Helium (8 page)

How did I respond then? I remember that comfortable June day with clarity. That cool and pleasant summer month. No heat, no dust at all . . . We had gone to the hill station of Mussoorie; my parents played Chinese checkers all day long on the cool, green lawns of the Police Guest House, the officers’ mess, and for some reason even I had no idea that something was being held from me, and believed every word that woman uttered on state-controlled TV. And she was not alone. The print media, too, was heavily biased and softly communal.

Why did the PM fail to grasp the enormity of her action? Or the anguish and scars it would cause within the Sikh community?

Operation Blue Star was the biggest disgrace in the recent history of our country.

But why?

Mrs G bought into her own ‘great leader’ myth:
Indira is India and India is Indira
. Myths can be dangerous. That one ruined her and thousands of others.

Nelly had arranged the books more or less the same way they were in the IIT house. Four bookshelves, not twelve or thirteen, but the arrangement was more or less identical on a smaller scale. Each title neatly bound by transparent plastic to keep away particles of dust. I was literally on my knees moving from one end to the other, and pulled out a book by Conrad, and another one by Flaubert, Volume II of
Sentimental Education
(Volume I was missing). Published in 1869, Volume II, older than the building I was in. Strange smells emanated from the dog-eared pages. Old railway timetables. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Another with a red-and-black damaged spine:
The King of Infinite Space
, a biography of Don Coxeter (the man who saved geometry). Why in the world was Nelly interested in that famous geometer? Why was she reading about the mathematics of shape and space? And then. On the brown shelf I found an object with a familiar smell; it had touched my hands, also his hands in 1984.

Levi’s cover photo stared out at me.

Trimmed white beard. Huge plastic-framed glasses. Schoken Books, New York. First edition. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. I stood for a long time in disbelief, leaning against the shelf, now on my right leg, now on my left, not realising the time it was. Reacquainting myself with that peculiar style, smelling the pages, half controlling my unexpected laughter, recalling that day when the package arrived in his office, remembering that day when he drove me slowly to my hostel in his white Fiat. Those days half of my class was going through the ‘asshole reading phase’ (a phrase I learned in the US) reading Ayn Rand. Professor Singh introduced me to Levi while most in the hostel were under the spell of Rand (masquerading as a philosopher). I read the chapter on cerium, pages 139 to 143. How the author and his handsome friend dealt with hunger, about fascism and death factories in Europe. How they refused the concentration camp universe . . . ‘Cerium’ kept them alive. They ‘stole’ cerium rods from a storage jar in the lab and, taking a huge risk, filed them at night. Small diameter rods ignite cigarette lighters. The two friends bartered meals for fire.
Alberto kept me alive
. But.
Alberto did not return
. Four or five lines underlined in pencil; a note in the margins in dense, baroque handwriting. While reading I shut the book now and then and studied the author’s beard and enigmatic, melancholic face hiding certain things.
Humans capable of such cruelty to other humans
. Depression. Suicidal thoughts. I could not help but think about the controversy surrounding his death. 11 April 1987. Was it suicide? My mind wove strange patterns and correlations. Primo Levi, born in Italy in 1919: three months after the first Amritsar Massacre in India.
The Periodic Table
appeared in English for the first time in November 1984. Random coincidences. Signifying nothing, and yet it didn’t feel merely random, as if the coincidence carried a ring of inevitability. That first night on Prospect Hill at her small place I kept hearing Nelly’s voice ‘the light is dim, move under the lamp’, but no, Nelly was in the other room, fast asleep. As I was replacing the book on the shelf two tiny photographs fell out of the pages. Like perennial migrants, the photos were impatient and keen to reveal the twists and turns of their odyssey.

Carefully I wiped away dust and scanned the images in the fragile light of the candles. The first one was the photo of thick ‘fog’ or ‘white smoke’ in our old lab. On the faintly visible bench there are traces of a completely shattered flower, a yellow rose. The professor’s two children are part of the photo; I suspect he must have done a special cryogenic demo just for them. The father must have demonstrated his famous ‘Coldest Experiments’ in a slightly different fashion to his children . . . The photo for some strange reason reminded me of Chardin’s
Boy Blowing Bubbles
, but I don’t think Professor Singh was thinking of Chardin when he took the photo. He must have warned the kids not to touch. Strange irony: one’s fingers ‘burn’ when one touches the coldest fluid. A prickly feeling hard to describe: an unfamiliar kind of pain goes through one’s arm. Most likely he plucked that rose from the garden outside his house on the way to the laboratory, perhaps he described it in literary terms as ‘Goethe’s rose’. I am exaggerating. One doesn’t talk to children that way. Perhaps he simply dipped the flower in liquid nitrogen. Magic. With forceps he plucked the brittle object out of the dewar flask; in the sink the frozen rose shattered like glass. In the photo the kids look reasonably amused, dark intelligent eyes. He must have entertained them further with ‘helium snow’. His lab for a few minutes would have become the coldest place in Delhi, indeed one of the coldest on our earth. The second photo is also a time-ravaged black-and-white. Beyond doubt it is a demo of the lambda point, the strange transformation, the so-called ‘phase transition’. Beautiful, hyper-beautiful helium-4. What made him think the kids would comprehend the very essence of his work? Sudden, extreme changes in properties, extreme confusion. An ordinary fluid becomes a superfluid. I remember. He loved explaining phase transitions with that smile of his, calling them an ‘identity crisis’.

Close to absolute zero, minus 271 degrees Celsius, liquid helium undergoes the crisis that collapses all definitions.

Normal becomes anomalous then, and anomalous becomes normal. Particles cease to be particles, they become small waves, no, one giant wave, as if a startled flock of birds (or eels swimming together). Think of the flock as a giant orchestra, flying. Each airborne instrument, each bird playing the same startled tune. Everything is identical everywhere. Who am I?

Helium has a very high heat capacity, and at very low temperatures it has an absurdly high heat conductivity. It stops boiling turbulently, defies gravity. It just ‘knows’ how to overcome obstacles. It becomes a fluid like no other, a superfluid. No friction, no viscosity, no resistance to its flow. Strange metamorphosis.

Professor Singh must have used his own coffee cup and his deadpan voice.
Let us do a thought experiment. Arjun, Indira, imagine this cup is half filled, not with water or milk, but with helium. Spontaneously . . . Look here. Look here. On its own the liquid rises, on its own it rolls over, on its own it crawls down the outer walls of the cup. And a lot of ‘He’ collects at the bottom, and you can see it, first as a little drop, and then as a big one getting bigger, dangling in response to gravity
. Imagine Ganga landing from the heavens on Shiva’s head. Imagine a river flowing over a high bridge. He must have derived enormous fun explaining the micro-details to his children, using strange analogies and metaphors.

That night at Mrs Singh’s place I curled over with real and phantom memories of death, of tiny superfluid drops on the sofa. I forgot to extinguish the slowly melting candles before drifting to a different world, and for some unknown reason thought about ‘Lihaf’ or ‘The Quilt’, Nelly’s favourite short story. A child, sleeping on a separate bed, in her aunt’s bedroom, witnesses something she doesn’t comprehend. On certain dark nights her aunt and her maid make love. To the child this seems like a fabulous transformation of a quilt into an elephant . . . Once in a while I heard the mad, twitching woman’s voice wafting from somewhere outside, wave after disturbed wave.
I will go to the moon and tell them about you
. Her wild laughter. In my dizzy state I finished what she started.
On a Chandrayan, the moon machine, I will go and land on lava fields and frighten the gods . . . and I will tell them about you. One . . . two . . . three
.

Next morning, I am embarrassed to spell it out, I woke up with an erection. Strong light was pouring in through the window. I stretched myself.

Something happens to one’s dreams when one is in the mountains. The high altitude, the changed magnetic field, all these factors influence the complex way blood flows in the brain. In my dark dream I made love to a friend of mine; the disturbing bit was that we hit each other and then fucked each other by 180-foot-high statues of Shiva and Kali and Hanuman, raw concrete, bronze and volcanic debris glowing in the harsh light of the sun. Afterwards we lifted heavy mountains on the tips of our fingers, and re-enacted Hanuman’s Lanka-burning feat.
Jai Maruti
. I woke up not just with an erection, but also with a lump in my throat because in real life there was no love or lust between the two of us, and I could not make sense of the unsettling parts of the dream. My mouth filled with ash and sand, completely dry. She lived on a different continent and was happily involved with, and powerfully attracted to, someone else. Nelly was absent in the apartment; a note was waiting for me on the dining table. Yellow, legal paper. She had covered my breakfast with heavy-duty insulators and it was still hot. Anda bhurji, dahi and T-parathas. I shaved, took a mugga bath (which flooded her bathroom) and, unable to locate a fresh towel, dried myself with an old black T-shirt; after changing my clothes I dared to spend a few moments in the bedroom. Everything so clean and tidy. The kind of order I had seen before at an ex-girlfriend’s place, who suffered from obsessive–compulsive disorder. Twice a day she would clean all the objects in her apartment, even books, which she would polish with a fine velvet cloth opticians use to clean prescription glasses. In Nelly’s room – a familiar smell I have not been able to forget. On the windowsill, next to her comb, a tiny bottle. Trapped within walls of glass the oil was partially frozen. (Nelly used to massage Professor Singh’s hair with coconut oil. In winter whenever I visited their house, I would find a little glass bottle of coconut oil on the veranda, undergoing melting in the sun.) Linen on the bed as white as snow. As if she did not live alone, and was expecting someone any moment. A quilt, with rhomboid patterns, on one side. I sat on the bed for a brief minute and took a deep breath. Her smell. Still good. But like everything else, it, too, had aged. On the wall a Goya and a large framed photo of the indispensable Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam.
Aj akhan Waris Shah nu / tikon kabran vichon bol / te aj kitabe ishq da / koi agla varka phol
. The poem still invoked the Partition and its two million dead. That most elegiac line, the line that carries more sorrow than it can hold. On the side table an antique mint-coloured lamp and an extra pair of reading glasses, and an illustrated large-format Kipling.

Once I was sexually attracted to Nelly, when I was very young and she was young, and now all that feeling had evaporated, and that was not the force field which had brought me to Shimla. The reason she offered me her sofa, and the reason I agreed, was because there was no possibility of a relationship between us.