Helium (18 page)
Father’s translation or rather ‘lack of translation’ distracted us. Instead of helping me persuade Nelly to reveal details about her adoption, we got sidetracked. Nelly had just begun telling me about the origin of the word ‘caste’ when the package arrived. How the Portuguese seafarers saw social relations in India in the fifteenth century . . . I must have been completely out of my mind. I told her about the details, the ‘translation’. Now I know I committed a big faux pas by handing her the package.
Nelly read the untranslated passages silently towards the end. After she was done I murmured a few incomprehensible words. She didn’t ask me to repeat or explain; slowly the disturbance within me dissipated on its own.
She was not mad at me, but she gave me an interrogative look. ‘Instead of composing these absurd “modern myths” why not write about the boy who didn’t return? It is not just your father who is living the lie, but you as well.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
Now that you have shown me these pages, and before this asked all your schoolboyish questions, let me ask you my own, said Nelly. Not that they are significant, not many things in my remaining life are, but they might be to you. I know the answer, and perhaps I am right, but I would like to hear it from you, said Nelly. (Some of her old gestures returned, and her hands were shaking.) That answer is more significant than any real or imaginary drops of blood you happen to have seen now or twenty-five years ago . . . You were Mohan’s favourite student. In his eccentric scheme you were placed at the very top, special. You knew this, the entire class did. Mohan rarely invited students home to dinner, not even star students, but he made an exception. The star students would come to tea (two or three times a year) and my interaction with them was minimal. Open the door, make tea, serve snacks, then disappear to my room. It was useless eavesdropping. After the students left he would tell me about them, what he really thought about them despite the grades; at times he would pronounce harsh judgements.
You were an exception. You came with exceptional talent, a ‘model’, an ‘ideal’, and you were well grounded in the arts. It was possible to have a real, intelligent conversation. He made a judgement about you as well – the difference is that he made the judgement before inviting you to our place. I was curious. When you first came to our house I was not taken by you. You were shy and did not say much, and you were in awe of your professor. Mohan looked visibly pleased with himself. Then I looked at your sandals, the black sandals and they made me laugh. The sandals didn’t match your body, you had a strange aesthetic sense . . .
Twenty-five years later you did not have to come back to tell me that you had joined Cornell. I checked the website. Over the years I have learned to use the Internet. I had gone to the university website to check if Gergina was still there. She was Mohan’s first love (before he met me), a fellow graduate student, and he had broken her heart. I wanted to tell her that the person she had loved was dead and gone. Gergina was there on the website, a full professor now. A distinguished-looking woman ageing gracefully. And your name was next to hers. And I didn’t send her an email. How does one explain something that cannot be explained? In her mind the man she loved once was still alive (and also dead). Most likely she had not heard. I thought it was perhaps for the best not to disturb her peace.
One by one all the star students of Mohan wrote to me. To this day I don’t know how they got hold of my address, but the letters arrived here in Shimla, and they all made it within three or four years; the last one arrived in 1989, when the world was going through massive upheavals. That wall crumbled in Berlin. I say ‘last’, because I was not expecting a letter from you. A visit, yes. In fact, till the beginning of ’89 none of his students mattered; even you, who were so important, ceased to matter.
You talk obsessively now about that railway platform photo, but have you forgotten the photo we never took? I wish I’d had a camera that day. On the surface it was an ordinary day, but before it ended it revealed all that was carefully concealed. Mohan had invited you to yet another dinner. His ex-room-mate from Cornell, an Italian American, now a professor of literature, was in town. I cooked Bengali-style fish. Our guest is magnetically drawn to Mohan’s ‘dancing girl’ and ‘priest king’, the Harappa artefacts. His eyes pop out as he rolls in his hand the Indus seals. A script impossible to translate. It is best certain things never get translated, he says. He, our charming guest, holds court that night, delights us with short bios of authors we never heard of before. We have only one bottle, but the wine is good. Conversation moves to a book, I remember, by Moravia. Our guest recites a fragment that has been troubling him, and because of that passage he finds it difficult to read fiction. All fiction. Technically it is a simple situation. X invites Y, his best friend, to dinner, and while X (the host) disappears for five minutes to the basement to get wine, X’s wife leans towards Y and kisses him. What should Y do? No matter what choice he makes he is doomed. Should he tell X? Not tell X? Will X believe him? Even if X believes him how will the telling affect the friendship? And what if Y chooses not to tell? Then the Italian American pauses, and for a brief moment there is absolute silence around the table, and then everyone laughs.
You were the only one who didn’t laugh. I had observed you while the Italian American was narrating the story. The way your body shrank. Your face transformed, and its colour. As if you were not there. You concealed yourself. I had no idea – I still don’t know – if the others noticed.
When you recovered you told a horrible Sikh joke as if you wanted me to dislike you. You knew I hated those jokes. (Repelled by your ‘surd’ and ‘sardine’ I made you stop.) When you left you didn’t even bother shaking hands with me that night. You made yourself repulsive and vanished. And a few days later I heard about your jaundice. At first I doubted the sickness was real. But I didn’t want you to die. When I was a girl the rickshaw-wallah who took me to school died of ‘pilia’, his eyes had turned yellow before he stopped coming. For a month you vacated the IIT hostel and moved to your parents’ house. Mohan was the one who encouraged me to go and see you. I called you. Mohan was the one who gave me the phone number. The maid picked up. She gave me the address. I changed city buses twice and made it to Amrita Sher-Gil Marg. You know how difficult it is for women to travel on those buses. I took a day off only to find out that your parents’ house was not far from the International Centre. Because it was an elite neighbourhood there was no trace of slums. The houses were bigger and more majestic than ours. Outside your bungalow on that billionaires’ boulevard real cops were posted, loaded with carbines. Two or three black cars and a jeep chaotically parked just outside the gate. I presented myself to the guards, they didn’t frisk me, they were respectful. There was no one on the veranda. I walked in. The bookshelves and other objects in the house suggested this family was steeped in deep knowledge about the world. It appeared the place had several servants, but at that time none visible. Service people cannot afford such places, such a house comes to one as inheritance or through high levels of corruption. In the kitchen I found the old maid in a sari. Your parents were not home. She told me you were fast asleep. She had gone to your room. I heard the conversation. You didn’t want to see me. Absolutely not. You commanded the maid to get rid of me. I overheard just enough. On the way home it occurred to me that something was keeping you from introducing me to your parents. Certain things don’t need proof.
Later on the railway platform you pretended this episode didn’t take place. You relied on ambiguity. But you never introduced me to your father as your professor’s wife. I could have been anyone. Someone’s mother. Thirty or thirty-one boys on the platform. All your father saw that day was the wave of my hand, farewell to you all. All he saw was a lie.
Chapter 3.
I don’t know what she meant about the lie, but I moved out of Nelly’s place and got a room in a hotel. I could see pain and outrage accumulating inside me, but tried to stay calm. The most difficult thing was the mirror in the bathroom, completely unnecessary. I taped three or four sheets on that clumsily polished surface. It was a four-star hotel, on the highest mountain in the city, with angled views of young chir pines, walls of deodars and swatches of green, and comfortable. I spent two continuous days in my room, unwell, filled with a kind of nausea not experienced for twenty or twenty-five years. On the wall across from my bed there were huge black-and-white photos of colonial tiger hunts, and the constant gaze of white sahibs stirred strange, uncomfortable thoughts within me.
On TV the main news items (regardless of the spin) highlighted the occupation of Kashmir, its alienated youth. The last two decades had left 90,000 dead. Thousands had disappeared. Women had been raped, entire villages, by men in uniform. Abuse. Torture. Mass graves. Despite that, the armed forces and paramilitaries enjoyed absolute impunity. Equally disturbing was the ongoing tragedy of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile. Local news focused on the collapse of a bridge in the Commonwealth Games complex. Twenty-five years ago there was only one state-run channel; now in ‘new and shining India’ 136 channels were telling the ‘truth’ in a babel of voices.
For a long time I stared at the empty, redundant swimming pool outside the window, and for some unknown reason thought about Father’s swimming pool in Delhi. I don’t know when exactly I called the bookshop downstairs to ask if they had stories set in Shimla. The bellboy got me every single forgettable book by Kipling. Nevertheless I flipped through those collectors’ editions. Kipling still had power over me. Buying the books, sa’ab? Get me three bottles of wine instead, I said. Sula. Worst in the world. Nelly didn’t call me either, I was the one who did, but something kept her from returning my calls. I felt I had perhaps offended her by not saying much. I had not uttered a single meaningful word.
My father, too, hunted tigers. When he visited Jabalpur to attend a police conference he developed a passion for the wild. He got lucky and shot the big cat ‘Surma’. The tiger was processed by the taxidermist in Calcutta. Once a year men in our house in Delhi would spread the skin (and the attached head) on the lawns. Burning bright, flames of winter sun would dry the kill. Inside, displayed on the wall, the head gleamed at night. When I was a child the tiger would create extreme emotional upheavals within me. I was proud of my father, and also hated him. ‘Dislike’ was not a strong enough emotion. In all he hunted thirteen tigers, I don’t know where the other twelve are. In post-independence India more than nine thousand were eliminated by foreign and indigenous hunters. Ironically, it was Indira Gandhi who imposed a so-called ban in the early seventies. One by one I consumed the bottles of horrible Sula red and then switched to beer. I heard intermittently the occasional whistle of a train. Long, long, short, long. Thick clouds galloped towards my window. Yes, long ago, an extremely strong and beautiful woman had stirred a powerful attraction within me that is hard to articulate. The whole thing started as pure lust, I remember still the dizzy feeling, the cloud of confusion, the delirium. The jacaranda earrings I made for her. How foolish and bold of me to make earrings out of seed pods which essentially look like vaginas. Nelly wore them only once, in his absence, and that is not a lie. I thought then that she was the love of my life (whatever it meant) and that is not a lie. But the truth is that I was really afraid. Afraid that day on the railway platform. I didn’t act, I could not, not because of the reason Nelly implied. Yes, indeed, long ago, in my wildest thoughts I did wish my professor dead once or twice (just as I wished my father dead when I was very young). But the wish was not real. Nelly didn’t understand me completely. She, too, knew the truth partially, and that is not a lie. Fear had penetrated my bones, and paralysed me, that is why I did not try to save him on the platform. Not because I wished him dead. I know now any action on my part would not have helped. I regret it though; if only I had tried (regardless of the consequences) I would have been hurt less, and by now I would have figured out a way to heal the wound.