Helium (30 page)

How little I know about my childhood. And yet I remember the sheer astonishment I experienced on finding out at school that it takes around eight minutes for the light of the sun to arrive on Planet Earth. Or the puzzlingly constant speed of light. Another thing that never fails to astonish me is the origin of life – chances are if the big bang happens again no life would form. Life is the biggest coincidence we know of on Planet Earth. I have no idea why I ended up choosing metallurgical engineering. Why I focused on microstructures of steel. Why I spent ten years of my life researching corrosion and vibration. Metallurgy was not even my first choice. Meteorites. I really wanted to study cosmic accidents; objects older than our earth. In November ’84 we were in Delhi. We were spared. Our neighbours gave us refuge . . . Our neighbours hid us in a dark room only after we agreed to cut our hair. (But once inside their storeroom we refused to cut our hair.) These neighbours were slightly better than those neighbours and a woman who sided with the mob. (I would like to believe she has become human again.) In some other city this is where the madness would have stopped . . . Soon afterwards we got a notice from our landlord to vacate the house – we had signed the lease for an entire year, but he asked us to leave . . . I would often eat at the landlord’s place and play cricket with his children completely oblivious to what was going on . . . My father was summoned by the court. At first he kept me in the dark. I found out and accompanied him to the hearing. Over there they abused him verbally, ‘
sardar-ji aa gaya, sala sardar-ji aa gaya
,’ then the judge scolded the lawyer representing us, ‘
Are you out of your mind?’
The landlord wanted us out because he was afraid some ‘lumpen’ might set his property on fire. The court ruled in his favour; we were served an eviction notice. Three or four men came and dismantled our house; so many of our objects resisted being moved, but on two lorries the men took our objects away. We went by train to Punjab to stay with our relatives. On the way, close to Panipat, the train made an unexpected stop, cops in khaki (and black leather belts) barged in and demanded IDs and arrested me arbitrarily. They took me to a prison inside an old fort, where they tied my hands behind my back with my turban, and then tied them to a rope, which was attached to a rod on the ceiling and a pulley. I was suspended in the air by the pulley while the police beat me with lathis on the soles of my feet and knees. Later a heavy wooden roller moved up and down my thighs until I lost consciousness. Cold water was thrown on my face, and then the cycle recurred as if an experiment. I don’t remember wearing my clothes, perhaps I had my underwear on. I try not to dwell on that image. All I want to say is that I learned a lot about the strength of materials in that crumbling fort, and a lot about physics and chemistry and biology and the human body. Later I acquired words like ‘fibrosis’, ‘dislocation’, and phrases like ‘tenderness of thigh muscles’. I still don’t know the proper Hindi or Punjabi word for torture.

These days I am reading a book titled
Reduced to Ashes
by a Vienna-based human rights expert. Within its pages I found something I did not know, and it made me feel lucky, because my father was able to generate ten lakh rupees for the Inspector General of Police to secure my release. Thousands of innocent people ‘disappeared’ then and the police killed thousands in custody and carried out secret cremations. Vienna-based Ram Narayan Kumar spent the last two decades of his life uncovering the truth about the secret crematoriums. The police, he writes, also created a climate of moral revulsion, sometimes they would themselves engineer heinous crimes – just like the terrorist – killing innocent people.

Sometimes a feeling grows within me to stop everything and scream like the magic-realist dwarf narrator in that German novel called
The Tin Drum
. Scream and shatter all things made of brittle glass. The body that they tortured is still within me. Sometimes it dissolves completely and it feels as if the process of dissolution is irreversible, but then it swells again, becomes bigger than me. I don’t want to stay like this for the rest of my nights. I want the swelling to shrink, to metamorphose into an invisible dot, I want the weight within me to become weightless, I want to experience weightlessness.

Not a single year goes by when I don’t encounter a person from the diaspora who claims that ‘you Sikhs deserved what you got’. ‘
Achha hua
.’ Huge violence in those two words. Often such characters are highly educated professionals. When I narrate the short version of my story their eyes pop out – but we never meet again.

What hurts me more than anything else is that my father never painted after we moved to Chicago; he grew his beard long, but never recovered from the shock. He drove a cab and that is how he raised me. He gave up what he loved the most, he had rebelled against his family members to study the visual arts, and he gave it up to drive a cab. No more Picasso, Matisse,
Lady in Moonlight
, Jamini Roy, Karkhana paintings. He purged art from his everyday life. Even the cab stopped after thirteen or fourteen years, he aged before his time, he would stammer, and lost the use of both hands, he was unable to apply torque with his fingers, unable to unbutton his shirts, unable to put socks on by himself and tie shoelaces. I feel like writing my own book and dedicating it to him. The narrator would completely repress his painful memories; he speaks the language of silence. But silence is not a real language. My father was like that, and I don’t want to become him.

Next day, after a lot of unnecessary resistance, I took a taxi to Trilokpuri slum. The clean-shaven, dishevelled cab driver was around sixty years old and carrying more wrinkles than he deserved. An entire era was visible within the confines of that rugged face. He was a bit puzzled when I mentioned the destination. We passed by a big DLF mall and an ice factory, and just before the zebra crossing he accelerated. I don’t recall how our conversation turned to 1984. Bodies on fire. Generating ash and grit. The carcasses . . . He told me stuff that in essence resembled the account in the disintegrating paper cutting, the one I stole from the archives. Sitting in the cab, I thought back to my days in Shimla and the abrupt return to Delhi. The previous night in the hotel sauna I’d had a similar conversation with a rich old man. The temperature set at eighty-two degrees Celsius. Only the facts matter, the 65-year-old had said in a calm and collected manner, his towel as white as mine. His loose, flabby skin absorbed the same fragrant eucalyptus oil vapour, and the heat of the rocks. The more ‘facts’ he narrated, the more agitated he grew, his language more vulgar. We were the only two in the sauna. He checked if I understood Hindi.
Chaurasi
, he said.
Tattey kaat deney chahiye thhey sab saalon kay? We should have chopped their balls off then?
. . . Only then I understood. Did you see it from up close? I asked. He paused. Were you part of the mob? Did you burn a Sikh? He was sweating, but not because of what I asked. Slowly he turned his neck in my direction. Young man, all I can say is that the motherfuckers didn’t get enough.

The cabbie was driving at near Mach speed. I asked him to turn back just before the bridge over Yamuna River and make towards an alternative destination. ‘Home’. No longer my home. Amrita Sher-Gil Marg was no longer my marg. Red tiles, and thriving aeroelastic palm trees. A thought flashed inside my liquidating brain. What if? What if? The man dropped me, and within an instant, seeing large numbers of police guards by the gates, fled without payment. There I spent a few minutes with the well-tended plants in my father’s garden. The creeper on the brick wall had no roots just like old times; it derived nourishment from the particles of soil trapped inside the cracks. Our old gardener saluted me and carried on watering the patch of yellow hibiscus. I borrowed a cigarette and smoked. One never forgets no matter how long the gap of time. Then I walked into my father’s study, and scanned the books he surrounded himself with, the study where he translated my myths, or ignored them; this is where Father kept his diaries, the daily orders he received and the actions he took. Inspired by the legendary officer DGP Rustomji my father had started keeping thick diaries, and they were meticulously labelled. All the diaries were there. Only 1984 was missing. Why in his retired life was it missing?

On his desk, a Rubik’s cube and letters. One of them from Clara. It was open and I was tempted, but I know all the polite meaningless words Clara mails him in that old-fashioned way now and then. She maintains a correspondence with him; my estranged wife and my father have formed a mutual admiration club and exchange polite meaningless words every couple of months. She believes my problems with him are ‘normal’ and ‘usual’ problems ‘normal people’ have with normal parents or the older generation. She has no idea that being the son of a mass murderer is a dreadful condition. She has no idea.

Now that I think about it I decided to meet Father purely for the sake of maintaking my sanity. It was impossible to move forward without a brief encounter. If someone were to ask me: How did it go?, the first thing my body would do in response to that question is to shake mildly, not violently; the mildness would tell my interlocutor the intense hatred I feel, revealing also the truth hard to admit. That I must have loved him in a different season.

He was not home. My quick-witted aunt, who cooked for him and controlled his drinks (and she was still a little in love with him, and I could not understand how anyone could harbour such feelings) told me that Father had gone to the Doordarshan TV Channel to participate in a panel. Is the show today? It is on the security of the international athletes expected to attend the Commonwealth Games. I don’t know when they will air it. I turned on the TV. A panel was discussing censorship and art – the ninety-year-old painter (the Picasso of India) had been forced out of the country by men who belonged to the Hindu Party. Men in sinister khaki shorts, religious extremists, had slashed and destroyed two more canvases of his. The Picasso of India had ‘offended’ their so-called sentiment by undressing the gods and goddesses. The Picasso of India was unable to find an inch of space to hide himself in the whole of India. The TV camera focused on an overdressed liberal who was verbally attacking a right-winger. My aunt checked if I was going to join them for dinner. Don’t wait for me, I said. I got the car keys from her. Then I drove towards the Doordarshan TV building. Normally I don’t drive when in Delhi but that day the fear of the Indian roads disappeared. I drove carefully and carelessly (establishing my own rules), and that is the proper way to drive in the city of cows, jams and Bentleys. Delhi makes one a child again. Even the toll highways are bumper-car rides. The pedestrians? An afterthought for urban planners. In twenty-five minutes I made it to the Doordarshan parking lot. Full. I paid extra money to get in. From where I planted myself I could see Father’s car; the driver waved at me, and walked up close.
Sa’ab is inside
. ‘Yes, I know.’ Now I have to make a request: ‘when Papa comes out don’t tell him I am here, just go on driving wherever he is headed and don’t mention me.’ He gave me an odd look. Do as I say. Twenty or thirty minutes later Father walked out of the building, stick in his hand, but he really didn’t need it, he uses the stick like a bandmaster. He was not alone. Father was accompanied by a serving police officer; the two men entered the car chattering cheerfully. I followed. Behind the car was a security jeep. The car was headed to the airport. Before the exit to the terminals the car took a detour and made it towards Gurgaon. Then the service road to the statue. It didn’t take me long to understand.