Helium

by Jaspreet Singh

  Nelly, during those days, would send me an occasional email. Once in a while a longish letter with a CD. Hi Raj. Dear Raj. Warmly, Nelly. She would write less and less about her personal affairs, and more and more stuff about others. She would dispatch audio files and old photographs, digitised sepia, which had the eerie quality of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra. The only things missing were the appropriate captions. But really there are photos which require no captions. She had established an ‘oral history’ institute in Delhi, not far from the Widow Colony. She did not like the extra-polluted air of Delhi, and developed a nervous belly. Sleeping was always a problem. But the survivors poured their hearts out, and she would listen to their stories over and over. Old photos made so many open up. Certain personalities, who claimed they had nothing to tell, especially opened up after seeing the photos. She witnessed unbearable ‘rage’ and ‘agony’ (as I write these two words down, they feel like an understatement). Once she broke down physically, and had to be put on medication. She did not inform me, but, as I said before, I have my sources. She found the behaviour of ‘Dilli’ men towards women despicable, but knew living in that city was important. Moving back gave a sense of urgency to her work. Some of her emails sounded as if she was trying to grasp the psychosis of Delhi. Those who ruled the city were still above truth. Schools and colleges in her own country (in ‘my’ country) didn’t teach 1984 honestly. As a result the younger generation knew nothing. The youth didn’t even know what they didn’t know. Only the ‘official version’. Funding was always a problem. Once or twice I received photos of women in the Widow Colony sewing or stitching clothes as if they were the forgotten daughters of the night.

  Then it happened. Nelly sent a collective email once to several of her acquaintances, and that is how I connected with Maribel. The moment I saw her long, earthworm-like email address on the computer monitor I was compelled to contact her. She was going to heal me the way she had healed Nelly. I composed my message quickly and pressed ‘Send’ without giving it proper thought. That message to Maribel, I feel now, was a huge faux pas. ‘I am assuming you know a few things about me via Nelly.’ My email ended with a request. ‘Please, if possible, keep our correspondence confidential.’ Please not a word to N. ‘But it is important I contact you. These words come to you in good faith. Hope you will not disappoint.’ That last line sounded so old-fashioned and inappropriate. Obviously she didn’t respond.

  I sent another email a month later. My tone apologetic. At the same time I informed her about my firm intention to visit Mexico City. I was headed south of the border to participate in the Rheology Society’s annual meeting and it would be ‘a privilege and pleasure’ to see her. Perhaps the two children as well. I sent her my exact dates and the hotel coordinates, etc. Once again she didn’t respond.

  Despite no response I decided to go ahead with the trip to Mexico. There I attended almost all the panels, the most exciting one was on the lava flows in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, and a Plinian eruption scenario at Volcán de Colima. A young grad student also presented findings about the monogenetic Parícutin, the one that will never erupt again. One thing we can be sure about . . . However, I found mingling with colleagues a chore. So I hung out with an older professor, a local, who turned out to be a Renaissance man. During drinks in the hotel bar he told me, among other things, about a few years spent in Italy, where he met Levi in 1984. I don’t recall now how he figured out my continuing obsession, how our conversation stumbled upon Levi (the most likely trigger was the newspaper report connected to the trial of some Italian seismologists), but when I demanded the exact details, the professor scratched his grey goatee and said that he would rather jot those impressions down. I still remember every single word of that email of his, which arrived within a couple of hours.

  Señor Raj, I must apologise for sharing the information in written form. I don’t understand fully why I felt uncomfortable doing so in the oral form. Perhaps it has to do with my English. I did have the occasion to meet Levi briefly, and am happy to resurrect my recollections of that evening in November of 1984.

  Those days I was teaching two semesters – dragging my feet on my doctoral dissertation – in Lugano. There I made acquaintances of a few fellow professors, who knew Levi. I believe there was a gathering of the old friends at a reading of a Pirandello play in Milano, and a talk as well by Primo Levi.

  He had come to Milano for this occasion, though he lived in Turino. I remember the reading of Pirandello, but have no recollection of the subject of the talk by Levi (my non-existent Italian didn’t help either), except for his gentle manners, soft voice and his piercing eyes.

  Levi knew Marco’s father (a Buchenwald survivor, and editor at Corriere della Sera) and Jardena’s father (a classmate from Ferrara, who fought against and died at the hands of Il Duce’s goons). So, the gentleman joined our dinner table briefly to chat with Marco and Jardena.

  At the time, I had read Levi’s Auschwitz memoir, his Periodic Table, and collections of his short stories. I was deeply moved by his humanity in the midst of madness . . . So, it was an honour to meet him in person, while regretful of my language barrier to converse with him. I was shocked, as were my Italian friends, to hear of his apparent suicide only a few years later. Such a man, who stood so resolutely for life!

  On the last day of the meeting I skipped the gala and visited the Museum of Anthropology and wandered through its labyrinths to finally stand in front of the Aztec calendar, and the sun god, Huitzilopochtli. It was hard to tear myself away from the Fire Serpent. When I returned the hotel clerk handed me a yellow slip, a message. Someone had called. Is the name Maribel? I asked. No, sir.

  Why don’t you come over to our place? the local professor had suggested. He left his phone number as well. I took a cold shower, and before stepping out checked the Internet, and, yes, there was a message from Maribel. Something happened that made me change my mind. Let us keep in touch via email. But I am not ready to talk to you in person. Safe travels.

  The professor’s place was in San Angel, at the edge of Coyoacán, walking distance from my hotel. On the way I noticed a heavily-ribbed statue of Gandhi, and not far from the statue a bookstore called Gandhi. Walking to his place I got a sinking feeling: that I was actually walking to Maribel’s place. I didn’t know what she looked like. Several times I tapped the metal knocker. The maid opened the door finally (‘un momento’) and took me straight to the courtyard. She was sitting by the fountain, reading, the professor’s wife. Seeing me, she stood up and smiled and took off her glasses. We shook hands. Her hairless dog sniffed me briefly. She looked much younger than Nelly. The moment I sat down a young man emerged from the house and took his leave with a single kiss on the cheek. We were not introduced. He is our son, she explained. Then the professor stepped out.

  Both were extremely open with me. Our son came to persuade us to pay for his travels to Europe. We have no problem with that, she said. But he wants to take his Argentinian girlfriend along and he wants us to pay for her trip as well. The professor’s wife had short hair, dyed brown, but her features resembled that famous painter, or perhaps I was desperate to see Frida Kahlo in her. Or perhaps I had imagined Maribel as Kahlo. The maid (from Oaxaca) served us hot chocolate and finger food. ‘Gracias’, I said. Something about the wife gave me the impression that if she accepted one as a friend then it was for life, and if she rejected one then it was for life. And she would do anything for the sake of a friend. Her nose ring gleamed like a mathematical singularity. Most likely she had acquired the stud of a jewel from an Indian shop. Her son didn’t look like her; he didn’t resemble her husband either, I thought. He could easily have passed as Nelly’s son. Our son. My mind was becoming mushy again. What if Nelly was pregnant in October ’84? What if she had asked Maribel to raise our child? The professor and his wife saw my outwardly smiling face, they had no idea what was brewing inside. Later they drove me to the university campus and gave me a guided walk of UNAM, now and the
n pointing at the murals. Briefly they mentioned the 1968 student massacre. I didn’t ask any further questions. I’d read about the massacre in a book by Paz.

  There I stood unable to tear myself away from the murals.

  Soon afterwards the professor showed me photos of the 2 October Tlatelolco demonstrations on his iPad. I borrowed the iPad and sent an urgent email to Maribel. She, much to my surprise, responded right away, in real time.

  ‘What is it really that you want to ask? I don’t think I will be able to betray confidences.’

  ‘Nelly,’ I wrote. ‘Did she know the truth about my father? I could not tell her in the beginning. It took me so long. But did she find out on her own?’

  ‘You sound worried.’

  ‘Please. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.’

  ‘You are an engineer, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘But don’t you see? Your father’s story is in the archives. It is public knowledge.’

  ‘Nelly never once mentioned my father’s involvement to me. She didn’t know for sure that the man who is mentioned by his rank (and not his name) in the archives happens to be my father. No, there is something I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t you see what everyone sees?’

  ‘I have one more question.’

  ‘Last question.’

  ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Is the last one really your child?’

  Maribel was mad at me, I know for sure. One can always tell such things. Finally someone was mad at me for the right reason. I had gone to Mexico prepared to extend my stay if the need arose. Now I felt the strong need to return ‘home’.

  Two or three months after my return from Mexico (for reasons that remain unclear) I invited her to visit me in Ithaca. After initial hesitation, a ‘categorical no’, and four phone calls, she came. I insisted on paying for the ticket. Those nineteen days with Nelly are perhaps the happiest in my life.

  I rented a furnished place for her. A pastor and his wife were headed on an RV holiday to Utah and they left behind the duplex, a curious combination of antiques and modern amenities including a home theatre.

  After her jet lag relaxed, I gave her a guided tour of Cornell’s ‘campus Gothic’ architecture, we had lunch at the students’ union, then I took her to my rheology lab, and Gergina’s locked office. We spent almost half an hour in Professor Singh’s old lab in the physics department. Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Professor Osheroff did revolutionary Nobel Prize-winning work in the same lab. One afternoon, Nelly and I drove to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, where she bought a book of birdsongs and a couple of posters. From the university store she picked up a book by David Foster Wallace. Another by Carl Sagan, and almost bought a thick blue volume of Nabokov’s butterflies. The long silences during our conversations made perfect sense, although at times I felt we were like two figures haunted by the same picture that needs no caption. I tried to persuade Nelly to extend her stay. Nothing would give me more joy than the sight of her at the pastor’s house sitting on the sofa with a book in her lap, allowing the weight of both hands to keep it open. One afternoon we were driving around Cayuga when she told me how Professor Singh, during a lighter moment, demonstrated ice hockey to the children, Arjun and Indira. He used a golf club, a carrom board striker as a puck and Rollerblades. The demo – a prelude to his ‘Coldest Experiments’ – took place on the roof terrace of the IIT house one night when the sky was very dark but the stars were very bright and low. She repeated the story two or three times (within a span of twenty minutes) during the drive, with exaggerated gestures, and for some strange reason I thought about that night when from behind the bougainvillea I watched them together, dancing.

  ‘It was in the late sixties when Mohan first moved to Cornell,’ said Nelly. ‘He didn’t know baseball or ice hockey. Field hockey and cricket, yes, but no one around him played those sports. His Jewish room-mate taught him how to skate. On ice. I see him struggling to learn on the rink. Single-mindedly he sheds his fear of falling. Every time he falls he becomes a child. Then rises like a physicist. Over there his body is pure force. Pushing and gliding slowly, and slowly he swirls, and swirls, and is spinning around in widening circles. Now F, now A, now G, E, D – he is fast becoming one of those of grainy rings of Saturn. I see it all and hear as well. Frozen water. Debris of ice. He is all of those cosmic rings of Saturn. Also the rings of the moon, Rhea. Arc after metallic arc the old-fashioned skates generate an ensemble of sounds I cannot get used to.’

  Once the two of them crossed the border, Nelly reminisced. Mohan and his room-mate drove all the way to Montréal, Canada, to watch a game of hockey. At the border all the cards they presented (read ‘flashed’) were mere university ID cards. Those days such things were possible.

  Nelly repeated the skating story, the ‘ensemble of sounds’ she found difficult to get used to, as we were driving around Cayuga. How far is Montréal? she checked. Whimsically I turned the car back. Quickly we collected our passports (in Ithaca) and drove non-stop to Montréal to watch a game. It was my first time, and her first time too. I don’t recall now the teams, and neither one of us knew the rules of the game, but we held hands, locked, for a couple of hours. Afterwards we drank red wine, 2004 Shiraz. Perhaps the only time I saw her consume wine after ’84. We talked about Faiz and Feynman and the wine, and she told me that it was in Montréal, of all places, the two friends had also gone to attend a sitar concert. During the concert, said Nelly, a string broke (according to Mohan) and Pandit Ravi Shankar very gracefully replaced the string as if it was the most natural thing to do, and then continued with ‘Rag Megh Malhar’ as if no accident had ever happened. Nelly and I stayed in the restaurant until the waitress (from Haiti) informed us in French that it was past closing time. The restaurant parking lot was filled with Volkswagen Golfs. Je me souviens licence plates. I translated for her sake and for my sake. Je me souviens. How painful those words became when translated. But not to have translated would have made them calamitous, I thought. Still inebriated, I tried to persuade Nelly to write her memoirs. ‘Please consider. The sayable and the unsayable.’ She was mad at me. My words must have touched a raw nerve. She didn’t speak to me during the drive back to the US. We patched things up just before she flew ‘home’. Despite that needless waste of time towards the end my overall state was ‘happy’. I could no longer say that happiness was impossible.

  She died. It was a natural death. She left no objects behind for me, only courage, warmth, affection, dignity, and they glow to this day like the nest of a rare Andamanese bird. I found out while I was teaching a class on viscoelastic liquids. Her co-worker phoned with the news. I cancelled all my engagements and took the first flight to Delhi. The city was wrapped in miles and miles of dense January fog. It felt like that sincere (elegiac and celebratory) day in Mexico, the day of commemoration. After the cremation I had a meal with Maribel not far from Jantar Mantar, but the meeting was brief, she was headed home that very day. M was different from the picture I had formed in my mind, and I knew our first meeting in all probability was also our last. She told me something I didn’t know. Nelly, too, had grown up afraid of trains. This was followed by a long silence, and in silence we parted. Later in my hotel room I skimmed through local papers. There was nothing on Nelly. It was already old news or no news. The media was obsessed with the Indian Premier League, and motorcycle gangs, and a couple of ghastly crimes.

  A week later I stood outside the house (that was once mine).

  Three or four private security personnel posted outside like attack dogs.

  Under a dark overcast sky, it was raining mildly and I was carrying an umbrella. A figure appeared on the upper balcony, stick in hand, gazing at the clouds, the wind grew stronger and ruined my umbrella, and the wind lifted the old man’s white kurta pyjama for a brief second. Then he spat and the wind gave his spit a strange parabolic trajectory.

  I loo
ked at the house and the dogs as if I was looking at them one last time. Then I took an overnight taxi to Shimla. As the car rolled into the night I experienced a flood of thoughts, and I knew what I had to do next. The Hague, I knew that was the road I would take next, but before The Hague a lot of work. Work, and save the truth from extinction.

  In the taxi I felt as if she was with me, her voice, and her unfulfilled promise. She had agreed to write a memoir, and now it would not happen. She had even chosen the title. Observatory Prose. I hear, I hear her still telling me about the ylang-ylang fragrance she received as a gift from Maribel. She tells me about lukkan-mitti, hide-and-seek, in sugar-cane fields, her Hero cycle, rope swings and tubewell vacations with cousins, the way her body responded when she first saw a combine harvester.