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Helium

Page 11

by Jaspreet Singh


  What are you doing? The Brahmins tried to stop him. Listen, brothers, said Nanak, the wheat fields of Punjab are really dry . . . But your water will never reach the crops, the Brahmins mocked him. Brothers, spoke Nanak, if your water is able to flow all the way to the sun, which is millions of miles away, then sure my water will fall like a heavy monsoon shower over the fields of Punjab.

  My family had agrarian roots. My father was the first one who attended university. He got a doctorate in botany and taught at the agricultural university in Ludhiana. I grew up listening to Partition stories. Every time he would tell a story my hand would automatically rise to my mouth. Stories that informed me that the Punjabis and the Bengalis did most of the dying. The so-called ‘azadi diwas’ was really a ‘barbadi diwas’. The holocaust could have been avoided, if only Lord Mountbatten and our leaders had chosen to act differently . . . Two million people dead, twenty million displaced. Women raped. Tens of thousands of children became orphans. We Sikhs were separated from most of our historic and cultural centres. The birthplace of Nanak and the place of his death are now on the wrong side of the border. The Partition dead were never mourned properly, so much was suppressed, the government built no memorials, for so many people life continued amid the ruins as if nothing had happened. To build memorials is to acknowledge not just what ‘they’ did to us, but also what ‘we’ did to them.

  [Pause.]

  It is painful for me to continue.

  [Pause.]

  One day my father informed me over dinner that an IIT professor who knew even the tiniest details about the big bang and other theories of the universe was interested in me.

  [Smiles.]

  You were considerably younger?

  Yes, and I was notorious for rejecting men my father would introduce.

  Mohan was in town to deliver a lecture at the local engineering college. I attended the talk, and was mesmerised. I requested my father to do everything in his power to invite Mohan home! Our first conversation was not about food or weather, but about work, about the archives. I had done an advanced course at the National Archives in Delhi. He asked me about my thesis. I had completed two projects. ‘How Outsiders Have Looked at Us Indians’, and ‘Nehru’s Prison Letters to his Daughter’. I never managed to finish my report on textile dyes. ‘Indigo’ in particular.

  Mohan asked if I was interested in the Punjab as well. I recall mentioning the Russian prince Soltykoff’s 1842 travels to Ludhiana in ‘Punjaub’, as he used to say. Soltykoff wrote: I am able to see the Shivalik mountains from Ludhiana. Mohan found this particular line strangely amusing and smiled.

  And then I asked him my first question, about his projects, and he said: Only one. Helium.

  He played bridge and tennis. I had no fondness for tennis, I felt more at ease with badminton and its feathered shuttlecocks. He presented himself as a cosmopolitan, sophisticated reader, who liked Musil, but stayed away from Maugham. I liked Virginia Woolf and Dickens and Hardy and was oddly indifferent to Maugham. Both of us had read Bhai Vir Singh’s Punjabi Renaissance novels in translation. Soon my knees will fail. Will you marry me? This is how he proposed! Yes, I said. Then he recited from memory a translated Turkish poem by Nazim Hikmet.

  Our wedding took place in a gurdwara; we spent our honeymoon in Kashmir in a houseboat called Neil Armstrong. Mohan, I soon found, was a bit like my father without his defects. This made him slightly less interesting. He had a tendency to make everyone happy, so life with him was less dramatic. After our honeymoon we visited a relative in Amritsar. My new husband knew that auntie-ji and uncle-ji didn’t approve of husbands doing the laundry. So: Mohan washes our clothes including the undergarments in the bathroom, and asks me to go and hang them to dry on the clothes line.

  Harmandar, the way we refer to the ‘Golden Temple’. It was just after our honeymoon, I still remember. My husband and I were circumambulating the shimmering pool in the Harmandar complex, and he commented on the orange haze of a blob, the reflection of sun in water, and he started describing the surface of ‘helios’ to me, our sun’s mysterious core. His one obsession was ‘Helium-3’. Thermonuclear equations, etc., etc. I phased out for a while, and don’t recall how our conversation turned to ‘neutrinos’. I knew neutrons. But neutrinos? Was it a diminutive? Mohan explained they were particles that go right through you. No charge. No mass. Ghost particles, Nelly. Going right through you and me, Nelly, and those beautiful marble inlays and the waters and the unrusting dome of Harmandar. They are all around us, invisible, dancing, a movement you would have never known. They come to us from deep inside the helios. Millions and zillions of them, passing through. For neutrinos there are no walls, Nelly.

  Harmandar has no walls. I almost levitated while saying this to Mohan. It is open to all the people in the world, the entire human race. He looked at me with deep affection, and it was at that precise moment I think I fell in love with him.

  Indira Gandhi is no longer your hero. When did she cease to be so?

  [Pause.]

  Would you like to say something?

  When I heard the news of her death I wept. But the Congress Party didn’t allow me and so many others to mourn her. On the TV we saw the close-up of her face (her body lay in state at the Teen Murti House), and the soundtrack on the national TV was the music of the mob – inciting people to kill all the Sikhs in the country. The Information and Broadcasting Minister responsible for the telecasts was later rewarded by the new Prime Minister, Indira’s first son. (The minister, H. K. L. Bhagat, was also the ex-Mayor of Delhi. Hundreds of eye-witnesses and victims accused him of mass murder in ’84. How strange he was born on the same day as Goebbels.)

  You have not told me much about your daughter. You rarely mention her.

  She was born a year after my son, and they were so alike and so different. She was not shy like him, she would go to people, make friends, she learned everything faster than him, she learned to walk before him, talk before him, and she never once said those hurtful things my son would say: I will make you unhappy. But why? Because you didn’t do this for me or you didn’t do that for me.

  She got this home assignment on flags . . . The teacher had asked her to select the map of a neighbouring country and write twenty lines about the country, and my girl was disappointed. She wanted to write twenty lines about Mexico, but Mexico was not our neighbouring country – she had two hundred lines ready on Mexico, on Oaxaca. She loved the way it is pronounced, Wah-ha-ka. She opened the atlas and looked at the maps. Of all the neighbouring countries she chose Pakistan, our official enemy. Why? Because I have to play, I don’t have much time, and the map of Pakistan is the easiest thing to sketch. She drew the map and used green crayons and asked me to help her write those twenty lines, but I really didn’t know how to begin telling her the story of that complex neighbour. Nepal or Sri Lanka would have been easier, even Bhutan.

  The children were extremely fond of my friend Maribel. She said her name was made out of two words, Maria plus Isabel. I met her at the IIC library, where I worked in the archives section. She worked in the cultural wing of the Mexican High Commission. She was curious about Octavio Paz’s days in Delhi (when he was the Mexican ambassador to India). We had invited her to the Diwali dinner six days earlier and, while the children ignited the firecrackers and sparklers, I told her the joyous reason why Sikhs celebrated the festival of lights. She asked me then about the difference between the Sikh and Hindu ideas on reincarnation. Whenever she said ‘cows’ it really meant ‘chaos’. She had given beautifully illustrated books (by an artist called Posada) to my children; one was on the Mexican Day of the Dead. I checked if the books were appropriate for children – my daughter and my son were impressionable, and they would find it difficult to sleep if they heard a frightening ghost story. Maribel said, ‘In Mexico the Day of the Dead is the most joyous and festive day . . . And she invited us to a gathering at her place. What is the party about? OK, we will call it a “Diwali fancy dress” party,’ sh
e said.

  Maribel . . . The Day of the Dead . . . Dress . . . We introduced her to my tailor-master in Khan Market. My son and daughter and Maribel and I had gone to get our costumes made. I had no idea. Vaquero dress for my boy (and her boy), and Maharani for my girl (and her girl). The tailor-master handled Maribel’s body differently, he touched her inappropriately and I scolded the rascal until he trembled, and when he took my measurements he was extremely cautious, maintaining five inches of distance with his so-called inch-i-tape, and my son laughed and laughed until he was on the floor. I often forget how much we laughed in ’84.

  How eerie that day was when Maribel picked up her glittery new dress and she resembled my mother as a young woman. She had her long hair braided – she told me it’s called trenzas in Spanish. She told me more details about the Day of the Dead, the way the Mexicans celebrate it; they cook for the absent ones, she said. The dead ‘eat’ on that day food they liked when alive. And the living eat pan de muerto, freshly baked bread shaped like an assemblage of bones, and sugar skulls. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is celebrated with jokes, marigold flowers and laughter, Maribel said. And lots of alcohol.

  And my children (Arjun and Indira) tried the dresses on. They had grand plans to go to school decked up in their new clothes on 14 November, Children’s Day (and Nehru’s birthday). Maribel and I had our own private plans for 14 November. We had tickets to attend the Nehru Memorial Lecture. Octavio Paz was going to deliver the lecture that year.

  On 30 October I dropped Mohan at the train station. (I had packed his suitcase the previous night, and I had forgotten his toothbrush.) From the station I took an auto-rickshaw to the Mexican High Commission. Maribel served hot chocolate and churros and played me her favourite song. Later I collected my children from school and we took another auto to stay at my brother’s place in Greater Kailash. My brother was a wing commander in the Indian Air Force, he had fought the ’71 war with Pakistan, which got him the Maha Vir Chakra from the President on recommendation of Mrs Gandhi. He had also participated in Operation Meghdoot when India took control of Siachen Glacier in Kashmir. His house was filled with sparkling medals and trophies. And knick-knacks from Russia. Bust of Yuri Gagarin. On 31 October when we heard the news about Mrs Gandhi’s assassination we didn’t eat. My brother played the saddest classical music on his HMV player, I remember his little dog stopped barking when it heard the music. Next morning I didn’t send the children to school. They did their homework, and later they were eager to try on the newly stitched costumes and I gave them permission to do so only in their room. It was my daughter’s idea to swap the costumes. We had a light lunch, and soon it was time for evening prayers. We washed our hands, covered our heads and prayed. During prayers my left eye kept flickering.

  And then: a knock on the door . . . I will never forget those five minutes. Three hundred dreadful seconds. We never believed that any harm would come to us. My daughter kept saying she had to finish her homework. I forced the kids to hide under the bed upstairs. My brother loaded his pistol and he asked the Congress thugs to disappear and he even fired in the air. It was then the cops appeared and they said they were going to take away his weapon and they were there to protect us. My brother was not going to but I forced him to listen to the police inspector. As soon as the police disappeared the mob reappeared and they dragged my brother out and made him sing the national anthem and bow before a calendar image of the goddess Durga and cut his hair and his beard and cut his penis and cut his testicles and doused kerosene on him and burned him . . . and then my daughter, no, my son . . . my daughter saved me . . . she saved me . . . she was dressed like a boy, she had seen so many things . . . she is the one who went to the neighbours and because of her three or four women came and they formed a chain around me and would not give me up . . . Leave my mother alone, she said . . . and my son, that idiot, came down as if he was competing with his sister to save me . . . Give us your son, and the Congress thugs picked her up, took her and smeared her with a white explosive powder (as if they were playing holi) and burned her . . . phosphorus, I know it was phosphorus, Mohan had shown me phosphorus in the lab . . . we will burn your daughter as well, they said . . . but they fled with the loot, including the war medals and the colour TV . . . the screams of my ‘son’ . . . she never once said that she was a girl . . . sometimes I think if they had taken my real son I would have behaved differently.

  [Pause.]

  I helped them kill my own daughter.

  You didn’t go to the police?

  Barefoot I ran after them . . . holding my ‘daughter’ tight I ran after them. Most of the Hindu men in the neighbourhood did nothing. Some applauded. It was not clear if they were applauding me or the killers or the cops, who did nothing. I asked the cops for help, but there was no help. I ran all the way to the main police station and the SHO didn’t register the preliminary FIR report . . . He refused to file a complaint. ‘Same thing will happen to you as happens to other Sikhs . . .’ At the police station there were other women as well. Similar stories. To stay there would have meant rape . . . sure rape . . . The sub-inspector didn’t allow us to leave. Then a man showed up, God knows from where. He said I was his wife. He said I was not a Sikh, that I was his half-mad wife who had run away from the house taking advantage of the ‘riots’. I didn’t trust him, but I decided to trust him as it was the only way out of the police station. At that point I just wanted to save my son and I didn’t care for the other women. The man took us to his big house and put us in the tiny room, the barsati on the roof terrace. He locked the barsati – he said this was for our own safety. There was no bathroom. My son clung to me tight. Two days later the man unlocked the barsati and drove us to the relief camp. He said Sikhs were really Hindus. He said the violence was wounding the Temple of India. On the way to the camp I kept saying to that good man, What have you done to my daughter? He looked at me with incomprehension. Then he wept.

  At this point did you know anything about what had happened to Professor Singh?

  No. From the camp I called home several times. But no one picked up the phone. I called the IIT Chairman. He didn’t pick up the phone either.

  Where were you?

  I should have called Maribel earlier from the camp. But I was shocked and paralysed. So many women had been raped . . . and two of them noticed that the same Congress leader, H. K. L. Bhagat, who, according to witnesses, had ordered his men to kill thousands of Sikhs and rape the women, was now there in the camp distributing blankets and food. The women had seen the Congress leader before. They pounced on him. Eighty-year-old Sikh men were crying like babies in the camp.

  Just like one cannot forget Einstein’s face, no matter how distorted, I am unable to forget the face of that monster H. K. L. Bhagat. Member of Parliament. Cabinet Minister. Ex-Mayor of Delhi.

  I called Maribel and she came right away in a diplomatic car with security guards on four motorcycles. Guardias de seguridad. Maribel installed us in the High Commission. I simply can’t tell my husband that I have lost my daughter. You tell him. Maribel, you are not allowed to tell him she is no more. Half a day later Maribel brought back the news, she was in tears, she said it is best I tell you now that your husband is no more. Don’t lie, Maribel. The IIT Chair had accompanied her. He was waiting in the living room, and I refused to see him.

  I slipped into a vegetable-like state. My son was playing in the other room. I asked Maribel not to tell him that his father was no more. My son had already observed a lot. He sketched a lot, and wrote a lot in his tiny journal. Circles, triangles, straight lines, gibbous eyes. Some of his images were right out of Maribel’s book – imaginary insects and a profusion of strange saffron yellow flowers. Cempasúchitl.

  But something had changed in our relationship. I was not able to touch him after that. I have not been able to touch anyone since November ’84.

  For a few days we played this grand elaborate game for him, as if all the violence was a game, as if it was really part
of the Mexican celebrations. I told the boy his father had taken his engineering students to a factory in a foreign country.

  What happened to your things at the house in IIT?

  Maribel. She fell while retrieving the things. She broke her tooth. Me quebré un diente! she said. Charred LP player. The molten records resembled a Dalí exhibition. Most of the books that burned were our copies of Ramayana and Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita. My husband had a twelve-volume translation of the Rig Veda. Half of these were reduced to ashes. So many other books were destroyed: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, two translations of the Adi Granth, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Shame by Rushdie, A History of the Sikhs by Khushwant Singh, Pale Fire by Nabokov (first edition), a copy of the Bible Mohan purchased at an antiquarian book fair in Ithaca, an anthology of Punjabi Dalit literature, Dubliners by James Joyce, poems by Shiv Kumar Batalvi and Dhani Ram Chatrik, Correspondence Between Tolstoy and Gandhi, Feynman Lectures, El Llano en Llamas by Juan Rulfo, The Man Without Qualities by Musil, The Little Prince, two books by Jean Amery, The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham, P. G. Wodehouse, Borges.

 

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