Jaspreet Singh’s eagerly awaited second novel is rather unusual, disturbingly beautiful and hard hitting

RHEOLOGY IS the study of the flow of matter, primarily in liquid state, but also as soft solids or solids under conditions in which they respond with plastic flow rather than deforming elastically in response to an applied force. It applies to substances which have a complex microstructure, such as muds and sludges, and bodily fluids e.g. blood. Well, there’s a lot of the latter in Helium. Heluim starts with the narrator, a professor of rheology recalling his last sabbatical visit home to New Delhi to visit his father, who is recovering from surgery. He stops over in Brussels on his way to attend a rheology conference, and gets stranded by the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption. The situation, coming after a rheology student presented a paper on the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius, sends the narrator into a mood of reflection. Everything in this world of ours flows. Even so-called solids, flow. My own work focuses on the flow of ‘complex materials’, the ones with ‘memory’. And the line, pretty much, sets the tone of what is to follow. India is a place filled with bad memories for Kumar. In 1984, the professor he considered as his mentor was murdered as part of the anti-Sikh ‘pogroms’ that followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Kumar witnessed the murder, which colours his feelings regarding his homeland. But the author is in no hurry to reveal the wider details and implications of that horrific event, which haunts the novel, as it haunts its protagonist. Instead, Singh follows the unpredictable trajectory, the non-linear ‘flow’ of memory itself, spilling backwards and forward in time in the manner of human consciousness, tantalising us with historical arcana and titbits as he unfurls his leisurely but purposeful narrative. Raj recalls how, within minutes of meeting him, Mohan Singh became his mentor and friend, introducing him to many potent, philosophical, scientific and literary ideas outside the professor’s area of specialisation, which was helium, He, the so-called noble gas. It was from the professor too that Raj first learned of Primo Levi, whose famous autobiographical stories were about his experiences of the holocaust. The periodic table, his mentor once explained, connects the world of molecules to the world of humans. In some senses, Helium bears many of the hallmarks of Singh’s lauded 2009 debut, Chef, which used a dying cook and Siachen to examine the bloody India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir.

An emotionally distant narrator, haunting memories and a contested history—as well as an acknowledged debt to WG Sebald—are all packaged inside a profoundly poetic novel that unfolds with the leisurely, meditative pace of a travelogue. Like his debut novel, Helium is a short 284 pages. But unlike his debut, it is pointedly peppered with archival photographs and real-life names, along with the odd scientific image and artist’s sketch, that it is palpably suggestive of a documentary, a non-fiction exposé. Memory continues to drive the narrator when he lands in Delhi, just as it shapes and drives the novel, which is anchored both in the events of 2010 and in the more distant events of 1984. For what is tugging at our rheologist’s consciousness, jostling for his attention among other memories from his life in Delhi and the very real happenings of 2010, is his memory of the time he witnessed the brutal murder of his former university professor. He invokes the nature of helium and the words of Levi to help fathom the 1984 massacre, to make sense of what he calls our periodic table of hate. His own driving impulse—one which he tries, unsuccessfully, to resist—is to explain humans and human memory in terms of atoms, molecules and elementary particles, and it’s this that imbues this unusual novel with an eerie, almost sinister beauty. Unable to shake the memories of 1984, to make the past stay in the past, Raj finally, 25 years after his professor’s death, gets on a train to Shimla to search for his widow, Nelly. He finds her, armed with a lame apology and a handful of questions. As the novel picks up in pace and moves towards its shocking revelations and ultimate denouement, Raj, or rather Singh himself, cannot help but meander through the idiosyncratic colonial history of Shimla, deliver us a treatise on ornithology in India and its British civil servant founder, Allan Octavian Hume—also a co-founder of India’s Congress party—and point out that every slope, every tree in the area carries traces of colonialism.

It is an oddly-haunting, somewhat mysterious novel with something of the free-flowing consistency of hyperbeautiful helium-4. A novel that does not shy away from delivering a savage indictment of suggestion that Shining India, as one of its characters says, “works for a small minority”.