Helium (19 page)

You are living a lie. Nelly was mad at me.

Bubbles in a glass of beer grow twice as big by the time they rise to the very top. Students almost always get this wrong: Why is the diameter of the bubble at the bottom of the glass half the diameter of the one at the top? A simple calculation shows that pressure-induced size reduction is no more than 10 per cent even in a very tall glass of beer. So, what is the real reason?

While rising, each bubble acts as a typical nucleation site. Moving up, it gathers dissolved carbon dioxide, which causes expansion. Size change also changes its speed. But that is a separate question, a separate set of equations.

My cellphone was ringing.

The IIT Chair’s name and number stared at me. I let it ring. I was done with helium. I had no idea how to introduce Professor Osheroff. Helium-3 was not even my area. And I was also done with my area as well – rheology.

Rhea is the second largest moon of Saturn.

Wispy and full of icy cliffs.

The only moon with rings around it.

The Rings of Rhea.

Beautiful and melancholic like Saturn.

Rhea is also a bird.

Unable to fly.

A distant cousin of the ostrich.

Both the moon and the bird were named after the ‘daughter of sky and Earth’ and the ‘mother of gods’. Rhea is a myth. Rhea is the wife of Time. And Time, back then, was a myth. ‘Time’ or ‘Cronus’ or ‘Saturn’ ate his own children. Rhea hid a newborn in a cave and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in a rag. Cronus ate that stone. In ancient Greek
rhea
means ‘flow’ or ‘discharge’.
Panta rei
, says Heraclitus: ‘everything flows’.

What appealed to me about rheology, at least during those early years, was its focus on deformation and flow of materials. Anomalous ones. Materials which betray Newton’s laws. ‘Thickness’ or ‘viscosity’ fail to characterise them fully the way they do with air and water and even honey. Blood, clay, toothpaste, biological molecules, liquid crystals, foam, paint, menstrual blood and lava are non-Newtonian. Anomalous equations guide them through various incarnations.

A spider crawled to the bottom of my beer glass and slowly moved up. I surveyed the curious movement of its small wriggly legs on glass. Detecting trouble or ‘instability’ it returned quickly to the base.
‘Nature is altogether out of it
.’ I couldn’t but help think of the one student who had tried to ‘save’ Professor Singh. At least he made an attempt while I stood on the platform numb and paralysed. What did he get in return? An iron bar that missed his head, and hit his shoulder instead. He fell on the platform and wriggled. Then he got punched in his mouth. Blood gushed out of him. He was not even a friend of the professor’s, not a favourite student, not an exceptionally bright student. No one thought he was ‘brave’. We all used to call him an expert masturbator. But when the need arose this mediocrity acted ‘brave’. He deserved a gallantry medal for trying. But he too ran away after blood gushed out. He kept running and never looked back. He is now a professor at Clarkson (Potsdam, New York). I traced him through the alumni association, and drove to his place and stayed with him. Tactfully over a drink I brought up Professor Singh. I saw him turn numb. Terrified. Now after so many years it was his turn to grow numb. He urged me not to open up that can of worms. I remember nothing, he insisted. His voice broke down. Nothing. I told him clearly about my project, also the fact that I was going to mention him for the sake of posterity. He raised his voice, which kept breaking. Is this why you have come? His wife shoved him into the study. Then she asked me to pack all my things and leave as soon as possible. On the way back I had thought and thought a lot about India and my father.

When I was eight or nine my father took me along to the remote areas on the so-called ‘police inspections’. Together we travelled to the high bur-fi-lay mountains. He drove the 4x4 jeep himself. Our luggage included his hunting gun. I sat in the front, since Mother was not with us. The driver sat at the back.

Father drove to Kalka, Solan and Shimla, and continued on the road to Kullu-Manali because he wanted me to see (or rather hunt in) the highest mountains. The road was a marvel of high-altitude engineering. He drove all the way to Rohtang Pass, 3,978 metres high. Rohtang, he explained, means a ‘pile of bones’. He was right. The pass resembled a Yeti’s icy knuckle.

We stood looking down. Cold wind struck our cheeks. I thought my cap was going to fall off, and all I saw was rock and road and no trees. Shivering, I returned to the parked jeep. Father encouraged me to take pictures. My hands shook when I used the metallic camera. Then we drove through a thin veil of clouds to the origin of Beas, the river water white and foamy, roaring and kicking and galloping towards the plains. We drank tea directly from the Thermos, and walked a mile to the base of the glacier, where we found a mountaineer’s shoe, and a minute later a perfectly preserved body no longer attached to it. The mountaineer’s face was well preserved too. Father and I hurried back to the jeep where the driver was waiting, a lump of snow in my hand. The lump melted drop by drop through my fingers, giving me immense pain and pleasure, both at once.

Father got directions from the nomads to the police check post, where he alerted the saluting, trembling havildar on duty about the body and then we were on our way again. During the descent, we encountered more nomads and flocks of sheep. The animals slowed us down, and when the jeep finally picked up speed I had to put on a thick sweater and zip up my jacket.

Those days Rohtang Pass (or Rohtang La, in Tibetan) was not connected to Leh. Father had promised to show me the semi-arid Leh. So he called a few important friends from the local police station, and from the valley on the other side of Rohtang a helicopter picked us up and spiralled to Ladakh. There we saw snow and a desert, and Father did some hunting, but what took our breath away was the chiru antelope migrating. In Leh we also bought three or four shahtoosh ring-shawls for relatives.

The same helicopter, a couple of days later, dropped us at the base of Mount Affarwat, 4,143 metres high. Father told me that he thought it would be a good idea to climb that beautiful mountain. He gave me a little test. You must learn to take only the most essential things along, he said. What would you keep and what would you discard? I told him it was not a good idea to carry his gun during the climb. Father patted my back, thrice. He left the gun with the driver and we hiked up extremely light.

From the summit of Affarwat we could see that 8,126-metre wonder of the world. The mountain looked semi-naked, and I was not surprised when the local police officer told us its name. Nanga Parbat, or the Naked Mountain.

In my hotel room I thought over and over about our journey to the ‘highest’ mountains. I know Father has not forgotten the journey either. He rarely forgets. Our house in Delhi is filled with paintings of Nanga Parbat. He commissions his favourite artists to do a ‘Nanga Parbat’ for him. He loves the magic of mountains and starts glowing when someone mentions Kipling, Kim, or K1, K2, K3 . . . I still remember that beautiful story he told me, the tiny myth about the origin of mountains . . . The police helicopter was flying over Affarwat when he told me about the mythic orogenesis.

Once upon a time elephants were able to fly. Completely white and delightful, the flying creatures also destroyed a lot of objects, houses, and trees. One day a fatigued elephant perched on a big tree. The tree fell. On several children. So, with a single thunderbolt, the gods cut off its wings . . . Collective punishment . . . What we see as mountains now are really those elephants without wings, and the ever-thickening clouds hovering about the upper slopes are really the detached wings. Together, the clouds and the mountains mourn their loss, and what comes down is rain.

The next few days it rained in Shimla and in the overheated hotel room I drifted in and out of a kind of dizziness and nausea I rarely experience. The white elephants remained invisible most of the time. Several times in my room or in the hotel lobby I heard sounds of bells wafting in from a faraway school or a temple.

When the rain stopped, I stepped out for an aimless walk, and spent some time browsing through dusty volumes at the rare bookshop on the Mall Road. The owner had a tiny TV and was watching a documentary on the Siachen glacier. Utopian proposals to build a ‘peace park’ at Siachen were being discussed. I bought a bottle of mineral water from the chemist’s shop, where, quite unexpectedly, I ran into a vaguely familiar nocturnal figure, the night porter wearing the same threadbare baseball cap. Suraj. He was sleep-starved, and informed me that he was heading to his village later that evening. Every year he was allowed a month off.

‘Who will take care of your nephew and niece?’

‘My sister-in-law is here,’ he said.

Suraj inspired me to do some planning, and that evening when he took the bus to his village in the high mountains I accompanied him. As the bus gained elevation he opened up, and even told me how he dealt with the chamgadar, the bat in the library. But my mind was elsewhere. I found it difficult to talk, and difficult to listen, especially to human voices. I yearned for silence, not absolute silence, but the silence of the high mountains.

The bus driver, speeding on that narrow, unsafe road, steered wildly like Captain Billions-of-Blue-Blistering-Barnacles in
Tintin
. Through the window I saw the abuse. Fewer trees and animals. That old magic of the landscape had vanished for ever.

Suraj drifted into deep sleep; he leaned against my shoulder for an hour, then woke up rubbing his eyes like a child, and asked me a sudden question, which left me unsettled.

‘Sa’ab, do you suffer from a pain?’

Unable to respond, I looked out the window.

Nelly’s pain was real. My ‘pain’ was merely a fantasy. I indulged in pain. I had no pain really. I had no guilt. Yes, there was shame. But shame is not the same thing as pain.

Yet I was unable to answer Suraj. He had used the Hindi/Urdu/Pahari word ‘dard’ for pain, and for some unknown reason that four-letter word cut right through me.

‘Why do you ask, Suraj?’

Intuitively he had understood something about me. He never invited me, but it was implied that I would stay at his place. His brother was away as well. When we looped up the narrow, numinous path to that log cabin of a house, Suraj used a key. Then he ran to the shop to get provisions and fixed us a meal. While eating he mentioned his neighbour, an old man who knew how to get rid of ‘pain’.

‘Perhaps tomorrow.’

Later that evening we dressed warmly and he took me on a short familiarising walk through his village. Now and then he described how a snow leopard skinned a musk deer. It struck me that Suraj’s own pain had abruptly ended because he was no longer in a big city. He walked ‘naturally’ here, a walk he was unable to walk in Shimla. Here, I was the one who felt unnatural – here I had to relearn the ‘walk’. Suraj pointed his index finger towards the neighbouring mountain. Slowly my gaze moved in that direction. The slopes were black and purple (the incline over sixty degrees) and the dead trees on the slopes vertical and horizontal cylinders of coke and coal, some still standing. That ruined, blackened brick building standing on the ridge, Suraj said, used to be a sanatorium.

Then followed a long, almost inchoate monologue.

‘Sa’ab, I was five or six years old when that mountain lit up so bright it was possible to find lost objects inside our house.

‘I have not been able to forget what happened when our village for the first time ever decided to celebrate the festival of Dusshera in that grand, spectacular way by burning effigies of the demons. I have no idea why the elders chose that mountain and not this one. The fire started not by lightning or by a bidi or an electric wire. The demon figures were burning and exploding at the base of the mountain by the river . . . Fortunately, there was no one inside the old sanatorium at the top, otherwise there would have been more casualties. The sanatorium had been long shut down, and other than old furniture there was nothing inside. To this day, sa’ab, I remember the sound of firecrackers . . . and the sounds of fire and the terrified animals.

‘The colour of the sun changed. For days on end the air smelled of smoke.’