Helium

July 1, 2013
Singh’s (Chef) second novel follows Dr. Raj Kumar back to India, 25 years after he left for graduate school in the United States, to find the widow of his favorite professor and confront the horrors of his past. In 1984, Raj stood by, helpless, as rioters set his Sikh mentor on fire during the pogroms that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination. But afterward, he can’t bring himself to visit Dr. Kaur’s widow, Nelly, with whom Raj had been conducting an affair. Now, a quarter of a century later, his marriage in shambles and his career on a precipice, Raj tracks down Nelly in the mountain city of Shimla and finds her aged by time and grief. He tries to regain her trust and learn her story, while investigating on his own in an attempt to make amends. In the process, he uncovers damning evidence that only binds him more tightly to his past, and Raj must decide how to proceed without causing irreparable damage to Nelly—or himself. An indictment of the terrible events of November, 1984, the book teases out the complicated intersection of family, love, politics, and hate, and how one man confronts the responsibility and guilt of one of the worst times in his nation’s history.

July 1, 2013
A melancholy novel, under the influence of W.G. Sebald, about a dark moment in India's contemporary history: the retaliatory pogrom against Sikhs after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on November 1, 1984. "[W]e all need a little private madness and a little lie in order to live....The problem is that your madness and your lie harmed so many." Raj Kumar is addressing his father, a retired police official with whom he has a tense relationship. Kumar, who left India and thrived in the States, has returned to confront the past and India's history. Kumar is a professor at Cornell, an expert on rheology, the science of the flow of materials. Marvelous details about rheology, and the unique characteristics of helium, Kumar's mentor's specialty, appear throughout the book but are too often deployed in a heavy-handed, symbolic manner. The book is so heavily indebted to Sebald (it even includes photographs of the sort Sebald lately made famous) that it might be called an imitation. Kumar's mood of unease, his bouts of nausea and confusion, his strange desires and stranger consummations--all seem derived from Sebald. In his title and method, Singh nods as well to Primo Levi's masterpiece of memoir The Periodic Table. Despite these profound debts and its curious style, Singh's (Chef, 2010 etc.) book has its own power. The story emerges slowly, following Kumar's return to India, a brief visit with his father, a return to his old school, and then a long interlude in the hill station of Shimla, where he tries in vain to have an in-depth conversation with Nelly, the wife of his old mentor. A gloomy but forceful novel.

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Starred review from October 1, 2013

Singh's second novel (after Chef) recounts Cornell professor Raj's obsessive search for the truth behind the murder of his own college professor and mentor during anti-Sikh riots across India in 1984. Years later, when Raj returns to India to visit his ailing father, he is driven to seek out Nelly, his professor's widow and an archivist. Nelly has secretly documented the events in defiance of widespread denial about the killings and official incitement from Indian police and the Congress party. Raj suspects, and later confirms, that his father, a retired police official, played a significant role in the events. Trained as a rheologist, Raj has a way of uncovering, describing, and explaining sordid events of the past, which Singh uses to structure and enrich the stream-of-consciousness narrative. Through the inclusion of archival photographs, Raj's tangential references to helium's chemical properties, and chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's writings, Singh re-creates the complicated tide of India's past, a past perniciously influenced by colonialism. VERDICT A well-crafted and weighty story, if not indictment, of this horrid era of history, this book is another achievement for Singh. While its asynchronicity is challenging, the writing offers a messy and disturbing beauty that is worth the effort. Recommended for all fiction collections.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

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