Erika Banerji A single event in the history of a country often places lives in its unremitting shadow. This is implicit in Jaspreet Singh’s new novel Helium, as he sets out to revisit and fictionalise the events after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.
The assassination of the prime minister at the hands of her two Sikh bodyguards resulted in riots and genocide against Sikhs in New Delhi. What Singh explores in this novel is one of the most harrowing episodes in the recent history of the nation and the enduring effects it had on individual lives.
Jaspreet Singh was born in India and moved to Canada in 1990, where he received a doctorate in chemical engineering. Two years later, he decided to take up writing full time. His debut collection of short stories, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 Quebec First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, an intense narrative about the resulting carnage of war on the beautiful landscapes of Kashmir was a 2010 Observer Book of the Year and won the Canadian Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction.
Helium opens with the narrator, a professor of rheology (the study of the flow of matter) at Cornell University, revisiting India after 25 years. In his quarter-century away, the country has changed and so has he, the only thing that remains impervious is the burden of a traumatic memory he has been carrying. “Part of me felt that, by living in America, the distance would help erase that beautiful time, but distance ironically, had the reverse effect. Ithaca [the city where Cornell is located] was not a solution. Especially when I felt like an outsider or was made to feel like one, I would enter the house of the ‘past’, and the ‘past’ would enter me like a veil of ash.” He feels uncomfortable as he sees a new India, which seems to have almost wiped away any awareness of the events of the past. “How ugly the collective consciousness of a nation can be,” he remarks.
At his father’s house, the narrator plunges into severe melancholia, recalling images of his long dead mother. At the same time, he expresses an enduring repulsion he has of his father. “Unlike me, she was less conflicted by father.”
Here, the novel takes the narrator back to 1984, when he was a young engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology. It was during his first year that he befriended his chemistry professor and was often invited to dine with him at his house, where he became infatuated with the professor’s young wife, Nelly.
It is the author’s own scholarship in chemistry which lends Helium its scientific perspectives. “My work focuses on the flow of complex materials, the ones with ‘memory’. Water, for instance, doesn’t have memory, but remembers its past. Volcanic lava flows and clays too, carry within them some deep traces of unresolved past.”
Primo Levi’s scientific work at the Jewish concentration camps is often alluded to, and the novel is interspersed with literary references to Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce and George Orwell, in particular, Nineteen Eighty-Four. “In the land where Orwell was born, 1984 was never imaginary. In India it was real, 1984 is burnt fully into my retina; it recurs every day, every month, every year with its own chilling periodicity.”
On November 1, 1984, Singh headed back with a handful of his students, including the narrator, from a trip to a pharmaceutical plant in Kasauli. As they disembarked from the train at New Delhi railway station, the professor was surrounded by a rampaging mob, doused in petrol, an old rubber tyre pulled over his shoulders, and then he was set alight in front of the group of horrified and helpless students.
The impressions we often retain of a particularly critical historical moment, whether negative or positive, are reworked and processed in our minds until any resulting narrative deluge can often become a curious amalgamation of fact and fiction. In Helium, both the author and the narrator have reiterated that moment or the knowledge of such a moment and recreated it as fiction.
What is often crucial to making a real moment in history come alive in a novel is a masterful use of narrative and a firm voice that guides the reader through the events until history is almost reimagined.
Yet, although the incident at the railway station happens at a critical point in the novel, there is something listless about the narrative voice, especially since the author has intensified the reader’s expectations throughout the previous sections. For an incident so pivotal and significant to the narrative, the prose here seems to be desperately lacking tension.
The rest of the novel sees the narrator on a quest to seek out Nelly, the professor’s widow, now living a lonely existence in the hill station of Shimla.
Here, Nelly has been quietly working in a library bearing the horrific scars of that November in Delhi. Not only was her husband killed but also so was her daughter. Her eight-year-old son, an innocent witness to the horrors of that time, never really recovers from the trauma and runs away from home, never to be found again.
Although she has by no means come to terms with her past, the narrator’s visit seems to unsettle her quiet existence. He rebels against her silence and the collective silence of the authorities about the events of 1984 and seeks answers, which he hopes will drive away the weight of those memories. “The past had come like bitter drops of helium, but he didn’t know how to handle it; this helium was neither inert, nor invisible, nor light, and refused to disappear. Was there a better way to handle the incompleteness of history; a milder way to encounter the dead, because no matter how hard one tries the dead keep returning.”
Helium chronicles forwards and backwards with an increasing sense of unease. Numerous figures, past and present, nameless and confusing, often congest the development of the plot and add no clarity to the revelations the narrator is trying hard to make.
What he suggests through the second half of the novel is his father’s and the government’s involvement in the pogrom which followed the assassination and the fact that the riots were a series of well-coordinated events. The author/narrator’s anger at the atrocities against the Sikh community at the time are entirely justified and Singh should be applauded for creating what is at its heart a categorical treatise against the authorities who not only allowed this to happen but so deviously covered up their tracks. “This was our Eiffel Tower. This was our carnival. Our periodic table of hate.”
Singh’s style is rare among literary novelists, writing more with the precise impassiveness of a scientist than the untethered emotions of a fiction writer. Despite this, he excels in the intense depictions of the inner turmoil of the main characters and the extraordinary power of empathy. While much of the book is weighted down by scientific information, it appears to be a novel that can appeal to the head as well as the heart. Thankfully, Singh does finally reward the reader with a sense of closure at the end.
This is a book that strives to convey the interior lives of the characters and their struggles in the face of a haunting, distressing moment in history. Helium is an unflinchingly honest and at times agonisingly affecting concoction of fact, fiction, politics and a large smattering of scientific scholarship.
Erika Banerji has written for The Statesman, The Times of India, The Observer and Wasafiri. Her short fiction has been published in international literary journals. She lives in London.
