Helium
For P. K. Page
1916–2010
How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all.
– W. G. Sebald,
Vertigo
Contents
Also Available by Jaspreet Singh
Chapter 1.
Now as I assemble my notes I recall the beginning of my sabbatical year, and my uneasy decision to spend some time in Delhi with Father, who was recovering from a serious surgery. It is still hard for me to picture his body on a bed, although I see clearly his face, and faintly unstable hands. Certain things, firmly connected to a body, can never be erased, especially hands. Papa sent an email without much sarcasm or hidden meaning: ‘worst is over’. As usual his words cut right through me.
I didn’t fly directly. My secretary booked a necessary stopover in Europe, where I attended a previously planned event on rheology. That is when, following a partially understood mechanism, a complexity of uneven forces, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland. The unexpected event occurred on the very first day of the Brussels conference. The TV channels showed surreal never-ending clouds of volcanic ash. Eyjafjallajökull, we were told, woke up after a long slumber and released gritty plumes as high as ten kilometres containing particles as small as sixty microns in diameter, spreading southward. These (rock and glass) particles generated fears of aircraft engine failure and grounded almost the whole of Europe.
Stranded, with every passing hour I felt as if through no fault of mine I had slipped into an uncertain in-between world. What made the flight cancellations particularly eerie was that they came into effect barely a few hours after a student presented an insightful, paradigm-shifting paper on the rheology of lava flows.
Stuck in Europe, I recall now how I gave up all hope of departure. But a week later the ash cleared, and the moment the flight finally took off, the skies displayed a beautiful hue of lavender, and as I drifted in and out of sleep Eyjafjallajökull merged with Vesuvius, and with Hokusai’s many views of Mount Fuji, another volcanic calamity, and together the ensemble merged with ‘roots’ of an old shadowy memory of my father driving me for the first time to the engineering college, the IIT.
Nine hours later we landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. The touchdown generated a near spontaneous applause from almost all the passengers aboard. No one was waiting to receive me. Because of the uncertainty I had not bothered to inform Father about the exact time of my arrival. Otherwise he would have sent the black BMW (as an overture to establish a truce between us). Nevertheless, I felt a strange sense of freedom arriving in the city of my birth as a mere outsider after a gap of nearly twenty-five years. It was dark; as usual the air of Delhi was heavy with nefarious gases. I took a taxi. Surprisingly the driver didn’t overcharge.
The taxi zipped through the highway to the heart of South Delhi. ‘You are my first customer of the day, and it is bad luck,’ he told me, ‘to overcharge.’ The driver, an elderly man with a two-day stubble, spoke in a candid no-nonsense manner, although the unnecessary laughter that followed puzzled me. ‘Is it OK to overcharge the second or the third customer?’ I said. He poked his short neck in my direction and stared as if I were a shadow of a figure from some imponderable era. ‘Sa’ab-ji, no one overcharges these days. The thirty extra rupees are merely the
convenience fees
.’
So much time has passed by since that cab ride. I am gathering these notes five years after my volcano interrupted flight. It is important to clarify a few things about myself. Thirty years ago, after completing my undergraduate degree at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, I proceeded with grad work in rheology at Cornell. Why Cornell? Because it was the only school that offered me a full fellowship. Ironically I teach at the same university now as a full professor. Once or twice during the Bush years I strongly felt like leaving my new life – carefully assembled in Ithaca – and starting all over again in a more enlightened European country, but my body responded strangely at the mere thought of it. Cornell, Ithaca, New York 14850–2488, for want of a better word, is ‘home’.
Father was deep asleep by the time the cabbie dropped me at the gates. Our old sentry carried my luggage to the room allocated to me. For some reason I had no recall of that room, and the harder I tried to remember, the more I felt blocked. Twenty-five years of absence is enough to diminish and erase certain memories. So much time gets needlessly lost, or twists silently, circulating as minor eddies and vortices. Truth is that during the last twenty-five years I had met Father not even once. I was still repelled by the very idea of having to confront him in the morning. But how could I forget that the room I found myself in was actually my mother’s bedroom?
The sixteen-metre by eight-metre room had nothing in common with its traces in my flickering memory. Even the smell was different. Certain irrevocable things, it was clear, had taken place during my absence. Almost half of the room was now filled with hunting trophies. Stags on the walls. For a while my eyes rested on the chiru, the endangered Tibetan antelope. Its shy upward gaze brought to mind the nimble baby pronghorn I had spotted not so long ago in the mountains in the US. Right across the newly varnished door I noticed a paralysed moth resting on the skin of a blackbuck. The hangul above the window had huge antlers, and Little Red Riding Hood was walking away from me, about to vanish again in the dense forest of its antlers. Such was the state of my mind when I arrived in Delhi.
Thirsty, I poured myself a glass of ice-cold water and sat in the living room staring at framed photos of my children, who to this day have not visited India.
Mother’s black-and-white portrait, high up on the wall, surveyed me as I surveyed my children. The blown-up photo had lost the original aspect ratio; as a result her high cheekbones and big youthful eyes appeared crooked. A moth had attached itself to the bottom right of the brown frame. This is not how I remembered my mother’s face. Sitting in the velvet armchair, I heard an echo of her voice. Softly she enquired about the well-being of my children, whom she never met. We held hands, and then she was gone. I missed her more now that I was in Delhi.
She died before my kids were born. I could not come for the cremation. (I didn’t come.) For several days in Ithaca in the US, after I heard the news, I would experience her walk in my rooms, and hear her body rustle and crack bit by bit like a mechanical object. The only time I wept.
But how could I forget her bedroom? Mother moved to this part of the house when I was still in high school. She found some solitude in the separate room, I remember. She used to call the room ‘my jahaz’ – my ship. Strange, I was convinced then that all her problems were really my fault. Often she would stare for hours on end at her shawl or voluminous sari. Unlike me she was less conflicted about Father. She avoided head-on collisions by using his words, and her own protracted silences.
Before I describe him fully in flesh and bone, let me articulate one faint but significant detail, because sometimes the lost moments do return in a new form. Something within me, ever since my grad-student days, has always been curious about ‘change’ and the ‘mechanisms of change’. Or rather: the mechanisms of forgetting. How past becomes past. My work, to put it simply, deals with the memory of objects and materials. Most things in this world of ours change. Every substance transforms. I have come to this awareness not as a historian, but as a scientific observer. Although I never fail to admire the distilled beauty of the sentence:
Everything flows
. Rheology, my specialisation, is the science of deformation and flow. Even so-called ‘solids’ flow: stained glass in old churches is thicker at the bottom.
My work focuses on the flow of ‘complex materials’, the ones with ‘memory’. Water, for instance, doesn’t have memory, but blood remembers its past. Volcanic lava flows and clays, too, carry within them some deep traces of unresolved past.
In the morning I met Father. It was his first week back home from the hospital. The surgery had basically eliminated any chances for heated arguments or the usual hostility between us. For years I had dreaded the very idea of a reunion. And now I was standing no more than fifty centimetres away. We shook hands; his were sweaty. Father looked more fragile than I had imagined him during the flight. The only thing constant, immutable and unchanged was the small mole on his left cheek. His hair had thinned. It was clear he had dyed the strands black before losing faith in the project completely. Father’s sparkly eyes blinked like window shutters as he explained a few procedural details of the surgery, and quite unexpectedly, he asked the nurse to leave the room. Then in an extremely concerned voice, he enquired about things in Ithaca. ‘Everything is going as expected, in fact, better than expected,’ I lied.
Worst is over
. Carefully I avoided any talk about my estranged wife, or my failed/failing marriage. I did mention my sabbatical though, and my plan to edit an anthology on the deformation of bio-materials. I don’t think he understood.
