Helium (28 page)

The train started rolling as if on Teflon, and soon it began to rain. The mynahs far away now, absolutely silent. Who in this bustling world would be cast to play the role of the great leader Indira Gandhi? I thought. How will the poor woman prepare for her role? If I ever write a book on this topic I will send the actress (my character) to the Indira Memorial in Delhi. She will go there and pay special attention to the polished surfaces, and all the missing bits, all the silences, loud and not so loud. What is absent will teach more about the so-called great leader than what is present, I thought. The great leader’s actions and the actions and inactions of her sons will teach my actress more than those four or five hagiographies, categorised as biographies. She will soon realise that her body is not passing through a Memorial, but really a Forgetorial. She will notice the conspicuous absence of certain citizens and question the state’s guided tour, and reject all the propaganda pamphlets. She will question the definitive versions of ‘What to remember’ and ‘How to remember’.

She will pose tons of questions about the Indian state, which organised, incited and carried out the genocidal violence.

The train was moving faster than the front of clouds. Outside, a woman was sitting on a fence scrutinising an undulating green field, tall pampas grass. All I could see (and still see) is a beautiful vortex of hair. She’s watching. She is watching a house. She is watching a house that is burning. She is watching a house that is burning in the rain. She draws cold water from a well (and it is still raining) and washes her sultry face. The image has deep subconscious striations, and this is a problem. Emblindened, she washes her hair with a dark textured substance that resembles henna . . . Who is this person?

The Russian actress, Margarita Terekhova, would be ideal for the role. She is a proof-reader running towards the printing press in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Breathless, in a state of panic, she runs in her unbuttoned overcoat; the dirt road is covered with crunchy autumn leaves. She enters the building through heavy security and runs to her office . . .
The evening edition . . . The special edition . . . No edition should have misprints
. The supervisor rushes the proof-reader to the printing zone amidst a loud hum of machinery, the two women in such a scurry as if paper unspooling out of a giant cylinder . . . She checks the proofs . . . Outside the window gusty, watery turbulence . . . No, she has made no error, and she starts crying . . . Her supervisor warms to her, lights a cigarette.

But what was the word?
I asked the grown-ups over and over while watching the film. Why did the woman whisper the word? Why were we in the audience not supposed to know? My mother put a finger on her lips. Shh! It was 1975. After the film we ate in the International Centre tea room. T. Gopal had just returned from an official trip to Russia. He ordered goulash for all of us, including his daughter Gul. During the middle of our meal he noticed we six were the only ones in the place, and at that precise moment he explained the ‘whisper’: the misprint ‘S(r)alin’ means ‘shit’.

Mrs Ghandi imposed her Emergency in 1975 and Tarkovsky’s
Mirror
was also released in 1975. She claimed she was a mirror that allowed dishevelled India to take a peek at itself. She was India. So she screwed and embogged India extravagantly. During those days of censorship my father read five newspapers, and they all read like exact copies of each other. Perhaps that is why he used them to kill mosquitoes.

In Delhi, go to Jantar Mantar, and then the Lodhi Gardens, said Nelly on the phone, when I called her from Chandigarh. Stand in front of neem and tamarind and peepul and blood-red semal, gulmohar, amaltas and a purple jacaranda, and recite Ghalib and Paz. Then go to Bangla Sahib and Sis Ganj gurdwaras and listen to Gurbani. You will hear more verses there, and if you are lucky you will hear them recited in thirty-one ragas. Only a gesture will allow you to express your true feelings. Sometimes I miss the old city, its walls and exaggerations, its smells, its 12 million people. Those narrow fissured lanes of Chandni Chowk. For my sake: take the train to Delhi. For I have forgotten what it means to travel by a train.

In Delhi, go to my favourite bookstores, especially in the maze of Khan Market.

Your presence helped a lot, she said. After Maribel moved back to Mexico I thought I would fail to make it on my own, she said . . . Our walks through Shimla during a particularly difficult time also reminded me of my walks with my father when I was a girl. How keen he was that I learn my ‘mother tongue’ properly, and I don’t know why I resisted then. I see myself listening to Darwin, Partition stories and God, and I see myself asking him questions while watching
Nanak Naam Jahaz Hai
, the film in which a man’s blindness is cured by miraculous force.

It was a superfast Shatabdi train, meals on board. Tomato soup saturated with salt and pepper. Samosas and ketchup. Fish curry was the only dish I liked. The mineral-water bottle on my seat smelled of organo-chlorines. Not far from me sat two obese and expressionless Wisconsin tourists and an army general in a thinking-man pose. To this day I don’t know what his pensiveness was all about; he seemed to be enduring a bunch of college students, whirling around, exuding incessant silliness. Cellphones kept ringing, and people kept consuming spicy thalis, and cockroaches kept doing their work. At Panipat station two banias entered the carriage and their chatter and petty business deals overwhelmed the whole vibrating compartment.
Wire ki length ki lambai kitni hai
. I was retracing a journey that has haunted me all these years. But on that train it really meant nothing. Half an hour before Delhi most passengers clogged the aisle, unafraid of injury to themselves and others. Then a high-pitched pre-recorded voice announced ‘You are requested to destroy the mineral-water bottles’ and a chill went right through me.

I was the last one to disembark the train at New Delhi station. Platform number 1. Flickering soot-coated neon signs. UPPER CLASS WAITING ROOM. Smell of human shit, peanuts and marigolds. There I felt a burning sensation. On the train the coffee had burned my tongue and my upper palate. Nothing else. I bought a couple of papers from Pankaj Bookstall, and instead of heading towards the station exit, on the spur of the moment decided to get a haircut from the station barber. Military-style crew cut. The barber made me repeat my request, sensing a disconnection between my words and thoughts. Towards the end his strong fingers massaged my bare head with coconut oil. During the haircut a chill went through my spine, and I thought about my Sikh classmate at IIT. That entire time came back like hard foam and slapped me. It was the 18th or 19th of November in 1984 when
his
hair was being removed; he had shut his eyes tight, and the crackling of the transistor radio could be heard in the barber’s shop and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s voice:
when a big tree falls the Earth shakes
. I was too young to process the lack of shock, and the force field of hate, in the new PM’s words. The massacre didn’t raise a single hair on the PM’s body. Limited vocabulary of a pogrom, and equally bad physics:
when a big tree falls the Earth shakes
. Slowly my feet dragged me automatically to the waiting room. Only one bench was free, but I decided not to occupy that tiny space. Don’t know why I stood paralysed in one corner with my luggage until I heard those seventeen-year-olds playing antakshari . . . At first the loud singing and clapping annoyed me . . . but listening to ‘Chingari Koi Bhadke’ I felt they were the only lyrics that Bombay cinema had minted which understood my inner turmoil. Kishore Kumar’s melancholic, mildly inebriated voice kept running through my mind,
majhi hi jo nav duboyeh usay kaun bachayeh
. Then someone sang an A. R. Rahman song and my eyes became moist.

Only once have I seen my father cry. After the wedding of his younger sister. That day he wore a mint-coloured safari suit, male fashion of the seventies, and right after the sister’s car took off he created a rare spectacle by sobbing uncontrollably. Only once have I cried for him. Because I thought we had lost him. Until the age of seven I slept on the same bed with my parents, in the middle, more towards my father. I loved his smell. Sometimes he would mutter nonsense in his sleep. But that gibberish only increased my resolve to become someone big and significant. Like him. I wanted to dance. Like him. Sometimes he would break into a foreign dance in his uniform. In his khaki uniform he took me to Tihar jail once, and showed me a ‘thief’, a ‘murderer’, an ‘arsonist’. In the wing for women he showed me a prostitute. She had small hands, the smallest hands I ever encountered. To this day I remember the shape and size. I stood close to the iron bars and she threw a hand outside and quickly touched my brow. This is real life, he said. You are ‘oversensitive’. Sonny boy, acquire a thick skin, he said. Other people’s children are different. He was so much more articulate than me, so much more judgemental. But he knew how to listen, analyse, suspect. How to enjoy. Spin around . . . Most of my memories of Father are pale vortices, overshadowing love. And the objects he gifted me . . . Did they speak of his everlasting love? That old metallic camera of his, my first real introduction to the magic and science of photography. How excited I was to receive the gift that would help me freeze the order and disorder of time. Just before we set out on the journey to the highest mountains. Rohtang Pass. Mount Affarwat. Nanga Parbat. Back home I took the camera and the rolls to the developing shop, and that technician of a man very hesitantly delivered bad news. That I had basically shot pictures of NOTHING. Because on the left side of the camera a tiny cavity had exposed the film, damaging it irreversibly due to leakage of light, whereas the film should have been wrapped and sealed by perfect darkness. My father cares about me, but I am afraid of him.

When the two men shook hands on the dark railway platform (Father and Professor Singh), although they were strangers, they trusted each other (I assumed), and I was the object of that trust . . .
Take care of my son, he has just recovered from jaundice
. . . Two days later when Father did what he did, he betrayed the Constitution, his oath, his profession; more important, he betrayed me, and I never saw it coming. For a long time I could not process the betrayal. I lacked the proper vocabulary or concepts to understand it, and there was no time, for heat transfer and mass transfer and diffusion equations and mechanics of materials and failure analysis and thermodynamics would occupy all my time . . . Then I started preparing with a certain madness for the GRE exams to escape India. But I don’t know for sure. We always take the past and bend it to our current awareness.

In Delhi I checked into a hotel. I called voluptuous calves, but she had changed her number. (The Kindle is still with me. What else can I do?) I continued taking notes, but the whole project made little sense now, not until I arranged a meeting with Father. And that is exactly what my whole body resisted. I tried to imagine the father–son meeting, but the experiment was a disaster. For days I felt shocked and paralysed. As if an unknown electromagnetic field had irreversibly changed my body chemistry. Then a professor friend of mine from the PhD committee invited me to watch a film by Pasolini at the IIT campus. Reluctantly I agreed. The cabbie, a young Sikh with a baby face, dropped me in front of the boys’ hostel. Glazed red-brick building named after the ancient mountain range Aravali. The room was packed, and although I arrived late the screening had not started. They had also changed the film – no longer Pasolini’s
Oedipus Rex
, but a film called
A Taste of Cherry
. From where I stood it was possible to scan the profiles of all those in the audience, and I spotted my friend at the very front, sitting next to the empty chair he had saved for me.

‘Pasolini has been cancelled,’ he explained. A gay professor’s expulsion from one of the IITs had polarised the campus. The IITs have a history of unjust expulsions, he said. During Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency many professors were expelled or arrested. Are you really interested in watching
Oedipus Rex
? I will have no problem borrowing the DVD, he said. I know the organisers of cultural events, SPIC-MACAY. You are also welcome to borrow Kiarostami. Sheer poetry. Who is Kiarostami? I asked. Perhaps the most important contemporary film-maker, and he lives in Iran. What I like about his cinema is that the characters re-enact their own real life stories.
A Taste of Cherry
is about an ordinary man who seeks assistance to kill himself. The film has a beautiful ending, perhaps the best in cinema.