Helium (20 page)

I wanted to stop Suraj midway during that near poetic moment of recall, and I wanted to urge him to speak directly to the recorder. But I knew that even a flicker of an interruption ran the risk of making him self-conscious, so I refrained. I listened carefully to him and his hypnotic account of fire that engulfed the forest. Now I don’t remember half of the words he spoke. Some of them stir me still. ‘Aag’. ‘Agni’. ‘The god of fire has two heads, and three legs and seven tongues’. The effigies, he told me in Hindi, stood by the river on the lower slopes of that mountain, and once the big sparks touched the firs and pines everything grew agitated, the fire spread like mad, sweeping, combing the entire slope. I don’t know if Suraj knew that if the festival effigies had been planted on the ridge, at the very top of the mountain, the fire would have been contained. But because the effigies (with ten or twenty demon heads) stood on the lower slopes, the hot air moved up like a leopard, facilitating combustion.

Suraj’s neighbour, the pain doctor, used to work for the TB sanatorium before it was shut down. He had no proper medical training – he used to work as a dhobi at the sanatorium. Nevertheless, villagers travelled many miles to the dhobi’s place to get rid of their ‘pain’.

Suraj narrated an ensemble of success stories, and he was not pleased when I declined the offer to consult the doctor. I knew my response offended him.

I decided to spend one more day and then return. That day, in search of silence, I walked, and the more I walked the more the place looked familiar. Like a dog I tried to sniff out the place. Like a dog I anticipated the hot spring (rather the ‘thermal spring’) long before I found myself by the banks of the river in its fog.

Water at a near boiling temperature gushed out of an orifice and merged with the cold glacial meltwater of a river.

I saw not a single tourist, and was certain that most religious festivals were over. There were no more than three or four villagers bobbing up and down in that safe confluence where the water temperature was thirty to forty degrees Celsius, and there was fog.

It was all coming back to me now. Father and I had come to this exact place many years ago. We dived in and quickly moved to the warm zone in the middle.

I removed my clothes and entered the river.

Feet first.

Father and I had come to this precise confluence of hot and cold water. Then snow started falling . . . I dipped and ran my fingers in eddies and vortices. Snow settled on Father’s face and his thin moustache and snow settled on me, and everything around us was mute and vibrating, both at once. Warm vapour kept rising, melting the snow on us into drops, but new snow kept falling, accumulating the muteness . . . and the highest mountains up the river resembled a giant writing desk that belonged to the gods. From where we were submerged in warm water a distant mountain looked like a woman who had just washed her hair and turned her neck . . . a frozen wave . . . a smiling Yeti.

Fog.

I thought about thermal gradients and brought to mind the rheology of molten rock, and I thought about the real reason our mountains were formed – to cool the Earth. The mobile plate tectonics are merely a response to the extreme heat-transfer problems that take place inside the belly of the Earth. And that extreme high temperature and pressure flow of that complex, extreme heterogeneous fluid beneath our feet is also responsible for Earth’s magnetic field, a field which helps us find our way, and helps birds migrate, and protects our planet from harmful radiation that comes from the sun. Without that invisible flow, our Earth would die more or less like Mars, I thought.

Soon, I thought, in 25 million years, the waters between Australia and Asia will move elsewhere, and the two continents will merge. Now it was all making sense. Everything flows. Nothing is constant. India was once a part of Africa, and India separated from Africa, turned and moved and turned and moved and collided with Asia. India was never constant, and its Himalayas were never constant, they are still growing, and undergoing toroidal motion, and after all the growing they will shrink and turn and shrink and turn again. And then I thought: What holds things together is more important than what separates them.

We slept in a damp dak bungalow that night, Father and I, and shared a quilt as damp as the room, and despite hundreds of embers in the brazier, the room was very cold. Before going to bed he cleaned and oiled his gun and read a book he always carried along. Nehru’s
History of India
.

On the bus to Shimla I thought a lot about Nehru’s
History
and I thought how limited our understanding of time is. So many moments have vanished for ever . . . and by the time we made it to the bus terminal the only question on the tip of my tongue was: How would Nehru (who died in 1964) write about 1984? How would the great man formulate the missing chapter on the deeds of his daughter and his two unworthy grandsons? And: How will I write about my father?

Back in Shimla, by strange coincidence, I got the same room number in the hotel. 48. In the overheated, pine-smelling room I pieced together everything Nelly had told me (directly or indirectly), even through her silences. I was not going to dwell on the distant past. Nelly required my assistance, but was reluctant to ask. Something didn’t feel right. Something didn’t make sense. An idea plants itself, tucks itself inside one’s head. All the little jigsaw pieces that presented themselves to me during that brief span of time in Shimla suggested that someone was hurting her.

For three nights I slept with the windows open, and thought about her and thought a lot about my father.

Four days later she called. We agreed to meet in the lobby. The wound was healing, her limp was slightly better.

Now it was possible to take courage and be more direct. I didn’t tell her about my trip to the high mountains this time, we only talked about her. The scar on Nelly’s cheek was from long ago, she said. When I insisted, she explained that it was almost twenty years old. In 1993 just before the so-called inquiry into the pogroms, a lawyer had approached her at the institute. (The National Archives in Delhi, harder to penetrate than Kafka’s Castle, and the Police Archives had destroyed many files connected to the violence, but because of work done by several human rights organisations, a huge non-governmental archive had assembled itself; Nelly’s effort at the Institute of Advanced Studies was a small but important contribution.)

‘The Doordarshan TV Archives either destroyed the tapes connected to October/November ’84 or put them away in boxes that would do Stalin’s Russia proud. Or so the lawyer told me,’ said Nelly. ‘During our many conversations he urged me to travel to Delhi as a witness against the man under investigation. At first I said “yes” and then “no”. My body responded in a strange way at the mere thought of travelling to that city. In ’84, from the upstairs room in my saviour’s house where we had initially taken refuge, I had witnessed two women being raped. No clothes on, dishevelled hair, the women completely exposed. Four men discharged their hate into those two one by one, then again. Children were made to watch the spectacle, and I had witnessed it all from the barsati. I felt like screaming, I felt disembodied. The lawyer later made me aware of the silence and denial around sexual violence. Sikh men chose silence, Hindu men chose complete denial. The loudest denials came from those who had committed the crimes. He begged me to say “yes” and gave me the other option – if you don’t feel safe travelling “home” then our organisation could be persuaded to send a legal team to Shimla. Maybe we will succeed this time to get the rape trials started.

‘Next week a man came to the library. I was alone in the photocopier room, about to copy a long article on “Churchill and the Bengal Famine”. He entered without knocking, and sealed my lips with his filthy hands. I felt cold metal on my forehead, then against my cheek. “One word,” he said, “and you are finished. No one will remember you any more.” The institute director’s office was right above us, and next to it was Lady Curzon’s boudoir.

‘While he pressed me against the staircase,’ she continued, ‘and punched my lower body, I saw her clearly in her Victorian costume, Lady Curzon’s hat at an angle. The Vicereine gave me the courage to scratch his skin with my nails. I managed to injure him a bit.

‘Then he hit my chest with his elbow again and again and then hit me one last time on my nose and was gone. I stared at the few drops of blood on the wooden floor. Drops of congealed blood, no longer mine. It is so easy to make that red thing flow out of our bodies. With my chunni I wiped it.

‘When my body started hurting badly I thought all the best our civilisation has to offer in the form of books and all the worst (in the form of that filthy man) had converged for five or six minutes in the photocopier room of a crumbling building filled with apparitions of some other empire. The lawyer returned. I refused to record my statement. I followed yet another inquiry.

‘Nothing came of it. Nothing. So many other bolder witnesses were there too. One had refused an offer of thirty million rupees from the perpetrators and inciters. Two retracted their statements under pressure, and turned hostile. Two were killed. Some Sikh leaders sided with the perpetrators. Some shameless Sikh men became rich doing the dirty work for the Congress, pressurising the witnesses. All charges against the accused Congress leader were withdrawn. He was promoted to the rank of a cabinet minister. The inquiry and many other inquiries and committees resembled a farce.’

Nelly’s cheek and her forehead carried traces of what I had noticed on the face of someone else, a 73-year-old man. Five or six years before, during a flight to Europe, I found myself sitting next to him as he flew from the US to Delhi to be a witness at another so-called court. Of course he didn’t disclose the exact reason. I found out about it later in the papers. The justice system protected the criminals and punished the victims. During that flight the elderly man did share some of his painful memories. A fellow passenger, sitting across the aisle, asked him gently: ‘Why don’t you Sikhs forget what happened a long time ago?’ The elderly man paused for a while and said, ‘For the same reason we Indians don’t forget British colonialism, the Amritsar Massacre or Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi march. We don’t even forget mythological events like Diwali and Dusshera. And you want me to forget something that happened as recently as in 1984? Did you do something wrong then? Is that why you want us to forget?’ The elderly man’s wounds had become scars, but inside he was still deeply disturbed, unable to achieve equilibrium.

Over time Nelly’s wound healed, but it triggered PTSD, an acronym she didn’t know then.

When I met Mrs Singh after a long gap of years the first thing I noticed were the scars, even before I noticed how much she had aged. The scars for some reason also reminded me of an exhibition by an artist in San Francisco. In his paintings, white people had proper faces, and black people were simply dots or smudges. In the hotel lobby Nelly opened up, sharing fragments from a long-concealed past. She ordered her coffee black and added no sugar. The waiter, in his early twenties, dressed in beautifully embroidered Pahari clothes, kept staring at her cup. What she told me left a chill in my limbs.

The second time she decided to record her statement was on the insistence of a female lawyer. It was 1997. Two days after she agreed to do so, someone threw concentrated acid on her neck. The man was waiting outside her apartment when she returned home from work. He was arrested. He claimed he was her
lover
and he had thrown acid on her after a lovers’ quarrel. A portion of her neck simply melted away, and she spent months afterwards undergoing treatment. The doctor who first examined her thought she must have jumped up during the attack because the acid was most likely meant for her face. Nelly had to put on a special cast around her neck. That is how most staff members at the institute remembered her past:
An irate lover threw acid on the beautiful ‘Sikh librarian’
. She had not remarried, and people invented her sexuality. They called her the
librarian
because they knew no difference between the library and the archives.