Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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 Indias long history.” —Booklist
About the Author
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 Toronto. www.jaspreetsinghauthor.com