Helium by Jaspreet Singh

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