Helium (32 page)

Watch them, read them, Papa. You are a real hero. Let these macabre books act like an axe to break the ice within you. And if you feel like it, translate. Even if you wreck the text, at least you will have read the crimes you co-authored. And if you feel like it, go ahead, use a black marker. Because no matter how hard you try you cannot erase. Strike a match, and the paper won’t ignite. The proof exists in libraries all over the world. In a few years little boys and girls will read about your deeds on Kindle. You have become literature, Papa, a monster. You have become a grand crime story.

Did I call you a hero? Fuck, no. Nothing extraordinary about you, Papa. You are not diabolical. You are not Evil. You are so ordinary. And that is what makes this a bigger crime story.

At home he walked into his study. ‘Bloody fool,’ he said and slammed the door behind him. After a couple of hours he stepped out, unusually quiet and sweaty, and several times climbed up and down the stairs, defying doctor’s orders. Then he strolled in the garden for a long time.

During dinner he didn’t defend himself, sitting in the tall chair with tribal tapestry, he didn’t ask me the dreaded question: What would you have done? I broke the uneasy silence with my ideas of justice and violence and my ideas of India. New India.

‘Father, we all need a little private madness and a little lie in order to live. I shall be the first one to acknowledge this. Normally the little madness and the little lie don’t harm others. The problem is that your madness and your lie harmed so many. Do you understand? Are you listening?’

‘I had no choice.’

‘Some chose differently.’

‘I think it is you who is refusing to listen,’ said Father. ‘What happened THEN cannot be understood from what is happening NOW.’

‘But, Papa, what happened THEN was also illegal THEN.’

Again silence.

‘Answer me, Papa.’

I asked him again, and then I asked him: ‘Now what should I tell the press?’

My father laughed. I have yet to watch a human being laugh like that. In 1984 he would have laughed too, exactly like that. One often forgets that 1984 was also a year of excessive laughter.

I walked to my hotel via Khan Market. The place gleamed like a phosphorescent jewel at night.
How could you forget?
I heard an echo of my aunt’s anguished voice. Just for a minute we were face to face and she had implored me.

He is after all your father.

On the pavement, not far from Khan Chacha’s kebabs, a magazine-wallah sold me three weeklies. All of them covered news about mass graves found in Hondh-Chillar, fifty kilometres from Gurgaon. Bones of an entire village in what is now the Millennium City . . . Dark spherical objects, some stained by indigo . . . Massacre in Pataudi.

How could you forget?

A court in the United States of America had summoned the astonishing Congress Party. Three separate articles informed me about the Alien Tort Claims Act. Finally some hope.

There is a molecule called alloxan. Primo Levi writes about it in
The Periodic Table
. In the next few days I reread the chapter on nitrogen, and was particularly struck by alloxan.

It is a pretty structure, isn’t it? (asks Levi). It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture, he writes, that ‘beautiful’ edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals or the arches of bridges.

Levi’s alloxan for some strange reason made me think of indigo, the word, the molecule, pronounced by Nelly as if it carried a latent possibility to take her breath away. But as soon as I thought of indigo I tried to forget the painful associations.

How would Nelly describe her perturbed state as a function of that grand independent variable Time without invoking the colonial history of a bird or a molecule? I have often wondered. Driving through Dilli’s Ring Road these thoughts would come to me on their own.

Our next meeting took place three months later. I was admitted to the Trauma Centre of All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Because I slipped into a half-conscious state while driving, my BMW collided with a lorry on National Highway 8. When she heard the news, Nelly immediately took the Volvo bus to Delhi, and a prepaid taxi to the hospital. On the way the driver asked, ‘Memsaab trauma kya hai?’ The beautiful Hindi word ‘sadma’ was on the tip of her tongue, but at that moment no matter how hard she tried it escaped her.

She must have walked straight to the ICU. Only a few traces are lodged in my memory.

‘You see my problem, Mrs Singh?’ I must have detached myself from the pillows. ‘I want to remain human.’

She must have sensed correctly that I had prepared my words carefully. She looked so delicate and graceful sitting close to me, a dead silkworm. I can never fully imagine what thoughts passed through her.

‘You will be all right.’

‘No matter what I do or don’t I will never be all right.’

Stuttering, I think I spoke about molecules, and after a long awkward pause I recited aloud the names of my daughters, and then felt compelled to talk about the woman who gave birth to me. In the past every time Nelly had expressed curiosity about my mother, I managed to steer the conversation towards the physical and chemical world of objects.

Mother didn’t attend the ceremony. When Father got his gallantry medal in ‘85, she stayed home. She didn’t attend the pompous event, and I had no idea what inner calamities she was going through. She mailed me a letter saying she was unwell. She included a photo of herself submerged in the pool. I never saw it coming.

Mother didn’t see it coming either. She believed in passive resistance. ‘Nelly, are you listening?’ I almost said. The difference between ‘passive resistance’ and ‘passive acceptance’ is like the difference between the value of ‘gravity’ in London and Delhi.

‘Disintegrating’ is the right word. Before Mrs Singh, before Nelly, lay a patient completely disintegrating. Mr Absolute Zero. I try to imagine her thoughts then. Was she thinking about my daughters? Do Raj’s daughters understand even a trace of what their father is going through? But children have a way. They know. They are more resilient than we think. Children understand. They pay for the crimes of the parents. By hiding. By lying. By atoning.

‘Let me tell you,’ I paused. ‘The truth about my father.’

She withdrew her hand.

‘He is faking it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He is faking it.’

My father was faking Alzheimer’s. Clearly and concisely I told her the details. She responded as if it was not the right moment to discuss something so grave.

‘You will be all right,’ she repeated the lie. ‘Time will heal you.’

Then she was speechless. A complete conflagration of words. I am unable to forget the fading colour on her face in the midst of a phase transition. She was absolutely unprepared as my father wandered in.

No longer the man on the railway platform. Different from the man she nearly had tea with. In the past she must have wondered how she might respond if such a human ever entered the same room. What language, what gestures to use in his presence? Dull anger is not enough. Nor a lump in the throat, nor an involuntary drying of the upper mouth. I bit my lips. Nelly’s body shook. Something within her was still crying.

Please don’t leave, Mrs Singh. You are allowed to say anything to this criminal. He is listening. He pretends he doesn’t comprehend any of this . . . Of course, it would have been best for all of us if this man had set himself on fire.

The nurse was listening. Her face beyond a shadow of doubt resembled the younger version of Shabana Azmi. Nervously, she kept moving a metallic object in her hand.

My mother, too, looked like that beautiful actress, whose films have comforted me. I have no idea how to make sense of the fact that Shabana got married in 1984. My mother, when she got married, also resembled the poet Amrita Pritam. I had no idea how to deal with all the traces my mother carried in her.

‘Nelly,’ I said, ‘I have spent long hours of the night listing the various ways to bring an end to his life, an honour killing of sorts . . . Who would have thought this strong physiological and moral need within me to see him dead? Why so much hostility?’

The nurse, repulsed by my words, asked me to be still and ordered Nelly to leave, but I insisted on two more minutes.

‘This man murdered my professor, and by doing so he killed me, and so many who are still “living”. I do not use words loosely here. Several times I have thought of making his body into a work of art – tattoos, all over his body . . . Nazi swastikas . . . To make a tattoo is to write on butter with a toothpick. The pain he will have to endure is minor compared to the pain he gave so many people . . . I have thought of driving Papa again to the slums, to the Widow Colony, where he will ask forgiveness for each individual death.’

‘You think that is absolution?’

I could not respond.

‘The women in the colony are the ones most betrayed,’ she said thoughtfully (and my father was listening). ‘The women die every day, they relive the trauma over and over. Just because they survived, outlasted, they feel the weight, the guilt, they bear the burden of shame, and witness the shamelessness of the conductors of the pogrom. Layers of layers of evidence . . . But not many believe . . . November 1984 never happened. November 1984 is not an Event in our nation’s history. Men don’t talk about sexual violence. Men use women to humiliate ‘‘other’’ men. History has used these women in the worst possible way. The state would like them to live without a past.’

‘Nelly, I understand your anguish, and I, too, would like to stir up the past, and shame this man . . . Perhaps this act will save me . . . As long as he is alive he can’t deny . . . And I would like to shame the entire Indian justice fucking system . . .

‘Father has given a new meaning to shamelessness. He paid his doctor an insane amount of money, the doctor has diagnosed Alzheimer’s, which is really an insult to all those who truly develop Alzheimer’s, and an insult to all the caregivers and family members of those who actually suffer from real Alzheimer’s.’

She grew unusually silent. Her frozen state made me think she was questioning me: but how could you be sure? People in old age develop Alzheimer’s, and the field of trauma is large and complex, both the victim and the victimiser undergo trauma.