Oct 27, 2013: Facts, fiction and pure chemistry merge in Canadian research scientist-turned-writer Jaspreet Singh's novel, 'Helium', based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. India, Singh tells Malini Nair, hasn't mourned enough for those who died in the conflagration and not learnt anything from it either.
Why did you feel the need to revisit the 1984 riots at this point?
One does not decide to visit 1984. 1984 keeps visiting us. It is the return of repressed, re-emerging memories triggered by current events. In 2008, after finishing my first novel, I was invited to Delhi to have a series of conversations with HIV positive orphans. The children demanded stories, heartbreakingly enough, ghost stories. Every afternoon after the story telling, I would step out for long walks through the city, and it was then the real ghosts of 1984 started returning — by a photocopier shop in Munirka, a car mechanic's shop, near the Jawaharlal Nehru University. As I was processing those Delhi experiences, walking with the ghosts, I started writing.
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Raj, the narrator of Helium, faces a huge predicament. His own father, a senior IPS officer, facilitated the violence in November 1984. In the story, under the watchful eyes of the cops a mob directed by senior Congress party leaders had burned to death Raj's beloved IIT professor . Later a traumatized Raj asks a question which might be of some significance to the younger generations in India: how do sons and daughters deal with the crimes of their fathers? Raj is unable to move forward until he has processed this question. Ultimately, he decides to acknowledge the crime of his father. He no longer hides it, or distorts it, and he is no longer silent about it.
Are there any autobiographical strains in your book?
I was a teenager in Delhi in 1984. I saw ash particles floating in air. Like Raj, the central character of my book, I too studied science and engineering. At the same time, Helium involved a lot of research and relied on survivor and relief worker testimonials. It is based on oral histories and private archives. The hybrid form allowed me to pose questions like: 'What happened?' and 'What could have happened?' It also allowed me to create distance.
You talk of nearly abandoning the project. Was it difficult extracting these memories?
What we are really talking about here is complicated grief and collective trauma. Unfinished mourning. Not just memory, but also postmemory and transmission of trauma. It is never easy.
Why did you choose to weave the facts you collected into fiction?
For me, Helium is really rough-and-ready notes for a book that belongs to the ambiguous, interstitial zone between history and traumatic memory — between the 'objective' and the 'intimate'. This form allowed me better access to the pogroms of November 1984 and the years that have followed. To try to do it otherwise, as in say a human rights report, is a paralysing affair, and affects our capacity as human beings to engage fully with the crime of crimes.
Why did you bring in the work of Italian scientist and holocaust survivor Primo Levi into the book?
Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is a fine way for a chemist to organize memories. The book has 21 chapters, each titled after a chemical element. Argon, Hydrogen, Potassium, Sulphur, Tin, Nitrogen, Nickel, Mercury, Gold... He sees strange parallels between humans and the properties of these atoms. Helium is also a homage to another favourite writer of mine: WG Sebald. Both were engaged with the subject of genocidal violence and other calamities.
There is a strong indictment of the Congress establishment in the book. Do you believe that the apology hasn't worked as a salve?
To this day, senior Congress leaders involved in the pogrom and their loyal protectors enjoy infinite immunity. Non deliverance of justice often creates uncomfortable situations like this one in the book: the Sikh victim's wife Nelly is retiring as a chief librarian and the chief guest for the occasion is a cabinet minister who had incited the mobs. November 1984 requires an enormous 'work of mourning' , not just by the survivors and the targeted collective, but by the entire nation.
You refer to the emerging saffron brigade in the book. Do you feel a sense of unease at this?
A recent article on the net called it the 'Sophie's choice' for India's electorate. My narrator's consciousness is saturated with similar anxieties. For him mass murder is mass murder — whether organized by the 'right wing' or the 'liberals' or the 'left wing' . A pogrom is a wound on the psyche of the collective and if left untouched it may result in repetitions that are similarly ignored.
 Novel revisits one of the darkest times in India's post-independence history, writes Bron Sibree |
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Jaspreet Singh’s writing always has an astute scientific side: Our narrator’s area of study is rheology, the study of flow, whether volcanic lava or money or memory or blood. In the years after the killing of his professor, the student attempts to estimate the speed with which fire engulfs the average human body, but cannot finish the calculations. Helium is loaded with science, but it is also a very literary book. Primo Levi’s work on the death camps haunts these pages and small black-and-white photos are interspersed à la W.G. Sebald; there are mentions of Roberto Bolano, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell and the strange Russian film Stalker. The blur of genres reminds me of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, and Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard seems a melancholy influence on the compelling voice. Helium is not a laugh riot, it’s an angry accomplished work, and will be a controversial book in India, which should give it legs (I believe India has slightly more readers than Canada). Decades after the pogroms, there are no memorials and no one has been punished; indeed, as on Wall Street, the guilty seem to be rewarded. Many want to move on and forget, but for the troubled narrator, the trauma and memory won’t go away. “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.” Silence around killings can be complicity. This is a noisy novel about silence.Source |