Helium by Jaspreet Singh – review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/15/helium-jaspreet-singh-review

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When his business trip to Iceland en route to Delhi is prolonged by the volcanic eruption, scientist Raj Kumar feels he has "slipped into an uncertain inbetween world". Even when he finally reaches Delhi this sense of liminality does not leave him: after 25 years away, he finds himself a "mere outsider" in his hometown, which like the rest of India has undergone "colossal transformation". Now the "deep traces of unresolved past" begin to obsess Kumar: the killing of his former professor in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the day after Indira Gandhi's assassination; the whereabouts of the professor's widow; the troubling role his father may have played in the pogrom…

Kumar is a specialist in rheology ("the science of deformation and flow. Even so-called 'solids' flow…", he explains) and the theme of "flow" governs both the novel's content and its fluid, mellifluous style, winding and weaving like the river Ganges through characters' stream-of-consciousness memories. The influence of Primo Levi and WG Sebald is strong in this richly intertextual novel exploring genocidal violence and the effects of the political on the personal. Singh's background as a scientist is apparent in the beautifully deployed scientific imagery: the past is like "drops of helium" that "refuse to disappear".

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