Helium (35 page)
Two days later I walked to the institute.
Outside, in the shade, there was a long line-up of colourful tourists, Indians and foreigners, one or two very old in wheelchairs, a figure from the days of the Empire, an Englishman in a trilby. I bought a ticket and joined the guided tour. The guide took us very close to the glass entrance, we stood under a hundred-year-old Belgian chandelier. People marvelled at the pale crystals of light. You are allowed to peek inside, a voice said. Quiet, but very quietly. Shh! Among the tourists there was a young mother with a daughter, around three years old, and the mother said, ‘
Auntie ko hello karo’
, and the child waved at the figure on the other side of the partition. Then she pushed open the door and took fifteen little steps towards the desk. The man at the gate stirred but didn’t stop her. A voice commanded the mother to fetch the girl back. ‘
Koi baat nahi’
, said the librarian. She bent low, shook hands with the startled girl, who pivoted on her tiny left foot imbibing as much as possible of that wondrous crumbling space, and at that point a recently married man standing next to me tapped his fingers on the Burma teak panels. ‘
This has been made by such levels of patience’
, he told his wife. I, too, touched the wrinkled panels (and almost whispered, ‘
But why don’t you mention the patience of the books on the shelves and the patience of the custodians of books?’
), and after the mother and daughter returned our guide led us to the Viceroy’s tea room, the new seminar room, and the billiards room with its Khatumbund ceiling, partitioned round table and glass mosaics stolen from ‘Burmah’. High up on the wall a Dutch pendulum clock with the exact shapes and degrees of the moon. A. V. Oostrom, 1826. The hands jerked forward. ‘
We wind the clock once a month’
. That is when I separated from the tour and returned to the glass partition. The figure was back at her desk. I saw a pile of dusty books, her black shoes, and felt as if I knew nothing about her, or the crumbling colonial building. I stepped out, trying to regain my ground, and for a brief moment gazed at the distant snow-clad mountains. The castle was colder inside . . . and during lunch she stepped out as well and sat on the empty bench under the tulip tree, and ate her sandwich. From where I was she looked like a dwarf in front of the building and as she started eating for some unknown reason I heard my aunt’s anguished voice. How could you forget?
The librarian shared the last bit of her sandwich with the birds.
For my son I will do anything
. Slowly it occurred to me that Nelly had obviously known about certain things – she never told me that she always knew about my father’s involvement. And that day I left Shimla abruptly because she had known it all the way along. A real scientist might say, ‘Raj himself knew about his father all along, but he was in search of another proof, and Nelly’s work confirmed what he feared, what he already knew but was afraid to admit.’
When I met Maribel after the cremation, she apologised for not meeting me in person in Mexico. ‘You deserved better. But I was genuinely angry at you, and not just because of that absurd question. Now I know how mushed up you are because of ’84. The fact is that Nelly always knew, and she kept postponing telling you about your father’s involvement, just like you kept postponing telling her. Do you understand? Do you?’
My project is done, I thought. Now I know more or less the essence of the story. And I am going to assemble it all in Shimla.
‘By any chance are you the new librarian? The new archivist?’
The woman flashed a thin smile. ‘Yes, I double as both.’
Her gaze, like her hands, delicate and patient, filled with an exuberant curiosity. What are you working on?
‘I am a new fellow at the institute,’ I told her, ‘and I am interested in the discovery of helium.’ Among the colonial papers she led me to I figured out that the question of ‘discovery’ was still not a settled affair. An Englishman based in the UK? Or someone based in occupied India? In one of the files I read that, in 1868, a French scientist came to Shimla; he had just observed the solar spectra in Guntur, in the south, and one bright yellow line just didn’t make sense. India was the best place to observe the sun that year (a perfect twelve-minute-long solar eclipse), and he had arrived with state-of-the-art equipment, and perhaps the yellow line (he thought, on the verge of discovery) was simply the fingerprint of a previously unknown element. In Shimla, high up on Observatory Hill, he reanalysed his data, the anomalous wavelength, 587.56 nanometres, and even thought of an appropriate name for the new element: Helios. But he was filled with mist and doubt. Perhaps the bright, unexplained line, the anomaly, was simply an error. The Frenchman, like other colonial scientists, didn’t know then that 23 per cent of the universe is made up of this lightest of all inert gases, and ‘rare’ only on Planet Earth. When an electric current passes through a sample it glows like a peach or becomes canary yellow. Helium was also responsible for the extra luminosity of Saturn. This new element would help us determine the age of our Earth, and tell us about the inner lives of stars. Superfluid helium would make CERN’s Large Hadron Collider possible, the discovery of Higgs Boson-like particle, and the origin of mass. Without an element as small as hydrogen we humans, the scientists didn’t know, would not see the way we see, because so much of our seeing depends on particles that come to us from our sun, and what creates those photons also creates a slightly bigger element called helium. In 1868 they knew nothing about its atoms, how they stuck together, how they vibrated, their anomalous behaviour, spin or iso-spin, and as I sifted through more boxes evening descended, and the archives room grew very cold.
Alexandra Pringle, Jackie Kaiser, Gillian Stern, Alexa von Hirschberg, Kathy Belden, Dr Jaswant Guzder, Nancy Marrelli, Surinder Jodhka, Olivier Fuldauer, Uma Chakravarty, Peter Balakian, Hartosh Singh Bal, The Singh Twins, Satish Abbi, Enrique Servin Herrara, Umaraj Saberwal, Anthony Whittome, Marni Jackson, Prashant Panjiar, Raj Kumar Hans, Colin Carr, Taras Grescoe, Anne Mclean, Rui Coias, Arvinderpal Singh, Hamish McDonald, David Albahari, Michael Hulse, Aparna Sundar, Kajri Jain, Simon Dardick, T. Sher Singh, Chiki Sarkar, Andrew Steinmetz, Lida Nosrati, Anvita Abbi, Marc Parent, Gunstein Bakke, Denise Drury, Christabelle Sethna, Swaati Chattopadhyay, Jim Olver, Patricia Uberoi, Juan Vera, Grazyna Wilczek, Katherine Fry, Rahul Bedi, Shohini Ghosh, Puneetinder Kaur, Audrey Cotterell, Farhang Sajed, Kim Williams, Donald Lee, Jessica Auer, Arpana Caur, Brigid Keenan, Beatrice Monti, Edward Moulton, Bhupinderpal Singh, Theresa Rowat, Arwen Fleming, Diya Kar Hazra, Rick Stroud and Dilreen Kaur. My parents.
MacDowell
Colony, Yaddo, Bloomsbury, Ledig House, Foundation Rowohlt, Canada Council for the Arts, Santa Maddalena, Banff Centre, and Natural History Museum (London).
Who are the Guilty?
by Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights and Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties.
When a Tree Shook Delhi
by Manoj Mitta and H.S. Phoolka. November 1984 films, documentaries and texts.
Primo Levi: A Biography
by Ian Thompson. Books by Richard Feynman, Allan Octavian Hume, Raaja Bhasin, Salim Ali and W.G. Sebald.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, Dr. Jaswant Guzder, Gauri Gill, Ram Rahman and Valerie Campos for reproduction of images. Gauri Gill’s photograph came with the caption: ‘Taranjeet Kaur’s grandfather Jeevan
Singh was killed by a New Delhi mob on November 1, 1984.’ Professor Uma Chakravarty provided complete access to her private archive connected to the pogrom; many images on relied on her collection.
The author and publishers express their thanks for permission to use the following material:
TEXT
Extract from
Vertigo
by W.G. Sebald, published by Harvill Press and reproduced by kind permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Extracts from
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, copyright © 1984 by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Extract from
Moments of Reprieve
by Primo Levi, reproduced with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman. Translator copyright © 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983,
1986 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 1981, 1985 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a copyright © 1986 by Primo Levi.
Extract from
Exterminate All The Brutes
copyright © 1992 by Sven Lindqvist. English translation ©
1996 by Joan Tate. Reproduced by kind permission of Granta Books, UK and The New Press, US,
www.thenewpress.com.
Extract from
The Collected
Poems
by Primo Levi reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
IMAGES
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Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ashsem_small.jpg
Copyright page copyright © 1984 by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., from
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Used by permission of Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Creative Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Granulos.jpg
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The Modular Man
by Le Corbusier © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013
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All other images are courtesy of the author.
Born in India, Jaspreet Singh moved to Canada in 1990. He is a novelist, essayist, short story writer and a former research scientist. He received his doctorate in chemical engineering in 1998 from McGill University, Montreal, and two years later decided to focus full time on writing.
Seventeen Tomatoes
, his debut story collection, won the 2004 Quebec First Book Prize.
Chef
, his first novel, about the damaged landscapes of Kashmir, was a 2010
Observer
Book of the Year and won the Canadian Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. He has also been a finalist for four awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. His work was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Punjabi and Farsi. He lives in Toronto.
Seventeen Tomatoes
Chef
Also Available by Jaspreet Singh
Chef
‘Singh writes of a beautiful place that dances on the razor wire of India and Pakistan's disputed border. His prose redefines an exhausted situation, giving it new light’
The Times
‘A fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey through one of the most beautiful yet besieged areas in the world – Jaspreet Singh brings out the full poetry and heartbreak of Kashmir’
Manil Suri
Kip Singh watches India pass by his window on the slow train to Kashmir. Timorous and barely twenty, Kip arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp and is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor who guides him towards the heady spheres of food and women. Though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his rightful allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. But when he comes across a Pakistani ‘terrorist' with long, flowing hair, swept up on the banks of the river, everything changes... Mesmeric and lyrical,
Chef
is a story of hope, love and memory.
