Helium (21 page)

Not many staff remembered the day Nelly first joined the institute. Not many knew about her son, or the fact that she had prolonged periods of memory lapses during the first eighteen months of her arrival. Time when she assumed complete silence. The director tolerated her symptoms. Two months after Arjun’s disappearance, she experienced the darkest period. Sleeplessness, nausea, a dull crackling silence. Discontinuous screams. Counting something mentally. For a couple of months Maribel moved to Shimla. Maribel bathed Nelly, combed her hair. Nelly did not eat, she resisted the plate on the table, and Maribel would tear her roti into small pieces as if feeding a child. Every meal took over two hours. Frustrated, Maribel started reading books aloud (half English, half Spanish). She thought listening to stories would make Nelly accept food. The only stories that worked, though, were stories for children. When Maribel read
The Jungle Book
or
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Nelly accepted dal and roti from her hand. Nelly started making alphabetical lists of all the children’s books in the world. Lists of various themes in fairy tales. The Mexican visited several times, occasionally unannounced, and she reintroduced Nelly to yoga, especially the breathing exercises. Yoga filled her with life. Yoga in thin mountain air was different.

People talk about the healing power of a landscape. The high mountains also started curing her, providing a balance between left-brain time (time = discrete units) and right-brain time (time = continuous flow). More than anything else 1984 had damaged this balance, and the walks through the ‘hill station’ (as if by osmosis) began repairing that loss. Nelly’s condition improved, but even then, once in a while she would sit down on the stairs outside her apartment and hit her forehead with her right palm.
Nothing makes sense. Nothing. No sense at all. Nothing
. She would walk for days on end, aimless walking, and return with no memory of her outings. She would spend time at Summer Hill train station, waiting. The walks and waiting and children’s stories ejected her out of an uncanny darkness outside the realm of language. During one of her stays, Maribel asked Nelly the Punjabi word for
denial
, and Nelly was unable to recall the equivalent. She searched the bookshelves all day long, and later in the library she used a fat dictionary. She became obsessed with the Punjabi word, wrote it down on a sheet of paper, and requested her special friend to quiz her about more words. Nelly bought a primer for children and started learning/relearning her mother tongue.
Urah, ehrah, eri, sasa, haha
. . . the alphabet, and each new/old word started expanding what she called ‘islands of memory’ and ‘what I had forgotten’, ‘what I was like as a girl’, ‘who I was as a woman’.

She recalled even the darkest times as patches of a strange and intimate language, her husband saying over and over
dhundhla dikhda hai
about Partition (
all I see is fog
), and her son saying over and over
saah ghutda hai
about the pogrom in ’84 (
I’m choking
). It is impossible to translate, no equivalents exist in English. Shimla, instead of allowing forgetting, imposed more and more remembering. Shimla became her Harappa and Mohenjodaro. Shimla was Excavation.

Then the unexpected happened. In February 1987 a Burmese scholar arrived at the institute, who started enquiring about the history of the Indian National Congress, and while assisting her, Nelly by sheer chance came across the Hume Papers. The Hume Papers, like Maribel, helped heal Nelly.

Grandson of the founding director of the East India Company, Hume, this most unlikely agent of healing, sailed to India in 1849 to work as a civil servant, and witnessed first hand the 1857 ‘War of Independence’, which left a deep impression on him. When he arrived the young, twenty-year-old bureaucrat was just like any other Scotsman who had been sent to India to do the dirty work for the Empire. But years later, quite ironically, he wrote, ‘No earthly power can stem a universal agrarian rising in a country like this. My compatriots, the British, will be as men in the desert, vainly struggling for a brief space against the simoom.’ Hume became a vegetarian and more and more outspoken with time. But his mind was essentially the mind of a collector; not many know today that he was an amateur ornithologist in contact with a vast network of bird-men.

Allan Octavian Hume presented most of his collection (over 80,000 birds) to the British Museum of Natural History before he died at the age of eighty-four; his ashes are buried in Brookwood, Surrey, England, where he shares space with John Singer Sargent and M. F. Husain. Born 6 June 1829 – Died 31 July 1912. The British Empire considered this dignified, avuncular man ‘seditious’. On 18 March 1894, when he left India, Hume called himself a ‘failure’. No memorial was built, not even by the Congress Party; his residence in Shimla lies in utter ruin, only the shell remains. We now know from innumerable diaries and memos Hume’s favourite quote from Schiller: ‘Worth is the ocean. Fame is but the bruit that roars along the shadows.’

Going through the files, Nelly became obsessed with Hume’s prodigious collection of the birds and eggs of India. She started collecting artistic representations of Indian birds, calendar art, modern art, miniatures. Etchings with metal, galvanised eyes. Flamingoes. Pelicans. Peacocks. Little egrets. Purple herons. Black ibis. Scaly-breasted munia. Common tailorbirds. Baya weavers. Nelly sketched them all with exaggerated detail. Not a trained bird artist, her sketches for the first few months were raw and naive. Swarming, building, preening. Never in flight. Birds on paper as if myths. Birds as reflection of her altering moods. Diving. Darting with suicidal thoughts. Crying like a limpkin. She read more and more about the colonial collector and his birds. Flat, macabre, skinned, archived. Birds of the Andaman Islands. Birds of the Western Ghats. Birds of the Himalayas. Titmouse. Stonechat. Eurasian hoopoe. Black-winged stilt. Asian hornbill. Saras cranes in pairs. Nicobar pigeons. Hovering kestrels. Painted storks. Hume’s whitethroat. Shaheen or wandering peregrine falcon, Northern goshawk (also known as a baaz), and the red-legged partridge, chakor, who can’t stop gazing at the moon with intense longing. Some twelve hundred avian species. She spent her free time drawing, one finished drawing a day. She would only do birds. Endless variations, daily exorcisms. Those drawings of hers are marvellous expressions of grief. Eyes out of scale, immensely expressive, pools of dense concentrated madness. Nightmarish bills, feet and necks. Stiff, silent, baroque, speckled – English words fail to do justice. ‘The days I didn’t sketch, I felt dead.’

She would wake up early to create in a dizzy state. Then she would eat and go to work. That is when the problem of destruction or decreation arose. Nelly destroyed her work by stabbing the sheets with a 6B pencil, or by tearing them to pieces. To deal with the impulse to destroy, she decided not to look at her creations. She would drop the ‘daily exorcisms’ in a box and try erasing the bird completely from her mind.

Ironically, the ghost of Allan Octavian Hume helped her bounce back, by giving her a new obsession. This work filled her with life and lightness. But it in no way prepared her for the attack in the photocopier room, or the concentrated acid. Both times, in addition to bodily pain, she suffered from PTSD, and both times the director was helpful in his own way.

Evening had descended and the light outside was dim and very pale. A guest in the hotel lobby was looking for her badminton partner and briefly Nelly turned her gaze in that direction. Perhaps she simply wanted to pause for a while. Most likely the hotel complex had a full indoor

court, but the exact location was a mystery to me. Nelly was looking away and it seemed I was still playing badminton with her in IIT. (She holds the racket differently each time she changes side. Her long black hair is wrapped in a neat bun. The poles are black and the netting, too, is black. We win and lose, dressed in white. Singles on Tuesdays, doubles on Fridays. I can still play. I can still play, even outdoors in the wind. Sure, it is not going to be easy.)

‘Stay . . . Dinner?’

‘Some other time. Now I know where to find you.’

She made it to the revolving door, driven by a sudden need to be alone. As I watched her dissolve into the city below, I understood.

How we had shared our worlds then, our little anxieties, and how I used to yearn to be alone with her. Every word she uttered would wrap me for days on end, and I would fill every random gesture of hers with supreme significance. After badminton she would return to those interstitial spaces of life that I had little access to. I recall conjuring her up more sad than she really was.

Fridays we played doubles. Her partner, a woman with very dark skin. My partner, a fellow hosteler. Joint Entrance Exam, All India Rank: 28. He would hit the shuttlecock gently and carefully towards Nelly, but applied all the Newtons of force available in the world while sending it towards the dark-skinned woman. Nelly complained, and I confronted him back in the hostel. You don’t expect me to play like a gent with that sweeperess, he said. Nelly is a proper lady, but that other woman is an impure
achhoot
, he said. What struck me was that he was not even a member of some extreme right-wing, fascist organisation. The prejudice deeply internalised in every single bone of his, a mind otherwise so bright. Nelly still doesn’t know his response. Perhaps she guessed. Why I stopped bringing him to the courts as my partner. So much I could not share with her then, even when I got some more access. And I am still not able to.

Arjun and Indira, her children – I called them Space and Time. Both prone to hyper-imagination, the boy less social, the girl making a special effort to reach out to others. Both affectionate and treated me like family. The boy’s face and especially his eyes resembled Nelly’s, and the girl looked more like her father. Once in a while (purely by mistake) they addressed me as ‘Papa’. Curled up on the bed, Nelly would reward them by reading aloud stories about Siberian tigers.

Part of me felt that, by living in America, the distance would help erase that beautiful time, but distance, ironically, had the reverse effect. Ithaca was not a solution. Especially when I felt like an outsider or was made to feel like one, I would enter the house of the ‘past’, and the ‘past’ would enter me like a veil of ash. I would drive to Seneca or Ovid or go to the stunningly beautiful gorges and lakes and swim and camp there or sleep in my car. Or I would listen to Carl Sagan talk about the cosmos in one of those Cornell auditoriums. But memory would refuse to become memory. Like a boundary-layer fluid, memory would gush or ripple towards me in widening circles, an interference pattern whose wavelength I could not determine. What was its amplitude really? And frequency? I would feel I was not normal, not even anomalous. As if I were a stuffed animal and in my cracks lived a beetle or a moth or some other creature constantly eating the fluids of my brain.

Nnnnn

Eeeee

Lllll

Lllll

Yyyyy

Something was not normal – once again.

She had not offered the details on her own. It was a topic that often ended with long pauses. And averted eyes. The retirement event. She was hiding something. The Internet was helpful. I Googled.

I used several sources to locate the missing information. At Nelly’s retirement event the chief guest was none other than one of the ministers accused of conducting the November 1984 pogroms. He was accompanied by two foreign delegations. From Germany and Austria.

When I looked at the photo of the ‘chief guest’ on the Net it produced a sickening reaction within my body. His designer khadi. Plump and sleek, swept-back hair. A mere photo had a strong effect. Finally the horror was in the palm of my hand.

Today in the library I spent the last few hours helping my assistant shelve books. Then I instructed her to take a tea break. Madam, aap chai nahin lengey? she checked. No, I said, I’ve had plenty of tea today, and after she was gone I gazed nostalgically at the books in the poetry section and felt like making an ironic declaration, but my inner voice interrupted again: You have been tricked. Are you ready to undertake enormous responsibility? How will you conduct the oral history project without institutional support? Delhi is the city of goondas. Are you out of your mind?

How will you return?

That city will kill you again.