Helium (16 page)

The children were extremely fond of my friend Maribel. She said her name was made out of two words, Maria plus Isabel. I met her at the IIC library, where I worked in the archives section. She worked in the cultural wing of the Mexican High Commission. She was curious about Octavio Paz’s days in Delhi (when he was the Mexican ambassador to India). We had invited her to the Diwali dinner six days earlier and, while the children ignited the firecrackers and sparklers, I told her the joyous reason why Sikhs celebrated the festival of lights. She asked me then about the difference between the Sikh and Hindu ideas on reincarnation. Whenever she said ‘cows’ it really meant ‘chaos’. She had given beautifully illustrated books (by an artist called Posada) to my children; one was on the Mexican Day of the Dead. I checked if the books were appropriate for children – my daughter and my son were impressionable, and they would find it difficult to sleep if they heard a frightening ghost story. Maribel said, ‘In Mexico the Day of the Dead is the most joyous and festive day . . . And she invited us to a gathering at her place. What is the party about? OK, we will call it a “Diwali fancy dress” party,’ she said.

Maribel . . . The Day of the Dead . . . Dress . . . We introduced her to my tailor-master in Khan Market. My son and daughter and Maribel and I had gone to get our costumes made. I had no idea. Vaquero dress for my boy (and her boy), and Maharani for my girl (and her girl). The tailor-master handled Maribel’s body differently, he touched her inappropriately and I scolded the rascal until he trembled, and when he took my measurements he was extremely cautious, maintaining five inches of distance with his so-called inch-i-tape, and my son laughed and laughed until he was on the floor. I often forget how much we laughed in ’84.

How eerie that day was when Maribel picked up her glittery new dress and she resembled my mother as a young woman. She had her long hair braided – she told me it’s called
trenzas
in Spanish. She told me more details about the Day of the Dead, the way the Mexicans celebrate it; they cook for the absent ones, she said. The dead ‘eat’ on that day food they liked when alive. And the living eat
pan de muerto
, freshly baked bread shaped like an assemblage of bones, and sugar skulls. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is celebrated with jokes, marigold flowers and laughter, Maribel said. And lots of alcohol.

And my children (Arjun and Indira) tried the dresses on. They had grand plans to go to school decked up in their new clothes on 14 November, Children’s Day (and Nehru’s birthday). Maribel and I had our own private plans for 14 November. We had tickets to attend the Nehru Memorial Lecture. Octavio Paz was going to deliver the lecture that year.

On 30 October I dropped Mohan at the train station. (I had packed his suitcase the previous night, and I had forgotten his toothbrush.) From the station I took an auto-rickshaw to the Mexican High Commission. Maribel served hot chocolate and
churros
and played me her favourite song. Later I collected my children from school and we took another auto to stay at my brother’s place in Greater Kailash. My brother was a wing commander in the Indian Air Force, he had fought the ’71 war with Pakistan, which got him the Maha Vir Chakra from the President on recommendation of Mrs Gandhi. He had also participated in Operation Meghdoot when India took control of Siachen Glacier in Kashmir. His house was filled with sparkling medals and trophies. And knick-knacks from Russia. Bust of Yuri Gagarin. On 31 October when we heard the news about Mrs Gandhi’s assassination we didn’t eat. My brother played the saddest classical music on his HMV player, I remember his little dog stopped barking when it heard the music. Next morning I didn’t send the children to school. They did their homework, and later they were eager to try on the newly stitched costumes and I gave them permission to do so only in their room. It was my daughter’s idea to swap the costumes. We had a light lunch, and soon it was time for evening prayers. We washed our hands, covered our heads and prayed. During prayers my left eye kept flickering.

And then: a knock on the door . . . I will never forget those five minutes. Three hundred dreadful seconds. We never believed that any harm would come to us. My daughter kept saying she had to finish her homework. I forced the kids to hide under the bed upstairs. My brother loaded his pistol and he asked the Congress thugs to disappear and he even fired in the air. It was then the cops appeared and they said they were going to take away his weapon and they were there to protect us. My brother was not going to but I forced him to listen to the police inspector. As soon as the police disappeared the mob reappeared and they dragged my brother out and made him sing the national anthem and bow before a calendar image of the goddess Durga and cut his hair and his beard and cut his penis and cut his testicles and doused kerosene on him and burned him . . . and then my daughter, no, my son . . . my daughter saved me . . . she saved me . . . she was dressed like a boy, she had seen so many things . . . she is the one who went to the neighbours and because of her three or four women came and they formed a chain around me and would not give me up . . . Leave my mother alone, she said . . . and my son, that idiot, came down as if he was competing with his sister to save me . . . Give us your son, and the Congress thugs picked her up, took her and smeared her with a white explosive powder (as if they were playing holi) and burned her . . . phosphorus, I know it was phosphorus, Mohan had shown me phosphorus in the lab . . . we will burn your daughter as well, they said . . . but they fled with the loot, including the war medals and the colour TV . . . the screams of my ‘son’ . . . she never once said that she was a girl . . . sometimes I think if they had taken my real son I would have behaved differently.

[Pause.]

I helped them kill my own daughter.

You didn’t go to the police?

Barefoot I ran after them . . . holding my ‘daughter’ tight I ran after them. Most of the Hindu men in the neighbourhood did nothing. Some applauded. It was not clear if they were applauding me or the killers or the cops, who did nothing. I asked the cops for help, but there was no help. I ran all the way to the main police station and the SHO didn’t register the preliminary FIR report . . . He refused to file a complaint. ‘
Same thing will happen to you as happens to other Sikhs
. . .’ At the police station there were other women as well. Similar stories. To stay there would have meant rape . . . sure rape . . . The sub-inspector didn’t allow us to leave. Then a man showed up, God knows from where. He said I was his wife. He said I was not a Sikh, that I was his half-mad wife who had run away from the house taking advantage of the ‘riots’. I didn’t trust him, but I decided to trust him as it was the only way out of the police station. At that point I just wanted to save my son and I didn’t care for the other women. The man took us to his big house and put us in the tiny room, the barsati on the roof terrace. He locked the barsati – he said this was for our own safety. There was no bathroom. My son clung to me tight. Two days later the man unlocked the barsati and drove us to the relief camp. He said Sikhs were really Hindus. He said the violence was wounding the Temple of India. On the way to the camp I kept saying to that good man, What have you done to my daughter? He looked at me with incomprehension. Then he wept.

At this point did you know anything about what had happened to Professor Singh?

No. From the camp I called home several times. But no one picked up the phone. I called the IIT Chairman. He didn’t pick up the phone either.

Where were you?

I should have called Maribel earlier from the camp. But I was shocked and paralysed. So many women had been raped . . . and two of them noticed that the same Congress leader, H. K. L. Bhagat, who, according to witnesses, had ordered his men to kill thousands of Sikhs and rape the women, was now there in the camp distributing blankets and food. The women had seen the Congress leader before. They pounced on him. Eighty-year-old Sikh men were crying like babies in the camp.

Just like one cannot forget Einstein’s face, no matter how distorted, I am unable to forget the face of that monster H. K. L. Bhagat. Member of Parliament. Cabinet Minister. Ex-Mayor of Delhi.

I called Maribel and she came right away in a diplomatic car with security guards on four motorcycles.
Guardias de seguridad
. Maribel installed us in the High Commission. I simply can’t tell my husband that I have lost my daughter. You tell him. Maribel, you are not allowed to tell him she is no more. Half a day later Maribel brought back the news, she was in tears, she said it is best I tell you now that your husband is no more. Don’t lie, Maribel. The IIT Chair had accompanied her. He was waiting in the living room, and I refused to see him.

I slipped into a vegetable-like state. My son was playing in the other room. I asked Maribel not to tell him that his father was no more. My son had already observed a lot. He sketched a lot, and wrote a lot in his tiny journal. Circles, triangles, straight lines, gibbous eyes. Some of his images were right out of Maribel’s book – imaginary insects and a profusion of strange saffron yellow flowers. Cempasúchitl.

But something had changed in our relationship. I was not able to touch him after that. I have not been able to touch anyone since November ’84.

For a few days we played this grand elaborate game for him, as if all the violence was a game, as if it was really part of the Mexican celebrations. I told the boy his father had taken his engineering students to a factory in a foreign country.

What happened to your things at the house in IIT?

Maribel. She fell while retrieving the things. She broke her tooth.
Me quebré un diente!
she said. Charred LP player. The molten records resembled a Dalí exhibition. Most of the books that burned were our copies of Ramayana and Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita. My husband had a twelve-volume translation of the Rig Veda. Half of these were reduced to ashes. So many other books were destroyed:
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima, two translations of the Adi Granth,
Orlando
by Virginia Woolf,
Shame
by Rushdie,
A History of the Sikhs
by Khushwant Singh,
Pale Fire
by Nabokov (first edition), a copy of the Bible Mohan purchased at an antiquarian book fair in Ithaca, an anthology of Punjabi Dalit literature,
Dubliners
by James Joyce, poems by Shiv Kumar Batalvi and Dhani Ram Chatrik,
Correspondence Between Tolstoy and Gandhi
, Feynman Lectures,
El Llano en Llamas
by Juan Rulfo,
The Man Without Qualities
by Musil,
The Little Prince
, two books by Jean Amery,
The Moon and Sixpence
by Maugham, P. G. Wodehouse, Borges.

To come out of my vegetable state Maribel suggested travels. She was the one who got us passports and visas and I withdrew most of the money in the bank and my son from school and I flew to Italy. Professor Singh had already planned the trip, and we were waiting for our savings to build up . . .

Then we took the train to Milan and from Milan the train to Switzerland. The Alps. And Zurich. All I remember of Zurich are the roasted chestnuts we had after not eating for two days. On the way back we spent two nights at the Milan railway terminal, we had no more money left. That is where during a vulnerable moment I told my son that his father was no more. In that fascist train station (built by Mussolini, as I found out later) my mind and my body overflowed with suicidal thoughts. My son didn’t believe his father was dead. He said he had seen him yesterday. Where? Behind the train to Zurich. On the train to Basel. I believed his fictions. Both of us started looking for his father in that fascist terminal. At first I thought he was an apparition. A chance meeting at the terminal, someone I knew was walking towards us. He was the chief librarian at the India International Centre, Delhi, and he was in Italy to attend a workshop on the Medici collection.

As long as you are alive your story is alive, my senior told me.

And he is the one who got me this position at the institute archives.

Any trouble here at the institute?