Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  She recalled even the darkest times as patches of a strange and intimate language, her husband saying over and over dhundhla dikhda hai about Partition (all I see is fog), and her son saying over and over saah ghutda hai about the pogrom in ’84 (I’m choking). It is impossible to translate, no equivalents exist in English. Shimla, instead of allowing forgetting, imposed more and more remembering. Shimla became her Harappa and Mohenjodaro. Shimla was Excavation.

  Then the unexpected happened. In February 1987 a Burmese scholar arrived at the institute, who started enquiring about the history of the Indian National Congress, and while assisting her, Nelly by sheer chance came across the Hume Papers. The Hume Papers, like Maribel, helped heal Nelly.

  Grandson of the founding director of the East India Company, Hume, this most unlikely agent of healing, sailed to India in 1849 to work as a civil servant, and witnessed first hand the 1857 ‘War of Independence’, which left a deep impression on him. When he arrived the young, twenty-year-old bureaucrat was just like any other Scotsman who had been sent to India to do the dirty work for the Empire. But years later, quite ironically, he wrote, ‘No earthly power can stem a universal agrarian rising in a country like this. My compatriots, the British, will be as men in the desert, vainly struggling for a brief space against the simoom.’ Hume became a vegetarian and more and more outspoken with time. But his mind was essentially the mind of a collector; not many know today that he was an amateur ornithologist in contact with a vast network of bird-men.

  Allan Octavian Hume presented most of his collection (over 80,000 birds) to the British Museum of Natural History before he died at the age of eighty-four; his ashes are buried in Brookwood, Surrey, England, where he shares space with John Singer Sargent and M. F. Husain. Born 6 June 1829 – Died 31 July 1912. The British Empire considered this dignified, avuncular man ‘seditious’. On 18 March 1894, when he left India, Hume called himself a ‘failure’. No memorial was built, not even by the Congress Party; his residence in Shimla lies in utter ruin, only the shell remains. We now know from innumerable diaries and memos Hume’s favourite quote from Schiller: ‘Worth is the ocean. Fame is but the bruit that roars along the shadows.’

  Going through the files, Nelly became obsessed with Hume’s prodigious collection of the birds and eggs of India. She started collecting artistic representations of Indian birds, calendar art, modern art, miniatures. Etchings with metal, galvanised eyes. Flamingoes. Pelicans. Peacocks. Little egrets. Purple herons. Black ibis. Scaly-breasted munia. Common tailorbirds. Baya weavers. Nelly sketched them all with exaggerated detail. Not a trained bird artist, her sketches for the first few months were raw and naive. Swarming, building, preening. Never in flight. Birds on paper as if myths. Birds as reflection of her altering moods. Diving. Darting with suicidal thoughts. Crying like a limpkin. She read more and more about the colonial collector and his birds. Flat, macabre, skinned, archived. Birds of the Andaman Islands. Birds of the Western Ghats. Birds of the Himalayas. Titmouse. Stonechat. Eurasian hoopoe. Black-winged stilt. Asian hornbill. Saras cranes in pairs. Nicobar pigeons. Hovering kestrels. Painted storks. Hume’s whitethroat. Shaheen or wandering peregrine falcon, Northern goshawk (also known as a baaz), and the red-legged partridge, chakor, who can’t stop gazing at the moon with intense longing. Some twelve hundred avian species. She spent her free time drawing, one finished drawing a day. She would only do birds. Endless variations, daily exorcisms. Those drawings of hers are marvellous expressions of grief. Eyes out of scale, immensely expressive, pools of dense concentrated madness. Nightmarish bills, feet and necks. Stiff, silent, baroque, speckled – English words fail to do justice. ‘The days I didn’t sketch, I felt dead.’

  She would wake up early to create in a dizzy state. Then she would eat and go to work. That is when the problem of destruction or decreation arose. Nelly destroyed her work by stabbing the sheets with a 6B pencil, or by tearing them to pieces. To deal with the impulse to destroy, she decided not to look at her creations. She would drop the ‘daily exorcisms’ in a box and try erasing the bird completely from her mind.

  Ironically, the ghost of Allan Octavian Hume helped her bounce back, by giving her a new obsession. This work filled her with life and lightness. But it in no way prepared her for the attack in the photocopier room, or the concentrated acid. Both times, in addition to bodily pain, she suffered from PTSD, and both times the director was helpful in his own way.

  Evening had descended and the light outside was dim and very pale. A guest in the hotel lobby was looking for her badminton partner and briefly Nelly turned her gaze in that direction. Perhaps she simply wanted to pause for a while. Most likely the hotel complex had a full indoor

  court, but the exact location was a mystery to me. Nelly was looking away and it seemed I was still playing badminton with her in IIT. (She holds the racket differently each time she changes side. Her long black hair is wrapped in a neat bun. The poles are black and the netting, too, is black. We win and lose, dressed in white. Singles on Tuesdays, doubles on Fridays. I can still play. I can still play, even outdoors in the wind. Sure, it is not going to be easy.)

  ‘Stay . . . Dinner?’

  ‘Some other time. Now I know where to find you.’

  She made it to the revolving door, driven by a sudden need to be alone. As I watched her dissolve into the city below, I understood.

  How we had shared our worlds then, our little anxieties, and how I used to yearn to be alone with her. Every word she uttered would wrap me for days on end, and I would fill every random gesture of hers with supreme significance. After badminton she would return to those interstitial spaces of life that I had little access to. I recall conjuring her up more sad than she really was.

  Fridays we played doubles. Her partner, a woman with very dark skin. My partner, a fellow hosteler. Joint Entrance Exam, All India Rank: 28. He would hit the shuttlecock gently and carefully towards Nelly, but applied all the Newtons of force available in the world while sending it towards the dark-skinned woman. Nelly complained, and I confronted him back in the hostel. You don’t expect me to play like a gent with that sweeperess, he said. Nelly is a proper lady, but that other woman is an impure achhoot, he said. What struck me was that he was not even a member of some extreme right-wing, fascist organisation. The prejudice deeply internalised in every single bone of his, a mind otherwise so bright. Nelly still doesn’t know his response. Perhaps she guessed. Why I stopped bringing him to the courts as my partner. So much I could not share with her then, even when I got some more access. And I am still not able to.

  Arjun and Indira, her children – I called them Space and Time. Both prone to hyper-imagination, the boy less social, the girl making a special effort to reach out to others. Both affectionate and treated me like family. The boy’s face and especially his eyes resembled Nelly’s, and the girl looked more like her father. Once in a while (purely by mistake) they addressed me as ‘Papa’. Curled up on the bed, Nelly would reward them by reading aloud stories about Siberian tigers.

  Part of me felt that, by living in America, the distance would help erase that beautiful time, but distance, ironically, had the reverse effect. Ithaca was not a solution. Especially when I felt like an outsider or was made to feel like one, I would enter the house of the ‘past’, and the ‘past’ would enter me like a veil of ash. I would drive to Seneca or Ovid or go to the stunningly beautiful gorges and lakes and swim and camp there or sleep in my car. Or I would listen to Carl Sagan talk about the cosmos in one of those Cornell auditoriums. But memory would refuse to become memory. Like a boundary-layer fluid, memory would gush or ripple towards me in widening circles, an interference pattern whose wavelength I could not determine. What was its amplitude really? And frequency? I would feel I was not normal, not even anomalous. As if I were a stuffed animal and in my cracks lived a beetle or a moth or some other creature constantly eating the fluids of my brain.

  Nnnnn

  Eeeee

  Lllll

 
Lllll

  Yyyyy

  Something was not normal – once again.

  She had not offered the details on her own. It was a topic that often ended with long pauses. And averted eyes. The retirement event. She was hiding something. The Internet was helpful. I Googled.

  I used several sources to locate the missing information. At Nelly’s retirement event the chief guest was none other than one of the ministers accused of conducting the November 1984 pogroms. He was accompanied by two foreign delegations. From Germany and Austria.

  When I looked at the photo of the ‘chief guest’ on the Net it produced a sickening reaction within my body. His designer khadi. Plump and sleek, swept-back hair. A mere photo had a strong effect. Finally the horror was in the palm of my hand.

  Today in the library I spent the last few hours helping my assistant shelve books. Then I instructed her to take a tea break. Madam, aap chai nahin lengey? she checked. No, I said, I’ve had plenty of tea today, and after she was gone I gazed nostalgically at the books in the poetry section and felt like making an ironic declaration, but my inner voice interrupted again: You have been tricked. Are you ready to undertake enormous responsibility? How will you conduct the oral history project without institutional support? Delhi is the city of goondas. Are you out of your mind?

  How will you return?

  That city will kill you again.

  So engrossed was I in my thoughts that the book by Mandelstam, the one in my hand, fell, and just when I picked it up and wiped it clean with my chunni I heard the director’s footsteps. He wears army boots. Namaste, he said, and walked unbearably close to me and asked if he could have a word.

  ‘There is one thing I forgot to tell you, Mrs Kaur.’

  ‘Oh, the gathering?’

  ‘You see, I would like to invite an important government official to honour you.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘You see, the minister is, as it is, coming to the town, and he will be attending.’

  ‘No need to make it so pompous.’

  ‘He will come anyway.’

  ‘Who?’

  The minister’s profile flashed before me. Murderer. His face on postage stamps. Plump and sleek, swept-back hair. The way he smiles and folds his hands in a mythical namaste. His designer khadi. The way he steps on people as if they were beetles or cockroaches.

  ‘Not him,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we cancel the retirement party?’

  ‘I didn’t invite him, Mrs Kaur. He insisted. He would like to take this opportunity to show our institute to important foreign delegates.’

  The director well knows that many years ago the minister along with many senior Congress leaders conducted a genocide. I felt like reminding him of the details. But then I thought it was inappropriate to do so. How could he ignore the recent news reports –

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘Move on, Mrs Kaur. Will you? He is no longer the man he was and you are no longer the woman you were.’

  ‘I am definitely no longer the woman I was . . . But don’t you dare say – MOVE ON.’

  ‘Tomorrow take the morning off. At 3 p.m. I will send my own car to pick you up.’

  Even if I try hard I can’t despise the director fully. All these years he has allowed me to work here without trouble, he has helped me during my moments of panic, moments when I saw dust gathering on the shelves and the orange curtains and the fire that engulfs us all. As I heard his footsteps departing the library my mind was filled with so many poisonous thoughts.

  On 28 December 1945, Primo Levi, after surviving the Buna-Monowitz camp, wrote a poem. The poem is titled ‘Buna’. With what kind of face would we confront each other? The Nelly in my notes knows this last line. Her favourite line in the poem, however, is neither the first nor the last, but line four: A day like every other day. The real Nelly perhaps never read the poem; and she would not allow me complete access to her inner self. But I know this for sure. A lot was going on in her mind that day when I located her under the tulip tree by the crumbling colonial mansion. Escape? Revenge? Nelly sends me ten miles away to Mashobra. She ‘forgets’ her speech at home. She wanted me to read the speech. She didn’t feel like delivering the speech at the retirement event. All the little facts and little actions led me to the following conclusion. There was someone else. Something larger at stake. Someone who was forcing Nelly to deliver that particular speech.

  She sends me to Mashobra that day; she wanted to keep me away. Reluctantly I took the bus. At the Oberoi Wild Flower Cafe I met the Benazir Bhutto lookalike. The young woman was sitting at the table close by, reading, or trying to read, her Kindle, unable to focus, distracted. She, in a black kurta, colourful Sanskrit mantras scrawled all over, and need I mention again her most voluptuous calves? She was reading the flickering page and I was trying to begin the book I bought from the antique shop, Maria Brothers, in Shimla. On her table a large plate of exotic green salad.

  ‘What book are you perusing?’

  Scarcely had I finished the question when I realised how many times in the past those five words led to an answer that transported not one, but two people on a long journey. She was reading Men in the Off Hours, a title I had not heard of. She returned to her Kindle as soon as she uttered those words, giving me the impression that my interruption was really an ill-timed interruption. Women in the Off Hours.

  Twenty or twenty-five minutes later she opened her handbag and dug out a cellphone. From what I could make out she called her driver, and the man’s loud Pahari voice said that the car needed repairs. From that moment on she was unable to sit still. She applied a coat of raspberry lip gloss and surveyed her face now and then in the reflecting surfaces around us. On her dry hands she applied a Vichy moisturiser and massaged it into her skin.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She looked in my direction. ‘I did not mean to be rude. What book are you perusing?’

  I had picked up an old volume from Maria Brothers, a rare book on bird etchings. She flipped through it and said something that has stayed with me. Birds, she said, the more you look for them, the more you see them. Her thought was not original, but she ended up articulating something true.

  With every passing second she looked more and more familiar, but I could not place her. She could have been the one at the student’s party who was studying attentively the nude Radha and Krishna.

  I moved to her table. We shook hands.

  ‘You look like an artist.’

  ‘Yes, I sketch birds,’ I lied.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The ones that live inside me. I need to draw every day. My daily exorcisms.’

  ‘You appear to be an intense man.’

  The waiter, a long shadow, appeared with the menu as soon as I installed myself.

  She took a while. I ordered Earl Grey tea.

  ‘Viennese,’ she said. ‘Without cream.’

  The young man blinked, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Then it is a black coffee, ma’am.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Viennese without cream is “normal” coffee, ma’am.’

  She worked as an interpreter for foreign tourists in Delhi. Slowly it emerged that she did several other part-time jobs. She was also trained (the way she phrased it) as a ‘past-life regression analyst’. Obviously she had made an error about my occupation! But I was immensely attracted and chose to play along. Occupations like hers were new in the new India with its teeming middle class. Part of my attraction to her was connected to this newness, this transition I’d missed. But, in certain ways, she was more North American than me. Fuck, she said. Viennese coffee! He thinks he knows more about coffee than me! What if? I asked. What if you are doing a past-life regression for a client and determine that three or four centuries ago they murdered you? Will you go to the cops? What will you do really? What if you determine that it was you who murdered the person standing before you? Fucking brilliant, she said. Fuck, I never thought about th
is! She applied more of her Vichy moisturiser. An hour later, when the driver phoned, she invited me ‘home’: her retired father’s cottage. She was in town for two days ‘only’. Mashobra was cold, and Mashobra was covered with pure walls of melting snow. During an erotically charged moment I kissed her lips; she told me, ‘Forget it, buddy’, she was seeing someone, the person was a consultant in the music business, and this person paid the rent. Forget it, she said. ‘I can’t do that thing with you.’ No, I don’t think I will be able to do it, she said, and pushed me aside. From the beginning I had anticipated this situation, for she was young and I was not young any more. Racism can be overcome, but age is more of a challenge. I kissed her again, this time on the left cheek. Help me forget something, I said. Only you can help me forget. I would like to forget myself and this shitty world. Murderer! she said. We settled on oral sex. One thing led to another. To be honest, for a while I felt my father had paid her the money to help me forget something. But it was a passing thought. We made what some people call ‘love’. Several times. Thrice in two hours. There were no condoms, we did it unprotected. We mimicked the Viennese waiter, never have I laughed so much, a deep belly laughter. What was I? A wild animal in ad 1060, an ant in 1214, a parrot during the times of Sikandar, and a moth when the Bamian Buddhas were being carved out of live rock. Fucking brilliant! Two full-length mirrors in the room, and they, too, saturated with our release. Afterwards her brown belladonna eyes became moist and she played some Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, and smoked cigarettes. How much money do I owe you? I checked. I am not a whore, she said, smiling and sobbing. She told me she got the biggest scare of her life when she had unprotected sex with a guy who revealed later that he had herpes. I hope you are free of diseases? she checked. Suddenly her nakedness felt exposed, and I, too, felt exposed. I used a few unprotected words. Raised my voice. Why didn’t you tell me about this beforehand? Why did you not tell me that you had slept without a condom with a diseased man, you cunt? She pounced on me and bit my ears. It happened so long ago, sweets . . . let me reassure you I got myself tested and I didn’t pick up the disease. But are you sure you are free of germs, you prick? I lit up a cigarette. After so many years of quitting I felt like a smoke. The ashtray on the study table was full. The desktop computer next to the ashtray had no screensaver. She mentioned the ashtray belonged to her father. He is in Shimla at the moment, she said. Next to the ashtray, four or five luminous apples. Almost all the cigarettes had been extinguished in a peculiar way. The ashtray reminded me of an old friend of my father’s, a senior civil servant. He would extinguish exactly like that. He would smoke only three-quarters of a cigarette and drop it. The cigarette would then extinguish itself, but it would retain the original shape, a perfect cylinder of ash.