Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  Levi’s cover photo stared out at me.

  Trimmed white beard. Huge plastic-framed glasses. Schoken Books, New York. First edition. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. I stood for a long time in disbelief, leaning against the shelf, now on my right leg, now on my left, not realising the time it was. Reacquainting myself with that peculiar style, smelling the pages, half controlling my unexpected laughter, recalling that day when the package arrived in his office, remembering that day when he drove me slowly to my hostel in his white Fiat. Those days half of my class was going through the ‘asshole reading phase’ (a phrase I learned in the US) reading Ayn Rand. Professor Singh introduced me to Levi while most in the hostel were under the spell of Rand (masquerading as a philosopher). I read the chapter on cerium, pages 139 to 143. How the author and his handsome friend dealt with hunger, about fascism and death factories in Europe. How they refused the concentration camp universe . . . ‘Cerium’ kept them alive. They ‘stole’ cerium rods from a storage jar in the lab and, taking a huge risk, filed them at night. Small diameter rods ignite cigarette lighters. The two friends bartered meals for fire. Alberto kept me alive. But. Alberto did not return. Four or five lines underlined in pencil; a note in the margins in dense, baroque handwriting. While reading I shut the book now and then and studied the author’s beard and enigmatic, melancholic face hiding certain things. Humans capable of such cruelty to other humans. Depression. Suicidal thoughts. I could not help but think about the controversy surrounding his death. 11 April 1987. Was it suicide? My mind wove strange patterns and correlations. Primo Levi, born in Italy in 1919: three months after the first Amritsar Massacre in India. The Periodic Table appeared in English for the first time in November 1984. Random coincidences. Signifying nothing, and yet it didn’t feel merely random, as if the coincidence carried a ring of inevitability. That first night on Prospect Hill at her small place I kept hearing Nelly’s voice ‘the light is dim, move under the lamp’, but no, Nelly was in the other room, fast asleep. As I was replacing the book on the shelf two tiny photographs fell out of the pages. Like perennial migrants, the photos were impatient and keen to reveal the twists and turns of their odyssey.

  Carefully I wiped away dust and scanned the images in the fragile light of the candles. The first one was the photo of thick ‘fog’ or ‘white smoke’ in our old lab. On the faintly visible bench there are traces of a completely shattered flower, a yellow rose. The professor’s two children are part of the photo; I suspect he must have done a special cryogenic demo just for them. The father must have demonstrated his famous ‘Coldest Experiments’ in a slightly different fashion to his children . . . The photo for some strange reason reminded me of Chardin’s Boy Blowing Bubbles, but I don’t think Professor Singh was thinking of Chardin when he took the photo. He must have warned the kids not to touch. Strange irony: one’s fingers ‘burn’ when one touches the coldest fluid. A prickly feeling hard to describe: an unfamiliar kind of pain goes through one’s arm. Most likely he plucked that rose from the garden outside his house on the way to the laboratory, perhaps he described it in literary terms as ‘Goethe’s rose’. I am exaggerating. One doesn’t talk to children that way. Perhaps he simply dipped the flower in liquid nitrogen. Magic. With forceps he plucked the brittle object out of the dewar flask; in the sink the frozen rose shattered like glass. In the photo the kids look reasonably amused, dark intelligent eyes. He must have entertained them further with ‘helium snow’. His lab for a few minutes would have become the coldest place in Delhi, indeed one of the coldest on our earth. The second photo is also a time-ravaged black-and-white. Beyond doubt it is a demo of the lambda point, the strange transformation, the so-called ‘phase transition’. Beautiful, hyper-beautiful helium-4. What made him think the kids would comprehend the very essence of his work? Sudden, extreme changes in properties, extreme confusion. An ordinary fluid becomes a superfluid. I remember. He loved explaining phase transitions with that smile of his, calling them an ‘identity crisis’.

  Close to absolute zero, minus 271 degrees Celsius, liquid helium undergoes the crisis that collapses all definitions.

  Normal becomes anomalous then, and anomalous becomes normal. Particles cease to be particles, they become small waves, no, one giant wave, as if a startled flock of birds (or eels swimming together). Think of the flock as a giant orchestra, flying. Each airborne instrument, each bird playing the same startled tune. Everything is identical everywhere. Who am I?

  Helium has a very high heat capacity, and at very low temperatures it has an absurdly high heat conductivity. It stops boiling turbulently, defies gravity. It just ‘knows’ how to overcome obstacles. It becomes a fluid like no other, a superfluid. No friction, no viscosity, no resistance to its flow. Strange metamorphosis.

  Professor Singh must have used his own coffee cup and his deadpan voice. Let us do a thought experiment. Arjun, Indira, imagine this cup is half filled, not with water or milk, but with helium. Spontaneously . . . Look here. Look here. On its own the liquid rises, on its own it rolls over, on its own it crawls down the outer walls of the cup. And a lot of ‘He’ collects at the bottom, and you can see it, first as a little drop, and then as a big one getting bigger, dangling in response to gravity. Imagine Ganga landing from the heavens on Shiva’s head. Imagine a river flowing over a high bridge. He must have derived enormous fun explaining the micro-details to his children, using strange analogies and metaphors.

  That night at Mrs Singh’s place I curled over with real and phantom memories of death, of tiny superfluid drops on the sofa. I forgot to extinguish the slowly melting candles before drifting to a different world, and for some unknown reason thought about ‘Lihaf’ or ‘The Quilt’, Nelly’s favourite short story. A child, sleeping on a separate bed, in her aunt’s bedroom, witnesses something she doesn’t comprehend. On certain dark nights her aunt and her maid make love. To the child this seems like a fabulous transformation of a quilt into an elephant . . . Once in a while I heard the mad, twitching woman’s voice wafting from somewhere outside, wave after disturbed wave. I will go to the moon and tell them about you. Her wild laughter. In my dizzy state I finished what she started. On a Chandrayan, the moon machine, I will go and land on lava fields and frighten the gods . . . and I will tell them about you. One . . . two . . . three.

  Next morning, I am embarrassed to spell it out, I woke up with an erection. Strong light was pouring in through the window. I stretched myself.

  Something happens to one’s dreams when one is in the mountains. The high altitude, the changed magnetic field, all these factors influence the complex way blood flows in the brain. In my dark dream I made love to a friend of mine; the disturbing bit was that we hit each other and then fucked each other by 180-foot-high statues of Shiva and Kali and Hanuman, raw concrete, bronze and volcanic debris glowing in the harsh light of the sun. Afterwards we lifted heavy mountains on the tips of our fingers, and re-enacted Hanuman’s Lanka-burning feat. Jai Maruti. I woke up not just with an erection, but also with a lump in my throat because in real life there was no love or lust between the two of us, and I could not make sense of the unsettling parts of the dream. My mouth filled with ash and sand, completely dry. She lived on a different continent and was happily involved with, and powerfully attracted to, someone else. Nelly was absent in the apartment; a note was waiting for me on the dining table. Yellow, legal paper. She had covered my breakfast with heavy-duty insulators and it was still hot. Anda bhurji, dahi and T-parathas. I shaved, took a mugga bath (which flooded her bathroom) and, unable to locate a fresh towel, dried myself with an old black T-shirt; after changing my clothes I dared to spend a few moments in the bedroom. Everything so clean and tidy. The kind of order I had seen before at an ex-girlfriend’s place, who suffered from obsessive–compulsive disorder. Twice a day she would clean all the objects in her apartment, even books, which she would polish with a fine velvet cloth opticians use to clean prescription glasses. In Nelly’s room – a familiar smell I have not been able to
forget. On the windowsill, next to her comb, a tiny bottle. Trapped within walls of glass the oil was partially frozen. (Nelly used to massage Professor Singh’s hair with coconut oil. In winter whenever I visited their house, I would find a little glass bottle of coconut oil on the veranda, undergoing melting in the sun.) Linen on the bed as white as snow. As if she did not live alone, and was expecting someone any moment. A quilt, with rhomboid patterns, on one side. I sat on the bed for a brief minute and took a deep breath. Her smell. Still good. But like everything else, it, too, had aged. On the wall a Goya and a large framed photo of the indispensable Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam. Aj akhan Waris Shah nu / tikon kabran vichon bol / te aj kitabe ishq da / koi agla varka phol. The poem still invoked the Partition and its two million dead. That most elegiac line, the line that carries more sorrow than it can hold. On the side table an antique mint-coloured lamp and an extra pair of reading glasses, and an illustrated large-format Kipling.

  Once I was sexually attracted to Nelly, when I was very young and she was young, and now all that feeling had evaporated, and that was not the force field which had brought me to Shimla. The reason she offered me her sofa, and the reason I agreed, was because there was no possibility of a relationship between us.

  Time had ruined her, just like it was ruining me . . . And that is the only truth. Even the beauty of helium ceases one day. But let me not slip into something abstract. I must resist the urge to explain humans in terms of atoms, molecules, bosons and fermions. Flesh and blood and bones and warmth require a different type of telling. Let me travel back in time and describe a few things clearly. Busy with exams I was unable to leave the IIT boys’ hostel and join Nelly for badminton for almost a month. But I kept hearing the sound of the white-feathered shuttlecock. The sound still exists and resonates in my ears. The shuttlecock drifts back and forth for no good reason. She was absent the day I returned. From the canteen I phoned. No response. So I walked to my professor’s residence. The door ajar. I rang the bell, and when no one showed up, I knocked four or five times. She came. Barefoot, running, finger on lips. Shh! She was putting the children to bed.

  I waited in the living room. In the adjacent room she read them ‘Five Blind Men and an Elephant’. It is a spear. No, a snake. A tree. A fan. No, it is a rope. ‘The Five Blind Men of Hindustan and an Elephant’ – the children knew the story well, but they loved listening to every single word repeated over and over.

  Finally she stopped, and the house was so quiet one could have heard a pin drop. Then I heard Arjun and Indira breathe. After fifteen minutes or so she stepped out, and told me Professor Singh was away in Punjab for a couple of days. Shall I make you tea?

  I don’t recall all the fuzzy details. How exactly we came to hold hands. For a long time we held each other. The eye is less a window to the soul, more a window to the body. She was beautiful, and that very moment no longer my professor’s wife. But soon her body broke free and walked away. The angle at which she stood illuminated her wristwatch, and I ran after her and sniffed her long hair. We hugged then, and she smiled and critiqued my way of hugging, and demonstrated the proper heart-to-heart hug.

  We moved to the roof terrace. Where the night was dark, and proper. Up there the stars low, and bougainvillea lusty. Our secret remained within us, accumulating more and more nights, and days, and I don’t know when pure, awkward lust transformed into something more real. We quarrelled, then made up. Quarrelled. Patched up again. I learned exaggerated patience. Towards her. But became more and more irritable. Towards others. Sometimes we had sex for two or four or six hours. When I witnessed that IIT grad student in a compromising position, many years later on his Jor Bagh roof terrace, I felt as if I had walked into the familiar labyrinths of a mirror. Time was replicating my story. Our narrative. Once Professor Singh returned a day early from Punjab and found Nelly and me together. The way he interrogated us by not saying anything. His prolonged silence. Did he suspect? I am not sure. One can never be. It was a fact like any other, a truth like any other. But all based on how I felt.

  Like I am never sure about my childhood memories. When I was around eight, my father bought a Japanese cassette recorder. He taught me how to become a minor detective. I recorded the sounds and micro-sounds of our house, every single room. Even then I had a feeling that truth was hidden in other rooms. Because I heard mysterious sounds wafting from my parents’ bedroom, I was curious about those night sounds as well. So I left the cassette recorder in their room one night after dinner, concealed and turned on. The recording lasted for thirty minutes before the tape ran out. Next day I heard the tape. My mother is not in favour of torture. My good father says some torture is part of his job in the police force. We are not a developed country yet, he says. When we become a developed country we will stop these methods. You think I don’t feel bad? he asks her. My mother sounds like a closet human rights expert on the tape. My father, so naive, assumes that the West doesn’t torture.

  In Nelly’s apartment in Shimla my mind flowed with unwanted thoughts. Slowly my gaze moved towards the floor, and I noticed a white substance. Spilled milk. Despite spending five or six minutes trying to comprehend the spill, I met with no success. Close to the refrigerator in the kitchen there was a long puddle, and it seemed to have formed on its own, without an apparent source. My whole body quivered at the sight of that substance. Nelly had woken up before me. Why did she leave the spill unattended? The thing had a peculiar shape, a strange fractal geometry, and I switched on the brightest light and scrutinised it. The source seemed to be at the top of the refrigerator; a drop fell down, then another after a long wait. I found an identical puddle of milk at the very top of the refrigerator, but nothing falling from the ceiling. I ran towards the window – it was wide open. No wire mesh. Outside a cluster of dilapidated colonial erections, buildings becoming ruins, and big red-flowering trees, and slender pines and slightly shaking oaks; the air reeked of resin, and then I noticed an introspective monkey, as if Lord Hanuman himself, and close by a cluster of monkeys, one grasping on to a milk carton, and it was then I understood the spill . . . Nelly had left tea in a pot, shielded by a heavily padded tea cosy. I drank my tea black, and for a long time stood by the window, and then I closed it.

  The note had been written in no hurry; it said the expected. Namaste. Almost involuntarily I touched those small, baroque words. Something immutable: the handwriting had not changed. I would have been happier if she had used the Sikh greeting. She left me the keys as well.

  Feel free to visit my institute, my crumbling splendour.

  Shimla was a bustling slope of a city at that hour despite the chill. Flocks of hill mynahs delightful as I walked down the hill and then up again. Something startled the cloud of birds as they flew low right above me, thinning and thickening the air. For a brief second the flock shimmered, then soared away. I turned and caught them vanishing, rising steeply like an ensemble of tiny black data points. I turned and they shifted again into the shape of a graph of cosmic proportions. On the narrow trail I encountered a woman knitting a sweater as red as the rhododendrons. Slowly I looped around the Himachal University campus. Gliding through students made me feel young again, and old, both at once. The birds returned, another neat kink in the graph, and were gone. By the time I arrived at the institute most of the male staff members were out on the lawns basking in the sun.

  Inside the library the carpet was soft and blue. But it was very cold.

  Even before I entered I noticed big eyes behind the shelves staring at me, and an old uncomfortable feeling ran through my spine. Years ago Father had used a newspaper to kill mosquitoes; the eyes behind the shelves belonged to the same photo embedded in my memory. The paper was some censored rag during Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency. From high up the same eyes stared at me now. A few stones that made up the crumbling wall were visible. Ahead of me a glass partition. He stood as a mythical figure, the khaki-clad man behind the partition glued to a slab of a heater (the only heater in the lib
rary), grooming his intimidating moustache and simultaneously scratching his ear. I simplified our exchange (which had the potential to become Kafkaesque), ‘Madam-ji’s permission’, and showed him the yellow sheet of paper (which carried her signature). He frisked me and pushed me in. There was no heating – the original fireplace was plugged with potted plants. The research fellows and scholars and other readers were wrapped in two or three layers, sweaters, shawls or jackets and woollen caps and gloves with dangling ghostly fingers. It was the coldest library in the world, and I was walking through the space where the British Empire had danced only sixty or seventy years ago, and the eyes of the censorship woman on the wall (Mrs Gandhi) kept staring at me; the British Empire danced when nine million Indians died of a famine, the famine occurred because of cruel taxation policy, taxes were raised to fund the Afghan wars, and the Viceroy and the Vicereine danced here and had fancy-dress parties and ate here, the dining table was able to seat 150 guests, each one got their own personal liveried waiter, and the menus competed with the menus of Queen Victoria, they did not want to be left behind, those who plundered the wealth of India, they, too, ate bull’s head and wild boar, because it was on the Queen’s menu in England. But now it was a library, and now most of the portraits on the walls and the power and the Raj belonged to the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty that took over from the British, but the building was so huge there was space for others, full-bearded Tagore hung on the walls and Ambedkar, too, deep and pensive, also a portrait of the first female president of India (in a spacesuit), and ex-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher, who had come up with the idea to transform the Scottish baronial castle into a castle of higher learning. This was architecture of a grand crime, and the philosopher-president had come up with a grand scheme to civilise the architecture. I moved between two front shelves; now the eyes on the wall acquired a face, and I pulled out a book and turned and there she was, Nelly, by an unusually tall window in the reading room, far from me, the faded maple-orange curtain as high as the window. The corridor of the Empire had become a reading room; stacks filled with magazines and journals, current issues on display. From where I was I saw Nelly bent over a book, taking notes, it was a corner table, a half table, on her left a pile of books, on her right a pile of papers. I felt like slowly walking up to her, but decided not to disturb.