Helium (5 page)
If Primo Levi had witnessed the moment he would have written the chapter called Sulphur differently. Sulphur is used to vulcanise rubber that is used in tyres.
Primo Levi survived the German Nazis and Italian Fascists because he helped them prepare Buna rubber during the war. In India my compatriots slipped rubber around Professor Singh’s neck and set him on fire.
My father had sent an official jeep to pick me up at the station and drop me at the IIT campus. Two of my classmates accompanied me.
As the jeep passed Tolstoy Marg I saw dozens of Sikh bodies on fire. Smell of burning wool and rubber tyres and human flesh. I saw taxis being smashed. And the black cloud of smoke touched the sky. This was our Eiffel Tower. This was our carnival. Our periodic table of hate.
We passed by the church. The Bishop was standing by the giant black-painted cast-iron gates, preventing the mob from entering the church. Thousands of children, women and men had taken refuge inside.
It was a Thursday. The jeep driver was in tears, he had seen horrible things. The skinny man trembled, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gurdwaras on fire, Guru Granth on fire. He said he didn’t want to come, but it was Sahib’s order and his duty. Those days my parents lived in a mansion on Amrita Sher-Gil Marg (the road named after the ‘mother of modern Indian art’), and I lived in the hostel on the IIT campus.
After this there are lapses in my memory. And moisture in my eyes. There was too much going on. Too many exams. What conversations I had with my father and classmates I have little recall. Were they equally shocked? Soon afterwards toxic methylisocyanide gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Back at the campus I stood in front of Nelly’s house and noticed that almost a quarter of it was badly damaged. Charred is the right word. There was a yellow padlock on the chestnut-coloured front door. The brick wall behind the house, between the campus and the village, was broken. According to rumours, she had survived the attacks.
Classes resumed and someone else replaced Professor Singh, and what made his death more unbearable was an empty chair; it was not his chair, but the chair of another Sikh boy in our class. He, too, had disappeared. When I had joined IIT there were two Sikh students in my class. Only one of them managed to survive and he was heavily traumatised; now he was the only one left and he seemed to have been transformed into silence itself.
Soon afterwards, maybe a couple of weeks later, we were all asked to assemble outside the hostels and form a line, and the new warden ordered the Sikh boys to form a separate line. At first I thought this was for their own safety, they were being sent elsewhere, this is the time before YouTube and Facebook and fearless bloggers, we didn’t know what was really going on, media was state-controlled, people turned on short-wave BBC to find out what really happened or what was happening in the country. But soon we found out. A Dalit woman had been molested on the IIT campus and she had complained to the authorities. A Sikh boy had molested her – she knew this because he had entered her tent in a turban. The student in our class was also in the line-up (along with nine or ten others). It is to that woman’s credit she didn’t point a finger at those who were innocent, but whenever she stood in front of a turbaned and bearded face my heart leaped out of my body. Not one of them was guilty; we all knew who had done it. A Hindu boy had tied a turban on and had entered the Dalit construction workers’ tent, but no one had the guts to report him.
After the incident the Sikh boy in our class came to me and urged me to accompany him to the market, and he told me to take him to the barber’s shop and the first barber refused to cut his hair, and the second one confirmed with him several times if he was sure. ‘Of course I am sure’, he said. And I remember that day clearly when his hair was being cut. He had shut his eyes tight, and the crackling of the transistor radio could be heard in the barber’s shop and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s voice:
when a big tree falls the Earth shakes
. I say this in hindsight; when I heard the crackling radio I was too young to process the lack of shock, and the force field of hate, in the new PM’s words. My classmate’s hair had piled up in the barber’s shop. We paid. He was slightly shorter than me, and it was windy, the city still smelled of burning rubber and I asked him how does it feel. He stopped on the pavement. And then God knows what got into him, he lifted his hand and slapped me. And I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. By the time I processed this it was too late to slap him back and I simply laughed.
Chapter 2.
‘Dystopia’ is a word I learned in 1983 while preparing for my GRE exams to apply for higher studies in the US. A compound made up of two ancient Greek words.
Dys
= ill, bad, wretched.
Topos
= place, land. A government that harms its own citizens. A state in which life is sometimes extremely wretched as a form of deprivation or oppression or genocidal pogroms. In the land where Orwell was born, 1984 was never imaginary. In India it was real, 1984 is burned fully into my retina; it recurs every day, every month, every year with its own chilling periodicity.
My memories are scalded memories. Remains of a fire. Dense black smoke flows through my veins. Delhi is a singed postcard. Smell of fungus, actinomycetes, just before rain. We waited. But it didn’t rain the first week of November. That is why human ash still coats my lungs. I have given up trying to comprehend the madness that overtook the city. I summon images, try to plot them with words and numbers on a 3D graph, but words don’t live up to their reputation, each one a failure. All I can do is listen to the pain of others. Perhaps it is more than my own.
Twenty-five years after the Event, on a night like this, I took the train to Shimla to see my professor’s wife. Something keeps me from calling her a widow. As the narrow carriage picked up speed, I thought about the remaining days of my sabbatical, and the possibility of closure. But the past refused to become past. Outside, a thin forest of chir pines and oaks with serrated leaves, although I could not see a thing. Only a faint reflection of spiral tracks and my own face in tinted glass. There exist only two ways to deal with time, and I, several years ago, chose the wrong way. More than once I thought of standing by the open, rattling door, but I was afraid of myself.
Shimla or ‘Simla’ was colder than I had expected. A porter moved my luggage along the rough cobbled path to the hotel on the upper mall. I had a booking for six nights at the Peterhof (a fossil left behind by the Empire). The hotel clerk had warned me of an upcoming Hindu Party convention, a ‘brainstorming’ session, a so-called chintan baithak. But the event hadn’t seemed to matter when I made the reservation.
The city was still waiting for the first snowfall of the season. For some unknown reason it didn’t snow during January and February, I was told. Global warming was too easy an assumption or conclusion. The distant mountains, visible from the balcony, still carried the weight of snow of previous years. The Himalayas were higher there. Chiselled peaks (with names like Bangles of the Moon) flushed with strands of orange or flamingo light. My room had a musty, resinous smell and the navy-blue carpet carried white stains along the non-functional fireplace. After that long and exhausting journey I felt like taking a proper shower. But, as expected, there was no soap in the bathroom, so I stepped out to purchase a cake of soap.
Nelly, if she followed the same profession, works at a library, the IIT Chair had told me, scratching his shock of white hair. Library or the archives. She was trained as an archivist. On a departmental sheet he had scribbled her phone number. ‘So much time has passed by, I am sure the number has changed.’
After a shower I shaved, then called the number. The answering machine clicked in and I was greeted by a voice choked by years of cigarette smoke, at the same time musical; the voice, darting out of the receiver, almost stabbed me. Not her, it was the voice of a man, a mediocre Indian Leonard Cohen. I left a detailed message for Nelly, and an inchoate apology regarding my failure to get in touch earlier.
Failure is the right word.
Shimla or Simla – a city six thousand feet high – was not a bad place to recover, an altermodern sanatorium, but my head pulsed like an overinflated tyre, and I was foolishly eager to locate Nelly. The best bet was to wait. I don’t recall how I spent an entire day in that L-shaped hotel room, but no one returned my calls. Next day, again, I spent the first half in the room, but after lunch, feeling energised, walked a hundred metres to the edge of the hotel. Past the black cast-iron gates at a slightly lower elevation I noticed the directions to an aviary. Smallish and poorly maintained, I could tell from the outside, but something compelled me to go ahead, and so disregarding my better sense I bought a ticket and spent two or three hours inside amid a confusing ensemble of Himalayan birds.
During the IIT days Nelly would tell me now and then fragments from her past. Listening to her I would try to imagine the shape of my alternative life if a biological accident made me take birth in a Sikh family. She would tell me what it felt like washing her father’s turbans. She did not romanticise the turbans the way I do. She would tell me about her kind but intimidating father, who trained as an agricultural scientist. Almost all his research focused on rice. The old man was never able to resolve the contradictions between science and religion. He knew half of the holy Granth by heart, and would recite hyper-melodious verses from the holy book and Nanak’s poetry on the oddest of occasions. Waking up at four in the morning and in the solitude of his room the rice scientist would hold reasonably loud dialogues between God and Darwin. These sessions lasted a little over an hour. God would win in the end, but Darwin would make sure the dialogues started again the next day. She rarely mentioned her mother. By all standards she had a happy childhood. Nelly, I recall, never learned to swim, and until the age of eight, she was afraid of snakes and water. Her father taught her cycling; often she would ride her red Hero to school (salwar puffed up) with friends. She loved foreign films, the first one she told me was
To Sir, With Love
. In her college years, Nelly suffered a minor bout of depression. The depression did not last long and getting married to Mohan eliminated the melancholic moods completely. At least that is what she told me. Together they travelled to different parts of the country on trains pulled by steam engines, especially the hill stations. Darjeeling, Dalhousie, Ooty. When I got to know them better my persistence paid off. I found out, if not the cause, the details of that depression. One day she also confided in me a difficult episode from her teen years. She was good friends with their neighbour’s daughter then. Several times Nelly watched a noisy spectacle through the bedroom window – the girl’s mother holding a cane. After the beatings I always felt sad, said Nelly. Sad that my friend’s mother was like that, and more sad because a part of me derived pleasure watching the beatings. Then there was a heavy mist in her eyes.
Despite a few odd recollections it occurred to me that I knew Nelly less and less. The gaps in my understanding remained despite reading at Cornell library several ‘Sikh’ biographies; in Shimla, looking for her, I felt the gaps more than ever, a tightening sensation as I observed the birds. I had even failed to ask, for instance, how Nelly and Mohan met. I never managed to ask the most essential questions. In my younger days I would dismiss such questions as ‘auntie talk’ (and in my twenties I would dismiss them as Oprah Winfrey). Of all the birds in the aviary, the ones that most caught my attention were a pair of monal pheasants. The female dull, the male flamboyant in metallic blue-red-green plumage, digging deep into the soil with his bill. Bejewelled, tessellated with heavily protruding eyes, trying to locate worms. As if he had never known fear. Observing the male I felt a mild twitching sensation in my left hand.
Over the next few days I tried another way to locate her.
Every morning I would drink two or three glasses of bottled water, put on my blue jeans and black Zara jacket, and step out for long walks. I did seven bifurcating walks, whirling around the seven hills of Shimla. The hills or mountains strangely defined, definitely not volcanic; the geometry misleading. Jakho, Mount Pleasant, Potters Hill, Bantony, Prospect, Summer Hill . . . Portions of the ageing hills still covered with trees. Nature had perished on those slopes a while ago; what remained now were simply the traces of the past. Chir pines. Chestnuts. Himalayan oaks with serrated leaves . . . Others crooked, dwarf, twisted, young . . . Himachal University library. No Nelly Kaur there. Another Tudor building on the ridge, the city library. The Cliff End Estate. The state archives. Structures more than a century old, fallen into disrepair. Railway Board Building, a cast-iron cage. In a decaying Catholic cathedral I saw the Virgin of Guadalupe. Snowdon, Medical College, Lakkar Bazaar. Three Kali temples. I even did the slums, and today more than three-quarters of the city is a hideous slum, perhaps the highest in the world, with crying children and incessantly clogged drains. Men in Himachali topis and women in incongruous white running shoes and brash, ill-mannered tourists despoiling the place. Walking around I encountered several concrete and bronze statues, shadows shortening and lengthening; the most impressive one was that of Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, a copy of the Indian Constitution in his hand. His bronze hand and bespectacled head glowed with utopian hopes. The Dalits, inspired by Ambedkar, were challenging old Brahmanical ways of being in the new India, not just economically and politically, but also symbolically, rightfully taking back what was denied to them for so many centuries.
I cannot give you heaven, but I can give you a voice
. One evening my feet started hurting and I sat at the base of the bronze statue, and thought of the grade-nine poem, ‘Ozymandias’. Ambedkar doesn’t belong to the Ozymandias category, a voice corrected the current of my thoughts. He stood for justice, dignity; an end to humiliation. An end to violence, an end to the poisonous Manusmriti, which says: All women are impure. Which says: Molten lead ought to be poured in the ears of an ‘untouchable’ who aspires to higher education. Ambedkar, who did his grad work at Columbia University, New York, is even more important to this country than Gandhi, who merely patronised the so-called pariahs. There: I contemplated the rest of my so-called sabbatical. My colleague’s pithy statements: ‘
So much work, so little time. So much time, so little work
.’ In Shimla: I was wandering without a good probability of success, squandering precious days over something unconnected to my research interests and rising-star career status. Locating Nelly had become my new obsession. Why now? Why after so many years? As if I were a freak, accidentally summoned by the demons. I called the IIT Chair. Surprisingly he didn’t scream or yell, but he wanted me to co-supervise a grad student. ‘At the very least introduce the Nobel Laureate Douglas Osheroff. Only you can do that.’ He flattered me . . . I wanted the Chair to help me locate Nelly. You are wasting your time, he excoriated. The cellphone connection kept failing; then a crackling disturbance set in and it cut off. The wind grew strong. My eyes watered because of alien particles stirred by its sheer force. I shut my eyes, and my ears alone couldn’t tell if the sound belonged to the rising and falling of the wind or to a body of water as vast as the Arabian Sea. For once I didn’t think in terms of pressure pockets, temperature gradients, boundary layers, dimensionless numbers or aeroelasticity. Vayu, the god of wind; I brought to mind his mythical powers, and even the sturdiest of conifers, in that sparse and austere forest, I feared were going to separate one by one from the root system and fall. She sheared past the agitated branches of a tree, leaning forward, running. Dressed in red and green rags, the woman with wild black hair and wild ravenous eyes, I noticed as the figure approached closer. Not shy at all she sat precariously close, splitting a blade of grass, or staring at her calloused hands, then staring vacantly at the unsteady, swirling mountains as unreal as fog or mist. From a small bag she dug out a red-coloured fruit and let it go. Together we watched the fruit rolling down the slope until it vanished completely. She smiled and twitched, then again, and then her longish, soiled fingers tapped and caressed my shoulder. My jacket was fluttering now. I have the key to happiness, she snapped, and burst out laughing. ‘
Do you want to know the secret?’
The cop posted in the square appeared with a stick and shooed her away as if she were an animal. ‘
Why are you so unhappy?’
The woman, mad like the wind, chanted from a distance. ‘
I will go to the moon, and tell them about you. I will go there and tell the goddess about you. Nine, eight, seven . . . Moon
.’
