Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  One must be careful about one’s confessions, especially during moments of vulnerability, and perhaps it was not a good idea to share with Nelly that night my other life, something that had become an obsession.

  In my free time (on my colleague’s and Clara’s recommendation) I had started writing science fiction and slowly I found that my notes acquired a real dimension, a tangent line, and it transformed into Professor Singh’s story, as if his life was a circle, and by delving into the fog of words I hoped to touch the circle at a single point, a tangent line. How little I knew about him, and I made up a past and made up a future; in that sense I imagined what happened to Nelly and his children after the violence. For me the starting, crystallising image or the ‘decisive moment’ was the railway platform where Nelly had come to bid him farewell. What happened after the train was no longer visible, when it became two little red dots in the morning fog? Did my father talk to her then? What conversation brewed? Did he offer her a ride home? I imagined my good father cracking a joke about something. He drops her home. She invites him in for tea. I imagined infidelity.

  She listened to me, preoccupied, and before she told me ‘nothing of that sort happened’, I mentioned the new feeling within me, to determine only the truth, I was on the wrong track earlier. You know in the old version I made you (Nelly) watch the city of Delhi, burning in the fires of hell, from the top of a 120-metre-high water tank. Not so long ago at an IIT reunion in New York I met an ex-classmate of mine, who had watched the city (Delhi) burning from the top of a concrete water tank. I gave you (Nelly) his experience. I made you flee to safety from the barbaric slogans of hate: khoon ka badla khoon se. It wasn’t just the fire, you see, it was the acoustics. I could not help you then, but in my attempts to exhume and decipher the past, in my note-taking, I am not a coward. I am trying to achieve more and more clarity. The sole reason I go to these inane IIT reunions in North American cities is to recover your traces. Do you understand? Do you?

  ‘Is that why you have come?’

  ‘Yes, to see you.’

  ‘You are gathering material?’

  ‘I need your help. I have a tiny digital device. Tomorrow, if you don’t mind may I record you?’

  ‘Why don’t you consult the archives?’

  ‘No other story matters to me more than your specific story. No other truth matters. I have waited for over two decades to find out. Where are the children?’

  ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’

  ‘Please . . . where are they?’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘What happened to them? You have no photos of your son and daughter here. Why?’

  Again she didn’t respond directly to my question. Long, viscous silence lingered in the room. The heaters did the usual kit kit kit. Expansion, contraction, expansion. Heat has its own rhythm and subtle signals.

  ‘Are you comfortable on the sofa?’

  ‘I am all right.’

  ‘Tonight why don’t you sleep on the bed?’

  Then: ‘I insist.’

  She slept on the uncomfortable sofa and I slept on the bed. I didn’t fall asleep right away. She was exhausted and snored mildly. I undressed and changed into kurta pyjama. (Normally I don’t use pyjamas at night, I sleep naked, but Nelly had insisted and gave me a spare kurta pyjama. White.)

  In Ithaca when I read about children dying in Iraq or Afghanistan or Norway or Gaza I go and lock myself in my office. I don’t join the student demos on the campus. Even the most familiar tasks appear unbearable then. Self-loathing and emptiness eat me like dimak, and I accuse myself of a crime I never committed. Damaged, I am aware of the reliable disorder in my mind.

  Clara, my estranged wife, tried several times to reduce the disorder. During the early days of our relationship, she gave me an anthology of poems. She believes in the comforting power of poetry. The book occupies a privileged spot in my office. The only freak on those shelves (as characterised by a grad student of mine). The one time I achieved success opening those pages a line slipped me into a particularly difficult state of mind. A translation of a line by a Polish Nobel Laureate, whose longish name I don’t remember, knocked me down. Sparks began to fly. Poetry has never comforted me. To read a poem is a traumatic event. During my difficult spells (triggered by the strangest of causes) I envy Clara, and envy my friend and colleague. He is afraid someone may steal his sports car. Every couple of months he buys a new security device better than the last one. I envy him his little anxieties, and his deep commitment to work. How little it takes to make him happy.

  Sometimes I forget my second visit to Nelly’s IIT house. Completely uninvited. Eating an orange, I am walking straight from the boys’ hostel to her red-brick house. The road is freshly tarred and slowly I’m trying to make sense of a mathematical conversation I overheard not so long ago: in topology it is possible to create a body the size of our moon, out of a body as small as an orange, the mathematician had said, if you cut an orange or an apple properly it is possible, theoretically, to reassemble the pieces to create something as large as the moon. But in reality such cuttings are impossible because we are dealing with a real orange made up of real atoms . . . On the road I whistle a real old Bombay film song ‘Chand Ko Kya Malum’, and keep dropping the pips with strange abandon. Approaching closer I hear familiar voices, and see them clearly, the children, Arjun and Indira, on the roof terrace. Red and black clothes. Perhaps green and black. He, the real long-haired boy, is flying a kite and she, the real long-haired girl, is holding an unsteady wheel of string, unspooling. Coated with particles of glass, the long, angled string gleams, it glistens. The kite, a little red dot, soars higher and higher, and the girl keeps moving towards the edge of the terrace. I yell. Don’t move. Stop. But she inches backwards. Expecting the worst I drop the leftover orange, the peels and pips, the juiciest bits. I run. Close to the wall. I look up. She falls. No, she doesn’t. She heard me just in time and froze. Three or four other men, who noticed her moving precariously towards the edge, leave whatever they were doing and rush towards the wall. Never before had I witnessed this human impulse to save a life. The fall would not have killed her. Severe injury, perhaps, but it would not have killed. There is a sudden commotion outside the house, I hear it still. Nelly steps out. The girl, Indira, still frozen, starts sobbing. Her brother starts too, as if competing with his sister.

  Nelly climbs up the stairs, picks up her daughter. I climb up the spiral stairs. She has figured out exactly what happened. Nelly kisses my hand. First time such a tender thing has happened to my hand. She invites me to dine with them again that night. The news travels fast to the hostel and to the class. Professor Singh never thanks me verbally, but the gratitude is in his long looks, in his tone, in handshakes. Words, I did not know then, are a defective medium to say what one really wants to say.

  Shimla was peaceful that night on Nelly’s bed, but my insomnia didn’t give in. In the dressing-table drawers I located an album, a compilation of nothing. Only four or five dimak-eaten photos. One of them: Professor Singh, a six-year-old, dressed like a girl. Two braided ponytails.

  On Nelly’s bed my mouth felt completely dry. The girl’s photo stared me in the face. Was I doing something terribly wrong? In the dressing-table drawers, more albums. The second one had a yellowing postcard on the very first page, mailed to Mohan on 12 February 1979. Mr or Ms G describes a chance meeting with a creationist pastor, a descendant of Darwin. Mr or Ms G would like to get rid of bad habits and visit India soon. Lots of love, G. I reread the postcard, then lost interest. Engulfed by strange indifference I lost interest. This is not the reason I was in Shimla. Nelly had no idea I was going through intimate materials. The rest of the album felt insignificant: glossy pictures of birds, and hundreds of sketches. The third and the fourth albums were the same. Part Audubon’s field notes, part Hokusai. Real and unreal. I did not even know the names of those birds. A bird caught in rain. A bird blinded by daylight. I stared at them, they stared back at me. Murmuration
. A long list of technical words and phrases. I had to look one up in the dictionary. My thoughts acquired an absurd dimension that night, whirling, wobbling, and I thought again about my insignificant affairs and my obsessive–compulsive ex-girlfriend.

  Slowly I opened the bedroom door. No matter how carefully, the hinges never fail to be noisy. She woke up, startled, and sat up on the sofa.

  ‘Sorry I disturbed you, Mrs Singh. I feel like walking. I am going to step out for a while.’

  What else could I say?

  ‘Dr Kumar . . . at this hour?’ She was so formal.

  ‘If–’

  ‘Turn on the table lamp.’

  Four or five unwanted insects came to the lamp and started hovering.

  I forget many details of the surreal conversation that took place between us that night. I do recall her eyes from time to time gathering moisture and changing colour. She would place her index finger just above her upper lip, a gesture that made her face change drastically: at times she looked more than herself, at times less so. She talked and I listened and all I remember are the birds. The photos, twenty bundles, of birds. Nelly, a collector. No pesky questions, so I shared an old memory connected to birds. I badly wanted her to talk about her children, but there I was talking about birds. I offered an old memory. When I was eight or nine, my father drove me to the highest mountains to see snow. In my mind snow was warm and gluey and hard, something like salt, and I imagined the mountain birds turning completely white in winter. Father took me to an aviary in the mountains and I asked him if it was possible to spend the night with the birds in the aviary.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  ‘No, I am fine.’

  She asked me to turn on the brighter light.

  I poured myself a glass of water from the jug in the kitchen.

  On the sofa she wrapped a black shawl round her shoulders. Orange hem. No socks. In the apartment she rarely wore socks. Her hair looked less grey and brittle in that light. ‘Fathers,’ she said. ‘My dar-ji, too, took me on a similar journey,’ she said in a single breath. ‘He took me to the aviary. I called him Dar-ji. He would mimic the chatrik bird, who drinks only the swaati droplets that fall from the leaves of trees, and chakors and koels and the flame-throated bulbuls and papihas and sheldrake. Dar-ji would tell me about the trickster bagula and white baaj and egrets, and the migrating cranes. Ude ud aave se kosa / tis paachhe bachre chharya / tin kavan khalave / kavan chugaave? There are birds, they fly from far far away lands to escape bitter winters, they leave the children behind, who feeds their young? I would ask him to recite this passage from Gurbani over and over. But how does the bird know that it has to migrate? I would ask. But how does the bird know that it has reached its destination?’ Nelly was drifting slowly to some other world, her voice was now coming from somewhere I had no access to. This sudden monologue made her resemble Clara more and more, my wife.

  ‘One of the first lists I made as a girl was the list of migratory birds,’ she continued. ‘Sarus cranes that come from the edges of coldest Siberia. Curlews, who never lose their breath flying thousands of miles. The geese, who fly like machines, higher than Everest. But what happens to the bird who separates from the migrating flock? Why do some birds turn their heads from side to side several times before flying? Why were the birds in the aviary performing repetitive movements? Something was not right. The more I tried to play with them, the more I frightened them. Even the injured fledgling I held in my hand shrank with fear.’

  Sleep was heavy in her eyelids, but she didn’t stop, as if rehearsing her retirement speech. When she spoke about birds her gestures returned. She did not notice the magical moment, the phase transition. I saw a phantom wedding ring on those old fingers. If there was still a trace left of the original Nelly I knew, it was visible in those avian gestures. I’d seen those hands before, shelling peas and braiding her children’s long hair. Hands that also conveyed an openness, and an exuberant curiosity about the world. I sat down on the carpet. Now I was really uncomfortable.

  She told me that one of her projects at the archives was to actively seek material connected to ‘Empire and Ornithology’. Nelly was particularly interested in one Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant in colonial India; the white man lived in Shimla for several years, and it was here, in 1883–4, he conceived the idea of forming the Congress Party, which would eventually work towards Indian independence. The Congress was not formed by Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru, but by an enlightened Scotsman in 1885. Gandhi and Nehru joined the party much later.

  Twenty-five years ago when Nelly shifted to Shimla she had no idea that the colonial Hume was different from the philosopher David Hume. Allan Octavian was also a prodigious collector, with eccentrically large trophies of stuffed birds and eggs. The collection arose out of perpetual travel and constant communication with a vast network of ornithologists scattered throughout South Asia. He used his own savings to start a first-of-a-kind journal, Stray Feathers, and authored books like From Lahore to Yarcanda and The Nests and Birds of the Empire. Some call him the ‘Pope or the Father of Indian Ornithology’.

  For a moment I thought I had learned nothing about the history of my own country from the teachers at school.

  She paused. Her left hand cleared cold perspiration from her brow, and her thoughts drifted to a distant tribe in the Great Andamans. The Andamanese believe when we humans die we become birds, she said. That is why the population of birds is higher than that of humans. The tribe members never hunt birds, because to kill them is to destroy our own ancestors.

  Her tone was that of a rationalist, not superstition. How beautiful was this fluidity between humans and birds. How beautiful the semi-permeable membrane between the living and the dead. But a part of me felt that she wasn’t interested in answering the very real questions she herself had posed about the migration of birds. How do birds use Earth’s magnetic field to migrate? Is there a compass in their eyes? And if they are able to ‘see’ the magnetic field, then how do they fly at night?

  ‘Mrs Singh, I am an insomniac. When I was a child my father wrote poems about my inability to sleep.’

  She, apparently, didn’t hear me properly, and her thoughts drifted towards the terns of Havelock Island, and a different tribe. Then towards endemic birds (nightjar? Narcondam hornbill?) on a volcanic island, some hundred kilometres from the penal colony set up by the British.

  As much as I wanted the monologue to continue, I recall leaving the room in haste. I put on my jacket, collected the keys and simply walked out of the apartment, perhaps giving the impression that I could stand her no longer. But that was not why I fled.

  Once outside I heard sounds unfamiliar to my ears. Snow was falling faintly, but did not settle on the ground. Instant phase transition. The three phases of water, it seemed, found a temporary equilibrium. Nothing was going to change, I thought, trapped now in the city and its cold night. The neighbouring hills looked more alive with dim dots of light. Where are the children? Not a single word about them. Not a single word about God, etc., only the ballistic little miracle of birds. A breathing space, I felt. Birds for her were like tiny healing devices; they were her prayers. Nevertheless, where were the children? Arjun and Indira and? Did our relationship lead to something or someone? A new life? Stolen? The laptop, still heavy in my thoughts, sent me purposefully towards the Peterhof. By now I have forgotten the exact details of my slippery, uneven walk. Freezing translucent rain was falling on sinuous streets, on parked army vehicles, on the corrugated roofs, on the nursery school under construction. On the bronze head of Ambedkar. The great leader lost in deep thought on caste and power and utopian hope. Ambedkar, instead of hope, filled me with foreboding. One of the cops posted outside the hotel was peeing against a wall. When I waved he yelled and four or five of his colleagues marched me on crunchy pebbles to their senior officer in the tent. He smelled of betel nut, and demanded my papers, etc., and when I spelled out the details he demanded American dollars
, and it was only then I spilled out my father’s name, and his ultra-high rank, and the police inspector, not surprisingly, stood up, erect, and saluted me and apologised for his rude behaviour, and added ‘sir’ to whatever he said, ‘your father was/is a supercop, sir’, and then he asked me to accompany him to the lobby and ‘just point at the man who had last handled the bags, sir’. A few party delegates were shuffling about the lobby. Fortunately the man was still present at the reception. He was explaining a map to a young lady, and the digital clock on the wall was ten minutes slow. That one in black. The officer requested me to leave an address or return the next day and check at the reception. ‘We will see what we can do.’

  Nelly had moved to the bedroom during my absence, and the door was not ajar. The light in her room was on, and I felt someone else’s presence. My Zara jacket was wet and I spread it on the same dining chair where I had seen her clothes dry the first night. She was reading a text aloud. I moved close to the door and heard, it was the same cruel story my father would read to me when I was a child, he would use Kipling to put me to sleep, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’. Father would read ‘Kabuliwala’ and Alice and Dorothy as well and Panchtantra and Lamb’s abridged Shakespeare and Grimm Brothers and Chandamama and Vikram aur Vetal. Several times I felt like knocking mildly on her door, but I didn’t and continued to scan the objects in the living room, the bookshelves, and I happened to discover by sheer chance a large collection of children’s books at the bottom. My conjecture was Nelly chose a different book every night and read it aloud to an imaginary child curled up in her bed.

  This is how she had maintained her sanity. (I was proven correct a few days later.) How wrong Professor Singh was that day on the train when he said that the three most important questions for us concerned the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of mind. He forgot to add other questions, or shall I say he forgot to ask the three really significant ones: Why do people respond differently to traumatic events? How do we remember the past? Why when ‘meaning’ collapses in our lives, do some of us seem to locate a new ‘meaning’?