Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  To come out of my vegetable state Maribel suggested travels. She was the one who got us passports and visas and I withdrew most of the money in the bank and my son from school and I flew to Italy. Professor Singh had already planned the trip, and we were waiting for our savings to build up . . .

  Then we took the train to Milan and from Milan the train to Switzerland. The Alps. And Zurich. All I remember of Zurich are the roasted chestnuts we had after not eating for two days. On the way back we spent two nights at the Milan railway terminal, we had no more money left. That is where during a vulnerable moment I told my son that his father was no more. In that fascist train station (built by Mussolini, as I found out later) my mind and my body overflowed with suicidal thoughts. My son didn’t believe his father was dead. He said he had seen him yesterday. Where? Behind the train to Zurich. On the train to Basel. I believed his fictions. Both of us started looking for his father in that fascist terminal. At first I thought he was an apparition. A chance meeting at the terminal, someone I knew was walking towards us. He was the chief librarian at the India International Centre, Delhi, and he was in Italy to attend a workshop on the Medici collection.

  As long as you are alive your story is alive, my senior told me.

  And he is the one who got me this position at the institute archives.

  Any trouble here at the institute?

  The director has been good to me in his own way; I have improved the archival collection. This is what I am good at and it kept me going. Ironically, it is in the libraries where I have always felt free. Another reason I continued is that my son knows I am always involved with the libraries and archives, and if he really wants to come back to me he knows where to locate me. But of late I have been losing hope, and the reason I decided to retire early is because I have lost all hope of his return. Over the years I have saved some money and I would like to start an oral history project. As long as I am alive, my story is alive. I cannot forget the unbroken voice of that woman who lives in the slums in Delhi, she lost twenty-six members of her family in a single day. As long as I am alive I will feel ashamed to call myself an Indian, the woman had screamed. At the end of the day all she had was her husband’s leg, half eaten by dogs. Agar Angrez hotey to hum bach jatey. In British-ruled India we would have survived. That woman who held on to Gagan Singh’s amputated finger. She doesn’t know how to read or write but she carries an entire archive inside. I would like to locate all of them, and interview all the survivors. That woman whose fasting, mourning husband was burned before her eyes. Where is Nanaki Bai now? Does she comprehend the ‘abnormal’ better now? That girl with two ponytails, who did not speak for three months? What happened to that mourning tongue? Where is she now, the three-year-old who screamed at the peace marchers, meri mummy ko mat maro, don’t kill my mother? Mira Bai? Tin dhiyan si mayriyan. Lash vi nahi milee. I had three daughters. We couldn’t even find their corpses. I would do anything. I would locate, too, the stories of the dead. Stories of those who saved lives. Countless unsung heroes, Hindus and Muslims and Christians, who risked their own lives to save lives. This is going to be my monument to them all, and I would like to work without institutional interference. Do you understand?

  Where is your son?

  [Pause.]

  Do you really think he is alive?

  Who?

  Your son . . .

  Of course. He is waiting. Waiting for the right moment to surface. To come back to me. When we returned to Delhi from Milan the immigration guard gave him a dirty look. But after our return my son wanted to go back to the camp . . . He said he was sure his father was in the camp . . . Again I found it easier to believe him . . . So we returned . . . and there were so many helpless people there, so many jumbled emotions . . . those who had survived due to the kindness of neighbours, those who had been savaged by neighbours, those who had seen senior Congress Party leaders like Kamal Nath directing, inciting the mobs close to the parliament building . . . lament, helpless anger, lament, helpless rage . . . How roles had reversed in the camp. Men behaved like women and women like men. Children kept saying to phantom parents: Take us home . . . Maribel sent her own driver with us to Shimla . . . My son did not want to join the new school. I insisted. One day he didn’t return home. He was only eight then.

  Do you believe in God?

  I used to. And now I only believe in music. Even now during my darkest moments I find myself reciting pavan guru pani pita mata dharat mahat, divas raat dui dai daya khelay sagal jagat. But I think God doesn’t exist. All we have is music.

  This recording I have heard more than twenty times by now. It always stops. Stops with a loud pounding sound. They were the monkeys on the roof in Shimla. I spent the rest of the night listening to her breathing punctuated occasionally by the sounds on the roof. One question not part of this recording: Did you do anything to get justice? Nelly didn’t say anything. Outside the window snow kept falling. I knew at some point it would stop.

  My name doesn’t matter. What matters is my age. Soon I will turn fifty-six and I don’t even have a house of my own.

  I have lived in the mountains for twenty-five years now. For twenty-five years in this ‘approximate’ hill station. I love the crispness of the air here, and recognise the sounds and silences of this town, the bells and whistles. At nine o’clock the last train will roll into the Summer Hill station, I will hear the rumble and its echo, and around two in the morning a platoon of monkeys will climb up the roof of my rented apartment and cause a minor geological activity. They know I live alone and that is why they never fail to put on a special performance. After they leave all I will hear is silence. Andhera. Khamoshi. Once in a while the leaves and the fluttering of flags in the wind.

  …

  There is a reason I didn’t remarry. A man was persistent, but I refused. To get married at this age, he said, is for companionship and to lie next to each other on the same bed, if not sex, for touch. I am afraid of being touched, I told him. Ever since I was little I have not been touched much, I lost my birth mother and birth father very young and Dar-ji didn’t touch me at all, he would not even embrace or hug, and whatever I learned from my husband I seem to have forgotten. These days the only things I touch are books and even those, distantly.

  …

  Raj believes me when I say that I have given up all hope. How could a mother give up hope for her son’s return? I would like to hug tightly my boy one last time. Every day I chart out hundreds of thousands of different paths he would have followed. I write letters and emails to known and unknown individuals on those paths. Some respond with materials, which break my heart, and make me go through helpless rage. This is how I am assembling the 1984 archives.

  He didn’t come home from school, he took the toy train to Kalka, then the night train to Delhi, and from the railway station he walked to the so-called ‘relief camp’, but there was no camp any more, so he took the DTC bus to the IIT campus. Walking around, he felt hungry. His pockets empty. No more money. He felt like crying, and walked all the way to Bangla Sahib Gurdwara. I have charted hundreds and thousands of paths Arjun would have followed.

  Morning brightened the mountains. Snow on all things living and dead. But it didn’t last long and vaporised without melting. Then it rained hard. When it stopped raining the city erased its memory of snow. I found the drops of blood had disappeared in the bathroom. She had obviously noticed, and wiped them clean. I made tea. Nelly came to the living room sobbing. I gave her my shoulder. You didn’t ask me a few things, she said. The most important one you left out. When I packed Mohan’s suitcase that night, when I forgot to pack the toothpaste (Promise toothpaste) I was wondering what Mohan was thinking.

  Nelly realised she was sobbing, a belated awareness, and tried to stop. You didn’t ask about the night of packing. Not everything was at peace despite his good spirits. There were the usual tensions at work, rivalries, and a difficult situation that had cropped up at the hostel, something between a student and a Dal
it employee, said Nelly. But I was thinking that night about what Mohan was thinking about me. In August ’84, two months after the attack on the Golden Temple, Mohan and I had gone to Punjab to attend a cousin’s wedding. I still recall the sombre mood during the ceremony and the reception. The boy’s father didn’t show up, he had opposed the wedding because the girl was a Hindu. Something about that atmosphere was stifling, the August heat stifling. What does it matter? I said to a relative. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you. Because you are a Dalit.

  This had never come up before. Of course she didn’t say ‘Dalit’, her tongue used a more derogatory word. But the certainty and uncertainty of the revelation stunned me to silence, said Nelly. Some relatives standing around us rushed to denial. No, you are not impure. You are different. You are also very fair . . . The relative who revealed the secret raised her hand to her mouth. I shouldn’t have, she said, said Nelly. No one knew the details about my past, no one was able to guide me to the unknown. My own memories, if I ever formed memories of my early years, were virtually non-existent.

  In Delhi I asked Mohan if this mattered to him. Why should it matter to me? he said. We were in the kitchen. He was doing the dishes and I was drying them with a cloth. But if I had grown up in an impoverished Dalit family, we would not have married. But you didn’t grow up in a Dalit family. I mean if I had, let us just assume? Mohan was silent. Both of us felt like orphans that night, said Nelly. For more than a month or a couple of months I didn’t feel like sleeping with him. We did not sleep in the same room. It is all coming back to me now. When my father would tell me about birds, he once said that I, too, had come to him as a bird. My father never told me about my adoption. Often he shielded me from his relatives. I know it must have been difficult for him. He was very bold, now that I think about it, he was also very wrong. All my memories of my birth mother and birth father are totally expunged. Why was I adopted? Is it because my biological parents disappeared? Always I shudder when the thought crosses my mind, said Nelly.

  Were their Dalit bodies set on fire the way upper castes often do? Or did they merely endure the ‘normal’ invisible everyday violence?

  Caste, said Nelly, how ironic. It is embedded in all organised religions. Even those with aspirations to eliminate it.

  The day was progressing quickly. Outside the window the clouds were low, but the sun had started to play games. Fresh light as it fell on fresh snow on the mountains had the feel of Japanese prints by Hokusai. In one of his notebooks, Hokusai writes about breaking the rules set by old masters, and I don’t know why while listening to Nelly I thought also about Hokusai. So much information had erupted in such a short span of time. Unable to absorb it fully, I felt a knot in my belly, a choking sensation in my throat, as if I were standing on the summit of an eight-kilometre-high mountain, looking down. Inside that safe room I experienced vertigo. Some feel vertigo in their calves or groin, I always get the sensation in my chest. I sat on the kitchen chair to recover balance. When I recovered, my eyes opened to the rectangle of light pouring in through the window. Outside, the city was mute, gleaming in the sun. Soon after melting the snow, I thought, the sun would heal the grass and the oaks. My healing, too, was connected to Nelly’s healing, I thought. She had cleared blood from the bathroom, and she limped when she walked. Something was not right, I knew then.

  During breakfast I asked her more about her adoption. She raised her voice (so unlike her). Then a phone call. I think she was expecting the call. The wrinkles on her face moved like minor mountains as she spoke. Briefly I phased out. The sun disappeared again, but I knew it was only a game. Nelly was on the phone for a long time. The doorbell rang. Perhaps that is what brought an end to the call. The postman came up. She collected the parcel. The package was not addressed to her. ‘For you,’ she said.

  It was an overnight delivery dispatched by Father. The khaki package heavy. Momentarily I thought all his awards and medals were inside.

  Medals were awarded in ’85 to police officers for meritorious, distinguished or gallantry work performed in 1984. ‘Meritorious’ is the code word for mediocre losers, Father told me once. ‘Distinguished’ means the officer is just about to retire. The ‘gallantry’ medal is the only real medal. But then I don’t know why Father received a gallantry in ’85, his third ‘real medal’. In ’72 he got a gallantry because he nabbed a gang of dacoits. Again in ’79 he received one for rescuing a kidnapped child. This was reported in the papers, and it raised his professional profile. He was treated like a real hero because he had injured himself during the rescue mission. Father fell from a horse, fracturing both his arms. The only time I saw him grow a beard. During those days when he was in the hospital ward, I would stand in front of a mirror at home wearing his police hats.

  What was in the package? I need to explain a few things. Without informing Nelly I had called Father and politely asked him to help locate Arjun. The old man, retired now, still knew how to pull a few strings within the police force, and I provided all the information to help trace the missing boy, who (if alive) was now a man thirty-five years old.

  Nelly was hiding something important from me. Arjun never attended that school in Shimla. The headmistress of the school told me ‘no one with that name was enrolled in our school in ’84, ’85 or ’86’.

  I must mention that I was not expecting Father to respond so quickly. In fact when Nelly said ‘the package is for you’ I imagined a collection of papers from my colleague at Cornell. Or papers connected to Dow Chemicals acquiring Union Carbide and the latest soil and water report on Bhopal. What arrived instead was a package containing the Hindi ‘translation’. Clara had suggested the project to Father during the one and only Skype call. He had not been able to expunge the contents of the call from his memory, and translated almost all the myths for my daughters.

  Almost all of them. For he had ignored a few. He neither acknowledged nor translated the ‘modern myths’. No handwritten note fell out of the package explaining why he ignored the five new myths I had formulated for my American daughters, Urvashi and Ursula. Five myths connected to violence in post-independence India. One of them involved November ’84. A father and son walk on corpses, burning carcasses. Stumble upon piles of hair, burnt rubber tyres, amputated limbs and ash. The son asks his father about those men, who returned home after setting bodies on fire, men who returned after rape. What did they tell their children and wives? Did the wives go to bed with them that night? The father doesn’t respond. He continues to listen to his son’s strange questions: Were there women who denied sex to their husbands? For how long did they refuse to make love?

  Father’s translation or rather ‘lack of translation’ distracted us. Instead of helping me persuade Nelly to reveal details about her adoption, we got sidetracked. Nelly had just begun telling me about the origin of the word ‘caste’ when the package arrived. How the Portuguese seafarers saw social relations in India in the fifteenth century . . . I must have been completely out of my mind. I told her about the details, the ‘translation’. Now I know I committed a big faux pas by handing her the package.

  Nelly read the untranslated passages silently towards the end. After she was done I murmured a few incomprehensible words. She didn’t ask me to repeat or explain; slowly the disturbance within me dissipated on its own.

  She was not mad at me, but she gave me an interrogative look. ‘Instead of composing these absurd “modern myths” why not write about the boy who didn’t return? It is not just your father who is living the lie, but you as well.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  Now that you have shown me these pages, and before this asked all your schoolboyish questions, let me ask you my own, said Nelly. Not that they are significant, not many things in my remaining life are, but they might be to you. I know the answer, and perhaps I am right, but I would like to hear it from you, said Nelly. (Some of her old gestures returned, and her hands were shaking.) That answer is more significant than
any real or imaginary drops of blood you happen to have seen now or twenty-five years ago . . . You were Mohan’s favourite student. In his eccentric scheme you were placed at the very top, special. You knew this, the entire class did. Mohan rarely invited students home to dinner, not even star students, but he made an exception. The star students would come to tea (two or three times a year) and my interaction with them was minimal. Open the door, make tea, serve snacks, then disappear to my room. It was useless eavesdropping. After the students left he would tell me about them, what he really thought about them despite the grades; at times he would pronounce harsh judgements.

  You were an exception. You came with exceptional talent, a ‘model’, an ‘ideal’, and you were well grounded in the arts. It was possible to have a real, intelligent conversation. He made a judgement about you as well – the difference is that he made the judgement before inviting you to our place. I was curious. When you first came to our house I was not taken by you. You were shy and did not say much, and you were in awe of your professor. Mohan looked visibly pleased with himself. Then I looked at your sandals, the black sandals and they made me laugh. The sandals didn’t match your body, you had a strange aesthetic sense . . .

  Twenty-five years later you did not have to come back to tell me that you had joined Cornell. I checked the website. Over the years I have learned to use the Internet. I had gone to the university website to check if Gergina was still there. She was Mohan’s first love (before he met me), a fellow graduate student, and he had broken her heart. I wanted to tell her that the person she had loved was dead and gone. Gergina was there on the website, a full professor now. A distinguished-looking woman ageing gracefully. And your name was next to hers. And I didn’t send her an email. How does one explain something that cannot be explained? In her mind the man she loved once was still alive (and also dead). Most likely she had not heard. I thought it was perhaps for the best not to disturb her peace.