Helium (25 page)

Back in the hostel I imagined a major quarrel brewing between the two of them. Unable to study or sleep in my room I decide to jog towards the Wind Tunnel, and when I was done with jogging and sweating I started worrying for her and a couple of hours later drove to their place. (Those days I used to take lessons from one of my father’s drivers. The chap would show up every alternate evening, and after the lesson he would park Father’s black Ambassador outside the hostel.) Carefully I drove the car with the big Learner’s sign, although there was no need for a car; slowly in the mottled night towards the faculty residences beyond the Solar Building. I turned off the headlights long before I arrived. All the lights of their house were on, and as I walked closer to the thorny bougainvillea, I heard a crackling sound. The living-room windows were open, curtains flapping, a stack of vinyl records by the turntable. The song is still embedded somewhere deep inside me.

Frank Sinatra’s ‘September’. Warm September of my years. A man is in step with the song. He is alone, wet in his sweat. I would like to believe him ‘sad’, I would like to see him alone, but he is neither sad nor alone. Nelly is is is with him. Extremely close. Entangled, in slow step. Not bhangra, not gidda. But another private invention. The man is exuding the kind of tenderness I had not associated with him. The kind that comes when one feels absolutely secure. His loose blue jeans rolled up to his knees, nothing on his chest, only long hair, curly and wavy, which had tumbled down from his head. She is bonded to his body and mind via a mechanism I understood (and yet I didn’t and still don’t). The slow, crackling September fills the space around them. For a second I felt and still feel Nelly was aware of my presence that night. But the second melts away. And the slow, non-bombastic, melancholic melody continues on and on and on tearing my eyes.

I called Nelly. She was pleased to hear from me. But expressed reluctance to send me to the institute director. Why do you need to take a look at the archives? All you need is in these disks. You don’t really need to go, I have digitised everything.

She had ‘everything’ on disks. I insisted on consulting the originals anyway. Something real about holding a twenty-year-old sheet of paper. Yellow and brittle, I wanted to hold the documents of crime. Smell the micro-organisms. Touch the coffee stains, and wipe the dust that might have settled on them.

The director, an enlightened squire of a man, had no problems with me going through the files. His well-preserved face seemed to say, Look, I am an important man. So don’t waste my precious time. Did he suspect I was gathering evidence? He had too many things on his plate. His grand second-floor office, adjacent to the curious turret, used to be the Viceroy’s opulent study (his residence was still called the ‘Squire’s House’). He offered me a cushioned chair and a glass of water, but all along I felt a fine mix of suspicion and hyper-alertness directed towards me. His tone gave one the impression that the man’s sole job was to protect the dusty archives from any human activity. Why would someone with your background need our services? Because I am researching colonial science. The moment I used the word ‘colonial’ he decided I was safe and became friendly. He offered me tea and asked hundreds of questions about Cornell. ‘My daughter is applying for admissions abroad.’ After tea he beckoned the clerks to make a temporary card. The babus could barely operate in English, but they used the language anyway. I spoke in Hindi, they responded in English. Finally, after a couple of hours, I received the typed permission.
With reference to your letter on the subject cited above, you, Dr R. Kumar, US passport holder, and university ID card bearing number 250111/95, is hereby allowed to consult the material inside.
No borrowing outside premises
. The new archivist, however, was unable to locate the information I was after. We possess nothing on 1984, she clarified. The only listed files are connected to a mini crisis within the Institute of Advanced Studies. ‘Yesterday when I took charge from the director,’ she said, ‘I was made aware of the details. In ’84, a group of people signed a petition to shut this institute, and another group tried their level best to keep it running. It is a miracle that this place is still running.’

So where were Nelly’s original files, the ones she had digitised?

The new archivist checked boxes and thick rotting files connected to Indira Gandhi and her sons, Shree Sanjay and Shree Rajiv. Nothing.

I understood then. Nelly had either destroyed or hidden the files. She had started assembling material long before she had access to new technologies. Did she destroy the files recently after creating the CDs? But where were the files before she started digitising them? She must have hidden them somewhere in the building. But where?

Where would I hide the material?

A man in khaki entered with a note. The new archivist walked out of the room as if it was an emergency. The man stared at me. Then he too was gone. Waiting, I paced up and down and counted the number of handcarts. I don’t know why. I started a brief conversation with two other fellows in the room. One of them, a young chap, was collecting material on Lady Curzon’s boudoir, the Bengal famine, the colonial census, and Dalit literature (topics so disparate), and the other on Hume, Allan Octavian, the selfsame founder of the Congress Party. The researcher, however, was focusing on records connected to Hume’s work as an ornithologist. In 1885 some twenty thousand stuffed birds, part of the prodigious collection, were destroyed in Shimla. ‘Twenty thousand birds,’ he exclaimed. Something I didn’t know.

Hume Papers

Box I, Box II . . . Box XX.

Box XIX had many files labelled ‘84’. The year 1884 had been shortened to 84. Box XIX had twenty-seven files that had never been touched. And that is where I found Nelly’s 1984 papers. She had taken precautions.

Papers, diaries, letters, postcards, photographs, children’s sketchbooks, ration cards, passports, fragile clippings, cuttings of interviews with a few survivors (and the injured and the displaced), lists of the guilty citizens, bureaucrats, diplomats, judges, cabinet ministers, industrialists, politicians, media personalities and senior IPS police officers. The Prime Minister. Then it dawned on me: the Congress Party had conducted its first major genocidal pogrom exactly ninety-nine years after it was formed, and exactly one hundred years after it was conceived in the hill station of Shimla.

Father’s name was not on the nefarious list. Only his rank. He was involved. Beyond doubt. He enabled the pogrom, I thought. Father was one of the most senior IPS officers then. Part of Delhi Police. Unable to deal with the shock, I booked a cab. Towards Delhi. I knew it was time to confront him.

The traffic moved slowly that day. Now and then I saw hawks and vultures hovering over deep ravines and burning garbage. An unknown bird, perched on a pile of asbestos sheets, looked at me with large perplexed eyes. Another with a long tail flew wave-like from branch to branch until it disappeared in the mist along sharp, faintly metallic sounds. Just outside Solan, workers were widening the highway, and the air smelled of molten tar. Mile after mile of excess. Mindless construction by so-called developers. On the way to Delhi we stopped in Le Corbusier’s city of concrete: Chandigarh. I asked the cabbie to make a detour to Sector XIV, and he drove slowly inside the university campus.

This is where my father studied anthropology, and this is where he was based when he applied for higher studies at Harvard. (He always avoids the topic. His move from Chandigarh to the US and back. Father never finished his grad work at Harvard. I don’t know why he discontinued.)

The cabbie drove me slowly to the Gandhi Bhavan, then around the city, and for some unknown reason I started taking pictures of all the concrete buildings designed by the architect who had erased the past. The grids, the modules, the ramps. Massive spatial and formal disconnection. Le Corbusier’s architecture produced my father. This new vision, this idea of modern India, produced him.

From Chandigarh I called Nelly. And apologised for my abrupt departure. ‘Is your father all right?’ she asked in a heavy voice. No, I think I am the one who is not all right. This I didn’t tell her. I could not.

Soon the cabbie parked in front of the Rock Garden. I wandered through the surreal ‘outsider art’ garden for a long time. Then I sat down on a bench and gazed at the objects and figures Nek Chand, the designer, had assembled out of shards. Broken bangles, broken plates, broken china, pottery, old tyres, scrap metal – he had filled them with a new meaning without destroying the old. Nek Chand’s dialogue with the past was a perfect counterpoint to Le Corbusier’s architectural cleansing, I thought. Le Corbusier’s ‘open hand’ tried to ‘purify’ the past; Nek Chand, on the other hand, celebrated ‘impurity’. Le Corbusier considered ‘past’ as waste; Nek Chand embraced ‘waste’. Broken washbasins, urinals, electrical sockets, tar drums, limestone. Nek Chand connected the modern with Harappa, with Mohenjo-daro. Man is a collector, and man is a builder of ruins, and man is a teller of tales. Man is not modular. Man is not a machine, and his house is not a machine, and his city is not a machine. By constructing the Rock Garden ‘illegally’ Nek Chand subverted Le Corbusier’s vision, I thought. As if a bomb had been dropped overnight over that arrogant vision. It was like saying: No head=No heart=No balls=Le Corbusier.

For a strange reason, it seemed, Le Corbusier was responsible for all the troubles in the world. His architecture would have meant something different if only my father had acted differently. Or shown remorse. I extended my stay in Chandigarh. The cabbie drove me to Sector XVII. Reluctantly I ate a Maharaja at McDonald’s and consumed a local ‘chil(le)d’ beer, and just outside Neelam cinema an angled voice (originating from a hole in the ground) made an urgent request. The disembodied voice froze me, and then two hands grasped my leg. Only then I noticed the shoeshine boy. On the pavement. Threadbare black shirt with white embroidery – triangles and stars. Perched on concrete, he was one among many, glued to a tiny wooden box.
Paalish, sa’ab! Shinning!
I had not even made eye contact. So why me? People better dressed walked ahead or behind, but he chose me.
Shinning
, he pointed at my shoes. The leather looked unrespectably filthy – coated by layers and layers of mountain dust and ash, traces of my long walks. No one else in that busy zone outside Neelam cinema required the service as badly as me. He grabbed my stiff leg and put my foot on a wooden crate and started. It was my first time. Public shoeshine. The boy, no more than thirteen years old, possessed unbelievable strength. His eyes huge as if waiting impatiently to absorb the whole world. After a split-second decision he started unlacing my shoes. I was in no hurry, he noticed, and unlaced the right one first and lifted it up like a mirror, and his head oscillated like a pendulum following the motion of the brush. I stood on a small, flat piece of cardboard, observing, and recall his Robin Shoe Polish and Crown Eagle shirt. The only words we exchanged during those five unsteady minutes, ‘Where are you from?’
Bhopal, sa’ab
. A chill went through my spine. I paid or overpaid hurriedly and wandered into a bookshop in my black shoes. Half hallucinating I flipped open three or four translations in the fiction section. One of them done by someone I know intimately. Someone who has failed me, but thinks that I deserve blame.

Clara, my estranged wife, is also a translator. She translates from French to English, and asks her authors lots of questions. She fusses over precision and accuracy for days on end. Clara, my red-haired wife, is forever locating the ‘echo’ of the original, forever locating the ‘author’s intention’, she wakes up in the middle of the night anxious she has made a terrible error. In French the word ‘mouton’ means ‘sheep’, but it also means ‘mutton’. She fusses over ‘tu’ and ‘vous’, and spends sleepless nights getting the emotional impact right. Once she drew me on a sheet of paper her major approach: if the original text is a circle, then the translation ought to be a tangent line to the circle. Clara participates in scholarly conferences on gender and culture. She is the one, an angel of history, who made me aware of how the colonial powers used translations to tame the ‘natives’ and perpetuate domination. At a conference she met a Cree translator, who told her how the prejudiced missionaries translated the Bible into the Cree language. Long chapters (not originally in the Bible) were added denouncing Cree rituals and culture, calling their potlatches and their way of life and their creation myths ignorant and sinful, literally commanding the so-called heathens to convert in order to save their souls.