Helium (33 page)
‘The doctor has made loads of money, the money that should have gone to the victims of ’84. The doctor called me to his clinic and revealed the ‘‘bad news’’ that my father has Alzheimer’s. ‘‘Dementia is invading his brain. Grey matter has declined dramatically. Aggregates of misfolded proteins are migrating to the key zones of the brain. He talks kachumber and pees in his pants. If you have failed to notice so far, you will soon.’’ On the wall (in the clinic) there was a calendar, Nehru on a polka dot horse. The MD pointed at the calendar, and said your father has forgotten the face of Nehru. Right now he is aware that that man is a human being. Soon he will even forget that. And one day it will be difficult to distinguish the horse from the man riding the horse. Then only the polka dots, and then nothing.’
The nurse reminded us that the time was up. ‘Wait a minute. I am not done yet,’ I protested.
The nurse gestured her to leave. In the parking lot Nelly might have encountered a stranger going through a different crisis. In those two or three seconds the two of them might have done something comforting for each other: a quiet validation.
Where did she go next? I try to imagine the taxi she took. How she released the taxi-walla. The hotel room. Perhaps I will never know if she walked to a friend’s place.
Would this constant note-taking ever create the precise conditions for healing? (asks Nelly.) So far his experiment had failed, in fact writing and words, and language had stirred things up, remembering had left him more wrecked than ever. The past had come like bitter drops of helium, but he didn’t know how to handle it; this helium was neither inert, nor invisible, nor light, and refused to disappear. Was there a better way to handle the incompleteness of history, a milder way to encounter the dead, because no matter how hard one tries the dead keep returning.
On recovery I returned to Ithaca. I promised myself ‘never return home’. Four years kept me going with conferences on rheology. Lab work consumed me. I published thirteen papers, edited an anthology, completed the unfinished monograph on bitumen, shale and tar sands, and got a promotion. For a while I even collaborated with my colleague on carbon fibres, a hot new topic – fibres so strong, a single strand is able to stop a plane on the runway. But my mind was not in it, I kept working mechanically because I could think of doing nothing else.
Several times I tried to tell Clara about Nelly, but our divorce proceeded with such bitterness, we never got a chance to talk like humans. She got custody of our daughters.
During those days of discomfort I called Mr Gopal’s daughter, Gul. So much time had passed, a huge gap of years to catch up. She told me that the old man was still around. She was in Connecticut for a year, and, like me, she too was recently single. We decided to meet midway in New York City. The concert at Lincoln Center was her idea, and I drove straight after my morning class. Despite heavy traffic I arrived a little early. After parking my car I wandered around the energetic city. The sun was about to set, and New York looked needlessly beautiful in its last light. Ten minutes before the concert I planted myself close to the ticket window and waited patiently for Gul. No call, no text message, and this got me worried. I stepped out of the hall and waited by the plaza, but she was still not there, nowhere to be seen. Inches away from me thousands of humans condensed and evaporated, and the sounds of sirens did nothing to diminish my anxiety. Waiting, panicking (outside the Alice Tully Hall), my mind went through the most rational (albeit a little absurd) algorithm. Miss the concert and continue to wait for Gul outside the hall, or leave the ticket with the clerk and go in. The first piece was ‘Subito’ (for violin and piano) by Lutoslawski, followed by ‘Sarabande and Toccata for Harp’ by Nino Rota, and the last one Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata in G Minor, Opus 19. South Korean pianist. Chilean cellist. Flawless is the only adjective that comes to my mind. (Flawless apogee of Romanticism. Grand structure. Sublime.) Followed by a standing ovation.
The cello sonata, now that I think about it, resonated with the audience deeply, and comforted me; the slow andante drifted my thoughts into a reverie, and I found myself meditating on the most independent of all variables. Time, I thought, was itself a Brownian motion (like the constant jostling of particles). Bits and pieces moving and mingling randomly, gathering mass, strange coincidences shearing past invisible blows and that includes stuff yet to come. If time is a river, then is it a river of discontinuous ice? Perfect balance between the instruments, the piano, I felt, swirled startingly around the cello. With his big energetic hand the Chilean allowed the bow to linger longer and longer on the strings, unaware of the shadowy figure behind him, who would stand up now and then, take a few steps towards the piano and turn and turn again the page. All the advances in technology had still not made the page-turner redundant, I thought. Once in a while my gaze would fall on the pianist’s ever-replicating hands in the black paint of a mirror, which reminded me of the composer Rachmaninov’s huge hands and the Marfan’s syndrome he suffered from. The duo wrestled with every single note, refusing to play the score in front of them, but struggling to create that score for the first time. There I wished the concert to go on for ever. When the two musicians (in black) walked back to the wings, I remained still for a long time, literally staring at the chair on the stage, solitary and empty, and so was the state of the chair next to me. It remained empty throughout the concert. Gul, I found out later, had lost her phone the previous day, and as a result completely forgot the concert.
Nelly, during those days, would send me an occasional email. Once in a while a longish letter with a CD.
Hi Raj. Dear Raj. Warmly, Nelly
. She would write less and less about her personal affairs, and more and more stuff about others. She would dispatch audio files and old photographs, digitised sepia, which had the eerie quality of Goya’s
Los Desastres de la Guerra
. The only things missing were the appropriate captions. But really there are photos which require no captions. She had established an ‘oral history’ institute in Delhi, not far from the Widow Colony. She did not like the extra-polluted air of Delhi, and developed a nervous belly. Sleeping was always a problem. But the survivors poured their hearts out, and she would listen to their stories over and over. Old photos made so many open up. Certain personalities, who claimed they had nothing to tell, especially opened up after seeing the photos. She witnessed unbearable ‘rage’ and ‘agony’ (as I write these two words down, they feel like an understatement). Once she broke down physically, and had to be put on medication. She did not inform me, but, as I said before, I have my sources. She found the behaviour of ‘Dilli’ men towards women despicable, but knew living in that city was important. Moving back gave a sense of urgency to her work. Some of her emails sounded as if she was trying to grasp the psychosis of Delhi. Those who ruled the city were still above truth. Schools and colleges in her own country (in ‘my’ country) didn’t teach 1984 honestly. As a result the younger generation knew nothing. The youth didn’t even know what they didn’t know. Only the ‘official version’. Funding was always a problem. Once or twice I received photos of women in the Widow Colony sewing or stitching clothes as if they were the forgotten daughters of the night.
Then it happened. Nelly sent a collective email once to several of her acquaintances, and that is how I connected with Maribel. The moment I saw her long, earthworm-like email address on the computer monitor I was compelled to contact her. She was going to heal me the way she had healed Nelly. I composed my message quickly and pressed ‘Send’ without giving it proper thought. That message to Maribel, I feel now, was a huge faux pas. ‘I am assuming you know a few things about me via Nelly.’ My email ended with a request. ‘Please, if possible, keep our correspondence confidential.’
Please not a word to N
. ‘But it is important I contact you. These words come to you in good faith. Hope you will not disappoint.’ That last line sounded so old-fashioned and inappropriate. Obviously she didn’t respond.
I sent another email a month later. My tone apologetic. At the same time I informed her about my firm intention to visit Mexico City. I was headed south of the border to participate in the Rheology Society’s annual meeting and it would be ‘a privilege and pleasure’ to see her. Perhaps the two children as well. I sent her my exact dates and the hotel coordinates, etc. Once again she didn’t respond.
Despite no response I decided to go ahead with the trip to Mexico. There I attended almost all the panels, the most exciting one was on the lava flows in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, and a Plinian eruption scenario at Volcán de Colima. A young grad student also presented findings about the monogenetic Parícutin, the one that will never erupt again. One thing we can be sure about . . . However, I found mingling with colleagues a chore. So I hung out with an older professor, a local, who turned out to be a Renaissance man. During drinks in the hotel bar he told me, among other things, about a few years spent in Italy, where he met Levi in 1984. I don’t recall now how he figured out my continuing obsession, how our conversation stumbled upon Levi (the most likely trigger was the newspaper report connected to the trial of some Italian seismologists), but when I demanded the exact details, the professor scratched his grey goatee and said that he would rather jot those impressions down. I still remember every single word of that email of his, which arrived within a couple of hours.
Señor Raj, I must apologise for sharing the information in written form. I don’t understand fully why I felt uncomfortable doing so in the oral form. Perhaps it has to do with my English. I did have the occasion to meet Levi briefly, and am happy to resurrect my recollections of that evening in November of 1984.
Those days I was teaching two semesters – dragging my feet on my doctoral dissertation – in Lugano. There I made acquaintances of a few fellow professors, who knew Levi. I believe there was a gathering of the old friends at a reading of a Pirandello play in Milano, and a talk as well by Primo Levi.
He had come to Milano for this occasion, though he lived in Turino. I remember the reading of Pirandello, but have no recollection of the subject of the talk by Levi (my non-existent Italian didn’t help either), except for his gentle manners, soft voice and his piercing eyes.
Levi knew Marco’s father (a Buchenwald survivor, and editor at
Corriere della Sera
) and Jardena’s father (a classmate from Ferrara, who fought against and died at the hands of Il Duce’s goons). So, the gentleman joined our dinner table briefly to chat with Marco and Jardena.