Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  When the two men shook hands on the dark railway platform (Father and Professor Singh), although they were strangers, they trusted each other (I assumed), and I was the object of that trust . . . Take care of my son, he has just recovered from jaundice . . . Two days later when Father did what he did, he betrayed the Constitution, his oath, his profession; more important, he betrayed me, and I never saw it coming. For a long time I could not process the betrayal. I lacked the proper vocabulary or concepts to understand it, and there was no time, for heat transfer and mass transfer and diffusion equations and mechanics of materials and failure analysis and thermodynamics would occupy all my time . . . Then I started preparing with a certain madness for the GRE exams to escape India. But I don’t know for sure. We always take the past and bend it to our current awareness.

  In Delhi I checked into a hotel. I called voluptuous calves, but she had changed her number. (The Kindle is still with me. What else can I do?) I continued taking notes, but the whole project made little sense now, not until I arranged a meeting with Father. And that is exactly what my whole body resisted. I tried to imagine the father–son meeting, but the experiment was a disaster. For days I felt shocked and paralysed. As if an unknown electromagnetic field had irreversibly changed my body chemistry. Then a professor friend of mine from the PhD committee invited me to watch a film by Pasolini at the IIT campus. Reluctantly I agreed. The cabbie, a young Sikh with a baby face, dropped me in front of the boys’ hostel. Glazed red-brick building named after the ancient mountain range Aravali. The room was packed, and although I arrived late the screening had not started. They had also changed the film – no longer Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, but a film called A Taste of Cherry. From where I stood it was possible to scan the profiles of all those in the audience, and I spotted my friend at the very front, sitting next to the empty chair he had saved for me.

  ‘Pasolini has been cancelled,’ he explained. A gay professor’s expulsion from one of the IITs had polarised the campus. The IITs have a history of unjust expulsions, he said. During Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency many professors were expelled or arrested. Are you really interested in watching Oedipus Rex? I will have no problem borrowing the DVD, he said. I know the organisers of cultural events, SPIC-MACAY. You are also welcome to borrow Kiarostami. Sheer poetry. Who is Kiarostami? I asked. Perhaps the most important contemporary film-maker, and he lives in Iran. What I like about his cinema is that the characters re-enact their own real life stories. A Taste of Cherry is about an ordinary man who seeks assistance to kill himself. The film has a beautiful ending, perhaps the best in cinema.

  Listen, I said, is it possible to skip the film? He agreed without much fuss. We abandoned the student hostel and walked through the campus towards the Wind Tunnel. He, too, was in a bad way, a state more fragile than mine. Dressed in a mere tracksuit. His hair messier than before. I detected he, also, had been drinking alone. Soon we passed by the faculty residences, and he admired the jacarandas. A professor of mine used to live in that house behind those trees, I told him. Professor Singh would park his white Fiat there, and once I saw him mopping the Fiat with a yellow rag, then he sprinkled the leftover water around the purple trees.

  ‘Will you help me kill myself?’

  That line didn’t come as a surprise. The surprising thing was that I, too, was facing similar impulses, hard to articulate.

  I spent another week in my hotel room in Hauz Khas. My black Calvin Klein socks had developed big holes. For the first time I didn’t shave for a week, didn’t shower. I would stand against the wall, helpless, squinting at the thick curtains. On the floor I lay sick, breathing heavily, persuading myself that it was all a redundant dream, an old tape that could be rewound. Room service delivered lunches and dinners, and I ate gluttonously to forget the simple fact that I had a parent. In Shimla in the archives when I was going through the files I could not share my discovery (Father = Mass Murderer) with the staff members. To do so would be to betray Nelly. But at the same time I could not resist borrowing from the files a newspaper cutting and a photo of the pogrom widows. Perhaps ‘borrowed’ is the wrong word. ‘Stealing’ is the right one. Over and over the stolen photo stared at me. Over and over in the hotel room I read the yellow cutting. Then I took to walking. Random aimless walking. Day and night I walked in the unwalkable city, the air heavy with petrol and diesel exhaust and other nefarious molecules, and I judged harshly the city and its part imperial, part box architecture, and ugly roads and countless humans trapped within countless million miseries. All the existential anxieties of my teenage years returned as I zigzagged towards the ring road and the outer ring road. During my teenage years I didn’t find history interesting, and now the only sites that beguiled me were connected to the past.

  Only the poor walk in Delhi. And they kept walking with me – the dead. Holding my fingers, unable to cross the streets by themselves. I took refuge in the zoo, gazing at the eyes of the animals, gazing at the specular eyes of captive elephants, tigers, panthers, snow leopards. I begged and begged again the dead to liberate me. In return I was prepared to do anything, even murder the caretakers of the zoological conc. camp, and obliterate my tormented selves by puting a noose around my neck. I walked in circles and spirals and straight Cartesian lines. But the dead continued to walk with me. After the fourth day my shoes looked visibly damaged, and no shoeshine boy grasped my leg. My left knee started hurting. Hurting, I felt a sudden need to see Nelly again. She called that evening. And left a voice message. She was going to take the bus to Delhi.

  After listening to my messages I checked the papers. There was a huge ad in the local paper – a high-school reunion. Not my school, but I decided to attend. Professor Singh once talked about this old school of his fondly, without a hint of revulsion. In ’84 the school (next to the Chilean Embassy) was vandalised and looted before it was reduced to ashes. The classrooms, the laboratories, everything.

  Now a new structure, a new generation.

  The principal told me that Nelly was expected any time after the assembly; he took me to the assembly and introduced me to the students. Before ardas I spoke a little about Professor Singh, Helium-3 and moon missions. The students heard but didn’t listen. The principal, a Sikh gentleman, did not know Mohan personally, but he knew the details. I hung out with Mohan’s ‘class fellows’. And that is where, once again, I found her an hour later. Nelly had come for two days from Shimla, a survivor mingling with other survivors.

  Now that I think about it she was happy to see me. Obviously she had overcome some of her fear of Delhi. I was about to tell Nelly about something new I had read in the papers – the US court and the summons it sent to the Congress Party – when her cellphone beeped, and soon afterwards a very intense man, who would have been about her son’s age, with big eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, introduced himself. ‘We would like to do a piece on you.’ Now, that annoyed her a little. I witnessed her face, filled with anger and anguish; it was clear she was not in a mood to be interviewed. But soon she changed her mind. The journalist’s own story was very interesting. He became quite animated while sharing it. Several years ago he moved to Chicago and decided to study engineering. Then, in the middle of his PhD, he dumped school and travelled the entire continent, Yukon to Yucatan, on a motorcycle, and afterwards switched over to journalism, and decided to return ‘home’. A chill went through me when he told us his name.

  Arjun.

  He was both shy and confident, and now and then tilted his head, which accentuated the beauty of his big eyes. I checked with Nelly if she wanted me there. She held my hand. We walked through the science block. Maroon pebble-dash walls. Several times I peeked in the laboratories, the walls crammed with colourful displays. Lateral Section of a Flower. Life Cycle of an Angiosperm. Chandrayan. Not far from the school bell there were three fire extinguishers. Walking through the corridor we also watched young boys and girls play volleyball. Such noise!

  ‘To this day I don’t know the rules of volleyball,�
� said Arjun. ‘I wish someone had taught me at the right age.’

  ‘Do you feel bad?’ asked Nelly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This was just a passing thought.’

  We walked to the huge banyan tree close to the swings. For a fleeting moment, it seemed, we managed to escape the past. Briefly the three of us sat on the swings, red and yellow. One or two repressed memories made an attempt to surface, but I refused permission. Boldly I dismissed them. My gaze fell on the blackened school wall. A few red bricks and the rest black like a child’s hair. On the other side of the wall – a DTC bus depot. On our side, piles and piles of abandoned furniture. Chairs, desks, antiquated computers, Godrej almirahs. By the swings Arjun told us something that has continued to haunt my hours.

  ‘Right after the pogroms the names of the guilty were published by PUDR and PUCL,’ said Arjun. ‘A senior Congress leader called Maken, who was also the son-in-law of the Indian Vice President, appeared prominently on the list. But the criminal Criminal Bureau of Investigation or the legal system did nothing. In the new government several of the accused were made cabinet ministers by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and subsequent Congress governments. Yet this is not the image transmitted to eloquent books of history. The Congress Party today is no longer the same. But it is the same. The party gave India its first Sikh prime minister. But he has done nothing . . . Not a single politician, cabinet minister, bureaucrat, diplomat, judge or a high-ranking police officer has been brought to justice. Manmohan Singh, after enormous pressure from human rights groups and the opposition, did issue an absurd apology, or semi-apology, whatever it was, without acknowledging the crimes of those at the very top, and no sense of justice. But look at the current government. The Minister for Trade, Kamal Nath, accused by tons of victims, human rights reports and eye-witness accounts. (How will he, I have often asked myself, be remembered by history?) He visits foreign lands (resort towns like Davos) on big business missions. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi often shake hands and do photo ops with the foot-soldiers of November 1984. The Harvard-trained Home Minister calls another genocide-denier (who until recently was the Minister for Overseas Affairs) ‘my friend’. However, Maken’s case is different.

  ‘In ’85 he was murdered at his house. Maken’s daughter was six years old then, she didn’t know that in November ’84, on her father’s orders, hundreds of innocent people were burned to death in the most brutal fashion.

  ‘Maken was gunned down by three militants, one of them a young man who had heard about the pogroms; his own father (a highly respected agricultural scientist and a professor at the university) was in the same neighbourhood where the Congress Party leaders, operating as merchants of death, are reported to have set up their killing machine.

  ‘He was nabbed many years later in the US by Interpol, where he was kept in a high-security prison. He confessed his crime and requested a trial in India. He was extradited in 2000. At the trial he confessed that he had nothing personal against the Maken family. Why didn’t the Indian state bring the Congress leaders and top police officers to justice?

  ‘In 2008 the case took a strange twist when Maken’s daughter decided to meet the man in the prison.’

  Nelly was staring at Arjun.

  ‘You have a huge book there,’ I said.

  ‘I am writing it as a tiny article for the paper,’ said the journalist. ‘These days I don’t have much time. I got married last year and now I perform the role of a new father. To write books one needs time, and time is the only thing I lack.

  ‘Anyway, the daughter had grown up hating the prisoner,’ he continued. ‘Who would not? But she decided to meet him. He had confessed his crime, and he enrolled in the distance education programme to continue his studies, a Master’s degree in agricultural sciences. She told him she had grown up hating him. He had snatched away her precious childhood. The prisoner exploded, ‘Your father snatched it away from thousands of children. Look, Indira Gandhi’s assassins were hanged, but those who ordered the pogroms and those who actually killed innocent people have still not been brought to justice. So many years have passed by, so much ruined time. Twenty years, twenty-five years. Soon all those who witnessed will die and the victims will die and thousands of widows will die and then all we’ll be left with is a big void. One day people in India will write plays about that Event. But justice is more important than plays and poetry, he emphasised.’

  ‘After the meeting the daughter told the media that she had forgiven the murderer. She also started lobbying for clemency.’

  Arjun fell silent.

  I decided to leave, he was waiting for me to leave in order to begin interviewing Nelly. We shook hands. Then I made it to the school gates. Outside I saw a rickshaw overloaded with freshly varnished furniture. Dressing table, dining table and a bed, all on one rickshaw, and I realised I hadn’t asked the most important question, so I turned back, literally running, noticing the labs and classes in progress. I made it to the reunion room breathless. They were still there. My reappearance made the journalist emit a piercing smile. Nelly was half expecting me.

  ‘Did you ever?’ I asked Arjun’s namesake. ‘Did you ever meet the man?’

  ‘Yes, I did. As a matter of fact I did. And the first question I asked was: Why did you kill Maken’s wife? She was innocent. She had no role to play in the pogroms. I didn’t want to kill her, he said, I waited for several hours and acted when the man was alone, but in a split second she appeared from nowhere running and embraced her husband in an attempt to save him.’

  On the way to the hotel the auto-rickshaw driver turned on FM radio. Radio Mirchi, 98.3 FM. Neither the driver nor the rest of the city listening to the songs on Radio Mirchi had the faintest idea about the stuff going through my mind.

  Because I didn’t charge my cellphone for a couple of days my voicemail filled with messages. Messages from IIT, and from Nelly. She left four or five messages. While checking the messages I dealt with one of my worst fears. What if unable to connect with me she decided to visit my ‘home’? What if she visited Amrita Sher-Gil Marg and Father received her at ‘home’?

  When I returned her call she was already on the train. Part of me was relieved, but I raised the worst-case scenario.

  ‘Did you go to Amrita Sher-Gil Marg?’

  ‘What for?’

  Nelly was travelling, and that is precisely the reason I postponed revealing the truth about my father. Yet again.

  Arjun’s interview appeared a week later. Nelly’s photo spread over two pages. And that is how I found out. Halfway into the interview she spoke about the trip to Italy, the fascist railway station. She and her boy returned after they ran out of money and spent a couple of days in a relief camp in Delhi. A few men at the camp were making plans to kill the pogrom instigators. Volunteers? She thought Arjun was too young, and that is why she didn’t warn him. When she woke up in the morning the boy was gone . . . There was another immensely moving piece in the same magazine, the story of a Chicago immigrant, an engineer like me. The engineer, Raj Singh, his real name, made me cry (and laugh) and I felt my six-foot cylinder of a body burning. The piece hit me like a concrete block. My doppelgänger was apparently tortured by my good father or one of his colleagues. How does one really forgive the unforgivable? The engineer’s story convinced me that a so-called apology amounts to nothing. Reconciliation is impossible without justice. Raj Singh writes:

  How little I know about my childhood. And yet I remember the sheer astonishment I experienced on finding out at school that it takes around eight minutes for the light of the sun to arrive on Planet Earth. Or the puzzlingly constant speed of light. Another thing that never fails to astonish me is the origin of life – chances are if the big bang happens again no life would form. Life is the biggest coincidence we know of on Planet Earth. I have no idea why I ended up choosing metallurgical engineering. Why I focused on microstructures of steel. Why I spent ten years of my life researching corrosion and vibration. Metallurgy was not even my first choic
e. Meteorites. I really wanted to study cosmic accidents; objects older than our earth. In November ’84 we were in Delhi. We were spared. Our neighbours gave us refuge . . . Our neighbours hid us in a dark room only after we agreed to cut our hair. (But once inside their storeroom we refused to cut our hair.) These neighbours were slightly better than those neighbours and a woman who sided with the mob. (I would like to believe she has become human again.) In some other city this is where the madness would have stopped . . . Soon afterwards we got a notice from our landlord to vacate the house – we had signed the lease for an entire year, but he asked us to leave . . . I would often eat at the landlord’s place and play cricket with his children completely oblivious to what was going on . . . My father was summoned by the court. At first he kept me in the dark. I found out and accompanied him to the hearing. Over there they abused him verbally, ‘sardar-ji aa gaya, sala sardar-ji aa gaya,’ then the judge scolded the lawyer representing us, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ The landlord wanted us out because he was afraid some ‘lumpen’ might set his property on fire. The court ruled in his favour; we were served an eviction notice. Three or four men came and dismantled our house; so many of our objects resisted being moved, but on two lorries the men took our objects away. We went by train to Punjab to stay with our relatives. On the way, close to Panipat, the train made an unexpected stop, cops in khaki (and black leather belts) barged in and demanded IDs and arrested me arbitrarily. They took me to a prison inside an old fort, where they tied my hands behind my back with my turban, and then tied them to a rope, which was attached to a rod on the ceiling and a pulley. I was suspended in the air by the pulley while the police beat me with lathis on the soles of my feet and knees. Later a heavy wooden roller moved up and down my thighs until I lost consciousness. Cold water was thrown on my face, and then the cycle recurred as if an experiment. I don’t remember wearing my clothes, perhaps I had my underwear on. I try not to dwell on that image. All I want to say is that I learned a lot about the strength of materials in that crumbling fort, and a lot about physics and chemistry and biology and the human body. Later I acquired words like ‘fibrosis’, ‘dislocation’, and phrases like ‘tenderness of thigh muscles’. I still don’t know the proper Hindi or Punjabi word for torture.