Helium: A Novel

by Jaspreet Singh

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.

Genres: Fiction, India, Asia, Historical Fiction, Literature, Ebooks

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 18, 2013

About the author

Jaspreet Singh (born 1969) is a Canadian writer.
He grew up in India and moved to Canada in 1990.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book for review from NetGalley.

I was recently browsing around on NetGalley after, oh... Two years of inactivity there, or so. I saw this book, and it looked really intriguing to me. I loved the cover, and the book description sounded fantastic - a story about India's turbulent recent history, the assassination of Indira Gandhi... Intriguing stuff.

I really wanted to love this book. I was hoping that it would speak to me and allow me to learn something of what it was like to live through such things. I was hoping for this book to be beautifully written and expertly told. But unfortunately, almost immediately, I struggled with this book.

I ended up giving up on this at 20%. I just couldn't get into the story. I couldn't follow the narration - it jumped around, not only in time and memory, but between random, unconnected thoughts and observations. There are sentence fragments, sentences that seem out of order, and jumbled phrases that just don't make sense to me.

The writing and the style just didn't work for me. It's told in first person narrative, and I found it extremely hard to get into the main character and narrator's head. In fact, I didn't even know his name until around the 19% mark. (It's Raj.) Not that that's a requirement for me, but it does help to get to know the person I'm supposed to be closest to in the story. It also felt distant and cold, as though Raj's own history meant nothing to him. He describes witnessing a mob of men throw a tire over his teacher - his friend - and set him on fire as though it was nothing. He tells the story as though he's describing paint drying.

And intermixed in all of this is information about Raj's work in rheology - the science of flow.

But there seems to be no flow to this story. It's not fluid or smooth - it's choppy and jumps around seemingly without rhyme or reason. There are many words, and it's possible, even likely, that they'd come together in the end and form a cohesive whole, but even getting to 20% was a struggle for me.

Here's a quote to illustrate, from 8%:

"I shall never forget my last visit to his office. The 19th of October, a faultless day like any other. The laburnum quivered in the sun, I recall, so bright they hurt my eyes. I placed the borrowed item on his heavily cluttered desk; sheets and memos spilling over, glacial mountains and ice fields of exam papers and clogged lava flows of lab reports. Still weak, recovering from jaundice, I was in a way rediscovering the world; everything around me felt new and alien. Even the smells I took for granted in the past, and the dewy brilliance of objects. Without wasting words he checked if I had the energy to walk back to the hostel. I nodded. But he insisted on driving me in his white Fiat, which he drove slowly for my sake. On the way we talked about Maxwell's demons, he was also curious about my recently formed opinions and thoughts on Levi. I was unable to express myself properly. I said something about Levi's dark sense of humour. How he made use of snake droppings once to manufacture lipstick! Then we discussed briefly the chapter that left a huge impression on me. How the author had dealt with hunger. What really happened inside the 'concentration' camp. Up until that day the words 'dilute' and 'concentrated' were simply connected to the density of molecules in solutions (and not human beings). The writing had disturbed me, pushed me out of my comfort level. Those pages were set in a world I did not know."

This paragraph is just all over the place. It's random, and vague. It left me confused and didn't add anything to the story.

I'm sure that this book is amazing, or could be amazing, for the right reader. I don't think that I'm that reader. I no longer have the patience to wade through jungles of words to try to piece them into a story. I need more cohesion.

It's also possible that this is not the final copy as well. I am not able to find anything saying for sure whether this has been corrected yet, so it is likely it has not. If that's the case, further editing may resolve some of the things I struggled with. But as it stands, I just don't think this book is for me.

[Ian Laird · Rating 1 out of 5]

Original review from mid-2016:

Finished this through willpower - eviscerating full review to follow...

Full review 2 June 2021:

I should start with the caveat that I am not Indian. I have been to India twice, visiting Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, and had a marvellous time on both occasions, enjoying friendly hospitality and the manifold delights of a richly diverse country full of vibrant colour.

What I know about Indian political history I have learned from school India: A Modern History by Percival Spear, histories such as Maria Misra’s Vishnus Crowded Temple: India Since The Great Rebellion and Indian literature, especially R. K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai and Kiran Desai. This is an ongoing journey and I am happy to acknowledge that there are many gaps in my understanding of the country.

Having said that I reckon there is a lot you can tell about the culture of a nation from its artwork: from its painters and sculptors.

On a visit to Delhi in April 2016 we went to the National Museum. Our party of five got into two cars with our guides and were driven to a gracious precinct with Sienna coloured buildings and spacious gardens set with sculpture among the trees. The high-ceilinged buildings were cool and full of paintings. I thought that’s rather nice, a museum that has lots of art work in addition to all the artefacts and objects I was looking forward to seeing. But it turned out we were at the National Art Gallery, which is next door to the National Museum – I was initially disappointed, there was not time to see both because we were flying out that day.

Anyway, I concentrated on enjoying the art works. They were interesting representations of colonial and other historical architecture, scenes from everyday life and portraiture. With few exceptions I did not know the artists. Then I happened upon a portrait of a young woman which was startlingly different from anything I had seen up to that point.

It was painted with free brush strokes, with vibrant colour and palpable sensuality. Then I saw more in a similar style with the same qualities. The artist was Amrita Sher-Gil and the obvious tragedy in her life was the shortness of it - she died at 27. I subsequently learned there was good reason for her paintings looking the away they do; she lived her life passionately and not all that carefully, leading to a premature death, probably the result of complications arising from an abortion.

All of this preamble is me skirting round the issue: you know a book is struggling when your review is about things apart from the book. On page eight of Helium, Raj, our central protagonist, takes a taxi from his father’s house on Amrita Sher-Gil Marg to the campus where he will spend his sabbatical. Given that authors, or at least good ones, choose names deliberately, this suggests an irony, unconscious or otherwise. By using the artist’s name he is giving the street a creative, lively connotation, but Raj does not have these qualities. He is a scientist a with failing marriage, an expert in the field of the deformation of materials, and whose widowed father is a retired policeman who may be a murderer.

After a long absence, Raj has returned from the United States to Delhi, and stays with his father, from whom he is largely estranged. Raj also recalls his university tutor, Professor Singh, to whom he was close, who was burned to death after being set on fire by fanatics during the explosion of sectarian violence following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 1 November 1984. Raj was close to his tutor, but even closer to Nelly, his tutor’s wife, and he now seeks her out after all this time; twenty years have passed since Professor Singh’s death.

Raj finds Nelly, in Shimla, historically significant as the seasonal seat of government during British rule. Each year when the heat got too much in Delhi, the administration simply upped stakes and moved to the remote hill station. Nelly is about to retire from her archivist’s job. Raj’s contact with Nelly is desultory and disappointing. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. She is permanently damaged by what happened to her husband. In the meantime Raj has confirmed what he suspected; that his father was complicit in allowing the historical violence to go unchecked.

And that’s it. The background for the story is sensational: political trauma, widespread violence in the streets, criminal complicity and possibly corruption. All this is pretty explosive, a good set of ingredients for exciting passionate story telling. Yet it does not work. The fictional elements: Raj’s difficult relationship with his father, seeking out his former lover, returning to Indian after a long absence - all amounts to very little. Raj is not interesting enough and certainly way too sorry for himself. Nelly is a shell. There is no passion.

Perhaps the whole experience would have been better as non–fiction. The fact of the assassination and its aftermath are sensational enough of themselves. The scene where Professor Singh is burned alive is horrific. And such immolations actually occurred. A factual account of the assassination, the Emergency which preceded it, the eruption of lawlessness, the vengeance wrecked upon the Sikhs, the opportunism of those seeking to take advantage of the turmoil to open up old wounds and enmities, all this would have worked better than attempting to dress it up in a fictionalised account, especially one premised on one man’s faltering marriage, his estrangement from his daughters, his attempt to reconnect with his father and his old lover. He is tired, he sounds tired and not all that interesting or admirable.

Almost a waste of time.

[Ellen Shifrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it, although the prose style kept me on my toes so to speak. I heard Mr. Singh interviewed, and then got the book, and while I don't remember the interview, I will remember the book. It deals with the November '84 Sikh massacre, so it's not light reading, but so many wonderful moments of wisdom. For example: “Clara has her romantic ideas of India and she clings to those ideas and I am a personification of those ideas. I am not allowed to narrate the dark side of that romance – how ugly the collective consciousness of a nation can be.” (p. 109) That insistence on pointing out the universal in the midst of the unbearable specific - I think is truly important to be able to remember to do.

It's a book essentially about human rights, the angst of finding out about people who are not as they seem, and reconciling, somehow, somehow . . .

[Ayelet Waldman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm obsessed with anything about India so I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

[Shreya Vaid · Rating 4 out of 5]

''Primo Levi survived the German Nazis and Italian Fascists because he helped them prepare Buna Rubber during the war. In India, my compatriots slipped rubber around Professor Singh's neck and set him on fire.''- Raj, Helium

Some books are written as fiction, but when you read them, they barely feel like one. Helium by Jaspreet Singh is a political novel set in the time of 1984 Sikh riots in Delhi. On 6th June, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered tanks into Golden Temple at Amritsar and those tanks and bullets rigged apart the holy shrine of Sikhs to catch terrorists. On 31st October, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The very next day, annihilation was Sikh community was conducted in which about 8,000 Sikhs were burned to the ground, including Professor Singh, who is the center of the novel Helium.

The story starts with Raj, who is a chemical engineering student at a university in Delhi, and his favorite Professor is Mr. Singh, who is an expert on the element, Helium. Both of them share a unique bond of books and chemistry and other things of life. As a teenager, Raj looks up to Mr. Singh not just his professor but someone in whom he could confide as well. On an unfateful day, when Raj and his classmates were returning with Mr. Singh from an industrial visit, a mob gathered around the group near a Railway Station. Unaware of the political fiasco that happened in Delhi when they all were visiting an industry, the mob grabs Mr, Singh, puts a rubber tyre around his neck and burns him to the ground. Raj tries his best to reason with the mob but ends up being a mute spectator to the heinous murder of his Professor.

''In the end, all that remained along with the ashes were a few bones and a steel bracelet. Black like a griddle.''

Twenty-five years later, Raj comes back to India as a scientist to seek the widow of his Professor, Nelly Singh and also work on his feeling towards his father, who he feels was involved in the activities that took place in Delhi during anti-Sikh riots. The story takes a turn when Raj visits Nelly in Shimla, and she takes over the story, She describes the horrors she went through during Anti-Sikh riots, even though she was the victim, she was abused and silenced most of the time. She even maintains a record of what happened during those riots, but never any authority paid heed to her claims. She turns out to be one of the victims who are always silenced, thanks to political motives and government goons, who twist every fabric in an incident to suit their needs. A day comes when Raj also confronts his father, about his involvement in the heinous crimes, but in vain.

Helium is a book that chronicles India's political history's most critical chapter, something which is always in debate till the date. The book turned out to be a great read and heart wrenching for me. Somehow, I always had half knowledge about this issue. But when you read Helium from Raj's perspective, you do not just get to know inside scoop of what went down but also the talent of Indian authorities who very slyly change facts and figures in front of the public. For most of them, nothing happened that day. But for many of Sikh families, they can still feel the heat of the fire that extinguished their loved ones in front of them.

''And I remember that day clearly when his hair was being cut. He had shut his eyes tight, and the crackling of the transistor radio could be heard in the barber's shop and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's voice: When a big tree falls the Earth shakes.''

The storyline of Helium is smooth and engaging. The only parts where you might feel confused is Raj's narration, where he uses metaphors from his language of trade, science. The story also has few jump points, where it includes inferences from riots of Babri Masjid and Godhra, but the story looks still credible. Helium was written as fiction, but when you read it, you realize its all facts. There are even pictures included in the book that will shake the sentiments in your heart. These pictures make the book look like an experiment file, the experiment being human conscience which is as twisted as political tales of this country.

Overall, Helium is a book that you should definitely read. It is a book that will make the new generation aware of their past generations involvement in inhuman crimes and they might make an effort to work on the bridging the differences of caste and creed. Helium is something that will make you work towards the betterment of society more, it will make you look at the person standing next to you as your own, no matter what his religious or political inclinations are.

Picture source;http://sanjayausta.photoshelter.com/

[Darcee Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riveting tale that brings up many questions of human compassion, as well as individuality so pure that it has been unseen this year in literature until now.

Darcee Kraus
Mckinleyville, CA
http://www.etsy.com/shop/BlassGlass

[Karan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering that most art that matters (Does it, really? Why most? Doesn't all art matter? Anyways!) is a creatively articulate individual's response to the surrounding world, what does one do as a passive reader when the dirty particulars of the parent subject also creep their way into it? Other than elasticising my empathy and knowledge, I am somewhat troubled when I am bombarded with page after page of incriminating documents and testimonies, like I am in Singh's Helium. I went through something similar while reading Bolano's interminable 2666. Maybe I should consider the literary, semi-fictive work designed around it as the trojan horse for a dispossessed individual or faction's need for an enduring written document to emerge from complete oblivion. Does the imprint on the chatterati's or a reviewer like mine's consciousness change the general order of things at grassroots? Borrowing a meditation from Kundera, one would hope that the incessant cycle of communal genocide and machinery of denial that repeats itself in weekly, monthly and yearly cycles would somehow give the atrocities a certain "weight", some critical mass after which a moral and political revolution would transpire. The large font genocides keep accumulating: the anti-Sikh riots in the 80s, the continuing torture and dispossession of Kashmiris and Naxalites, the anti-Muslim 2002 pogrom in Gujarat; talking nothing of the casual, spontaneous bursts of deranged, licensed violence on religious or poltiical lines that continues to decimate families, neighbourhoods and whole tribes. But maybe every reader is part of those grassroots, and one day after such meditation and contemplation has been done by a critical mass of people, the tolerance thresholds will be reset and the aforementioned revolution would come that would bring forth a new era with space for rights, equality, fair trials, remorse and justice. Aren't we familiar with this train of thought too? How many times in history and current state of affairs have we seen idealism bow down to corruption and short-term gains for people seeking favours, money and "power"?

So purely as a cautionary tale then and a reminder of the depravity and Evil humanity is capable of, let's balk, gawp and sigh over just an example revisit of an epic miscarriage of justice and morality in a land where governing and judicial institutions being infested with cronies having zero moral radar and zilch intellectual rigour at every level is the norm. Where Establishment backed butchery and dispossession of minorities en-masse with paid-mobs despatched and organised by the ready machinery of the colluding police-army guilds is a sorry parallel narrative. Where mass amnesia and apathy has become the way to move on with the day as attention spans worsen, the atrocities pile up, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International warnings are given and retracted, victims get morphed into distant numbers and statistics, farcical committees are formed and disbanded, perpetrators go on to govern even larger constituencies and, no mean feat, lead the whole country. From this regrettably fallen land comes one such distillation of an epic tragedy into a personal, individual realm.

Existing in that troublesome twilight zone between fiction and non-fiction, Singh's Helium is in equal measure a cathartic and metaphorical exercise that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. It's easily one of the most high-profile literary reactions to the 1984 pogroms and coupled with Tavleen Singh's Darbar which gave an insider's view of the gradual but definite corrosion of the power corridors under the Gandhi family in the 80s and the 90s, makes for a necessary companion piece.

An Establishment backed genocide transpired on the streets in India following the assassination of its lady prime minister, Indira Gandhi. The ruling pan-national Congress party, spearheaded by her son, exercised every muscle he could in the power gym corridors of all the corroded four estates and managed to not just exonerate the perpetrators but erode and re-frame the memory of the whole pogrom. Naming and shaming the key perpetrators in the governing party , the seething directness with which Singh writes the setpieces in the second half certainly does the memory of those who perish everyday some comeuppance. It's probably negligible relief for those perishing in the negazone of family and justice deprived limbo, but as a cautionary tale for the future this has value. As the way Singh has designed his book, his ambitious juxtapositions with inorganic chemistry and geophysics notwithstanding, he wants the focus squarely on the castigation of those who got scotfree in the 1984 riots against the Sikhs, and this admirable mission of his almost overwhelms the fiction and an attempt to critique it.

Looking at the book closely, the key refrain that emerged for me was that of an inchoate polyphonia of a troubled soul struggling to come to terms with gratuitous violence in his past on his homecoming journey. He is chronicled here travelling within a completely transformed cityscape scenting out the trail of the Event and his mindscape is seen drawing metaphors and stringing symmetries with concepts from his (and author's) professional worlds. From metallurgy to ornithology, some wild and idiosyncratic relationships are made, and while not all successful, they are endearing and made me revel in the capacity, beauty and refuge of Imagination. I have to confess that the homecoming bit, especially in the first half, sagged every few pages as pastoral descriptions and short adjective-laden phrases of static scenes accumulated, but with some wide-ranging solipsism, these were tempered with. There was a thread of an unrequited semi-romance that veered between frustrating vagueness and literary pretentiousness that neither convinced nor moved me. The protagonist's drive to his home country derived much traction from this unresolved, unspoken space but Singh mired most of the emotion in literary smokes and mirrors building it up to Hellenic proportions, for not much.

What surprised me most was the sudden burst of confrontation, incident and revelations that sprouted and completely took over the second half. The author almost transformed into a rigorous documentarian sparing no words, naming and shaming with utmost certainty and almost toppling the whole meditative, distant, quietly brutal trance he had begun with. This lavaburst of activity on the written page left me in a perpetual state of agitation, and while his gifted turn of phrase did not make the whole exercise unwieldy, the book somehow did not become more than a sum of its parts as the characters and their journeys became completely incidental. I do recommended it, but with caution.

[Linda Lpp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the book wandered off into places and scientific details that for me distracted from the story. Reading about events from India's history was interesting but in many instances horrific, and disturbing. ** will add more soon.

[Briann · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was overall a pretty good book. The science sometimes was a little heavy, but I like books that are multigeneric and unique.

I did have a bit of a problem with Raj being selected as the book’s narrator. I don’t understand why Jaspreet Singh selected Raj as the narrator. Singh is a Sikh himself and experienced the 1984 pogroms first-hand. Therefore, I do not completely understand why he made Raj, a Hindu, the narrator.

Also, Raj and his father already had a terrible relationship, so Raj discovering that his father helped perpetrate the pogroms was not as dramatic a betrayal as it could have been.

I don’t understand why Nellie wasn’t given a more central role or more agency.

“ ‘The women in the colony are the ones most betrayed,’ [Nellie] said thoughtfully (and my father was listening). ‘The women die every day, they relive the trauma over and over. Just because they survived, outlasted, they feel the weight, the guilt, they bear the burden of shame, and witness the shamelessness of the conductors of the pogrom. Layers of layers of evidence… But not many believe… November 1984 never happened. November 1984 is not an Event in our nation’s history. Men don’t talk about sexual violence. Men use women to humiliate “other” men. History has used these women in the worst possible way. The state would like them to live without a past.’ ”

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won an Advance Reading Copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway, so I'm unsure if any parts will be edited. My review is based on the copy I received.

Initially this story seems to follow the same formula as The Kite Runner - Grown man must return to his homeland to reconcile the horrors witnessed in his youth and in the process discovers secrets about his father and his own past. Unlike The Kite Runner, this one did not wrap up nicely with a little bow on top. I prefer some ambiguity in a story and was happy to find this in Helium. Helium follows Raj as he returns to India and the site of the 1984 Sikh massacres. He is trying to learn more about what happened to his murdered professor's family and about his own father's involvement in the mass killings. The narrative moves between past and present almost unnoticed and does not follow an easily distinguished path. Like Raj's thoughts, it is convoluted and takes some piecing together. The story is also intermingled with black and white photos from around India. Initially these photographs were bothersome to me (due to their lack of captions) but they made the story seem more realistic, as if it is a person's piecing together of their own thoughts and photographs like a scrapbook.

One passage talks about the memorials to various leaders found around India and critiques the idea of them as memorials, when they are really intended to make people forget everything that is not presented before them. The topic of memory and of forgetting comes up frequently in the novel and this passage was a beautiful expression of those ideas in relation to the government's involvement in the massacres.

This won't be the book for everyone due to the jumpiness of the narrative but I really enjoyed it. It made me want to read more on the massacres, and I was pleased when the author interspersed book lists throughout the story. This is a very interestingly written book and the author creates a thought provoking story with many loose ends that keep the reader curious even after they've finished.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

couldnt put this book down, talked about a story that I knew nothing about, and of all the riots and murderous rampages that have occurred in India, Im surprised that I was not exposed to this sooner. One thing that strikes me as odd is the absolute lack of guilt on the part of Nelly or the narrator. Nelly, for cheating on her husband with his student, maybe in the events that came after the affair, guilt about her husband was the last thing she had to think about. I think there must have been extreme guilt in the loss of her children. the What ifs and if onlys must have been enormous. At what point do you say, if only I had done one thing different the trajectory of my life may have changed. And it seems like Nelly and her husband had a good marriage. there didnt seem any reason for her to cheat. Who knows. And the narrator defied the trust that his professor placed in him by taking his wife. and befriending the children. And insinuating himself in their lives. and then watching the professor burn. And doing nothing. Not attempting to stop the murder at the time. Or avenging it after the fact. Or checking up on Nelly after the events. It was a very odd book, but I loved the way it was written, almost like a scrap book but very much in stream of consciousness. Shall I return this book to the library or reread it? To be honest, I didnt much like the personality of the narrator. too flawed for my liking. distasteful even. I do have to admire the author. like Manil Suri, educated, an academic, but with a totally different side to him, to write like that. Its not that I didnt like the narrator, I didnt have feelings for him, no sympathy, he was like Hamlet, distraught and unable to do anything about it. I loved the setting Deli and Shimla, absolutely Magical. still thinking I may keep it and read it again, but no, I hate men like that.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't add much more than has already been said about this book. Interesting topic, of which I had no previous knowledge, but couldn't follow the narrative at all. I actually thought I was reading an autobiography at the beginning. Maybe it was loosely based on the authors own experience? Who knows. And I never got to grip with the symbolisms included.

I probably wont ever read another one by this author as I found this book to fragmentary and sadly the main character wasn't someone I ended up caring about. The writing style was just too hard.

I wish this book had captured me, because finding out your father is implicated in a terrible event, and how you, as the child, overcome or reconcile with that, is a very interesting concept - I have often wondered about how sons and daughters of SS officers from the Nazi party handle this. But this book is not the book to do that well.

Within the novel the author mentions some other books that cover the same period - I think I will try and read those to further my knowledge of this period in India's history that I shamefully knew absolutely nothing about. So reading the book has been positive in one way.

I would not recommend this book to anyone unless they really like rambling pontifications. Maybe someone who like Salman Rushdie style books?

[Natalia · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's... I don't even know how to describe it. My first point of frustration was the over use of the term "so-called" which appears on almost every page at the beginning and never truly disappears, often being used needlessly, like a school kid would add extra adjectives to make a short essay appear longer without ever expanding on anything. But then you kind of get a sense that writing is not the author's vocation and he lacks experience. Interesting points were an insight into some of India's history, but sadly the author doesn't appear to be able to hold onto his own thoughts. It is somewhat reminiscent of a man rambling and hopping between subject matters. Perhaps the main character is in fact the author, fictionalised to make him more interesting. Unfortunately as a result, this story was a nightmare to follow and some pages had to be re-read to try and figure out where the train of thought decided to split from its original track. Overall, it drones on sluggishly and wasn't worth the time it took to read and then to get over the bewilderment.

[Ba]

Though my understanding is really incomplete, I learned a lot about history here...(think about authors who write to pander or "teach" to a certain audience, what diff audiences get or miss, etc.) I liked how Singh turned my expectations on my head. There were shades here (to me) of Roy (especially the love among severe political and personal pain), and at the beginning I thought of perceived differences between authors...how many feel the impulse to prove their authority before writing on a subject...whereas others do not...thinking of people like Szymborska, whose freedom (writing about philosophy, science, love, politics...) is inspiring to me. Singh also weaves usually "disparate" fields together in a poetic way. Thought about Miroslav Holub. And Digges. But most striking to me was how I read this in relation to Modiano...both focus on the revelation of a father's monstrous crimes, the complex, tortured feelings of the son, the older woman affected or entangled in the father's political actions...and the writing style, too. Very pared down, did not overexplain things. Singh switches points of view, narrative to dialogue and back, mixes media (i.e. Sebald) throughout the narrative without much warning. But it is done elegantly...will re-read this week.

[Cc]

Though my understanding is really incomplete, I learned a lot about history here...(think about authors who write to pander or "teach" to a certain audience, what diff audiences get or miss, etc.) I liked how Singh turned my expectations on my head. There were shades here (to me) of Roy (especially the love among severe political and personal pain), and at the beginning I thought of perceived differences between authors...how many feel the impulse to prove their authority before writing on a subject...whereas others do not...thinking of people like Szymborska, whose freedom (writing about philosophy, science, love, politics...) is inspiring to me. Singh also weaves usually "disparate" fields together in a poetic way. Thought about Miroslav Holub. And Digges. But most striking to me was how I read this in relation to Modiano...both focus on the revelation of a father's monstrous crimes, the complex, tortured feelings of the son, the older woman affected or entangled in the father's political actions...and the writing style, too. Very pared down, did not overexplain things. Singh switches points of view, narrative to dialogue and back, mixes media (i.e. Sebald) throughout the narrative without much warning. But it is done elegantly...will re-read this week.

[Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been quite an astonishing and weirdly beautiful if somewhat traumatic read due to the substance if the story being based around a student’s professor being doused in petrol and set alight . Years later Raj is still affected and returns to India find the professor’s Widow.
The path this leads Raj on is enlightening but Also painful as he finds out distressing truth about his father and his it all goes back to that day at the Delhi station and the attack on the professor.
The book has a glorious setting of the Kashmir landscape and is a feast for the imagination as the author describes it .

[Hanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to read this, because it sounded very promising on the cover and I really wanted to learn more about India’s history.
But this book was definitely not for me. It’s all over the place, hard to understand what the main character is talking about a lot of times.
In the end you can kind of understand the story and there are some really strong paragraphs, but there are a lot of paragraphs that don’t make sense at all to me.
Unfortunately it is one of the first books I bought that I don’t really feel like keeping 😅

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving, emotional work that brings us into the mind of a witness to genocide. Sometimes it was hard to read because of how freely the author switches from narration to dialogue, but I was able to quickly able to adjust. It's painful, complicated and enraging all at once, but also very sentimental and human. A great read to get a basic idea about the political and cultural conflicts in modern India.

[zespri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just visited both Delhi and Shimla, I found this book fascinating. It is not that easy to read, the author's style is unusual, but I couldn't put the book down. It's not normal for me to want to go back and begin a book again, but I feel I missed so much first time through, that a re-read is a must.

[Anonymous · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its's definitely not lighthearted as I was expecting. It is politically heavy and deals with the 1984 Sikh massacre and the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. I didn't finish this book since I was honestly kind of scared of what happens next, so I don't have much to say about this.

p.s this is my first ever review

[Nourhan Jamal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbingly beautiful. Tragic.
4.5 because I took a long time than I should have, because I was dealing with uni responsibilities that was impeding my reading pace.
"Worth is the ocean. Fame is but the bruit that roars along the shadows."

[Catriona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Struggled to get into this and to follow it but at the same time knew I was reading something good! I had no idea about the events in this part of Indian history so I at least appreciated the learning through reading even if the writing style was a challenge.

[Haadia Mumtaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book started off really well and kept me hooked. I also love the topic it tackled. However it seemed to stretch on unnecessarily which was a bit off putting. Additionally, the constant back and forth between stories and time spans felt a bit disorienting.

[Parvati Rotherham · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read, beautifully written and depicts an interesting part of history that was not aware of. The photos throughout the book are a bit unnecessary as they have context provided and just make reading the book disjointed

[Ot · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for a class. Truly one of the most boring and incomprehensible books I’ve ever read. Thinking about the fact that I will soon be tested on this book makes me want to inhale a gallon of helium.

[Gabrielle Trenbath · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept on trying to finish this book but however hard I tried I just couldn’t. The narrative was just so slow it just couldn’t keep my attention

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreaking!

[Mohamed Zaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking and leave me pondering......

[Eliot Parulidae · Rating 2 out of 5]

A genocide is a formidable subject for a novel, even if the author has a personal connection to the event. Humans, readers, lack the capacity for limitless empathy, and the author discovers that it is his or her task to expand the valence shell of understanding by appealing to readers' quirks and biases. This may mean talking about a specific group of victims: the children, for instance, or the nerds. Yes, the nerds. The intellectuals cruelly deceived by Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, the people taken by the Khmer Rouge for the crime of wearing glasses, educated Jews in concentration camps who suffered more for trying to understand...for certain readers, these stories rend the heart like nothing else. In Helium, Jaspreet Singh shows us the 1984 pogrom against the Sikh minority in the city of New Delhi through the eyes of nerds. The protagonist is Raj, who, like the author, works as a chemical engineer. He is haunted by the memory of watching Hindu fanatics burn his beloved professor to death on a railway platform, and by his complicated relationship with the professor's archivist widow. The novel attempts to use his fractured, idiosyncratic, science-tinged narrative to give us access to a horror few in the West know anything about.

If only it worked. Singh employs a dime store assortment of motifs - birds, superfluids, particular books and writers, trains, Kindles, cold, volcanoes - that never seem to gel. Author avatar speeches occur. The author often tells instead of shows. The protagonist treats women badly for no reason and never learns his lesson. The murdered professor doesn't get sufficient character development. The big twist is extremely predictable, but the plot elements it (finally) introduces are never resolved. An avalanche of details that bore buries those details that fascinate. As nerdy as Singh clearly is, he is unable to integrate science into the story as anything but a bunch of awkward asides. I am reduced to praising this book for having cool pictures in it.

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

On page 99 of my copy (an advanced reading copy), the narrator reminds us his beloved professor thought the three most important questions involved the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of the mind. He then refutes these questions by suggesting three more important ones, the ones that, for me, were my understanding of the novel: why do people respond differently to traumatic events, how do we remember the past, and why when "meaning" collapses in our lives do some of us seem to locate a new "meaning"? I feel that is what the main character is trying to do throughout the novel, move on past his trauma and see how others have moved on. It's not his trauma that haunts me. It's Nelly's, another character's.

The first 100 pages, for me, were fragmented and stream-of-consciousness mixed with chemistry and Indian vocabulary that I didn't know. I struggled. Since I wasn't able to follow the writing style easily, I focused on the story that I could. Though our narrator Raj was supposed to be home on sabbatical visiting his sick father, we learn more about his relationship with his estranged wife and about the present life of his professor's widow. The randomness of the narration must have some purpose, but I am clearly not on the same intellectual plain. I also know there is some tie in with the birds, some metaphors there,but...the author assumes the reader has certain background knowledge. I felt like giving up, but I'm glad I didn't because I would have missed an emotional story.