surgery.

  ‘So you were conceived in one of those rooms!’

  Technically this is not correct, said Nelly. The original Peterhof mysteriously caught fire in the early eighties. She then described the fire in detail, but I was unable to concentrate. Her words assembled a strange burning image in my mind and momentarily I was overcome by a feeling of panic.

  Once I had yearned to be alone with her, and now everything had changed. She had a fearless but delicate face then, the way Punjabi women are, a regal posture. She was responsive to small changes, very small alterations, in a different season. Now, in my mind, the gap between the remembered Nelly and the real Nelly acquired a complexity I had not foreseen. She was still beautiful, but crumblingly so. My memories themselves, I realised, had become viscous, viscoelastic, or elastoviscoplastic, terms I usually reserve to characterise materials and the way they flow.

  So far, very carefully, we had avoided talking about Professor Singh, and she had not mentioned a single word about my changed appearance. She was not the only one. I, too, had changed. The cops had blocked the short cut to the hotel, the path which looped up the steep hill via the aviary. We followed the longer path. With the sun almost down, I felt the air become cooler. Nelly said, ‘You have come at a time when Shimla is untidy, chaotic, completely taken over by the politicos. It is not always like that. There are times when research fellows take over the streets and of course while there are some who treat the institute as a playground, certain fellows get serious work done.’

  We were unable to walk past the aviary, but the sounds the birds made swelled and shrank around us as if a chorus in a play. Some birds merely imitated others; and others, while fluttering about, emitted notes of incomprehension as if they had completely lost their sense of reality.

  On the train to Shimla a strange image had flashed in my mind. A little girl more or less like Red Riding Hood was playing with a predator of a bird. The wolf was disguised as the peregrine falcon. Is that you, Grandmother? Are you really hungry, Grandmother? Now and then the little girl stared at a painting by Amrita Sher-Gil. But the wolf stared at the girl with murderous rage. To protect herself, the girl entered the painting . . . Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly and safely into the labyrinths of raven-coloured hair, confessing strange theories about her ‘wicked’ grandmother.

  Something trembled at the edge of my hallucination. Three Women, the painting, never fails to stir me. Three women, three ‘saviours’, enduring what comes from outside the frame, and the bigger pain woven or braided within. Big bird-like eyes averting the surveyors’ gaze, vividly coloured dresses, perfect locks of black hair. The longer one stares at those delicate faces, this one thought precipitates: those three must be out of their minds. Moving backwards or forwards or sideways offers little help. Whenever I encounter reproductions of the painting in art magazines and even in newsprint I get the feeling that perhaps I, too, must be out of my mind.

  Nelly, it seemed, had not had a proper conversation for a while now. Her deep penetrating silence during our stroll spoke louder than a reptating bead of words. I was looking forward to difficult questions over dinner. In a different season, it is safe to say, she had been loquacious and had a tendency to ‘cultivate’. She questioned my all-male reading list. She would often disturb my equilibrium, make it meta-stable. She is the one who persuaded me to read ‘The Quilt’ by Ismat Chughtai. To this day I have not been able to forget the story and its marvellous discontinuities. Perhaps start our conversation in the restaurant with ‘The Quilt?’ Or start with something safe. Little did I know the new developments. During my absence the Peterhof had become abnormal – almost a citadel. The man at the reception desk said that he had been looking for me. ‘Where were you, sa’ab?’ He was very apologetic. ‘Sorry, sa’ab, we had to move your things out of the room, we made a mistake when we took the booking, sa’ab.’ Momentarily I lost my temper. I rarely lose my balance. Then I scanned the place more objectively. The statue of Buddha on the lawns looked as puzzled, disappointed and harassed as me. The Hindu Party had literally taken over; saffron flags were all around and men in sinister khaki shorts were doing sinister drills on the lawns, and it was so screechingly loud it hurt my ears. Within a few hours the so-called retreat had become pure movement and action and order. Suddenly the men lifted their arms in unison and delivered a fascist salute.

  Nelly suggested we try Hotel Cecil. I settled the account and we rolled the suitcase towards the building. The roof had a distinctly green copper patina. She offered to carry the smaller laptop bag, but it was heavy and I slung it around my shoulder. In the lobby of the Cecil a pianist was playing the Doctor Zhivago theme song and there was a sentimental mood in the air. There, too, no space was available because the Hindu Party had booked all the rooms.

  On that long, more familiar Mall Road we walked towards other hotels, and soon passed by a building completely ravaged by time. My sudden breathlessness did not go unnoticed. On Nelly’s suggestion we sat on a bench. Lots of horny honeymooning couples around us. Some, I thought, simply happy to have escaped the clutches of ‘family’. I noticed an ensemble of monkeys. Nelly helped me distinguish two types of Shimla monkeys. Langurs and lal-walay. Langurs stay away from humans. Lal-walay are more playful, and sometimes attack for a vested reason, for they are completely dependent on the residents of Shimla for food. It is an uneasy coexistence. The brains of these macaque bandars were studied in Western universities not so long ago, said Nelly, and without delving into details slipped into a prolonged silence. Not entirely unexpected, she stared at the moss on grey rocks and barks of deodars, and then gazed into empty space. One of Nelly’s earrings was missing, and very politely I decided to remark on asymmetry. She touched her ears in disbelief. The solitary earring gleamed with impatience. Perhaps it was not important, she said. ‘Twenty-five years,’ she said. Those two words lingered. ‘You have come back after twenty-five.’ I stayed silent. She took it as an invisible blow and started looking for the lost object and (because she was the luckiest woman on Earth) a few minutes later found it under the bench next to my luggage.

  In her hand there was an ancient-looking book, which looked more conspicuous than my luggage; she placed it between us while putting on her earring. A red binding. Mildly damaged leather spine. Kipling. ‘What I love are his stories for children,’ said Nelly. ‘My father was never able to read this man without getting agitated. He took it out on a sheet of paper. Once he drew Kipling as a monkey. Darwin’s theory was correct after all, he said. On that sheet of paper Kipling got a pinky-blue face, and Kipling ate the sun thinking it was an orange! And I don’t think the intention was to make me laugh.’

  Kipling, a hirsute monkey, an irascible old man, a bandar with a short temper. Kim is the only book of his I really like.

  ‘Stay at my place,’ she suggested. ‘It is small and I am busy with the retirement function, but you are most welcome to spend a few days. As long as you are not pesky.’

  ‘Pesky’ – I had not heard the word for a while.

  Her generous offer was hard to refuse. She stood up. The air was crisp and clear and cold. I walked a little behind her, deodars on one side and humans on the other, and monkeys swung on the canopy of branches above us. During the walk a fleeting sense of relief overwhelmed me, but I was careful not to ask a wrong question or stray anywhere near that violent strand of memory. Once or twice she stopped in mid-sentence as if processing something, processing a thought, a pain that could not be articulated.

  She lived on the slopes of Prospect Hill. A one-bedroom unit in an old run-down house. Approximately one hundred steps higher than the legendary ‘starr
y cottage’ and its fossilised red-brick chimney. No servants, not even an anonymous maid. She led me in. Bare walls. Two small windows, but not very bright. I tried to recognise objects. Her clothes were drying on the dining chairs. For some strange reason I had expected the place to be filled with smoke, but it seemed no one had lit a cigarette in those rooms for nearly two decades.

  I sat on the yellow sofa and closed my eyes for a long time. There I heard the squeaking of brakes; a clogged mountain road whose existence I didn’t know yet. When I woke up I noticed she had lit up two (half melted) candles. The clothes were no longer on the chairs.

  ‘Triangulars, as usual?’

  She remembered my weakness for caraway-seed parathas (shaped liked triangles) with anda bhurji and pickle. More than the ajwain, I savoured the smell of her freshly made parathas and ate more than necessary. She made tea using dried milk powder, her usual way, with a hint of medicinal banaksha, dried violet pansies. Nelly’s new kitchen had Spanish tiles, patterns that reminded me of aperiodic quasicrystals, lacking translational symmetry. Something was not quite right, and obviously this didn’t come as a shock. She kept quiet while cooking, and sat as far apart as possible and did not eat. She drank tea, but all I heard was mild slurping. Strange resonance. Between us a triple wall of silence. Dull unangry silence. How does one unlive what has been lived? The only thing that came out of her emerged with enormous effort, as if she was working against will. ‘Twenty-five years.’ Later she showed me the way to the bathroom and asked me to sleep in the bedroom.

  ‘And where will you?’

  ‘On the sofa.’

  ‘No, please.’

  She insisted. ‘In the morning you will get disturbed. I wake up early. And I will need the living room then.’

  ‘The sofa is all right,’ I said.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I knew you would say that.’

  Her voice came from some other world. She shut the bedroom door, and opened it again.

  ‘If you need anything else, don’t hesitate. Sorry there is no TV.’

  I couldn’t say a word.

  As long as you are not pesky.

  Unable to fall asleep I stood by the window. Nelly’s institute perched on top of the Observatory Hill exhibiting a few traces of its old glory and many dots of dim light. The building looked comical – almost a folly. Inside the living room most of the objects were new, like her black boots by the entrance, or second-hand, like the slightly singed Persian carpet (and the sofa with fatigued springs), reacting with each other, but the object that seemed to carry truth, the one that drew me most towards it, was Mohan’s silver-framed photo. The photo had outlasted him. On the back: Self, London, 1975. (This is the same year Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency.) Professor Singh in a long black winter coat with big buttons, on the steps of St Paul’s and looking unusually melancholic, trying to forget perhaps his unfortunate country, or trying to remember every single detail. There were a couple of blank sheets of paper on the side table. I had a strong urge to transmute the yellow photo into a narrative. I confess I am not a real writer. But at that moment I felt if I don’t find precise words corresponding to his life I would turn to stone.

  One evening he found himself standing in front of a cathedral, which could only have been St Paul’s. So many times he had been to London but he never got a chance to step inside the shrine, which was destroyed partially during the war . . . the damage long repaired, it carried no memory of the relatively recent German bombs or the Catholic structure before the Great Fire, the one that stood three or four centuries ago, no memory of the painting in the old cloister oddly titled the Dance of Death. He stood for a long time in front of the small memorial to thousands of Sikh soldiers, who had died for the British. Stepping out of the cathedral his thoughts turned briefly to the road to Amritsar, to a very different structure, the cathedral of his childhood, the Golden Temple. This is the shrine of a place where his grandparents and parents took refuge whenever struck by catastrophic events. For some mysterious reason on the steps of St Paul’s the young engineering professor also brought to mind a book he had read during his college days: The Temple of Golden Pavilion. But it was the real shrine (and not fiction) that provided him with comfort and extremes of happiness, and despite being a man of science he often thought about the road to Amritsar.

  I have only once been to the Golden Temple. Father had to go to Punjab on official duty, an interstate crime investigation, and I accompanied him and Mother. I was around eight then. We were not Sikhs, but the gurdwara was open to all humans. ‘Humans’? Even at that age they were a mystery to me. And ‘Sikhs’? Honestly I knew nothing about the Sikhs then, and I didn’t care. Once an uncle of mine said, Today at the bus stop I saw three human beings and a Sikh. And we all laughed without recognising his racism. Other than Bhagat Singh in a trilby and Indira Gandhi’s shoe-licking president, I had little idea then about the Sikh community’s out-of-proportion contribution to the freedom struggle and the armed forces. In school the textbooks taught me next to nothing about Sikh history, or about Maharajah Ranjit Singh and his grand multicultural Empire. The Sikhs are a proud people, only 2 per cent of the country’s population, but for some strange reason don’t consider themselves a minority. Most walk like kings. And have the rare ability to laugh at themselves. My uncle must have envied them. But I don’t think my family had anti-Sikh hatred ingrained in the psyche . . . At the Golden Temple I don’t recall now if we ate the ‘spartan’ but delicious langar or not. It is all coming back to me now, fresh with all its smells. Dal and chapatti served on plates made of fig leaves (stitched to each other with toothpicks). Something left a deep impression on me. I have not been able to forget the visual representations of that titanic scholar and warrior, Baba Deep Singh, the 75-year-old, who fought the invading Afghans in the eighteenth century. Perhaps I started paying attention to the Sikh saints and warriors after I got to know Nelly. Deep Singh’s seven-foot-long double-edged sword gleamed with confidence, and his severed head on the palm of his own hand. Another odd memory of Amritsar: I refused to drink the holy amrit. Mother, my somewhat devotional mother, was very keen that I drink water from the sacred pool. That water is not so pure, I cried. That water is full of dissolved salts and acids, it doesn’t make the sacred sacred. When we returned home I got sick, and my mother correlated my refusal to drink amrit with the onset of my sickness.

  When in school, before I joined the engineering college, there were two Sikh boys in my class but I didn’t get to know them properly. Throughout my schooldays for some mysterious reason there were always two Sikh boys in my class. Once I sat next to one of them, and heard his views on the ‘Punjab Problem’. But another close friend of mine pulled me aside. Abe tu uski baat kyon sunta hai? – wo to Sikh hai. ‘Why listen to him? – he is after all a Sikh.’

  On 6 June, thousands of families were gathered at the Golden Temple to commemorate the day of martyrdom of the fifth Guru – it was a bit like Christmas Day (or Good Friday rather) for Sikhs – when Mrs G ordered an unprecedented army action, Operation Blue Star, apparently to flush out the militants and the extremist preacher, her own creation (someone on her payroll for several years). Old newspaper cuttings in the archives are filled with this information. The shock-and-awe army action was deeply flawed and was not the only solution. Seven battle tanks rolled in . . . The Akal Takht was completely destroyed. The holiest shrine was riddled with hundreds of bullets. The treasury looted. Rare manuscripts and historical artefacts seized. The library set on fire. Mrs G’s, it is said, army killed more innocent civilians than the Butcher of Amritsar, General Dyer. According to human rights reports between two thousand to eight thousand innocent civilians were killed. There is also a mention of a firing squad taking care of captive men after tying their hands with turbans. Thousands in Punjab were tortured, humiliated, thousands disappeared . . . Even if one agrees with the rationale behind the attack (the archive says), one finds the ‘secrecy’, the ‘timing’ and the ‘method of
attack’ unacceptable.

  How did I respond then? I remember that comfortable June day with clarity. That cool and pleasant summer month. No heat, no dust at all . . . We had gone to the hill station of Mussoorie; my parents played Chinese checkers all day long on the cool, green lawns of the Police Guest House, the officers’ mess, and for some reason even I had no idea that something was being held from me, and believed every word that woman uttered on state-controlled TV. And she was not alone. The print media, too, was heavily biased and softly communal.

  Why did the PM fail to grasp the enormity of her action? Or the anguish and scars it would cause within the Sikh community?

  Operation Blue Star was the biggest disgrace in the recent history of our country.

  But why?

  Mrs G bought into her own ‘great leader’ myth: Indira is India and India is Indira. Myths can be dangerous. That one ruined her and thousands of others.

  Nelly had arranged the books more or less the same way they were in the IIT house. Four bookshelves, not twelve or thirteen, but the arrangement was more or less identical on a smaller scale. Each title neatly bound by transparent plastic to keep away particles of dust. I was literally on my knees moving from one end to the other, and pulled out a book by Conrad, and another one by Flaubert, Volume II of Sentimental Education (Volume I was missing). Published in 1869, Volume II, older than the building I was in. Strange smells emanated from the dog-eared pages. Old railway timetables. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Another with a red-and-black damaged spine: The King of Infinite Space, a biography of Don Coxeter (the man who saved geometry). Why in the world was Nelly interested in that famous geometer? Why was she reading about the mathematics of shape and space? And then. On the brown shelf I found an object with a familiar smell; it had touched my hands, also his hands in 1984.