Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  Following our so-called after-play she ran to the kitchen to get us warm milk. During her absence I went through the dressing-table drawers. Whitening serums. Facewash. Magenta-coloured moisturiser bottles. I thought of Clara, and had the urge to check my emails. The keyboard, stained, carried a slim layer of dust, black on the edges. The desktop was unlocked. But the mouse was not connected. It took me three seconds to reconnect. Unreal. What I saw was a bit shocking. It didn’t take me long to understand. There was no need now to check my emails.

  Before me was a single folder called Hindu Rashtra. I clicked and entered. Image after shocking image. Pictures of a crumbling, national historic building – a 500-year-old place of worship that belonged to a minority community. Being destroyed by tens and hundreds of men in saffron. Being reduced to rubble by men in khaki shorts. I clicked on the folders within the folder. Deep inside I found links to acronyms like RSS, VHP, BD. Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh. Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Bajrang Dal. These were extreme fascist organisations, which used the Hindu Party as a political front. Each one more eager to establish upper-caste supremacy. Each one preaching more patriarchy, hatred and violence. Collectively the group was known as the Sangh Parivar.

  I heard her. She was headed to the bedroom with milk. Quickly I shuffled away from the desktop. She entered with a silver tray, two tall glasses. She didn’t take long to realise what I might have seen. After a brief conversation she stared at the screen and turned off the machine. Tactfully I restricted our conversation to computers. How I almost became a software engineer. She didn’t ask a single question. I squeezed her tremulous hand. She didn’t withdraw. A dog came from a different room and sniffed me. Out, she said, and it disappeared. She had not used the dog’s name. ‘Why are you not carrying your laptop?’ she asked. There and then I shared the details. My laptop. Stolen and recovered.

  The ‘Peterhof?’ she checked.

  ‘Yes, the Peterhof.’

  The hotel has many past lives, I didn’t say.

  ‘Ugly architecture,’ she blurted out. ‘Sweetie, it is a cross between–’

  ‘The Hindu Party organised a chintan baithak there.’

  ‘As a delegate?’

  I missed my chance to lie. ‘As an observer.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘My father, too, spent two days at the Peterhof.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Recently.’

  ‘Is he a member?’

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Member of the Hindu Party?’

  ‘He is a doctor.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘He is retired. But now and then he acts as a locum for the hotel emergencies.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Say again.’

  ‘Does he know what the party is all about?’

  She paused for a while. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Does he, too, believe in Hindu supremacy?’

  ‘No,’ she said. But after a long pause.

  There were photos of her father in the glass cabinet, and one of them similar to the photo I had seen in Nelly’s albums, the photo of the man who saved her life by locking her in the barsati upstairs. I extrapolated the man’s ‘old face’ from his ‘young face’ and came to a conclusion. Nelly had called him ‘my saviour’.

  She had used the phrase three or four times. Unable to hide that something was not right. Every mention of the man made her uncomfortable. As if he were nearby in the same room floating around as a shadow.

  In Shimla that night while waiting for Nelly in her apartment I used the Internet to locate more information about the ‘saviour’. What I found perturbed me. At a certain point in his life, Benazir Bhutto’s father had started defending the pogroms conducted by the Hindu Party. In 2002, Muslims (and not Sikhs or Christians or Dalits) were the target. The 2002 pogrom took place in Gujarat.

  That such a man existed and was able to breathe like any other ordinary human being really upset me. Whatever limited hope I still harboured about the inherent goodness of human beings imploded. That night after recording my interview with Nelly I sensed truth in that cliché (now or never), I knew I had to pose real ‘pesky’ questions. She had already spoken a lot, and I could hear exhaustion in her voice. Possessed by unknown energy I pressed on. She grew more and more uncomfortable and agitated and literally ordered me to turn off the recorder, which I did. Now there was no gizmo between us. But our face-to-face talk grew more and more awkward and she switched to complete silence. That said: it became possible to see what cannot be seen. Outside the window snow kept falling and when it stopped she spoke again, giving well-rehearsed answers to my questions. But why? Like a difficult thesis adviser (or rather, like my father’s supercop persona) I would not let her go. Mass murder. That is what we were solving. Something more complicated than a typical problem in engineering. I even dropped ‘Mrs Singh’ during the exchange.

  ‘You must be going through stress. I understand. Too bad you have started smoking.’

  She said a friend had visited.

  ‘This is perhaps none of my business, but is this person by any chance your saviour? You must have kept in touch.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Something eerie about her response, I felt. But she was not lying.

  ‘Did he attend your retirement party?’

  Long pause.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘But first he showed up here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Later you two walked together to the institute?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did you go?’

  ‘I took a taxi.’

  She dug out a receipt from her handbag.

  ‘He attended?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who invited him?’

  ‘He invited himself.’

  ‘Did something unusual happen during the event?’

  ‘I forgot my speech at home, I almost panicked, but I managed. Why are you asking so many questions?’

  The speech. I had read those nine printed sheets. She had planted the quivering pages on the kitchen table. My fingers still remember the texture and edges of that yellow legal pad paper. Small, baroque handwriting. No corrections. The speech was based on facts (I verified them later). I understood why she didn’t want to deliver the speech (although the most probable explanation didn’t occur to me right away). Obviously she didn’t want to embarrass the director of the institute. What I didn’t understand was why the saviour hit her.

  The ‘saviour’ made one last attempt to persuade her. She expressed doubts all over again, so in a cool and calculated manner he hit her. Perhaps he did so after the event, because she failed to follow the instructions.

  ‘You didn’t fall. That man hit you, didn’t he?’

  She was stunned and silent.

  ‘This has happened before?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘It must have.’

  ‘No, it was all my fault.’

  The saviour pressured her to deliver the speech (the one he had composed). Papers, media. This was the best way to warn the rival Congress Party: don’t investigate the 2002 pogroms conducted by the Hindu Party, otherwise the party would insist on further investigations of the 1984 pogroms conducted by the Congress Party. A strange balance of power: Gujarat brought back the ghosts of Delhi. Gujarat ended the long silence. Pogrom One absolves Pogrom Two and vice versa. Such was the perverse logic in the so-called largest democracy. How reassuring the knowledge must have been for the Hindu Party that its rival had indulged in a similar, if not identical, orgy. Dangerous and perverse.

  ‘Did he hit you before or after the event?’

  Long ago I felt paralysed at New Delhi railway station, and now that fear was gone, the paralysis was not there. In my hotel room I felt like doing the right thing. The most rational thing was to arrange a meeting with the saviour right away. I had to warn him in no uncertain terms that the beatings must stop.
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  So many died in ’84. She will compile a list. Julio Cortazar died on 12 February. Ansel Adams died on 22 April. Lee Krasner Pollock died on 19 June. Michel Foucault died on 25 June. Lillian Hellman died on 25 June. Truman Capote died on 25 August. François Truffaut died on 21 October. Martin Luther King (Senior) died on 11 November. Faiz Ahmad Faiz died on 20 November . . . Michael Jackson didn’t die then, but he burned himself in 1984.

  Throughout my childhood days a different woman (Indira Gandhi) was my inspiration.

  How wrong I was, she says.

  Indira was a harmful heavy metal. Indira was radium. She made clocks gleam, and then killed the very women who painted the dials.

  These days if I consider someone close to being a hero I can think of no one other than Aung San. I know I am right this time.

  Like Aung San I would like to go ‘home’.

  Delhi, the wounded city, the psychotic city, the city of 12 million unfinished histories. Delhi, the city of human unsuccess. Soon it will turn a hundred years old, the Imperial New Delhi, but it will refuse to narrate those stories of FIRE. Dilli, the miserable city of collective amnesia.

  If I go back to that discarded city, it will tear me apart. With its amnesia.

  Next morning the mountains awoke slowly in angled light. The air was damp and cold, the sky blue and bright. From the hotel lobby the distant villages visible for the first time. Cheap and hasty constructions. Corrugated tin or asbestos roofs angled just like the light. With some effort I was able to detect the Chadwick Falls in the gap between two sheer cliffs. In the early sun the parabola of widening water resembled molten iron. Without warning the receptionist, I walked past the glinty skating rink all the way to the bus stop. The wait was not long. On the vibrating bus my body acquired a strange momentum, and for a change I overcame the usual feeling of worthlessness. I had a mission now, knew exactly why I was headed there. Most passengers were simple hill folk, local Paharis and Khadus, one carrying a glinty metallic object, and after some hesitation I checked if he would be willing to sell it to me. The man panicked and moved a few seats away. A rifle is more impersonal, I thought. The bus followed the serpentine road, making me think about Father’s 44-calibre rifle, the one that terrified me as a child. I wish I knew more about weapons. The bus dropped me at the slushy stop. What looked like a boulder from a distance were two stubborn yaks. I walked towards the solitary optician’s shop. The vehicle disappeared with a strange sense of urgency after dumping a vapour of diesel in my face. The dense deodar forest, entangled in low ribbons of clouds, appeared more tranquil than last time. The snow gone, high walls more or less at an equilibrium, and I was struck again by the sublime beauty of bare, leafless trees and apple orchards.

  He was a retired golf-playing oncologist in his late sixties with a Chekhovian goatee, and charming. Very charming and clear-sighted and more youthful than I had expected. His Leonard Cohen voice different from the way it sounded on the answering machine. He spoke Mayo College or Doon School English, and wore tweed, and didn’t smoke all the time. He smoked only two cigarettes during the fifty or sixty minutes we spent together in his Hindutava living room. He began with the Great Trigonometric Survey conducted by the British in the nineteenth century, but soon drifted towards Vedic mathematics. He spoke about a root borer, the beetle that was destroying the trees in his orchard.

  How India had a large ‘treasonous minority’ (the Muslims), the enemy within. Dalits were ‘Hindus’. Sikhs were ‘Hindus’. All non-Hindus must acknowledge their Hindu ancestry. Failure to do so would mean no voting rights. I had heard that before. Humans for him were no more than communal categories. The codling moth is another pest we would like to eliminate, he explained. The bookshelves next to me had complete works by Shakespeare and Naipaul. Two walls were crowded with luminous photos of mythological characters, independence fighters, genocide-denier Narendra Modi, accused by national and international human rights organisations as the chief architect of the 2002 pogrom, and muscular-looking men. I kept my jacket on.

  He asked me to relax and offered a cigarette.

  ‘But I no longer smoke.’

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Before I reveal the details I must confess that a part of me derived enormous delight out of the conversation. His right-wing views, contradictions, and attempts to explain himself in a frank, open manner carried a literary potential. His profession (oncology) made him all the more exciting. The man recalled a book I had read in Ithaca on a friend’s recommendation, Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas.

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now we can talk.’

  Rarely had I experienced such direct, no-nonsense dialogue with a lover’s family. So far my ‘meet the parents’ encounters had turned out to be disasters because the heart of the matter never surfaced, was never allowed to surface. Concealment was the guiding principle. My younger years were filled with offensive overtures delivered by testy mothers or fathers.

  ‘You see, sometimes my daughter just gets carried away.’

  Other than wood burning in the fireplace, the cottage was perfectly quiet – a silence unknown in flatlands or even in Shimla. The dog came and sniffed me. Tactfully his master shifted gear. He really wanted me to dislike her.

  ‘You see, she kept telling me. For ten years.’

  He roused my curiosity.

  ‘Only women turn me on, she kept telling.’

  ‘Until she met me?’

  ‘I am glad. She is not averse to men.’

  The silence that followed was natural.

  ‘What caste are you?’

  ‘What if I am not the right one?’

  My response didn’t go down well.

  ‘Oh but why are we talking about this? You have come for the Kindle. Haven’t you?’

  When I called Benazir the previous night she reassured me that she got the tests done at the Apollo Clinic and the doctor found no disease. Great news, I said. You prick, she laughed. Fucking brilliant, I said. I have forgotten something in the heights of Mashobra, she said. And I don’t want to buy a new one, I am very attached to my old one. When do you visit Delhi? Visit me, honey! Bring me my Kindle.

  The saviour’s cellphone rang. Faux-patriotic ringtone. He got rid of the cigarette and hurried slowly to the adjoining room. Although I couldn’t follow, it was clear he switched languages several times. When he returned the phone was still in his hand emitting a strange bluish light.

  ‘Sorry for the interruption.’

  He settled down. Still fiddling with the gizmo.

  ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘Kindle.’

  ‘Her Kindle.’

  The servant served tea and spinach pakoras and dropped more wood in the fireplace. The saviour sa’ab gave instructions, and sent the chap to the bazaar on a longish mission. For a brief second my eyes rested on spilled ash.

  ‘What are you hiding from me?’

  I knew the effect my entirely unexpected curiosity would have on him. The oncologist asked me to repeat.

  ‘Did a human being do that to you?’

  ‘No. This is what an animal did.’ He pointed at his face, drawing attention to his black eye. The left one. I had noticed it right after entry into the cottage, but felt it was impolite to pursue the cause-and-effect questions without proper reason.

  ‘Looks like an animal punched you hard.’

  ‘Does it appear that bad?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘Bloody monkey.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  He turned his fascist gaze towards the shelves. Right above the poetry and fiction section there were hundreds of medical textbooks, and right above the medical section there were medieval weapons and rifles on display. Of course the man was a villain. Although the servant was no longer at home, I felt we were not alone. There was a small movement. The curtains flapped.

  Without my host’s per
mission I shut the window. ‘What are you doing?’ I didn’t use the curtains to make a rope. The sash cloth on my sofa came in handy. It was bound to happen. The saviour protested as I tied his ancient hands to one of the wooden columns in the room. I didn’t seal his lips because that would have made it difficult to hear his responses.

  ‘You must have hit her first. She must have done it in self-defence. Please, why did you hit her?’

  He stared at me. ‘What is the good engineer talking about?’

  ‘What are you hiding?’

  ‘I am hiding nothing. I can even show you the place where the incident took place.’

  The dog came running. There was a black sock in its mouth. Benazir had warned me that the dog loved playing with socks and brassieres. ‘Leaves them lacerated.’

  This is painful to write. The old man struggled to free himself. ‘This is a mistake,’ he said.

  ‘Listen, Mrs Singh didn’t send me here, I figured it out all on my own.’

  ‘I have no idea, my dear, no idea, my good engineer, what you are talking about.’