Helium (15 page)

‘Mrs Singh, you took this photo. Remember?’

‘I see,’ she said.

I felt she was staring at my father.

The following was recorded with Nelly’s permission.

Please, Mrs Singh, what happened that day after our train departed?

I took a three-wheeler to my friend’s place.

Your friend’s name?

Maribel. She played me her favourite song. Do you really want to know?

Yes .
. .

She was excessively funny that day. Maribel grew up in Mexico thinking that we Indians have eight toes on each foot and eight fingers on each hand! Señor Weinberger, her uncle, told her that in India people have white shocks of hair until thirty, and at that precise age the hair colour begins to turn black! She played me her favourite song. One of José Alfredo Jiménez’s, sung by Maria Dolores Pradera. I have no idea why all this has stayed in my mind . . .

Who is she?

She worked at the Mexican High Commission. We had met at the International School six months earlier in 1983. Our children were in the same class.

What were their names?

My son, Arjun, and my daughter, Indira. They were eight and seven years old. You know this.

After the High Commission you returned home?

Yes.

How did you first meet Professor Singh?

Mohan and I had an arranged marriage. You know this.

No, I don’t.

I see.

Eventually did you fall in love with him?

Love? Not the way it happens in Hollywood or Bollywood. Mohan didn’t talk much about his past. Whenever I raised the question of his childhood he would not give a proper response. Evasive is the right word. By and by I found out.

By and by you found out?

He was born in a village called Toba Tek Singh, named after a compassionate Punjabi man who distributed free water to travellers. Mohan’s grandfather, an independence fighter, spent time in jails, and later his father was shipped to Kala Pani, or Black Water, the dreaded ‘Guantánamo Bay’ run by the British. His family had no problems with the colonial administration before the Amritsar Massacre. Mohan’s mother turned ‘half mad’ – at least that is what the relatives said, and when the partition was announced in ’47, despite several attempts, no one was able to locate her, not even close to the waters. He had just joined a school where classes took place under a 200-year-old fig tree. Then the violence flared up. At the refugee camp (in Toba Tek Singh) he was adopted by a school headmaster, and they made it safely to the Indian side on a special military escorted train.

Mohan told me bits and fragments of this when we visited the Golden Temple after our wedding. We were circumambulating the sarovar and he recalled how when he was four or five he had made it safely to the Golden Temple. Later he showed me a couple of photos from that era, his hair braided, ribboned, the boy looked more cute than a girl. First his mother and then the headmaster’s wife dressed him up in colourful frocks . . .

He was terrified of trains, I know you don’t know this. Whenever possible he avoided taking the train. Every couple of months we would take the bus to Amritsar. Sometimes we would change buses two or three times. Sometimes we would combine the bus with a short train journey from Delhi. Slowly I helped him overcome his fear.

He was extremely fond of the children. I remember the first time we took them to the Golden Temple – Mohan showed them the museum, toshakhana and the reference library. In the museum there were huge paintings of the enlightened ones; I recall Mohan telling the children about Guru Nanak and his walks. Nanak was a saint and a poet and he walked around twenty thousand miles in forty years, all the way to Ceylon, Tibet and Baghdad, a figure as important as the Buddha, and aspired to eliminate caste. Nanak rejected Brahmanical Hinduism, and untouchability. He rejected the authority of priests, and pointed out the injustices committed by the powerful rulers of his time … The word ‘Sikh’ means ‘student’ in Sanskrit, and in a way all Sikhs are students for life. Mohan and I took the children to Jallianwala Bagh Memorial, the site of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre. Arjun noticed a squirrel and parakeet and a pigeon dining together in the garden! Back in the temple complex we sat by the shimmering waters and listened to Gurbani. Often I think back to that day. Mohan dazzled the kids with more stories about the life of Baba Nanak. The melancholies of the saint, his udasis and the art of travelling long distances on foot. Once Nanak walked all the way to Benaras and waded through the Ganges and there he encountered a cluster of sham holy men. Unable to comprehend why the Brahmins were splashing water, he asked the usual question. What is the purpose? Clever, as always, the Brahmins replied, We are only sending holy water to the sun. The souls of our ancestors live there, screaming with thirst. Nanak questioned the sham logic with a precise action, something beyond words. He turned 180 degrees and started sending water in the opposite direction.

What are you doing? The Brahmins tried to stop him. Listen, brothers, said Nanak, the wheat fields of Punjab are really dry . . . But your water will never reach the crops, the Brahmins mocked him. Brothers, spoke Nanak, if your water is able to flow all the way to the sun, which is millions of miles away, then sure my water will fall like a heavy monsoon shower over the fields of Punjab.

My family had agrarian roots. My father was the first one who attended university. He got a doctorate in botany and taught at the agricultural university in Ludhiana. I grew up listening to Partition stories. Every time he would tell a story my hand would automatically rise to my mouth. Stories that informed me that the Punjabis and the Bengalis did most of the dying. The so-called ‘azadi diwas’ was really a ‘barbadi diwas’. The holocaust could have been avoided, if only Lord Mountbatten and our leaders had chosen to act differently . . . Two million people dead, twenty million displaced. Women raped. Tens of thousands of children became orphans. We Sikhs were separated from most of our historic and cultural centres. The birthplace of Nanak and the place of his death are now on the wrong side of the border. The Partition dead were never mourned properly, so much was suppressed, the government built no memorials, for so many people life continued amid the ruins as if
nothing
had happened. To build memorials is to acknowledge not just what ‘they’ did to us, but also what ‘we’ did to them.

[Pause.]

It is painful for me to continue.

[Pause.]

One day my father informed me over dinner that an IIT professor who knew even the tiniest details about the big bang and other theories of the universe was interested in me.

[Smiles.]

You were considerably younger?

Yes, and I was notorious for rejecting men my father would introduce.

Mohan was in town to deliver a lecture at the local engineering college. I attended the talk, and was mesmerised. I requested my father to do everything in his power to invite Mohan home! Our first conversation was not about food or weather, but about work, about the archives. I had done an advanced course at the National Archives in Delhi. He asked me about my thesis. I had completed two projects. ‘How Outsiders Have Looked at Us Indians’, and ‘Nehru’s Prison Letters to his Daughter’. I never managed to finish my report on textile dyes. ‘Indigo’ in particular.

Mohan asked if I was interested in the Punjab as well. I recall mentioning the Russian prince Soltykoff’s 1842 travels to Ludhiana in ‘Punjaub’, as he used to say. Soltykoff wrote: I am able to see the Shivalik mountains from Ludhiana. Mohan found this particular line strangely amusing and smiled.

And then I asked him my first question, about his projects, and he said: Only one. Helium.

He played bridge and tennis. I had no fondness for tennis, I felt more at ease with badminton and its feathered shuttlecocks. He presented himself as a cosmopolitan, sophisticated reader, who liked Musil, but stayed away from Maugham. I liked Virginia Woolf and Dickens and Hardy and was oddly indifferent to Maugham. Both of us had read Bhai Vir Singh’s Punjabi Renaissance novels in translation.
Soon my knees will fail. Will you marry me?
This is how he proposed! Yes, I said. Then he recited from memory a translated Turkish poem by Nazim Hikmet.

Our wedding took place in a gurdwara; we spent our honeymoon in Kashmir in a houseboat called
Neil Armstrong
. Mohan, I soon found, was a bit like my father without his defects. This made him slightly less interesting. He had a tendency to make everyone happy, so life with him was less dramatic. After our honeymoon we visited a relative in Amritsar. My new husband knew that auntie-ji and uncle-ji didn’t approve of husbands doing the laundry. So: Mohan washes our clothes including the undergarments in the bathroom, and asks me to go and hang them to dry on the clothes line.

Harmandar, the way we refer to the ‘Golden Temple’. It was just after our honeymoon, I still remember. My husband and I were circumambulating the shimmering pool in the Harmandar complex, and he commented on the orange haze of a blob, the reflection of sun in water, and he started describing the surface of ‘helios’ to me, our sun’s mysterious core. His one obsession was ‘Helium-3’. Thermonuclear equations, etc., etc. I phased out for a while, and don’t recall how our conversation turned to ‘neutrinos’. I knew neutrons. But
neutrinos
? Was it a diminutive? Mohan explained they were particles that go right through you. No charge. No mass. Ghost particles, Nelly. Going right through you and me, Nelly, and those beautiful marble inlays and the waters and the unrusting dome of Harmandar. They are all around us, invisible, dancing, a movement you would have never known. They come to us from deep inside the helios. Millions and zillions of them, passing through. For neutrinos there are no walls, Nelly.

Harmandar has no walls. I almost levitated while saying this to Mohan. It is open to all the people in the world, the entire human race. He looked at me with deep affection, and it was at that precise moment I think I fell in love with him.

Indira Gandhi is no longer your hero. When did she cease to be so?

[Pause.]

Would you like to say something?

When I heard the news of her death I wept. But the Congress Party didn’t allow me and so many others to mourn her. On the TV we saw the close-up of her face (her body lay in state at the Teen Murti House), and the soundtrack on the national TV was the music of the mob – inciting people to kill all the Sikhs in the country. The Information and Broadcasting Minister responsible for the telecasts was later rewarded by the new Prime Minister, Indira’s first son. (The minister, H. K. L. Bhagat, was also the ex-Mayor of Delhi. Hundreds of eye-witnesses and victims accused him of mass murder in ’84. How strange he was born on the same day as Goebbels.)

You have not told me much about your daughter. You rarely mention her.

She was born a year after my son, and they were so alike and so different. She was not shy like him, she would go to people, make friends, she learned everything faster than him, she learned to walk before him, talk before him, and she never once said those hurtful things my son would say: I will make you unhappy. But why? Because you didn’t do this for me or you didn’t do that for me.

She got this home assignment on flags . . . The teacher had asked her to select the map of a neighbouring country and write twenty lines about the country, and my girl was disappointed. She wanted to write twenty lines about Mexico, but Mexico was not our neighbouring country – she had two hundred lines ready on Mexico, on Oaxaca. She loved the way it is pronounced, Wah-ha-ka. She opened the atlas and looked at the maps. Of all the neighbouring countries she chose Pakistan, our official enemy. Why? Because I have to play, I don’t have much time, and the map of Pakistan is the easiest thing to sketch. She drew the map and used green crayons and asked me to help her write those twenty lines, but I really didn’t know how to begin telling her the story of that complex neighbour. Nepal or Sri Lanka would have been easier, even Bhutan.