Helium by Jaspreet Singh Page B

(one of those papers) also ran a long tribute to Nadine Gordimer: No violence is more frightening than the violence of revenge . The paper also carried a piece on a thorium mine, and a huge headline: suicide of a dalit medical student . Reading the article, for a fleeting second I thought about the ‘crystallising image’ that made me start taking notes. New Delhi railway station. On 30 October 1984, we left two figures behind. What happened? Did my father speak to her? Did he offer Nelly a ride home?
    She was busy handing over, she had warned me. I will not be able to play a good host the next few days. That day all I did was walk and linger in cafes, and take more notes. All of a sudden I felt accumulation and transformation. My brief interaction with Nelly so far cast a new spell; I had new ideas to deal with my old demons.
    There was proper heating in Barista and I don’t know when exactly my shivering stopped. Two Armani-clad youths sitting a table away gave me a dirty look. They were nibbling at reddish-blue sandwiches, and it seemed the duo had popped down from Neptune. I scribbled on a sheet of paper. The flow of words drowned the inane cellphone conversations, businesslike transactions and a faint murmur of love-smitten teenagers, necking.
     

     
    For so many in ’84 death began with rubber tyres . . . Sikhs were mere objects (of hatred) bonded to rubber tyres, offered to the gods . . . Agni, the god of fire, has two heads, three legs and seven tongues . . . My compatriots (under normal circumstances) don’t burn fellow citizens. Under ‘normal’ circumstances some do transform the strange joke of an unease they feel towards Sikhs into Time (Sardar, tehre barah baj gayeh; your time’s come, sardar-ji) . . . Who am I? What is common between me and other ‘Hindus’? All I know is that I have not been able to study properly the microstructure of rubber. I fail again and again when it comes to estimating the speed with which fire engulfs a cylinder over six feet tall . . . But I correctly assume that an average human body weighs sixty-five kilos . . . Twenty thousand cylinders means 1.3 million kilograms. 1.3 million kilograms of human mass . In the cafe my otherwise numb fingers started moving. Memories, I felt, have an elastoplastic quality of their own.
    Why think of one genocide in terms of another? Why use a prism? It is impossible to compare and quantify suffering, I know. Why then? Because one story is better known and the other one completely unknown, completely distorted or filled with ominous silences. (What breaks me is the silence of distinguished public intellectuals, liberal-secular writers and established academicians.) Because this is exactly the process I follow in my own discipline, I use analogies to move from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown’. At first all I see are the similarities. Differences or uniqueness emerge later. Where would we be if Rutherford had not imagined the structure of an atom as a tiny solar system. Later, Bohr destroyed the solar-system model with his ‘quantum’, but where would Bohr be without Rutherford’s insight? But why am I so shocked if thousands were murdered in Delhi? Why am I shocked if the ‘majority’ is unable to comprehend the enormity of its actions and the pain of the ‘minority’? Why does this pattern repeat itself over and over in the world? Why does the dominant group continue to represent itself as a ‘victim’? Bigger genocides have happened before. Armenian. Rwandan. Native American. Genocides will happen? Regarding this I am not sure. One can never be . . . Animals are much better, they don’t conduct genocides . When my fingers became numb again I called Nelly half hoping we would dine together. Bluntly she declined. She, of course, was preparing her retirement speech. I ate alone at Restaurant Splash. My table next to the only window with a commanding view of the deodar hills of Shimla and the valley below. The red-tiled