Helium (12 page)

She told me that one of her projects at the archives was to actively seek material connected to ‘Empire and Ornithology’. Nelly was particularly interested in one Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant in colonial India; the white man lived in Shimla for several years, and it was here, in 1883–4, he conceived the idea of forming the Congress Party, which would eventually work towards Indian independence. The Congress was not formed by Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru, but by an enlightened Scotsman in 1885. Gandhi and Nehru joined the party much later.

Twenty-five years ago when Nelly shifted to Shimla she had no idea that the colonial Hume was different from the philosopher David Hume. Allan Octavian was also a prodigious collector, with eccentrically large trophies of stuffed birds and eggs. The collection arose out of perpetual travel and constant communication with a vast network of ornithologists scattered throughout South Asia. He used his own savings to start a first-of-a-kind journal,
Stray Feathers
, and authored books like
From Lahore to Yarcanda
and
The Nests and Birds of the Empire
. Some call him the ‘Pope or the Father of Indian Ornithology’.

For a moment I thought I had learned nothing about the history of my own country from the teachers at school.

She paused. Her left hand cleared cold perspiration from her brow, and her thoughts drifted to a distant tribe in the Great Andamans. The Andamanese believe when we humans die we become birds, she said. That is why the population of birds is higher than that of humans. The tribe members never hunt birds, because to kill them is to destroy our own ancestors.

Her tone was that of a rationalist, not superstition. How beautiful was this fluidity between humans and birds. How beautiful the semi-permeable membrane between the living and the dead. But a part of me felt that she wasn’t interested in answering the very real questions she herself had posed about the migration of birds. How do birds use Earth’s magnetic field to migrate? Is there a compass in their eyes? And if they are able to ‘see’ the magnetic field, then how do they fly at night?

‘Mrs Singh, I am an insomniac. When I was a child my father wrote poems about my inability to sleep.’

She, apparently, didn’t hear me properly, and her thoughts drifted towards the terns of Havelock Island, and a different tribe. Then towards endemic birds (nightjar? Narcondam hornbill?) on a volcanic island, some hundred kilometres from the penal colony set up by the British.

As much as I wanted the monologue to continue, I recall leaving the room in haste. I put on my jacket, collected the keys and simply walked out of the apartment, perhaps giving the impression that I could stand her no longer. But that was not why I fled.

Once outside I heard sounds unfamiliar to my ears. Snow was falling faintly, but did not settle on the ground. Instant phase transition. The three phases of water, it seemed, found a temporary equilibrium. Nothing was going to change, I thought, trapped now in the city and its cold night. The neighbouring hills looked more alive with dim dots of light. Where are the children? Not a single word about them. Not a single word about God, etc., only the ballistic little miracle of birds. A breathing space, I felt. Birds for her were like tiny healing devices; they were her prayers. Nevertheless, where were the children? Arjun and Indira and? Did our relationship lead to something or someone? A new life? Stolen? The laptop, still heavy in my thoughts, sent me purposefully towards the Peterhof. By now I have forgotten the exact details of my slippery, uneven walk. Freezing translucent rain was falling on sinuous streets, on parked army vehicles, on the corrugated roofs, on the nursery school under construction. On the bronze head of Ambedkar. The great leader lost in deep thought on caste and power and utopian hope. Ambedkar, instead of hope, filled me with foreboding. One of the cops posted outside the hotel was peeing against a wall. When I waved he yelled and four or five of his colleagues marched me on crunchy pebbles to their senior officer in the tent. He smelled of betel nut, and demanded my papers, etc., and when I spelled out the details he demanded American dollars, and it was only then I spilled out my father’s name, and his ultra-high rank, and the police inspector, not surprisingly, stood up, erect, and saluted me and apologised for his rude behaviour, and added ‘sir’ to whatever he said, ‘your father was/is a supercop, sir’, and then he asked me to accompany him to the lobby and ‘just point at the man who had last handled the bags, sir’. A few party delegates were shuffling about the lobby. Fortunately the man was still present at the reception. He was explaining a map to a young lady, and the digital clock on the wall was ten minutes slow.
That one in black
. The officer requested me to leave an address or return the next day and check at the reception. ‘We will see what we can do.’

Nelly had moved to the bedroom during my absence, and the door was not ajar. The light in her room was on, and I felt someone else’s presence. My Zara jacket was wet and I spread it on the same dining chair where I had seen her clothes dry the first night. She was reading a text aloud. I moved close to the door and heard, it was the same cruel story my father would read to me when I was a child, he would use Kipling to put me to sleep, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’. Father would read ‘Kabuliwala’ and
Alice
and
Dorothy
as well and Panchtantra and Lamb’s abridged Shakespeare and Grimm Brothers and
Chandamama
and
Vikram
aur Vetal. Several times I felt like knocking mildly on her door, but I didn’t and continued to scan the objects in the living room, the bookshelves, and I happened to discover by sheer chance a large collection of children’s books at the bottom. My conjecture was Nelly chose a different book every night and read it aloud to an imaginary child curled up in her bed.

This is how she had maintained her sanity. (I was proven correct a few days later.) How wrong Professor Singh was that day on the train when he said that the three most important questions for us concerned the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of mind. He forgot to add other questions, or shall I say he forgot to ask the three really significant ones: Why do people respond differently to traumatic events? How do we remember the past? Why when ‘meaning’ collapses in our lives, do some of us seem to locate a new ‘meaning’?

My father, after leaving the police force, consciously decided against getting a corporate job or setting up his own security company. He has enough stocks, and lockers in foreign banks. Three generations can live off his assets. In his retirement he has stumbled upon a new meaning. He reads the classics and studies alternative medicine, and sometimes prescribes Ayurvedic remedies to friends, most of them retired civil servants or diplomats and even industrialists, and they spend time in his living room in Delhi, learning the medicinal properties of a rare mushroom extract.

I read some of these details in a letter he wrote to Clara. Everything happened behind my back. I never gave her Father’s address, Clara got it from my old passport. She sent him our wedding photo, and he responded on Mother’s death anniversary.

Ever since, although they have never met, my estranged wife and my father have formed a mutual admiration club and exchange polite meaningless words every couple of months.

Not so long ago she arranged a Skype call between our daughters and my father. Had I known in advance I would not have allowed any such contact. Clara, during that one and only video call, encouraged Father to teach Hindi to the kids. He was overjoyed to hear those words coming out of the American wife. Conversation turned to
Sita Sings the Blues
. Urvashi and Ursula take immense delight in transcendental animation. Clara persuaded him to tell them the Indian myths. The girls feigned interest when Grandpapa started repeating stories they had already heard from their father. Clara rescued the delicate situation like a true Midwesterner. She printed out the myths and mailed them to Father. In my spare time I had compiled hundreds of them to entertain the girls. It was Clara’s idea. She suggested a good and proper translation of those myths (my myths) into Hindi.

Father, it seems, took the suggestion seriously. After all, he is a self-appointed saviour of Indian languages and culture. That night I felt an abnormally strong urge to hurt myself. Once again my wife and I were upset with each other over Father . . .

I am twenty years old. It is my last day in Delhi. The flight to New York via Europe is supposed to take off at the most inconvenient hour of the night. My mother and the maid (from Nepal) have just finished packing my suitcase and I step out on to the lawns and touch trees, shrubs and flowers as if I am going to the moon. Father beckons me. His voice urgent, but lacking in emotion. Son, I would like to have a word. As usual he utters the word ‘son’ with mechanical authority. Father always has that special ‘word’ with me at the dining table. No food on the table yet, just salt and pepper shakers. A fat bottle of Kissan lemon pickle. He waits for me to sit down. He, the head of the table, clears his throat. Don’t feel bad, he begins. Just answer me honestly. Do you have plans to return? After the studies are over do you come back? We know you keep things deep inside, so answer me honestly. Come on, don’t hide. Will you return? The long pause is my fault. I am observing my good father like never before. As if you are not hiding something? I say. Jokes apart, he says. Tell us, will you return? How words betray his gestures. As if subconsciously he has figured me out completely, and doesn’t desire my return. Yes, I conceal myself from him. I want to sort this problem out, but Mother is standing by the edge of the oblong table. I wait for her to pull out the chair and sit next to me. She doesn’t. She keeps staring at the lemons trapped in the bottle. Of course I will, I say, more for her sake. I will return after the studies are over. But the moment I do so, she weeps more not less. I have abandoned her as well.

Where would we be without lithium? Ever since the doctor prescribed lithium she made no attempts to kill herself. The lithium story freaked out all my girlfriends. So I omitted talking about that element in the periodic table to anyone. Clara has no clue about lithium. I pretended I knew nothing. Now it is too late to tell.

Clara would insist on a short visit to India after we got married. She figured out something was not right. She detected a problem, a ‘non-amicable’ relationship, something messy connected to my past. No family member of mine had attended our wedding. I could not invite Mother, because she was dead. I never invited Father. Because he was alive. Clara wanted to meet him. ‘You go,’ I would respond. Frustrated, she would mimic and mock my ‘you go’. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving, unfailingly, she would try hard to persuade. But she never bought a ticket.

Why did she fall for me? She fell for her idea of me. My defects. Mathematics. My exoticness. My mild British accent. I don’t need an analyst to reveal this. But things were different when we first met. Her presence comforted and calmed me down during those early days. She made me less lonely. And we laughed together. There were heavier things I was unable to tell, things that really mattered. I spared her that. Not telling meant not processing the stuff myself. She didn’t sense any major concealment. Let me spell them out clearly – two things I could not share with the woman (who was not yet my wife). The first: my anxiety that she would run away the moment she discovered my ideas about not having children. The second one, more complex, connected to Father. Something wrong, periodically sinister, but I could not bring myself to believe it. So I started concealing it even from my own self. And Clara? Not that I didn’t trust her, but I knew the way she was, the way she operated in the world, she would not understand.