Helium (9 page)

Time had ruined her, just like it was ruining me . . . And that is the only truth. Even the beauty of helium ceases one day. But let me not slip into something abstract. I must resist the urge to explain humans in terms of atoms, molecules, bosons and fermions. Flesh and blood and bones and warmth require a different type of telling. Let me travel back in time and describe a few things clearly. Busy with exams I was unable to leave the IIT boys’ hostel and join Nelly for badminton for almost a month. But I kept hearing the sound of the white-feathered shuttlecock. The sound still exists and resonates in my ears. The shuttlecock drifts back and forth for no good reason. She was absent the day I returned. From the canteen I phoned. No response. So I walked to my professor’s residence. The door ajar. I rang the bell, and when no one showed up, I knocked four or five times. She came. Barefoot, running, finger on lips. Shh! She was putting the children to bed.

I waited in the living room. In the adjacent room she read them ‘Five Blind Men and an Elephant’. It is a spear. No, a snake. A tree. A fan. No, it is a rope. ‘The Five Blind Men of Hindustan and an Elephant’ – the children knew the story well, but they loved listening to every single word repeated over and over.

Finally she stopped, and the house was so quiet one could have heard a pin drop. Then I heard Arjun and Indira breathe. After fifteen minutes or so she stepped out, and told me Professor Singh was away in Punjab for a couple of days. Shall I make you tea?

I don’t recall all the fuzzy details. How exactly we came to hold hands. For a long time we held each other. The eye is less a window to the soul, more a window to the body. She was beautiful, and that very moment no longer my professor’s wife. But soon her body broke free and walked away. The angle at which she stood illuminated her wristwatch, and I ran after her and sniffed her long hair. We hugged then, and she smiled and critiqued my way of hugging, and demonstrated the proper heart-to-heart hug.

We moved to the roof terrace. Where the night was dark, and proper. Up there the stars low, and bougainvillea lusty. Our secret remained within us, accumulating more and more nights, and days, and I don’t know when pure, awkward lust transformed into something more real. We quarrelled, then made up. Quarrelled. Patched up again. I learned exaggerated patience. Towards her. But became more and more irritable. Towards others. Sometimes we had sex for two or four or six hours. When I witnessed that IIT grad student in a compromising position, many years later on his Jor Bagh roof terrace, I felt as if I had walked into the familiar labyrinths of a mirror. Time was replicating my story. Our narrative. Once Professor Singh returned a day early from Punjab and found Nelly and me together. The way he interrogated us by not saying anything. His prolonged silence. Did he suspect? I am not sure. One can never be. It was a fact like any other, a truth like any other. But all based on how I felt.

Like I am never sure about my childhood memories. When I was around eight, my father bought a Japanese cassette recorder. He taught me how to become a minor detective. I recorded the sounds and micro-sounds of our house, every single room. Even then I had a feeling that truth was hidden in other rooms. Because I heard mysterious sounds wafting from my parents’ bedroom, I was curious about those night sounds as well. So I left the cassette recorder in their room one night after dinner, concealed and turned on. The recording lasted for thirty minutes before the tape ran out. Next day I heard the tape. My mother is not in favour of torture. My good father says some torture is part of his job in the police force. We are not a developed country yet, he says. When we become a developed country we will stop these methods. You think I don’t feel bad? he asks her. My mother sounds like a closet human rights expert on the tape. My father, so naive, assumes that the West doesn’t torture.

In Nelly’s apartment in Shimla my mind flowed with unwanted thoughts. Slowly my gaze moved towards the floor, and I noticed a white substance. Spilled milk. Despite spending five or six minutes trying to comprehend the spill, I met with no success. Close to the refrigerator in the kitchen there was a long puddle, and it seemed to have formed on its own, without an apparent source. My whole body quivered at the sight of that substance. Nelly had woken up before me. Why did she leave the spill unattended? The thing had a peculiar shape, a strange fractal geometry, and I switched on the brightest light and scrutinised it. The source seemed to be at the top of the refrigerator; a drop fell down, then another after a long wait. I found an identical puddle of milk at the very top of the refrigerator, but nothing falling from the ceiling. I ran towards the window – it was wide open. No wire mesh. Outside a cluster of dilapidated colonial erections, buildings becoming ruins, and big red-flowering trees, and slender pines and slightly shaking oaks; the air reeked of resin, and then I noticed an introspective monkey, as if Lord Hanuman himself, and close by a cluster of monkeys, one grasping on to a milk carton, and it was then I understood the spill . . . Nelly had left tea in a pot, shielded by a heavily padded tea cosy. I drank my tea black, and for a long time stood by the window, and then I closed it.

The note had been written in no hurry; it said the expected.
Namaste
. Almost involuntarily I touched those small, baroque words. Something immutable: the handwriting had not changed. I would have been happier if she had used the Sikh greeting. She left me the keys as well.

Feel free to visit my institute, my crumbling splendour.

Shimla was a bustling slope of a city at that hour despite the chill. Flocks of hill mynahs delightful as I walked down the hill and then up again. Something startled the cloud of birds as they flew low right above me, thinning and thickening the air. For a brief second the flock shimmered, then soared away. I turned and caught them vanishing, rising steeply like an ensemble of tiny black data points. I turned and they shifted again into the shape of a graph of cosmic proportions. On the narrow trail I encountered a woman knitting a sweater as red as the rhododendrons. Slowly I looped around the Himachal University campus. Gliding through students made me feel young again, and old, both at once. The birds returned, another neat kink in the graph, and were gone. By the time I arrived at the institute most of the male staff members were out on the lawns basking in the sun.

Inside the library the carpet was soft and blue. But it was very cold.

Even before I entered I noticed big eyes behind the shelves staring at me, and an old uncomfortable feeling ran through my spine. Years ago Father had used a newspaper to kill mosquitoes; the eyes behind the shelves belonged to the same photo embedded in my memory. The paper was some censored rag during Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency. From high up the same eyes stared at me now. A few stones that made up the crumbling wall were visible. Ahead of me a glass partition. He stood as a mythical figure, the khaki-clad man behind the partition glued to a slab of a heater (the only heater in the library), grooming his intimidating moustache and simultaneously scratching his ear. I simplified our exchange (which had the potential to become Kafkaesque), ‘Madam-ji’s permission’, and showed him the yellow sheet of paper (which carried her signature). He frisked me and pushed me in. There was no heating – the original fireplace was plugged with potted plants. The research fellows and scholars and other readers were wrapped in two or three layers, sweaters, shawls or jackets and woollen caps and gloves with dangling ghostly fingers. It was the coldest library in the world, and I was walking through the space where the British Empire had danced only sixty or seventy years ago, and the eyes of the censorship woman on the wall (Mrs Gandhi) kept staring at me; the British Empire danced when nine million Indians died of a famine, the famine occurred because of cruel taxation policy, taxes were raised to fund the Afghan wars, and the Viceroy and the Vicereine danced here and had fancy-dress parties and ate here, the dining table was able to seat 150 guests, each one got their own personal liveried waiter, and the menus competed with the menus of Queen Victoria, they did not want to be left behind, those who plundered the wealth of India, they, too, ate bull’s head and wild boar, because it was on the Queen’s menu in England. But now it was a library, and now most of the portraits on the walls and the power and the Raj belonged to the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty that took over from the British, but the building was so huge there was space for others, full-bearded Tagore hung on the walls and Ambedkar, too, deep and pensive, also a portrait of the first female president of India (in a spacesuit), and ex-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher, who had come up with the idea to transform the Scottish baronial castle into a castle of higher learning. This was architecture of a grand crime, and the philosopher-president had come up with a grand scheme to civilise the architecture. I moved between two front shelves; now the eyes on the wall acquired a face, and I pulled out a book and turned and there she was, Nelly, by an unusually tall window in the reading room, far from me, the faded maple-orange curtain as high as the window. The corridor of the Empire had become a reading room; stacks filled with magazines and journals, current issues on display. From where I was I saw Nelly bent over a book, taking notes, it was a corner table, a half table, on her left a pile of books, on her right a pile of papers. I felt like slowly walking up to her, but decided not to disturb.

I fluttered about the aisles, overwhelmed by dusty tomes. Some of them with damaged bandaged spines, others never touched before. Randomly I exhumed a disintegrating bone of a volume and browsed. A veil of dust particles spread around me. I didn’t see Nelly leave the reading room. The creaking corner table where she was working only a while ago was empty now. Slowly I walked to her space and sat in the chair. A strong rectangular light poured in through the tall window, and I don’t remember when exactly I turned to observe the spot by the shelves from where I had observed her earlier. The glare almost ruined my eyes. The face of Mrs Gandhi was visible as half a face now. I flipped open the book (
Anthropology of Violence
) Nelly was perusing moments ago, but found it difficult to concentrate. Even the doorknob looked ghostly.

‘Sa’ab, if during your consultations you find a dusty shelf let me know. I will clean it. I will wipe dust that has gathered on the books.’ He came to me, the man in khaki, with a strange request, which in hindsight was not so strange. ‘This is a huge library,’ he smiled and nodded, ‘and no matter how hard I try there is always a slim layer that settles down.’ I asked him Nelly’s coordinates, the best way to locate her. The man walked me down the stairs to the basement where very few rays of natural light penetrated. We went through a gargantuan double door, beyond which stretched a narrow corridor lit by dim translucent globes all the way to her office. She was not in. But khaki cardboard boxes were there, bulging files and other orderly chaos. Her Burmese desk, a desktop, a swivel chair, a handcart, a jug of water (half full), a tiny white towel, and the hum of fluorescent lights. Feeling disappointed, my guide designed a little tour of the basement for my benefit, which included what used to be the wine cellar, the dumb waiter and the boiler room. The room was now a storehouse for rats, fungus and wrinkled old Victorian furniture thrown together in haphazard piles, rusted metal frames and two disintegrating cribs. White paint peeling off fragile wood. Viceroy’s children? The cribs made no sense at all, and my guide had no idea. ‘Let me now show you the fire-extinguishing system, it is old but smart and relies on the melting of wax.’ The man whisked me round the corner. But I lost all curiosity and ran up the stairs, away from the dark, dripping foundations of the Empire, and spent another hour in the reading room browsing through current periodicals.