Read Helium for Free Online Page A

government that harms its own citizens. A state in which life is sometimes extremely wretched as a form of deprivation or oppression or genocidal pogroms. In the land where Orwell was born, 1984 was never imaginary. In India it was real, 1984 is burned fully into my retina; it recurs every day, every month, every year with its own chilling periodicity.
    My memories are scalded memories. Remains of a fire. Dense black smoke flows through my veins. Delhi is a singed postcard. Smell of fungus, actinomycetes, just before rain. We waited. But it didn’t rain the first week of November. That is why human ash still coats my lungs. I have given up trying to comprehend the madness that overtook the city. I summon images, try to plot them with words and numbers on a 3D graph, but words don’t live up to their reputation, each one a failure. All I can do is listen to the pain of others. Perhaps it is more than my own.
     
    Twenty-five years after the Event, on a night like this, I took the train to Shimla to see my professor’s wife. Something keeps me from calling her a widow. As the narrow carriage picked up speed, I thought about the remaining days of my sabbatical, and the possibility of  closure. But the past refused to become past. Outside, a thin forest of chir pines and oaks with serrated leaves, although I could not see a thing. Only a faint reflection of spiral tracks and my own face in tinted glass. There exist only two ways to deal with time, and I, several years ago, chose the wrong way. More than once I thought of standing by the open, rattling door, but I was afraid of myself.
    Shimla or ‘Simla’ was colder than I had expected. A porter moved my luggage along the rough cobbled path to the hotel on the upper mall. I had a booking for six nights at the Peterhof (a fossil left behind by the Empire). The hotel clerk had warned me of an upcoming Hindu Party convention, a ‘brainstorming’ session, a so-called chintan baithak. But the event hadn’t seemed to matter when I made the reservation.
    The city was still waiting for the first snowfall of the season. For some unknown reason it didn’t snow during January and February, I was told. Global warming was too easy an assumption or conclusion. The distant mountains, visible from the balcony, still carried the weight of snow of previous years. The Himalayas were higher there. Chiselled peaks (with names like Bangles of the Moon) flushed with strands of orange or flamingo light. My room had a musty, resinous smell and the navy-blue carpet carried white stains along the non-functional fireplace. After that long and exhausting journey I felt like taking a proper shower. But, as expected, there was no soap in the bathroom, so I stepped out to purchase a cake of soap.
    Nelly, if she followed the same profession, works at a library, the IIT Chair had told me, scratching his shock of white hair. Library or the archives. She was trained as an archivist. On a departmental sheet he had scribbled her phone number. ‘So much time has passed by, I am sure the number has changed.’
    After a shower I shaved, then called the number. The answering machine clicked in and I was greeted by a voice choked by years of cigarette smoke, at the same time musical; the voice, darting out of the receiver, almost stabbed me. Not her, it was the voice of a man, a mediocre Indian Leonard Cohen. I left a detailed message for Nelly, and an inchoate apology regarding my failure to get in touch earlier.
    Failure is the right word.
    Shimla or Simla – a city six thousand feet high – was not a bad place to recover, an altermodern sanatorium, but my head pulsed like an overinflated tyre, and I was foolishly eager to locate Nelly. The best bet was to wait. I don’t recall how I spent an entire day in that L-shaped hotel room, but no one returned my calls. Next day, again, I spent the first half in the room, but after lunch, feeling energised, walked a hundred metres to the edge of the hotel. Past the