Helium (22 page)

So engrossed was I in my thoughts that the book by Mandelstam, the one in my hand, fell, and just when I picked it up and wiped it clean with my chunni I heard the director’s footsteps. He wears army boots. Namaste, he said, and walked unbearably close to me and asked if he could have a word.

‘There is one thing I forgot to tell you, Mrs Kaur.’

‘Oh, the gathering?’

‘You see, I would like to invite an important government official to honour you.’

‘No need.’

‘You see, the minister is, as it is, coming to the town, and he will be attending.’

‘No need to make it so pompous.’

‘He will come anyway.’

‘Who?’

The minister’s profile flashed before me. Murderer. His face on postage stamps. Plump and sleek, swept-back hair. The way he smiles and folds his hands in a mythical namaste. His designer khadi. The way he steps on people as if they were beetles or cockroaches.

‘Not him,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we cancel the retirement party?’

‘I didn’t invite him, Mrs Kaur. He insisted. He would like to take this opportunity to show our institute to important foreign delegates.’

The director well knows that many years ago the minister along with many senior Congress leaders conducted a genocide. I felt like reminding him of the details. But then I thought it was inappropriate to do so. How could he ignore the recent news reports –

‘Not him.’

‘Move on, Mrs Kaur. Will you? He is no longer the man he was and you are no longer the woman you were.’

‘I am definitely no longer the woman I was . . . But don’t you dare say – MOVE ON.’

‘Tomorrow take the morning off. At 3 p.m. I will send my own car to pick you up.’

Even if I try hard I can’t despise the director fully. All these years he has allowed me to work here without trouble, he has helped me during my moments of panic, moments when I saw dust gathering on the shelves and the orange curtains and the fire that engulfs us all. As I heard his footsteps departing the library my mind was filled with so many poisonous thoughts.

On 28 December 1945, Primo Levi, after surviving the Buna-Monowitz camp, wrote a poem. The poem is titled ‘Buna’.
With what kind of face would we confront each other?
The Nelly in my notes knows this last line. Her favourite line in the poem, however, is neither the first nor the last, but line four:
A day like every other day
. The real Nelly perhaps never read the poem; and she would not allow me complete access to her inner self. But I know this for sure. A lot was going on in her mind that day when I located her under the tulip tree by the crumbling colonial mansion. Escape? Revenge? Nelly sends me ten miles away to Mashobra. She ‘forgets’ her speech at home. She wanted me to read the speech. She didn’t feel like delivering the speech at the retirement event. All the little facts and little actions led me to the following conclusion. There was someone else. Something larger at stake. Someone who was forcing Nelly to deliver that particular speech.

She sends me to Mashobra that day; she wanted to keep me away. Reluctantly I took the bus. At the Oberoi Wild Flower Cafe I met the Benazir Bhutto lookalike. The young woman was sitting at the table close by, reading, or trying to read, her Kindle, unable to focus, distracted. She, in a black kurta, colourful Sanskrit mantras scrawled all over, and need I mention again her most voluptuous calves? She was reading the flickering page and I was trying to begin the book I bought from the antique shop, Maria Brothers, in Shimla. On her table a large plate of exotic green salad.

‘What book are you perusing?’

Scarcely had I finished the question when I realised how many times in the past those five words led to an answer that transported not one, but two people on a long journey. She was reading
Men in the Off Hours
, a title I had not heard of. She returned to her Kindle as soon as she uttered those words, giving me the impression that my interruption was really an ill-timed interruption. Women in the Off Hours.

Twenty or twenty-five minutes later she opened her handbag and dug out a cellphone. From what I could make out she called her driver, and the man’s loud Pahari voice said that the car needed repairs. From that moment on she was unable to sit still. She applied a coat of raspberry lip gloss and surveyed her face now and then in the reflecting surfaces around us. On her dry hands she applied a Vichy moisturiser and massaged it into her skin.

‘Excuse me.’ She looked in my direction. ‘I did not mean to be rude. What book are you perusing?’

I had picked up an old volume from Maria Brothers, a rare book on bird etchings. She flipped through it and said something that has stayed with me. Birds, she said, the more you look for them, the more you see them. Her thought was not original, but she ended up articulating something true.

With every passing second she looked more and more familiar, but I could not place her. She could have been the one at the student’s party who was studying attentively the nude Radha and Krishna.

I moved to her table. We shook hands.

‘You look like an artist.’

‘Yes, I sketch birds,’ I lied.

‘What kind?’

‘The ones that live inside me. I need to draw every day. My daily exorcisms.’

‘You appear to be an intense man.’

The waiter, a long shadow, appeared with the menu as soon as I installed myself.

She took a while. I ordered Earl Grey tea.

‘Viennese,’ she said. ‘Without cream.’

The young man blinked, a puzzled look on his face.

‘Something wrong?’

‘Then it is a black coffee, ma’am.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Viennese without cream is “normal” coffee, ma’am.’

She worked as an interpreter for foreign tourists in Delhi. Slowly it emerged that she did several other part-time jobs. She was also trained (the way she phrased it) as a ‘past-life regression analyst’. Obviously she had made an error about my occupation! But I was immensely attracted and chose to play along. Occupations like hers were new in the new India with its teeming middle class. Part of my attraction to her was connected to this newness, this transition I’d missed. But, in certain ways, she was more North American than me. Fuck, she said. Viennese coffee! He thinks he knows more about coffee than me! What if? I asked. What if you are doing a past-life regression for a client and determine that three or four centuries ago they murdered you? Will you go to the cops? What will you do really? What if you determine that it was you who murdered the person standing before you? Fucking brilliant, she said. Fuck, I never thought about this! She applied more of her Vichy moisturiser. An hour later, when the driver phoned, she invited me ‘home’: her retired father’s cottage. She was in town for two days ‘only’. Mashobra was cold, and Mashobra was covered with pure walls of melting snow. During an erotically charged moment I kissed her lips; she told me, ‘Forget it, buddy’, she was seeing someone, the person was a consultant in the music business, and this person paid the rent. Forget it, she said. ‘
I can’t do that thing with you
.’ No, I don’t think I will be able to do it, she said, and pushed me aside. From the beginning I had anticipated this situation, for she was young and I was not young any more. Racism can be overcome, but age is more of a challenge. I kissed her again, this time on the left cheek. Help me forget something, I said. Only you can help me forget. I would like to forget myself and this shitty world. Murderer! she said. We settled on oral sex. One thing led to another. To be honest, for a while I felt my father had paid her the money to help me forget something. But it was a passing thought. We made what some people call ‘love’. Several times. Thrice in two hours. There were no condoms, we did it unprotected. We mimicked the Viennese waiter, never have I laughed so much, a deep belly laughter. What was I? A wild animal in
ad
1060, an ant in 1214, a parrot during the times of Sikandar, and a moth when the Bamian Buddhas were being carved out of live rock. Fucking brilliant! Two full-length mirrors in the room, and they, too, saturated with our release. Afterwards her brown belladonna eyes became moist and she played some Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, and smoked cigarettes. How much money do I owe you? I checked. I am not a whore, she said, smiling and sobbing. She told me she got the biggest scare of her life when she had unprotected sex with a guy who revealed later that he had herpes. I hope you are free of diseases? she checked. Suddenly her nakedness felt exposed, and I, too, felt exposed. I used a few unprotected words. Raised my voice. Why didn’t you tell me about this beforehand? Why did you not tell me that you had slept without a condom with a diseased man, you cunt? She pounced on me and bit my ears. It happened so long ago, sweets . . . let me reassure you I got myself tested and I didn’t pick up the disease. But are you sure you are free of germs, you prick? I lit up a cigarette. After so many years of quitting I felt like a smoke. The ashtray on the study table was full. The desktop computer next to the ashtray had no screensaver. She mentioned the ashtray belonged to her father. He is in Shimla at the moment, she said. Next to the ashtray, four or five luminous apples. Almost all the cigarettes had been extinguished in a peculiar way. The ashtray reminded me of an old friend of my father’s, a senior civil servant. He would extinguish exactly like that. He would smoke only three-quarters of a cigarette and drop it. The cigarette would then extinguish itself, but it would retain the original shape, a perfect cylinder of ash.

Following our so-called after-play she ran to the kitchen to get us warm milk. During her absence I went through the dressing-table drawers. Whitening serums. Facewash. Magenta-coloured moisturiser bottles. I thought of Clara, and had the urge to check my emails. The keyboard, stained, carried a slim layer of dust, black on the edges. The desktop was unlocked. But the mouse was not connected. It took me three seconds to reconnect. Unreal. What I saw was a bit shocking. It didn’t take me long to understand. There was no need now to check my emails.

Before me was a single folder called
Hindu Rashtra
. I clicked and entered. Image after shocking image. Pictures of a crumbling, national historic building – a 500-year-old place of worship that belonged to a minority community. Being destroyed by tens and hundreds of men in saffron. Being reduced to rubble by men in khaki shorts. I clicked on the folders within the folder. Deep inside I found links to acronyms like RSS, VHP, BD. Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh. Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Bajrang Dal. These were extreme fascist organisations, which used the Hindu Party as a political front. Each one more eager to establish upper-caste supremacy. Each one preaching more patriarchy, hatred and violence. Collectively the group was known as the Sangh Parivar.

I heard her. She was headed to the bedroom with milk. Quickly I shuffled away from the desktop. She entered with a silver tray, two tall glasses. She didn’t take long to realise what I might have seen. After a brief conversation she stared at the screen and turned off the machine. Tactfully I restricted our conversation to computers. How I almost became a software engineer. She didn’t ask a single question. I squeezed her tremulous hand. She didn’t withdraw. A dog came from a different room and sniffed me. Out, she said, and it disappeared. She had not used the dog’s name. ‘Why are you not carrying your laptop?’ she asked. There and then I shared the details. My laptop. Stolen and recovered.

The ‘Peterhof?’ she checked.

‘Yes, the Peterhof.’

The hotel has many past lives, I didn’t say.

‘Ugly architecture,’ she blurted out. ‘Sweetie, it is a cross between–’

‘The Hindu Party organised a chintan baithak there.’

‘As a delegate?’

I missed my chance to lie. ‘As an observer.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘My father, too, spent two days at the Peterhof.’

‘Recently?’

‘Recently.’

‘Is he a member?’

‘Say that again.’

‘Member of the Hindu Party?’

‘He is a doctor.’

‘How old is he?’

‘He is retired. But now and then he acts as a locum for the hotel emergencies.’

‘Does he know?’

‘Say again.’

‘Does he know what the party is all about?’

She paused for a while. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Does he, too, believe in Hindu supremacy?’

‘No,’ she said. But after a long pause.

There were photos of her father in the glass cabinet, and one of them similar to the photo I had seen in Nelly’s albums, the photo of the man who saved her life by locking her in the barsati upstairs. I extrapolated the man’s ‘old face’ from his ‘young face’ and came to a conclusion. Nelly had called him ‘my saviour’.

She had used the phrase three or four times. Unable to hide that something was not right. Every mention of the man made her uncomfortable. As if he were nearby in the same room floating around as a shadow.

In Shimla that night while waiting for Nelly in her apartment I used the Internet to locate more information about the ‘saviour’. What I found perturbed me. At a certain point in his life, Benazir Bhutto’s father had started defending the pogroms conducted by the Hindu Party. In 2002, Muslims (and not Sikhs or Christians or Dalits) were the target. The 2002 pogrom took place in Gujarat.