Read Online Helium by Jaspreet Singh - Free Book Online

word.
     
    As long as you are not pesky.
     
    Unable to fall asleep I stood by the window. Nelly’s institute perched on top of the Observatory Hill exhibiting a few traces of its old glory and many dots of dim light. The building looked comical – almost a folly. Inside the living room most of the objects were new, like her black boots by the entrance, or second-hand, like the slightly singed Persian carpet (and the sofa with fatigued springs), reacting with each other, but the object that seemed to carry truth, the one that drew me most towards it, was Mohan’s silver-framed photo. The photo had outlasted him. On the back: Self, London, 1975 . (This is the same year Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency.) Professor Singh in a long black winter coat with big buttons, on the steps of St Paul’s and looking unusually melancholic, trying to forget perhaps his unfortunate country, or trying to remember every single detail. There were a couple of blank sheets of paper on the side table. I had a strong urge to transmute the yellow photo into a narrative. I confess I am not a real writer. But at that moment I felt if I don’t find precise words corresponding to his life I would turn to stone.
     
    One evening he found himself standing in front of a cathedral, which could only have been St Paul’s. So many times he had been to London but he never got a chance to step inside the shrine, which was destroyed partially during the war . . . the damage long repaired, it carried no memory of the relatively recent German bombs or the Catholic structure before the Great Fire, the one that stood three or four centuries ago, no memory of the painting in the old cloister oddly titled the Dance of Death . He stood for a long time in front of the small memorial to thousands of Sikh soldiers, who had died for the British. Stepping out of the cathedral his thoughts turned briefly to the road to Amritsar, to a very different structure, the cathedral of his childhood, the Golden Temple. This is the shrine of a place where his grandparents and parents took refuge whenever struck by catastrophic events. For some mysterious reason on the steps of St Paul’s the young engineering professor also brought to mind a book he had read during his college days: The Temple of Golden Pavilion . But it was the real shrine (and not fiction) that provided him with comfort and extremes of happiness, and despite being a man of science he often thought about the road to Amritsar.
     

     
    I have only once been to the Golden Temple. Father had to go to Punjab on official duty, an interstate crime investigation, and I accompanied him and Mother. I was around eight then. We were not Sikhs, but the gurdwara was open to all humans. ‘Humans’? Even at that age they were a mystery to me. And ‘Sikhs’? Honestly I knew nothing about the Sikhs then, and I didn’t care. Once an uncle of mine said, Today at the bus stop I saw three human beings and a Sikh. And we all laughed without recognising his racism. Other than Bhagat Singh in a trilby and Indira Gandhi’s shoe-licking president, I had little idea then about the Sikh community’s out-of-proportion contribution to the freedom struggle and the armed forces. In school the textbooks taught me next to nothing about Sikh history, or about Maharajah Ranjit Singh and his grand multicultural Empire. The Sikhs are a proud people, only 2 per cent of the country’s population, but for some strange reason don’t consider themselves a minority. Most walk like kings. And have the rare ability to laugh at themselves. My uncle must have envied them. But I don’t think my family had anti-Sikh hatred ingrained in the psyche . . . At the Golden Temple I don’t recall now if we ate the ‘spartan’ but delicious langar or not. It is all coming back to me now, fresh with all its smells. Dal and chapatti served on plates made of fig leaves (stitched to each other with toothpicks). Something left a deep impression on me. I have not