Helium by Jaspreet Singh

cluster of monkeys, one grasping on to a milk carton, and it was then I understood the spill . . . Nelly had left tea in a pot, shielded by a heavily padded tea cosy. I drank my tea black, and for a long time stood by the window, and then I closed it.
    The note had been written in no hurry; it said the expected. Namaste . Almost involuntarily I touched those small, baroque words. Something immutable: the handwriting had not changed. I would have been happier if she had used the Sikh greeting. She left me the keys as well.
     
    Feel free to visit my institute, my crumbling splendour.
     
    Shimla was a bustling slope of a city at that hour despite the chill. Flocks of hill mynahs delightful as I walked down the hill and then up again. Something startled the cloud of birds as they flew low right above me, thinning and thickening the air. For a brief second the flock shimmered, then soared away. I turned and caught them vanishing, rising steeply like an ensemble of tiny black data points. I turned and they shifted again into the shape of a graph of cosmic proportions. On the narrow trail I encountered a woman knitting a sweater as red as the rhododendrons. Slowly I looped around the Himachal University campus. Gliding through students made me feel young again, and old, both at once. The birds returned, another neat kink in the graph, and were gone. By the time I arrived at the institute most of the male staff members were out on the lawns basking in the sun.
    Inside the library the carpet was soft and blue. But it was very cold.
     

     
    Even before I entered I noticed big eyes behind the shelves staring at me, and an old uncomfortable feeling ran through my spine. Years ago Father had used a newspaper to kill mosquitoes; the eyes behind the shelves belonged to the same photo embedded in my memory. The paper was some censored rag during Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency. From high up the same eyes stared at me now. A few stones that made up the crumbling wall were visible. Ahead of me a glass partition. He stood as a mythical figure, the khaki-clad man behind the partition glued to a slab of a heater (the only heater in the library), grooming his intimidating moustache and simultaneously scratching his ear. I simplified our exchange (which had the potential to become Kafkaesque), ‘Madam-ji’s permission’, and showed him the yellow sheet of paper (which carried her signature). He frisked me and pushed me in. There was no heating – the original fireplace was plugged with potted plants. The research fellows and scholars and other readers were wrapped in two or three layers, sweaters, shawls or jackets and woollen caps and gloves with dangling ghostly fingers. It was the coldest library in the world, and I was walking through the space where the British Empire had danced only sixty or seventy years ago, and the eyes of the censorship woman on the wall (Mrs Gandhi) kept staring at me; the British Empire danced when nine million Indians died of a famine, the famine occurred because of cruel taxation policy, taxes were raised to fund the Afghan wars, and the Viceroy and the Vicereine danced here and had fancy-dress parties and ate here, the dining table was able to seat 150 guests, each one got their own personal liveried waiter, and the menus competed with the menus of Queen Victoria, they did not want to be left behind, those who plundered the wealth of India, they, too, ate bull’s head and wild boar, because it was on the Queen’s menu in England. But now it was a library, and now most of the portraits on the walls and the power and the Raj belonged to the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty that took over from the British, but the building was so huge there was space for others, full-bearded Tagore hung on the walls and Ambedkar, too, deep and pensive, also a portrait of the first female president of India (in a spacesuit), and ex-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher, who had come up with the idea to transform the