Helium: A Novel

by Jaspreet Singh

Overview

On 1 November 1984, a day after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination, a nineteen-year-old student, Raj, travels back from a class trip with his mentor, Professor Singh. As the group disembark at Delhi station a mob surrounds the professor, throws a tire over him, douses him in gasoline, and sets him alight.
Years later, after moving to the United States, Raj finds himself compelled to return to India to find his professor's widow, the beautiful and enigmatic Nelly. As the two walk through the misty mountains of Shimla, painful memories emerge, and Raj realizes he must face the truth about his father's role in a genocidal pogrom. But, as they soon discover, the path leads inexorably back to that day at the train station.
In this lyrical and haunting exploration of one of the most shocking moments in the history of the Indian nation, Jaspreet Singh has crafted an affecting and important story of memory, collective silences and personal trauma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620401187
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab, and brought up in Kashmir and in several cities in India. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for four awards including the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. He lives in Toronto.
Born in India, Jaspreet Singh moved to Canada in 1990. He is a novelist, essayist, short story writer and a former research scientist. He received his doctorate in chemical engineering in 1998 from McGill University, Montreal, and two years later decided to focus full time on writing. Seventeen Tomatoes, his debut story collection, won the 2004 Quebec First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, about the damaged landscapes of Kashmir, was a 2010 Observer Book of the Year and won the Canadian Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. He has also been a finalist for four awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. His work was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Punjabi and Farsi. He lives in the Canadian Rockies.

www.jaspreetsinghauthor.com

Editorial Reviews

A tour de force.” —The Globe and Mail

“An indictment of the terrrible 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“A poignant and devastating depiction of how silencing fails to annul complicity.” —Daphne Marlatt

“In Helium, Jaspreet Singh evokes, with striking images and prose that honours W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Primo Levi, the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in India. It is a feat of chemistry, but also of alchemy, for Singh transforms the seemingly ineffable—the enduring chaos engendered by mob violence—into a work of fiction both beguiling and lyrical.” —Taras Grescoe

“Singh illuminates a horrific event: the systematic genocide of minority Sikhs in November 1984 . . . [A] brutally honest indictment of an often glossed-over episode in India's long history.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

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.

Kirkus Reviews