Helium (13 page)

The night was dense with its tightly packed shadows. I tried to forget my stolen Mac. Forgetting doesn’t come easy to me. Needlessly I tossed and turned on the sofa, now abandoning the pillow, now claiming it back. Then the phone rang. Nelly didn’t step out of the room. Reluctantly I responded. Who’s this? Call is from Mashobra, said the woman. Who would you like to talk to? Wrong number. The phone disconnected. The woman’s voice kept echoing in my ears. My mouth completely dry, and I felt a cold sweat, I felt as if I didn’t belong to my body and it was raining inside Nelly’s apartment, slowly burying me in thixotropic mud. I cannot say I missed sleeping with Clara. Sex with her always lacked fun and spontaneity. One had to plan days in advance . . . But I have not forgotten . . . She taught me tenderness, and for that I am grateful . . . Soon the foolish hallucination
I will go to the moon
. The ridiculous Chandrayan chant.
No water on moon
. The madwoman’s voice transported me to 1982 or 1983, and together, in my hallucination, we watched a Russian film,
Solaris
. Ironically it was that film which had first given me the bug to walk into the crepuscular world of science fiction. On the spaceship there is a library. Not far from the shelves a cosmonaut is alone with his long-dead wife, Haari, his subconscious personified. (In my mind when I think about Haari, I cannot but help thinking about Nelly, and when I think about Nelly I think about Haari.) She sits next to him, Haari, a melancholic, lost in deep thought, almost human. Then: zero gravity. Together they experience thirty seconds of weightlessness. Four flaming candles soar steeply upwards and collide with the sparkling chandelier, a fugue of a chime, and Haari and the cosmonaut levitate like helium, wrapped in Bach’s little organ music, an open book (an encyclopaedia) orbiting around them. Five elements, fire, metal, glass, air and wood, come together, and Planet Earth merges via the painting on the wall . . . Human figures, animals skating on snow. Skating, I am inside the cosmonaut’s consciousness now, I am witnessing my own childhood memories, a swing, a boy wearing a red cap, red pants, running around in a winter landscape; I warm myself by setting fire to twigs; images of two intimate strangers, my mother and father, and outside the spaceship the colloidal ocean moves vortex-like. Solaris takes over, filling the screen with its mysterious slow eddies. Sound of a flask breaking. The madwoman has tried to kill herself again, this time with liquid oxygen. An echo of a scientist’s voice: instead of space explorations, what we humans really need is a mirror.

Next morning when I woke up she was still in bed, the door slightly ajar. Outside the window: membranes of snow. Millimetre-thin layers.
Papadi wali baraf
. I muffled myself and walked to the hotel reception. The Hindu Party had left behind lots of debris in its wake (the ‘chintan baithak’ over). The cops had left too. Suffocating smell of crushed marigold flowers and sandalwood incense. Ruins (smouldering ash and smoke) of a huge safety hazard of a havan. Wine- and tea-stained furniture. Mountains of discarded styrofoam cups and plastic. At first I didn’t recognise the man at the reception; he was no longer in black, there was a red scarf around his neck and his left arm was in a white cast. On his face there were three or four fresh marks of violence. One look and he trembled. ‘
We found your missing item, sa’ab
,’ and his assistant literally ran towards me and handed me an object – my muddy laptop.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Sa’ab, I just fell,’ he said. ‘I was walking last night with too many things on my mind.’ He trembled again, and I checked with him if the wounds were the result of falling or something else. ‘
Minor matter, sa’ab
.’ Then I spent some time in the gift shop. Why was he not at home? Did he receive strict instructions? Later when I walked to the exit with my laptop, I turned back one last time. Again the skinny man trembled. Most likely I was the cause.

Back in the apartment a note was waiting for me on the kitchen table. Nelly had stepped out for a morning walk to ‘cleanse her mind’. It was her big day, and she had no plans to share it with me.
Why not visit Mashobra today? Hill of deodars. Lush and wrinkled. Go stand on the slopes of the ‘Magic Mountain’
. Second time she had brought up that idyllic hamlet, six miles away. Mashobra, the so-called post-colonial wilderness. Less a forest, more the remnant of a forest. Mashobra, the Viceroy’s weekend chateau, the so-called retreat; according to travel books during the last days of the Empire Lady Mountbatten had fucked Pandit Nehru there, but the topic is of little interest to me. There is nothing more boring than celebrity political romance. I understand Nelly absolutely does not desire my presence at the institute during her retirement gathering. I brush my teeth with Sensodyne and take a hot mugga bath (flooding the bathroom again) and leave her apartment around nine thirty (as soon as the sirens start wailing across the city, alerting the denizens to begin work) and spend some time at the antique and rare bookshop on the slushy Mall Road. Then I take the bus.

Mashobra makes me feel more and more disorientated. Something deeply unconsolable about the landscape. Every inch, like Shimla, every slope, every tree carries traces of colonialism. The ‘magic’ is still there, but it is the magic of ruins and destruction. Crumbling buildings left behind by the British and the maharajahs. Private villas owned by the old rich and the neo-rich. Lots of dead and dying trees, a couple of them planted by the Viceroy’s old tailor. In Mashobra the rare English oaks are highly stressed and visibly injured. One saving grace, though: the tourists are largely absent, and the deodar forest is dense, tightly packed, sublime, the trees melt into each other like old memories, and they are everywhere, the rhizomes and wild strawberries. A poet or a historian would have liked it. Mrs Gandhi stayed in the chateau there in 1972 when she signed the so-called Shimla Agreement with the defeated Pakistani PM on Kafka’s birthday. Yes, there is fresh mountain air in Mashobra, and roofless walls of snow, and unlimited angled views of teacup-shaped valleys, but the fresh mountain air-oxygen and teacups and ponies and sanatorium-like buildings make me all the more sick. Rereading Thomas Mann’s
Magic Mountain
is not a bad idea, I remind myself. Magic Lower Himalaya. Then I feel an invisible blow. Whiteness hurts. Whiteness never fails to hurt my eyes. My feet are cold. To warm myself I walk into the stately Oberoi Wild Flower Cafe. By the entrance I find a dark object embedded in snow. The guard at the gates smiles like a mythical figure. Inside it is just the right temperature. Warm, the way it should be warm. I order a latte. With my fingers I clean a dark yellowish metal disc. The object reveals itself fully – a watch without a strap, and only one hand. She is cute. The woman at the table next to mine. Resembles someone vaguely familiar; her sharp features carry traces of my ex-girlfriend. Longish neck, medium-sized breasts, and a young Benazir Bhutto face. Dark brown leather boots, and a deep, deep sexual fragrance. Never before have I encountered such voluptuous calves. In the cafe she was alone (her table touched mine and the thick radiator), reading a Kindle. Such women by their sheer existence make fellow humans happy, and help them achieve that blissful state of forgetfulness. I had a lot to forget. Slowly she crossed and uncrossed her legs and kept twiddling a strand of her hair over and over. To this day I have not understood fully the power of her attraction. For a change I felt no resistance, only a strong urge to seduce or be seduced, hopelessly and instantaneously haunted. The detail that really matters is that we hung out together and those hours bought me rare happiness. Later we shared a cab; and from Shimla bus stand she took the Volvo to Delhi.

Ironically, whenever I think about Mashobra I don’t know why I immediately move that happy day into parentheses, not sure if the silencing or the repression is subconscious, or because the details are too improper, too embarrassing to admit. Details that never fail to double my grief. (I will return to Benazir a bit later.)

Nelly was still not back in her apartment in Shimla. Her absence slipped me into a state of disquiet. Then worry. Perhaps it was wrong to make assumptions. But it was around ten at night. Outside the window snow was falling silently. No sign of her, no message. To distract myself I did the dirty dishes, then I read a book for children.
Just So Stories
. I read aloud, thirty or forty pages, and when I checked my watch it was past midnight. The idea of reporting to the police was laughable. I read one last piece aloud. Slowly, I put the large-format book aside and turned off the lights. But doing so only exacerbated the questions floating around. Perhaps Nelly’s colleagues had taken her somewhere after the event, perhaps there was something else she didn’t want to share with me. Perhaps something happened. Something done by someone, something done by herself. The more I thought the more my anxiety grew. Did I ask wrong stuff the previous night? Was she offended by my project?

Something within me was convinced that Nelly was not going to return that night.

From the window I saw the neighbour’s cottage (a young chap shining his shoes). He looked like a man who was watching himself, not entirely comfortable in his body. Most likely he knew next to nothing about Nelly. Perhaps he saw her as an old and redundant woman.

In the bedroom I noticed. She did not go to the institute in the dress she was ironing. She had changed several times before deciding on the one she liked. There was no other clue in the bedroom.

When I returned to the window the neighbour was no longer there. The Observatory Hill. Globes and pinpricks of light, and rising and falling vortices of snow. I see it still. White powder accumulating on the dark tiles and turrets of the institute.

The phone rang. Expecting bad news, I paced towards the instrument, but the answering machine clicked in and I decided not to answer. An unfamiliar voice rippled towards me. The way the caller spoke English with a mild accent, I was able to identify her Spanishness. She wished Nelly all the best on her special day.
Hola. Ciao. Gran abrazos
.

I replayed, checked all the messages on the machine . . . My own, the one I had left right after my arrival in Shimla, was still part of the tape, not erased. Stored, perfectly preserved messages. There were more. All in the same voice, messages from the same man, perhaps he was the man in her life. The greeting on the answering machine had the identical voice. Indian Leonard Cohen. Everything I did that night, every object I touched, felt like a clue to locating Nelly because I was convinced.

I had grown up observing my supercop father. He suspected everything, and revealed rarely his innermost thoughts before resolving an investigation. Now I found myself operating in the same mode.

Only a day ago when I broached the topic of her retirement, Nelly’s face had transformed momentarily. To me her oval of a face looked like a phase diagram plotted between fear and shame. A moment later she smiled a thin smile. The face had transformed into her usual expression then.

To deal with my growing anxiety I distracted myself further, and made two calls to Ithaca. November is the month Clara buys leg warmers. This happens after Halloween. Children love the festival. They exaggerate the spookiness of pumpkins. They dress up as dead nerds or dead fashion models. They knock on almost every door in the neighbourhood and return joyous with their loot. After Halloween we celebrate Diwali. Clara has her romantic ideas of India and she clings to those ideas and I am a personification of those ideas. I am not allowed to narrate the dark side of that romance – how ugly the collective consciousness of a nation can be.

My wife (my estranged wife) has this remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts to children, which I admire, which I never developed really. I am too adult-like with children, I believe if the world is not good they should know the details, but she shields them – at times I tell her that they might find out the ‘truth’ at school and they might find out the ‘wrong truth’, but at the same time I hope they don’t find out. Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan. Tsunami, 9/11, Air India bombing. Clara explains the world to them in small doses, and the girls find this satisfactory. Who is the Devil? the younger one asked. And Clara’s response was, The Devil is a character, who makes people do evil things. And Clara has already explained ‘evil’ in a roundabout way to the girls. So they, especially the younger one, are satisfied, and no nightmares follow. And this is the ability I lack – I end up telling them a lot, even when I confine myself to ‘myths’, and this leaves the girls confused.

Clara – if she had been born in Nazi Germany, she would have told our children that the Jewish neighbours were really headed to some land of toys and candies. What if one of the kids really took off with the neighbours?

I called home. The girls were about to begin breakfast and I could hear their mother in the background. Clara doing the blueberry pancakes. ‘Dad, she asked who is an Egypt?’ the elder one said. ‘She doesn’t even know that Egypt is a country.’

And then Clara took the phone and asked me to call later in the evening (her evening). The girls are going to school today. She, if she could help it, would never allow me to be in contact with the girls again.

Clara is not just angry at me. She is also angry at herself that she is angry at me. She feels emotional excesses are highly contagious. ‘Before I met you I didn’t know anger.’

I made the second call to my colleague. Before I took off for India we had agreed to work on a book, co-edit an anthology on rheology, and I was lagging behind. Nelly was not responsible for the delay. The real reason? I felt increasingly out of place in my department in my adopted country. The Chair was kind of all right, but the Dean disliked me, and I knew, all the popularity in the classroom doesn’t mean much to the university if you don’t have publications. The Dean was especially not keen on my area of research because it brought little corporate funding. If he had his way he would even accept money from the tainted Dow Chemicals. Not many people know. Dow bought Union Carbide, the corporation criminally responsible for the Bhopal gas leak. And Dow seems to have no plans to clean up Bhopal. No moral responsibility.