Helium (6 page)

Then she laughed. ‘
Nine, eight, seven. Teen, doh, ik
.’

The cop addressed me as ‘sa’ab’ and advised me and my hallucination to try the old Viceregal Lodge on top of Observatory Hill. He made a stiff but awkward movement in the wind and made a strange remark, which has stayed with me all these years. ‘Now books live where the Lat Sahib used to live.’ Further probing led me to more information. I had read about the lodge but didn’t know that the Scottish baronial castle had actually become the Centre for Advanced Studies . . . In his own limited way he explained that the dark chapter of colonialism was over. I felt like giving the man a small tip, but restrained myself. The cop’s face resembled an isosceles triangle sketched by a naive and mischievous child, something about that Euclidian nose and forehead and his black leather belt transported me to the time when I would accompany my father to remote towns and cities for police inspections (during his deputation posting). When we stepped out for long walks, uniformed men (posted throughout the city) would salute me. How delusional my childhood years were because I walked a little ahead of my father! The cop told me that the institute had a huge library of its own. Naturally I assumed I had almost found Nelly. And the archives? I checked. What is that? I didn’t press further and followed the steep path, which looped up to the green posts. As I climbed up I felt a cool and green dampness in the air.

Over a hundred years ago when the British built the castle they thought the Empire would last forever. The sun would refuse to set, and the wheels of history would always move forward (for them). Those at the very top planned a giant ‘non-perishable’ machine assembled out of mere sandstone and limestone. The aspirations of the imperial architects matched the grand aspirations of the Empire, and its absurd rationale for plundering the colonies, the so-called white man’s burden. Lord Dufferin himself oversaw the construction of the flamboyant structure, which began in 1884. His wife, the Vicereine, wrote long letters to family and friends in England about the interiors done in the most English of chintzes, reassuring the readers all along that finally there was a building in Shimla worthy of their high rank, and in no danger of slipping over a mountain.

I have a confession.

When I rounded the road to the library and first saw the building I felt sorry for the British; momentarily it dispelled some of the sadness I carry around. Once inside the building, I bought a ticket to the guided tour (led by a sprightly man in his twenties). Most tourists parked themselves and listened quietly as if this was the most significant moment in their lives. Unable to stand still, the engineer within me made quick calculations related to materials, volumes and surfaces. Pacing up and down and tenuously attached to the obedient tourists, I marvelled at the massive electrification problems. Structural challenges. Calculations about the entire throbbing mechanism. How many faceless, voiceless men ran the grand imperishable machine? The main collection of the library is housed in what used to be the Viceroy’s ballroom, with its tall windows and Gothic arches. Some very powerful and wealthy sahibs and memsahibs danced there. In the Empire’s dining room there are shelves on history, archaeology and emotions. In the leaky pantry: law, technology and religion. Downstairs in the vaulted room: Indian languages and translation. The archives are in the gleaming cabinet room where the Viceroy determined the fate of millions of subjects. Research fellows from India and abroad inhabit the colonial building now. The tour was exceptionally well researched, but over in twenty short minutes. On the noticeboard by the entrance I saw announcements for upcoming conferences on Memory, Forgetting, History, Truth and Reconciliation.

It was closing time. I lingered around the pebbled path by the entrance. The pebbles, sharp and striated, did not belong there. Neither did the castle with its many architectural associations. Glancing sideways, I noticed some movement. A woman looking much older than her age stepped out of the main entrance, the so-called porte cochère, and walked to the solitary bench under the tulip tree planted by Lord Curzon. Most of her colleagues seemed to be in the mood to compete with the speed of light as they disappeared towards houses and bazaars down the hill. She was the only one on the bench, visible from where I stood. Salt-and-pepper hair. Monkeys around her; not too close. Those creatures didn’t look different from Kipling’s monkeys, the ones he sketched for his kids during time spent in undulating Vermont.

She was wearing a loose salwar kameez, black boots, a chunni round her neck. I walked on the crunchy pebbled path very close to the bench. It was clear this person had never dyed her hair. She noticed me, her mouth half open. I had no idea how to begin, so I stammered, ‘By any chance are you?’

The face was still beautiful. But it had started to ruin. The mole below the lower lip drew unnecessary attention. Distorting symmetry. Some faces are difficult to describe using models and metaphors. One looks for traces of the old self, but all one sees is loss, and what remains feels like an unsettling fiction or a perfectly settled disguise. Let me just say that she, the woman in front of me, had the aura and grandeur of an ageing beauty.

Imagine a piercingly attractive actress who (for the sake of her role) makes an attempt to look old. Using a special wax and make-up she allows extreme undulations to appear on her forehead. Also a scar on the right cheek, and another hint of one on the brow. Such was the face I saw.

‘Yes, I am Nelly Singh, I mean Kaur,’ and then she looked at me for a long time.

‘Raj?’

She stood up, almost hugged me, but some mysterious force made her change her mind.

We shook hands.

‘Your hands are very cold.’

She asked me about things that had happened in my life, and I told her briefly about my years in Ithaca, my thesis topic, etc.

‘Are you married? Children?’

The shock and excitement of having actually located her was only now penetrating my body, and I could hardly say a meaningful word. I even forgot to ask about her children. There was a book in her hand, a dusty red cuboid of light.

‘How did you recognise me?’

‘I knew you would come.’

‘You knew?’

‘Got your phone message.’

‘But you didn’t call me back, Mrs Singh.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Peterhof. I mentioned the hotel when I left the message.’

‘Sorry.’

She smiled. With some difficulty I scanned her face again. The oval. Big, beautiful eyes. Her nose striated, as if the make-up artist had stretched a rubber band and run it repeatedly on the young woman’s skin just below the bridge.

‘Mrs Singh?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I invite you . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘May I invite you to dinner this evening?’

‘OK.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But I don’t have a lot of time.’

Her chunni fluttered in the wind.

‘In that case, shall we eat at the restaurant at the Peterhof?’

‘OK. I know what to order. But we must do it right away.’

For several years now she had worked at the institute, six years as a chief archivist.

‘You have come during so much chaos.’

Nelly didn’t spell out the exact reason. It was an early retirement. Her lips quivered as she spoke. She had had the ‘good fortune’ to assist innumerable distinguished scholars, visiting research fellows from abroad. Dr Uberoi of Australia. Dr Aung San of Burma. ‘You know, Dr Raj Kumar –’ she used my complete name – ‘a few speeches will be made and then the director will praise me, my contribution to the collection, and ask me to say something before handing me the gift box. Standard procedure.’

The streets to the Peterhof were dirty with political posters stuck by the Hindu Party, as they were about to have their annual brainstorming session in the city, and they had chosen that fossil of a hotel as the main site. Nelly told me something I didn’t know. The Peterhof was the High Court before it became a hotel. That is where the trial of the zealot (Nathu Ram Godse) took place, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. The assassin belonged to the same Hindu Party.

‘And you?’ Nelly asked me. ‘Why did you choose the Peterhof?’

‘Well, my reason is entirely personal. My parents spent their honeymoon in Shimla. They stayed at the same hotel.’

I didn’t tell her about the difficulties my parents had throughout their marriage, or my own troubled relationship with my father, or his surgery.

‘So you were conceived in one of those rooms!’

Technically this is not correct, said Nelly. The original Peterhof mysteriously caught fire in the early eighties. She then described the fire in detail, but I was unable to concentrate. Her words assembled a strange burning image in my mind and momentarily I was overcome by a feeling of panic.

Once I had yearned to be alone with her, and now everything had changed. She had a fearless but delicate face then, the way Punjabi women are, a regal posture. She was responsive to small changes, very small alterations, in a different season. Now, in my mind, the gap between the remembered Nelly and the real Nelly acquired a complexity I had not foreseen. She was still beautiful, but crumblingly so. My memories themselves, I realised, had become viscous, viscoelastic, or elastoviscoplastic, terms I usually reserve to characterise materials and the way they flow.

So far, very carefully, we had avoided talking about Professor Singh, and she had not mentioned a single word about my changed appearance. She was not the only one. I, too, had changed. The cops had blocked the short cut to the hotel, the path which looped up the steep hill via the aviary. We followed the longer path. With the sun almost down, I felt the air become cooler. Nelly said, ‘You have come at a time when Shimla is untidy, chaotic, completely taken over by the politicos. It is not always like that. There are times when research fellows take over the streets and of course while there are some who treat the institute as a playground, certain fellows get serious work done.’

We were unable to walk past the aviary, but the sounds the birds made swelled and shrank around us as if a chorus in a play. Some birds merely imitated others; and others, while fluttering about, emitted notes of incomprehension as if they had completely lost their sense of reality.

On the train to Shimla a strange image had flashed in my mind. A little girl more or less like Red Riding Hood was playing with a predator of a bird. The wolf was disguised as the peregrine falcon. Is that you, Grandmother? Are you really hungry, Grandmother? Now and then the little girl stared at a painting by Amrita Sher-Gil. But the wolf stared at the girl with murderous rage. To protect herself, the girl entered the painting . . . Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly and safely into the labyrinths of raven-coloured hair, confessing strange theories about her ‘wicked’ grandmother.

Something trembled at the edge of my hallucination.
Three Women
, the painting, never fails to stir me. Three women, three ‘saviours’, enduring what comes from outside the frame, and the bigger pain woven or braided within. Big bird-like eyes averting the surveyors’ gaze, vividly coloured dresses, perfect locks of black hair. The longer one stares at those delicate faces, this one thought precipitates: those three must be out of their minds. Moving backwards or forwards or sideways offers little help. Whenever I encounter reproductions of the painting in art magazines and even in newsprint I get the feeling that perhaps I, too, must be out of my mind.

Nelly, it seemed, had not had a proper conversation for a while now. Her deep penetrating silence during our stroll spoke louder than a reptating bead of words. I was looking forward to difficult questions over dinner. In a different season, it is safe to say, she had been loquacious and had a tendency to ‘cultivate’. She questioned my all-male reading list. She would often disturb my equilibrium, make it meta-stable. She is the one who persuaded me to read ‘The Quilt’ by Ismat Chughtai. To this day I have not been able to forget the story and its marvellous discontinuities. Perhaps start our conversation in the restaurant with ‘The Quilt?’ Or start with something safe. Little did I know the new developments. During my absence the Peterhof had become abnormal – almost a citadel. The man at the reception desk said that he had been looking for me. ‘
Where were you, sa’ab?’
He was very apologetic. ‘
Sorry, sa’ab, we had to move your things out of the room, we made a mistake when we took the booking, sa’ab
.’ Momentarily I lost my temper. I rarely lose my balance. Then I scanned the place more objectively. The statue of Buddha on the lawns looked as puzzled, disappointed and harassed as me. The Hindu Party had literally taken over; saffron flags were all around and men in sinister khaki shorts were doing sinister drills on the lawns, and it was so screechingly loud it hurt my ears. Within a few hours the so-called retreat had become pure movement and action and order. Suddenly the men lifted their arms in unison and delivered a fascist salute.