Helium (26 page)

As I walked out, hallucinating, I felt the gentle touch of ‘early’ Clara. Not far from me a boy was eating ice cream from a cone, licking the rivulets of melting fluid. The boy’s father – a vaguely familiar face from a different season. But this man could not have been Mr Gopal because he looked twenty years too young. Mr Gopal, my father’s close friend. No idea who failed whom. Their friendship had ended abruptly for some mysterious reason. Mr T. Gopal. IPS. Gopal Uncle. He lived in Chandigarh, I found his phone number listed in the yellow directory.

She answered the phone, cold and indifferent. Mrs Gopal. I insisted on speaking to Gopal Uncle. He is in the shower, she said, and put down the phone. Twenty minutes later I called again. He has gone to the Reri Market. An hour later she didn’t even bother to respond.

I called at eight in the evening. He is taking a walk. She gave me his cellphone number. Son, why don’t you come tomorrow? he said.

The living room was spilling with tablets and bottles of alcohol and ample revelation of an agitated mind. His hair: grey and brittle. I don’t have long to live, he said right after we hugged. It is cirrhosis. His wife was in the kitchen, and didn’t rush to receive me. In olden days I would call my mother ‘ma’ and I would call Mrs Gopal ‘badi ma’, big mother.

Are you married now?

The room had two or three mirrors, but I couldn’t see myself in them. Elliptically, I told him how happy I was with my marriage. My lovely wife. I told him the names of my daughters. Perhaps this steered the conversation to his own daughter. Trained as an economist, she had ended up becoming a visual artist in the US, he told me. She switched from a comfortable World Bank job to the precarious life of an artist. Gul had also done photo essays depicting the lives of immigrants, and this had won her a couple of major international awards. We knew each other as children; I recall helping her make a periscope in grade seven. Gul is my real past, my real regression, I thought. Perhaps I should call her.

Despite his failing eyesight and vodka, Gopal Uncle was ploughing through a thick hardback, a biography of the philosopher Wittgenstein. For a while now I have devoted myself to studying this genius, he told me theatrically, just like old times. Whereof one cannot speak (he quoted Wittgenstein), thereof one must be silent.

And both of us were silent for a long time.

Son, what I admire about Wittgenstein is that the man gave away his wealth. His entire wealth. He was an engineer just like you. We Indians call ourselves spiritual but we never give away a single rupee. We produce Tatas and Mittals and Ambanis and polyester princes and mining millionaires – while 500 million lead lives more impoverished than the most wretched in Africa.

More silence.

Mr Gopal poured me vodka on the rocks. The level in his own glass was alarmingly low. Once when I was very young and he was mildly inebriated I had asked him about the meaning of a new word I had come across. ‘Revolution,’ he told me. ‘Revolution means revolution.’ His old sayings were all coming back to me. ‘We are really one of the most violent countries in the world. But we tell a different story about ourselves to foreigners. We use Mahatma Gandhi as our poster boy.’ The sayings. ‘We are a country with a bad memory,’ he blurted out once. ‘We are good at forgetting. And we remember mostly the wrong things.’

Gopal Uncle topped my glass up, sat next to me and continued his strand of thought.

You see, son, what we need in this country are lots of Wittgensteins and not hideous, vulgar palaces built on land grabbed from orphanages. What we need, my dear son, is an end to further destruction of our land, rivers and air – an end to further plundering. How is the vodka? It is very good, I said. It better be good, he said. You see, son, the world continues to believe that the genius of our great country is spirituality . . . Our genius is that after throwing the British away we have colonised our own people.
Shining India
works for a small minority. The history of our country is the history of one wrong after another.

Shall I pour you another?

Later.

Our national genius, my dear, is to make poor men, women and children defecate on the roadside. Six hundred million don’t have proper toilets. We build tens and thousands of cheap, tasteless monuments to Nehru and Gandhi, and we name every single airport and bridge and street and market and ship and roundabout and school after that woman who imposed the dreadful emergency and censorship and forced vasectomies, or we name every single museum or hospital or flying school or market square after Indira Gandhi’s son who banned a book by a writer like Salman Rushdie. This first son of hers, Rajiv, was our leader during the biggest massacres in the country. Bhopal, too, happened during his regime. Why was the CEO of Union Carbide allowed to flee India scot-free after the disaster?

He was breathless after the long impassioned monologue. It appeared to me as if he had lost his entire skin. Gopal Uncle had not changed.

‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,’ I said.

Long silence.

I broke the silence. Finally, I said something direct, I urged him to talk about that man.

‘Who am I to talk about?’

‘You know things I don’t.’

‘Whatever I am going to say, remember, your father didn’t start out that way.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t know much. Do you know how your parents met?’

‘It was an arranged marriage.’

‘Then you know nothing.’

Mr Gopal stared at his glass.

My body became absolutely still.

‘Imagine this situation,’ he said. ‘Right after our training, your father and I, two eligible bachelors, worked in the office of the Police Chief in Delhi. It was a brand-new building. I was in your father’s office, when the Chief walked in unannounced. We stood up. Saluted. He shook our hands and politely asked me to leave.

‘I know about the first posting. I know Father worked at the headquarters.’

‘But do you know what happened behind closed doors?’

‘Papa didn’t talk much about his job.’

‘But this involves you, son. My friend and your father told me afterwards. That night we went out for a drink at the Imperial.’

Mr Gopal kept staring at his glass.

‘He was something of a playboy, the Police Chief,’ said Mr Gopal. ‘To use that old-fashioned word, he
ruined
many young women. That day he was in your father’s office to request him, beg him, or rather command him, to marry a woman five months pregnant. Abortion was not a possibility.’

‘And I am that child?’

‘Son, please don’t leap to sudden conclusions. After the wedding your mother delivered a child who didn’t survive more than a few hours. You were born a couple of years later. By the time you were born your father had already received two quick promotions.’

My eyes filled with a sadness I had not known before.

‘I don’t think your father cared for those promotions. I think he genuinely wanted to help your mother. I think in his own way he fell for her.’

‘They had a difficult marriage.’

‘All marriages are difficult. Together these two produced you. So in a way their union was a success!’

I couldn’t control my dark laughter.

‘Your father was a graduate student at Harvard University,’ he said, ‘in the anthropology department, when he took the Civil Service exam. This has always remained a mystery to me, why he chose to do so. He was at an age when idealism infects the young. But really, why did he abort his studies at Harvard? A broken love affair? Culture shock? Or simply the winter?

‘Or was it the Vietnam War? This last one is the “exact reason” he himself provided. The protests at the campus against the war. Now I know better: the exact reason is not always the exact one.

‘Your father takes the Civil Service exam. He ranks number 24. Which means he is allowed to choose the most coveted Indian Foreign Service. He doesn’t. Because those buggers are liars of the first order. That is what he said. Diplomats are the most fraudulent of all human beings, said your father,’ said Mr Gopal.

‘He opts for the Police Service (not even the second-most coveted Indian Administrative Service). All he told me was “I like a good game of chor-sipahi”. What do you make of it? We grew close during training at the Police Academy in Hyderabad. The training, your father perhaps told you, is not just ideological, it is also physical. Perhaps you know. Morning PT, military drills, firing. Now that I think about it human bodies start transforming when they have to learn to assemble parts of a gun and shoot a target within nine minutes. Rigorous training is essential, I am not questioning.
Roznamcha. Nakka
. Do you still remember the words? Your father consistently scored well. Especially in papers that had to do with the Indian penal code, sociology, psychology and problem solving. After training school our fraternal bond became even stronger, because we were from the same state, the same cadre. A few years later we picked up our selection grade the same month. He was sent on a deputation posting for three years to the border zones, as you know, where he fought infiltration. What really happened in those zones is another mystery of cyclonic proportions. Men, weapons, narcotics. The kind of money he made. Don’t quote me on this, son. Several complaints were also lodged by the rights organisations against his “interrogation methods”. We kept in touch through letters, but he rarely wrote about his job. I had no idea then that our friendship would last exactly nineteen years . . . “Chaurasi,” ’ said Gopal, ‘was a turning point.’ He used the Hindi word for ‘eighty-four’.

In ’85, a few months after the pogroms, when the new Prime Minister presided over a special function, T. Gopal had refused to shake hands with the great man. They transferred him overnight to a Central Reserve Police Force battalion (fighting the Naxalites), and started a ridiculous ‘misuse’ inquiry and that is when he started studying law. Soon he chose to resign and moved to Chandigarh to practise law.

To be honest, he said, I didn’t want the government to reward those who had enabled the massacres. Your father received a medal for the ‘commendable work’ he did and was promoted, and my career was ruined. (In ’84, you see, our friends, the senior officers in West Bengal, didn’t allow a single citizen to be harmed.) In Delhi, your father got a gallantry medal. The PM had won his own medal, his party won a landslide election victory. The pogrom, it seemed, was essential to become the leader of the country. And, rather than punish, the PM rewarded the guilty. Son, does this astonish and perturb you when I say that the massacres took place because the PM himself gave a nod? There is no paper trail, but the PM had a direct phone line. The Home Minister had a direct phone line. (The police were under the direct control of the central government.) These two – at the very top – allowed the state to collapse for over seventy-two hours. The senior cops partly followed, partly anticipated the command from the very top. They could have refused. Please forgive me, son, for I don’t speak of your father in a positive light. I was his friend, not a chamcha. A silvery medal was pinned on your father’s chest and it glowed with a strange hubris and a complete disregard for human lives. No matter what your father says now, he belonged to the school of thought that ‘Sikhs ought to be taught a lesson’ . . . All these years I have thought it over and I know the overall responsibility is that of the astonishing Congress Party. Congress made that orgy of madness possible. You see, for every Sikh who was saved, equal numbers were handed over by the neighbours. Some well-educated people said,
Maza chakha do Sikhon ko
. Ordinary citizens were mere bystanders; they watched the pogroms the way one watches the Republic Day parade or a cricket match. And yet nothing was spontaneous. As witnessed by thousands of human and animal eyes it was largely a Congress Party affair. As if the party set out to eradicate an entire people. A thousand Sikhs were killed every day in Delhi alone. (Ironically, most of the contractors who constructed the imperial city of Delhi a hundred years ago were Sikhs.)

No, I am not completely out of my mind when I tell you that public buses and trains were used by the State to transport paid ‘mobs’. Voters lists were provided and Sikh homes and businesses were marked overnight. Cops disarmed Sikh citizens if they happened to be armed and aided the ‘mobs’ perform their operations seamlessly. No it can’t be true? Most victims, my dear boy, were burned with the aid of oil or a white inflammable powder, the mobs were given instructions-money-liquor-kerosene by senior leaders who belonged to the astonishing Congress Party, some of them Doscos, educated at the elite Doon school, my own classmates, sinister ringleaders, who guided the mobs just a kilometer away from the parliament. The Home Minister, another real hero, sat on his ass while Dilli turned into a killing field my dear son. Untold number of men were set on fire in more than 40 cities throughout the country. Thousands were massacred in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra . . . There was a massive cover-up; we are still counting the dead.