Helium (10 page)

Later I had coffee at Barista. In the local paper (in Hindi) there was a brief article on Nelly Kaur’s retirement. What struck me the most was that no mention was made of what her life was before she moved to Shimla. How she survived Delhi. What happened to her children. Especially the children. No details of her ‘monumental project’.

The article ended abruptly.
Whosoever replaces N. Kaur?

Other papers carried nothing on Nelly. The Hindu Party convention received front-page attention. Shameless dishonesty and filthy power struggles within the party. Photos of men in khaki shorts giving the fascist salute. The
Express
or the
Tribune
(one of those papers) also ran a long tribute to Nadine Gordimer:
No violence is more frightening than the violence of revenge
. The paper also carried a piece on a thorium mine, and a huge headline:
suicide of a dalit medical student
. Reading the article, for a fleeting second I thought about the ‘crystallising image’ that made me start taking notes. New Delhi railway station. On 30 October 1984, we left two figures behind. What happened? Did my father speak to her? Did he offer Nelly a ride home?

She was busy handing over, she had warned me. I will not be able to play a good host the next few days. That day all I did was walk and linger in cafes, and take more notes. All of a sudden I felt accumulation and transformation. My brief interaction with Nelly so far cast a new spell; I had new ideas to deal with my old demons.

There was proper heating in Barista and I don’t know when exactly my shivering stopped. Two Armani-clad youths sitting a table away gave me a dirty look. They were nibbling at reddish-blue sandwiches, and it seemed the duo had popped down from Neptune. I scribbled on a sheet of paper. The flow of words drowned the inane cellphone conversations, businesslike transactions and a faint murmur of love-smitten teenagers, necking.

For so many in ’84 death began with rubber tyres . . . Sikhs were mere objects (of hatred) bonded to rubber tyres, offered to the gods . . . Agni, the god of fire, has two heads, three legs and seven tongues . . . My compatriots (under normal circumstances) don’t burn fellow citizens. Under ‘normal’ circumstances some do transform the strange joke of an unease they feel towards Sikhs into Time (Sardar, tehre barah baj gayeh; your time’s come, sardar-ji) . . . Who am I? What is common between me and other ‘Hindus’? All I know is that I have not been able to study properly the microstructure of rubber. I fail again and again when it comes to estimating the speed with which fire engulfs a cylinder over six feet tall . . . But I correctly assume that an average human body weighs sixty-five kilos . . . Twenty thousand cylinders means 1.3 million kilograms. 1.3 million kilograms of human mass
. In the cafe my otherwise numb fingers started moving. Memories, I felt, have an elastoplastic quality of their own.

Why think of one genocide in terms of another? Why use a prism? It is impossible to compare and quantify suffering, I know. Why then? Because one story is better known and the other one completely unknown, completely distorted or filled with ominous silences. (What breaks me is the silence of distinguished public intellectuals, liberal-secular writers and established academicians.) Because this is exactly the process I follow in my own discipline, I use analogies to move from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown’. At first all I see are the similarities. Differences or uniqueness emerge later. Where would we be if Rutherford had not imagined the structure of an atom as a tiny solar system. Later, Bohr destroyed the solar-system model with his ‘quantum’, but where would Bohr be without Rutherford’s insight?
But why am I so shocked if thousands were murdered in Delhi? Why am I shocked if the ‘majority’ is unable to comprehend the enormity of its actions and the pain of the ‘minority’? Why does this pattern repeat itself over and over in the world? Why does the dominant group continue to represent itself as a ‘victim’? Bigger genocides have happened before. Armenian. Rwandan. Native American. Genocides will happen? Regarding this I am not sure. One can never be . . . Animals are much better, they don’t conduct genocides
. When my fingers became numb again I called Nelly half hoping we would dine together. Bluntly she declined. She, of course, was preparing her retirement speech. I ate alone at Restaurant Splash. My table next to the only window with a commanding view of the deodar hills of Shimla and the valley below. The red-tiled boarding school melted into the deodars, which melted into the skating rink.

While eating alone I started missing my children. My wife has not allowed me to see them since we broke up. You don’t know how to edit the world for children, she has a constant complaint. You scare them.

I have two girls. If I had stayed behind in India I would have dealt with the burden of the past differently. A pattern established at Cornell even before I became a professor, none of my relationships would last more than six months, maximum a year, and they all ended badly because whoever I was involved with wanted a child and I didn’t. I never felt ready for children, and women would simply walk out of my life. The so-called East–West cultural clash was not my narrative. My narrative was different, and that is when (on the strong recommendation of a colleague) I saw an analyst. I, who always mocked analysis, ended up doing that and found the hour-long sessions helpful. One day during analysis I realised I had not had sex for almost a year. I think we can easily avoid being sexual beings, but that problem is more complex than our neuroses about it. Later that night after a bit of hesitation I called an escort. Before her I had never been with a paid woman.

She was from the Middle East (she told me that). When I had called, I told the male voice at the agency only the size. 36D. There are many things I remember about the escort to this day, but more than anything else her limited English, and thick ankles, her tight skirt, and oiled curly hair. The TV was on all the time when we did the act, and afterwards she started weeping. I didn’t pay you to cry, I said.

‘Next it is the turn of my country.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘War,’ she explained as if I understood nothing.

‘Can we do this every weekend?’ I made an offer.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I cannot do this more than once with anyone.’ Then she picked up her handbag, used the bathroom and left.

Next day I stepped out for breakfast with my engineering colleague; we picked the place randomly. In fact he was the one who suggested the restaurant. Somewhere we had never been before. The waitress who served us coffee looked vaguely familiar, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that she was the exact same person with whom I had slept the previous night. A corn on her right toe. Before me flashed a naked body I had not even tried to remember, also the sharp smell of sweat which had cut through my nostrils a few hours ago. I had no idea if she had recognised me. But the way her eyes avoided us when she poured warm coffee into my cup assured me that she, too, had figured me out. My colleague was sitting there, talking tensors, vectors and carbon fibres, and had no clue what was stirring in my body. She must have been in her early twenties. When I returned home I was unable to concentrate. I had breakfast at the same restaurant for the next three or four days, even the weekend, but she didn’t return.

Days later I launched a search, and after a few weeks succeeded in locating her, and persuaded Asma or Azra (her made-up name) to sleep with me one last time. And then it became an obsession. I found out where she lived, the man she lived with, and the day I encountered the man for the first time I felt a strong urge to kill him. I wanted her all to myself, the woman with a corn on her right toe. I returned to my department. Something had transformed. I felt like eliminating whoever I saw, fellow professors, my secretary, and realised I needed serious help. Without help I would have become one of those rare engineering professors who run along the corridor shooting innocent people. In the end the person who saved me was my colleague. He introduced me to Clara, he persuaded me to have children, and we had two cute daughters. I thought they would not allow me to do research, but I did some of my best work after the girls were born, and I also, on the suggestion of my colleague (who turned out to understand me better than the analyst), started scribbling.

Urvashi and Ursula, my daughters, I’d give up anything to see them again.

Urvashi, our firstborn. The day she arrived, the moment I held her close and felt her heart beat, I thanked Clara silently, and decided to give up my Indian passport and become an American citizen. But just before I kissed her tiny hands and head, I had a strong urge to name her Indira – after Professor Singh’s daughter. In the end I didn’t.

Urvashi looks a lot like her mother. Due to a complex biological reason (or mere chance) even her skin colour resembles her mother’s. One day I accompanied my wife to the day care to collect the child, and the woman over there produced a boy as brown as me. He had curly black hair, and a strange sadness in his sparkling eyes. The woman knows Clara well; every evening she pulled out the right kid (pale like her mother), but my presence short-circuited all her mental associations. I don’t know how to respond to such errors of judgement committed by polite and friendly bleeding-heart liberals. Some still support racial profiling at airports. Some of them, although they deny it now, supported the Iraq War. Guests Clara invites now and then to celebrate India or Indianness. At the last Diwali party one of our so-called friends revealed his abnormally large ignorance about the ‘Third World’. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by the Sikhs, he said while eating a besan laddoo and a cashew burfi. The Mahatma was shot dead in 1948 by a Hindu zealot, I corrected Dick. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, but Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a zealot. My response annoyed him. He left early.

When I returned ‘home’ Nelly was ironing her clothes. Salwar, kameez, chunni. Clothes for retirement.

‘There is lots of food in the fridge.’

She kept ironing and I sat on the sofa pretending to read the paper. But my thoughts were still stuck in Cornell, the grey stone buildings, the bell tower, sleepy, misty valleys and long finger-shaped lakes, and Cayuga and Bebe and the gorges. How many times I have walked down into so many of them. How many times I have sat behind a waterfall, under a rock ledge, watching water thunder down in front of me, how many conversations in the lab simply began with the suspension bridge and the achingly small Thurston Avenue bridge and the ‘jumpers’, definitely not my colleague, whose marriage broke down the very same day I married Clara. That unsuicidal day, 11 May, as I found out later, is also the birthday of the genius of a physicist Richard Feynman, who himself taught at Cornell from 1945 till 1950 before moving to Caltech, where he did work on ‘anomalous’ helium. Before switching over to superfluid, supercooled liquid helium investigations Feynman was involved with the Manhattan Project. The dropping of the bombs over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki induced in him a depression he hadn’t known before, as if something deep inside was irradiated by a conical beam of darkness. Perhaps the depression was really due to the sickness and death of his wife. One can never be sure. Yet Feynman’s memoirs have the kind of lightness absent in Levi’s
Periodic Table
. When I go through my own darkest moments I read Feynman. That day he was sitting in the Cornell cafeteria, whiling away the time, and suddenly for some unknown reason a guy threw a plate in the air (he writes). The plate wobbled, going higher and higher. Feynman curiously observed the wobbling motion, also the motion of the red medallion of Cornell painted on the plate. The medallion went around its axis faster than wobbling. Nothing else to do, his hand sketched the motion of the rotating plate, and he soon figured out that at a certain angle, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate – that neat enigmatic ratio ‘two to one’. Feynman worked out equations for wobbles. ‘Everything’ flowed out of work that started as pure ‘fun’. How the electron orbits move in relativity. Then the Dirac equation. Finally, quantum electrodynamics. The entire Nobel Prize, he writes, sprang out of that random plate in the cafeteria, during his unhappy days at Cornell.

‘Are you sure you have eaten?’ she asked again.

I turned my gaze in her direction. Nelly appeared stressed and exhausted. The hem of the kameez she was ironing twitched in her hand.

‘Yes, I ate at a restaurant. After my meal I ate a paan as well.’

Our ‘conversation’ (I take the liberty to use that word) drifted to Hindi. I used ‘aap’ and she responded with the same respectful form of address, which made me uncomfortable. I had expected ‘tu’. ‘Aap’ paradoxically enlarged the distance between us, the area of silence. Once or twice (not without delight) I detected an authentic Punjabi word wobbling out of her otherwise reasonably well-modulated Hindi. For instance ‘drakhat’, the word for a ‘tree’. And the phrase ‘nutth-bhajh’ which meant ‘running around’. Steam kept rising from the ironing board. “What are you thinking?’ she asked. Feynman, I said. Professor Singh once told me a very personal episode from the physicist’s life. Although Feynman moved out of Cornell he would return once in a while to teach a course. Professor Singh worked as Feynman’s teaching assistant for two terms. I didn’t tell Nelly my growing regret. Why didn’t I ask him more stuff when he was alive? She was hearing me, not listening, her thoughts elsewhere. I felt she needed space. Goodnight. One thing was certain. I was not going to have a good night. Wait, I will just clear this space, she said. I waited also for an invitation to the retirement event. Her hesitation to do so was not connected to tiredness. So why was she avoiding any talk about the event? She extended no informal invitation, not even a fleeting mention. I murmured the high-energy Sikh greeting – ‘Victory to truth’ – Sat Sri Akal. She merely smiled. Perhaps I was expecting a lot from her before re-establishing trust. I opened my Swissair bag. Mud marks inside. No way. Such lightness . . . The absence was easy to detect. I unzipped all the different parts of the bag, but that slim object with finite weight and volume was no longer there. My worst fear had materialised. My 17-inch Mac had gone missing.