Helium (14 page)

Nelly was not back and I grew more worried. I watered all the plants in her apartment, one by one. I identified them using the Internet. Then I checked my email. Forty-five more minutes passed by. Then without making any sounds I left the apartment and slowly took the steep, dangerous path towards the Observatory Hill. First down on the cobblestones, then up. The neighbour was looking out of the window, the shoeshine man. For me he did not exist.

The Summer Hill train station was bright with moth-like lights. Fresh snow on the tracks, and on layers and layers of open garbage. Snow on the high arches of the tunnel. Ice and loose snow. I walked past a sharp smell of piss. Climbing up the half-hill I felt the city itself was a collection, an archive, a ghostly archive of hubris, greed, neglect and fear. Alongside me walked Kipling’s dark wild animals, imaginary cheetahs, Shere Khan, Baloo, Bagheera, Kaa and cruel poisonous nags. How easy it is to read about Kaa and Darzee in
The Jungle Book
from the comfort of a living room in Ithaca. (Not so long ago Clara pointed out that Kipling never managed to create skunks and raccoons, the North American inhabitants. India cast a bigger spell than North America, or even his ‘native’ Britain.) The more he stayed away from this landscape, the more he wrote about its people and animals. Distance failed to make India disappear. Not the first time someone disappeared from my own life, so many friends of mine made the disappearing act one by one. During my day walks on the same path I’d noticed mysterious local women knitting or sweeping (the Brownian trajectories of rising and falling dust particles, eddies and vortices), but now it was night. The women gone. Ahead of me the incongruous Scottish baronial castle, its menacing turrets. High up on the canopy of trees, nimble monkeys. They knew the double bonds, and made me think of
The Wrench
by Primo Levi and
The Periodic Table
. ‘The Grey Zone’. The worst survived, the best all died. Vanadium. After the war a chance occurrence in the paint factory brought Primo Levi into contact with his ex-boss, Dr Müller of Auschwitz. Reappearance. After a long disappearance.
A vast zone of grey consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims
. Buna rubber factory. Levi was one of the three chemists in the factory just seven miles from the camp. Dr Müller was the chief chemist there. On clear days the flames of the crematorium, the carbide tower, were visible from the factory. After a difficult exchange of letters Dr Müller phoned – ‘Could we meet?’ So much time had passed by. ‘Yes,’ said Levi, taken unawares. But the meeting never happened. Eight days later he died, Dr Müller.
Why the children in the gas chambers? (In the letters) Müller’s condemnation of Nazism was timid and evasive, but he had not sought justifications.

The snow-covered pebbles crunched under my feet. The closer I approached the castle the more I felt like a ‘native’, a ‘brown heathen’, a petty subject of the British Empire, who by a freak accident managed to sneak out of his shack, duping the guards, climbing up the hill to marvel at the wonders of electrification. How this new force would one day eliminate the darkness that had occupied his land, and send the foreign rulers home. The land of his ancestors, now ruled by those who claimed to be the creators of civilisation. But in reality they had damaged and frightened his people more or less like Attila the Hun. Imperial policies had led to extermination of large numbers of humans in the colonies. ‘Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination has long rested’ Sven Lindqvist. One by one I observed through the tall fuzzy uncurtained windows objects that belonged to the Empire, and the new ones. An oak desk. Just like the desk in daylight. But different now. A fluorescent light flickering, irradiating a red sash in the ballroom. On the desk a head. A human head. Was she asleep? The porte cochère, on the other side, fifty metres away, the main entrance half blocked by a huge silhouette of a rusty colonial bell. I woke up the bidi-smoking porter. Once a complete battalion of Gurkhas guarded the place and now only one red-eyed night porter sporting a threadbare baseball cap.

‘Madam-ji is locked inside. Hurry.’

The porter shook his head. Bhoot, he whispered the Hindi word for a ghost.

‘Archivist madam.’

‘Madam who?’

‘The librarian.’

‘Who are you?’

Losing my patience, I pinched the man wearing a baseball cap and fingerless gloves. His name was Suraj.

Suraj = Sun.

‘And who are you?’

Suraj knew I lived not far from New York, we’d had an extended conversation only a day ago. He had saluted me and was friendly and he had shared his own details then in a sprightly voice. ‘Sa’ab, I grew up in a village on the high mountains.’ His brother and parents were still on the ‘high mountains’ dependent on a couple of farms and a small orchard. He himself lived with his nephew and niece in a single room in what used to be the Viceroy’s horse stables. The kids had moved to the ‘big’ city to attend school. Only a day ago Suraj and I had talked about his lowly salary; I had even taken the liberty to ask him about his political affiliation, his take on the Hindu Party, and he had said that he never supported those corrupt politicians, and when I had asked ‘why’, he had explained, Those people destroy what they don’t want to remember.

But Suraj was a transformed man that night.

‘Sa’ab, the lady is the bhoot of Curzon. Dressed in a white petticoat. We have seen before. She rustles though the corridors. Everyone knows. Sometimes the petticoat hits the old furniture and one hears someone crying.’

‘Suraj, Nelly-ji is inside.’ I grabbed his wrist. ‘She is wearing an orange salwar kameez.’

He rubbed his eyes. ‘These, as I say, are manifestations of a ghost,’ he said in Hindi. ‘Not my job. Are you her husband?’

He wasted five more minutes before unlocking the door, and as I stepped in I felt I was walking not on a soft carpet, but on a sea of freshly molten wax. Everything inside the mansion was mute and dimly lit, the wallpaper peeling as if it were the skin of colonialism, unable to express properly its real purpose or pain. So many of my memories are completely extinguished by now, but this is hard to repress. After the difficult farewell Nelly had stayed behind, she wanted to move the last few boxes from her office to the collection. Took her a couple of hours, then she locked the archives, and her office in the basement. She spent a few moments in the ladies’ washroom, cleaning her dusty hands thoroughly, and then moved upstairs and sat at the assistant librarian’s desk, and started observing through the glass window a shower of snow, and she had no idea when sleep overtook her. The farewell gathering took place in the Viceroy’s tea room (the transmuted ‘seminar room’).

Nelly requested the porter to show me the debris of the event. She didn’t accompany us into the room. So this is where she delivered an improvised speech, I thought. All I remember of that dimly lit room now is the ‘original’ maple-coloured silk wall-covering and the ‘original’ but faded, threadbare curtains and the portrait of long-grey-bearded Tagore on the wall facing the Raj-era podium. For forty-five years Tagore had stayed glued to the same colonial wall, keeping watch over hundreds of seminars, panels and workshops, or gatherings of a more private nature. Standing there I could not help but think that in 1919 the Nobel Laureate had returned his knighthood to the British to protest the Amritsar Massacre. For a while I was not sure where exactly I was.

‘It is all coming back to me now, Sa’ab,’ Suraj said. ‘You a New Yorker.’

Suraj and I stepped out. Nelly was in the lobby (with its infinitely high ceiling). She looked up. She was staring at a black dot, which swelled as it flew right above us . . . Skilful user of a sonar device, the gliding dot of a creature knew how to avoid collisions with big objects and the walls. The bat shrank and swelled again passing right above us, and moved without disturbing the air, without producing any audible effects. Suraj, no longer afraid, claimed he knew how to take care of chamgadars. I will see to it, he reassured her. The porter’s eyes glowed as if he were a modern-day Kipling, as if after dealing with the bat or chamgadar he was going to sit down and write a book for his nephew and niece.
Namaskar, madam-ji
. He didn’t wish me goodnight.

On the way home she walked slower than her usual pace, and Nelly’s beautiful face looked sad and exhausted, and she mentioned next to nothing about the event. The real reason – as I found out later – was shame (and she didn’t want me to play the witness). I cannot even begin imagining what she experienced being in the same room as the man who destroyed the life she had assembled, everything that was meaningful to her.

How does one look into the eyes of someone who ruins one’s nest? What else, if not shame? She chose to tell me ghost stories instead, fear and fantasy floating around at the institute: a research fellow who finds the quilt on his bed neatly wrapped every morning, an illiterate dhobi who mutters a line or two of perfect Victorian English and calls himself Cyril Radcliffe, and that no matter how many locks are used on the Vicereine’s bathroom door some mysterious figure always manages to take a hot shower.

She stopped and took a deep breath.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Small thing,’ she said. ‘My foot is hurting.’

She offered the details herself.

‘A heavy box fell . . . and I tripped down the stairs.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Small thing.’

Her response carried an echo of the response I got earlier in the day from the trembling lips of that receptionist, the man in black. I asked again and when she nodded I noticed for the first time a black eye. Someone had punched her hard. Perhaps in that darkness I wanted to believe that someone had punched her, and punched again.

‘Should we get a taxi?’

There were no taxis around. We stood in the middle of the road, where only sixty or seventy years ago some of our liveried compatriots plied foot rickshaws.
Jinrickshaw
, the colonial terminology. Kipling’s characters rode them, sahibs and memsahibs. Every summer they came to ‘Simla’ to ‘forget India’, but India always tagged along, showing its dirty feet. The same feet and hands pulled brown sahibs and memsahibs up and down the hills, including our brown leaders, who arrived by train to hold ‘round table’ talks on freedom.

‘Should we go to a doctor?’

‘No.’

The rest of the way, awkwardly, I held her hand. Soft and scabrous at once, her skin. Her handbag dangled in my other hand. In the cold and crisp air our words generated plumes of white smoke. No, not an apparition – Nelly, walking beside me, was real. She was hiding something, and that, too, was real. It took us almost an hour. Back home she spent a long time in the cold bathroom. When she stepped out her limp was more pronounced. I made her hot tea. She asked me to serve it in the bedroom.

‘You would like to know,’ I disclosed finally. ‘The laptop is back.’

She displayed no surprise. Only a thin smile.

She sat on the bed and requested me to cover her feet with the quilt. Grotesque swelling on her right toe. Purple or faint blue. I turned on the heaters as well. She smiled again and unribboned and unwrapped the farewell gifts. Two red mugs. A miniature bronze woman, reading a tiny bronze book. The surface rough, but shining. Someone at the library knew her passion. Two Oxford India paperbacks:
The Birds of Eastern Himalayas
, and a veteran ornithologist’s memoir,
The Fall of a Sparrow
.

She didn’t volunteer more information about the farewell or the black eye, and I didn’t persist. Something was not right. Inside the bathroom two or three drops of blood. Outside the fog grew thick like an unknown animal. I knew it was not a good idea to start investigating blood. So I asked her if she had more old photos.

‘Most of them were destroyed.’ She requested me to open the upper chest of drawers and retrieve an album. I found two old postcards from Cornell (mailed to Mohan) and only one photo, a girl. Braided hair, ribbons, frock.

‘This is my son,’ she said. ‘You met him.’

‘Arjun?’

Shaking mildly I turned on my Mac. She put on her reading glasses. Nelly didn’t reveal much emotion while scanning and scrolling the photos of my research lab, and photos from my student days at IIT. Once or twice she tapped her fingers on the flickering screen. Then I showed her the photo which had gone through so many reflections and refractions, the railway station group photo.