The Third Hand

Eleven years ago, the day after the Third World War had ended finally, Mr. Badami came to my room in the camp and drew a chair out. ‘What do you think is going to happen now, Private?’ His voice was between gurgly and grumpy, more gurgly than grumpy, I thought at the moment. Maybe because it was only seven in the morning.

‘Nothing unusual, sir, I suppose,’ I tried to sound cautious but there was no need. The War had ended, hadn’t it? After twenty-seven years and half the world population gone, most of the fossil fuel exhausted, who would give a fuck about what Mr. Badami thought about me thinking about what was going to happen now? He was not my boss anymore – at least not in my mind. There were some formalities that needed to be taken care of but that shouldn’t take more than a few hours. 

No computers were left though. We had gone back to the days of scribing and pencil-pushing (literally). There was no paper as well, since the War had killed almost all the trees. We wrote on slates now. Wrote and erased. Wrote and tried to remember what was written, wiped the slate and wrote again. The War had done one good thing. It had made us intelligent. Many of us now could recite the table for nineteen and add and subtract fractions.   

Mr. Badami was one of those who were at odds with this new wave of intelligence. He lacked the deftness with which one could survive in a world devoid of smartphones and shopping carts. His concern was genuine. ‘How are we going to order pizza?’ He asked me. Obviously, he couldn’t cook, that imbecile.

I stared at the sundial outside my window and moved in my chair – a universal signal that someone was in a hurry and someone didn’t want to continue this conversation – that someone being me in this context. Mr. Badami was unmoved. ‘During the War,’ he continued nonetheless, ‘I thought we were fighting for a better world. But what kind of a world is this? I had to stand in a queue for water the other day. A queue, Private, a fucking queue! Which better world has a queue? Did we wipe out half of the world population for this? For standing in a queue? That too for water!’

Was he crying? There was definitely a hint of moisture in his eye area but I had no time to enquire further. He had a point though. Even a bad clock gives right time twice a day. Why did we still have to stand in a queue? Who were all these people around us, still squirming like worms and fighting for their spaces in long queues? Did the war end too soon?

Mr. Badami was observing me keenly. ‘I knew you would be interested. You always seemed so smart, Private. Let me tell you this – and I don’t say this frequently – you are the best handyman I have ever seen. The way you fixed the radio so that I didn’t have to miss the classical jazz hour on FM 105.7 was pure magic. I told my secretary…’

I cut him in the middle, ‘Sir! I need to be somewhere. Thank you for the recommendation letters. You were also one of best bosses I have ever had.’ I got up and moved towards the door. Mr. Badami had a secretary! No wonder the world hadn’t improved even after a twenty-fucking-seven-year-long World War. ‘Can I get a glass of water?’ I looked at his face. He had a pained expression, like that of a man who never knew when to smile fake and when real. I gave him a half-filled bottle of water and closed the door on his face. I didn’t have to be rude but the bastard had a secretary when most of us had to share our toothbrushes.

Eleven years later, today, when I am writing this story, I feel bad for Mr. Badami. I had never seen him since. I heard he had killed himself few months later – quite predictable – and his relatives auctioned his belongings. I wish I could be there at the auction. He had a lighter which I was very fond of. With every click, there was a light flickering at the bottom. Of course, towards the end, when even the last battery had worn out, we had to imagine the light. But the strength of that imagination kept us – the boys of the 39th Infantry Division – alive and smoking till the War ended. Had I been at that auction, I would have bought that lighter whatever be the price.

I needed that lighter like everybody else in my division, I guess. I had a series of interviews after the war and none of them clicked. I realised how stupid it was wishing the War end. At least we had a belly full of food and a roof over head when we were fighting. After the War, all supplies went dry. All hopes were derailed. All doors were closed on my face like I closed it on Mr. Badami’s face. By the way, his recommendations were all bullshit. Nobody even bothered to look at them. ‘Badami, that old fool who refused to wash his own handkerchief?’ One of my prospective employers laughed, ‘Why on earth did you think that would be useful?’ By the time, Mr. Badami was dead. Otherwise, I would have strangled him myself.

Almost a year later I got a job with a puppeteer. With diminishing supply of electricity, entertainment options were quite limited. People spent their evenings at home mostly, talking to their partners and kids. Those who were single like me went to puppet shows. Previously thought of as a poor substitute of cinema, some of these puppet performances were graduating into a distinct art form where the jumpy, uneven movement of stringed figurines filled us with a longing that we never thought was possible again. A longing for belonging. We wanted to get into the scene; we wanted to be a part of the happenings; we wanted to make love and sing ballads of despair; we wanted to live in the shadows of life.

My employer was a woman. She was the best puppeteer in the neighbourhood. Her puppets were not lifelike. They represented certain ideas in the cubist style. Their faces were half-turned to eternity and their bodies were mixed up in an orgy of protrusion. Something or the other, a limb or a lump, was always jutting out from different sides of their tattered built, creating an illusion of movement amidst the mediocrity of perpetual stillness. ‘I added time to their space,’ she told me once, the puppeteer. Her name was Oolka.

The first time I saw Oolka was at a bus-stop. There was no bus though. People usually walked now. Not enough diesel or petrol. It was funny how we still referred to these places by their old names. It was like remembering an old love or a lost organ. The number of amputees had increased a lot since the War. They must have felt at home at these places.

I was not an amputee. I was staying at the bust-stop because I was evicted from my apartment. The rent was due for six months. I could barely have two meals a day. The bus-stops gave shelter to many more like me. Once a waiting place for the buses, now a waiting place for something more formidable and certain.

Oolka visited the bus-stop one morning with her collection of puppets. She was told the people there would appreciate her performance more than anybody else. She was misled. People at the bus-stop needed food, clothes, sex, and shower, not puppet shows featuring a talking fish and a one-legged ballerina. ‘What’s the point of the ballerina?’ I thought. ‘Most of the time they are on one leg anyway.’ The problem was I was thinking aloud. Not really loud, whispering, but Oolka’s hearing was exceptional. She could hear a baby cry before it flared its nostrils. ‘Of course, someone as basic as you would think that way,’ she glanced at me from the corner of her eye. ‘The ballerina knows she has only one leg. That’s what matters.’ Yes, Oolka had one eye. Later, that night, we made love next to a deserted engine. ‘I can still smell the dry petrol,’ she said inside my mouth.  

I left the bus-stop with her. ‘I can’t just keep you,’ she told me before we entered her apartment. ‘You need to work. What do you know?’ ‘I can cook and clean,’ I said. ‘That’s not enough. If we co-live, you will do that anyway. Why should I pay you for that? Think of something else.’ ‘OK, OK,’ I said, ‘I can stitch the clothes of your puppets. I am good at stitching. I can also make the small furniture on which your characters will sit.’ ‘Umm,’ she said, contemplative, ‘why don’t you help me with puppeteering?’ ‘Puppeteering?’ I said, still standing at the threshold, ‘But I know nothing of puppeteering.’ ‘Oh, I will teach you. It will be so much fun!’ She got hold of my right hand and placed it on her face. I followed the curvature of her single eyebrow with my index finger. I knew my life was going to change very soon.

And it did. Within a couple of months of me moving in, Oolka wrote a play with five characters – a mute parrot, an orphaned butterfly, a depressed Ping-Pong player, a workaholic elephant trainer and a blind preacher. It was supposed to be a merry musical but the problem lay elsewhere. In the final scene, all the characters had to appear together. ‘How is this possible? We have only four hands.’ I asked. She looked at me curiously. ‘What about your third hand?’

A chill ran through my spine. I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. When I opened my mouth, somebody else spoke, ‘What are you talking about?’ She smiled like a black cat in the dark, ‘You don’t have to hide it from me. I knew it all along. That’s why I wrote this play. I knew I could count on you.’

I wanted to run out of the room but my legs were plastered to the floor. This was the most well-kept secret of my life – perhaps my only secret. Nobody in the army had any idea, not even Mr. Badami who loved me like a son. So many times, when I was holding the gun with two hands and there was an itching on my nose, I had the temptation to scratch it till my comrades looked at me with horror and I was given a dishonourable discharge for having something I shouldn’t – a third fucking hand.

‘How did you know?’ My voice was still someone else’s. Oolka smiled again, ‘All my life, I was looking for you, my love. Can’t you see, all my models are based on you? I dreamed about you since I was a child. I knew this world must compensate for my missing eye. You make me complete.’ She stood next to me and motioned to the mirror on which we practiced our moves. I looked at it and saw three eyes and five hands, all juxtaposed against each other, like a drawing by Picasso at his cubist prime. ‘Which characters do you want to play?’ Oolka asked. ‘Why don’t I play the humans?’ Said I and, at that very moment, a thought occurred to me. My third hand was the only hand in the world whose fingerprints were not available to the government. If I strangled someone with this hand, nobody would ever know.

Since then, every night, I go to sleep with this thought.

The House Next Door: A Story by Leela Majumdar

If you want, you can suspect the whole thing from start to finish. You can easily call me a liar, a cheat, a fraud. It won’t affect me. I will keep telling what happened a hundred times over. Actually, I also don’t believe in ghosts. 

See, my mother’s second aunt happens to be really rich; palatial house in Bullygunge surrounded by trees, lush lawn with green grasses, rows of Patabahar plants. All the rooms have marble flooring; their décor will make you lose your own marbles. That apart, how majestic is their lifestyle; they never walk out of the house on foot; they never get a glass of water on their own. Then again, how wonderful tennis they seem to play; how brilliantly they play the piano as well. And the food in their house is amazing. That was the real reason why I went there today. Otherwise, me in my khaki half-trousers in that palace! Oh, god!

Anyway, the house next door is quite infamous. Nobody lived there in the last twenty-five to thirty years. The garden is filled with weeds and wild plants; the walls are infiltrated by peepal trees; and the garage has become a colony of bats. It’s chokingly dark even in the daytime with a damp smell. On top of that, in the evenings, a bald huge man has been spotted standing next to the broken window at the first floor. He looks exactly like the grandfather of the present owners. But the old man has been dead for fifty years! And the owners live in Delhi. 

I’m sure you have got it already, everybody is scared to visit the place. My case is different though. I don’t believe in ghosts and their grandfathers. I go up to the roofs alone for midnight strolls. To tell you the truth, I am scared of nothing except cats. Cats give me a little shiver.

Anyway, in the afternoon, we all sat together and finished countless helpings of mutton samosas, chicken sandwiches, sweets of kheer, pink pastries and so much more. But then, trouble started to brew. By the time it would have been wonderful to take the small steps to home, people started singing, dancing, playing instruments and reciting poetry. I was so restless! Then they tried to drag me into that. I was unmoved by all means! My mother’s uncle said mockingly, “Oh, you think singing and playing instruments is all very girly and you are a big man. All right, let me see how big a man you are; I will admit your courage if you can go to that haunted house!” Hearing that, everybody rolled on the floor in laughter.
Just listen to the insult! My body started to burn in anger. I stood up and said, “Why, are you challenging me? I don’t believe in ghosts. See, here I go.” Immediately, I sprinted through the garden and, within a minute, jumped over the walls to land in the house next door!

When I got up and shook the dust off my knees, I felt I might have made a mistake. How sleepy and quiet was the place! It wouldn’t surprise me if some bad people had taken shelter here.

Anyway, I can’t tolerate mocking, so I had no option but to come. I took small steps. It was not all dark yet. There was some flickering light here and there. I saw broken doors and windows hanging from their frames; banyan trees sprouting through the cracks in the black-and-white marble floors; dense spiders’ webs filling up every corner. A strange wind had started to blow all of a sudden; the broken windows and doors were rattling; the webs were dangling; an odd sound was coming from the first floor – the sound of people walking and moving boxes and suitcases. But the big wooden staircase seemed broken and deserted in the ground floor; no one could climb it from this side. The circular staircase for the servants also seemed damaged.

I won’t lie, my heart was pounding. I left the room and came outside again. At that moment, I saw an Oriya gardener with a pair of garden scissors standing next to the servants’ staircase. Oh, what a relief! The house must not be completely empty then; maybe it was him who was usually seen at the window; he must climb up somehow to the first floor, clinging to this and that. 

The gardener came close and asked me with a smile, “Why khokababu, are you afraid? My name is Adhikari. I work here.” I said, “Why should I be afraid? Afraid of what?” He said, “No, nobody comes on this side out of fear these days; that’s why I asked.” I smiled and said, “Huh, I don’t believe in ghosts.” The Adhikari guy was very nice; he showed me the entire house. He was lamenting that the owners had stopped coming and everything was in ruins – the chandeliers were coming down; termites were attacking the mahogany furniture; the giant paintings were losing their colours in the sun and rains. Practically nothing was left, I discovered. How much could one lonely gardener do? 

In the garden, the Dhutura plants brought from the Himalayas didn’t bloom anymore; the Kurchi plants had died; the mango trees now had wood flies. Adhikari was almost in tears – “Nobody comes here to have a look.”

Finally, he brought me to his room at the end of the yard. He sat me on the clean floor and gave me coconut water to drink. I was thinking how stupidly scared people usually were! I was laughing to myself also, how many things they mistook for ghosts. Everything was shining in bright starlight. Sitting next to me, Adhikari said, “Please tell me, why don’t people come here anymore? It was so magnificent in the olden days. So many carriages used to gather here; the drivers and the coachmen used to sit in my room, drink coconut water and smoke hookah; the whole place used to be so thriving.” I told him, “They say there are ghosts here. That’s why people are afraid to visit.” Hearing this, Adhikari was irritated. He stood up and said, “Ghosts? Where are the ghosts in this house? If the grand old owner of the house stands at his own window, should people still be afraid of him? What nonsense, ghosts! I am telling you, khokababu, I am working in this house for the last hundred years, I never went home even for once, I have never seen these ghosts in my own eyes.” He looked around and added, “Now I have to go. I can’t stay once the Moon is out.” He finished the sentence and, believe it or not, vanished right in front of my eyes. Just like the way the fire on a matchstick goes out when you blow on it. The strange wind started to blow again from all the sides; the doors and the windows started to rattle; the Moon started to rise in the East, and I sprinted through the broken main door at my topmost speed. Here, look, I am still panting.

There Is No Tomorrow

‘What happened to you? You look like bad sex!’ 

I turned to my friend of twelve years, his face brazen and pink like that of a toddler without toilet manners, and squinted. I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything; my eyes were tired after staring at an empty beer mug for the last fifteen minutes. The bottom of the mug had a few remaining drops of the worst beer I had had in sometime. It did taste like bad sex. That too on a Monday.

‘I told you we should go to The Bunker. It’s much cheaper there and the bartender is cute,’ my friend continued.

‘Bartender is a man,’ I said, returning my gaze to the bottom of the mug.

‘Don’t be a moron. She is not.’

‘It should be “bartendress.” The bartendress is cute. Like actor and actress.’

‘Are you fucking with me? Who says “actress” anymore?’

‘Yeah?’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Why don’t they?’

‘Because it’s discriminatory. Women performers are no less than men. Everybody should be called the same. What is the matter with you?’

‘Why isn’t everybody called actress then?’

My friend fumbled for a couple of seconds but he recovered quickly. He had to. He used to teach literature at a university with a fake fountain and fake grass. Now he had grown interest in gardening.

‘The moment we start calling everybody actors, its maleness is gone. It becomes genderless.’

I didn’t want to argue with him. Let him win this battle. I was letting him win all the battles recently. I was really tired. And depressed. The world had suddenly become dreadfully boring.

It all started with an announcement on TV. The serious looking newsreader (another genderless word) looked genuinely terrified when she uttered the words: ‘The world is coming to an end. The world as we know it is coming to an end.’ I noticed she had a mole on her left cheek. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she blabbered a lot about an asteroid that was going to hit our planet in a few months. I kept on looking at the mole. It looked lonely.

I had this habit of staring at things without any reason or purpose. I was first diagnosed with this condition when I was eight. My mother caught me looking at a pair of scissors for longer than an hour. ‘What are you doing?’ I still remembered the horror in her voice. ‘Nothing, Ma. I am just looking at it.’ She said a prayer and took me to see his brother who always introduced himself as a musician. Medicine was his side business. In our neighbourhood, he started the fashion of music therapy. ‘Music is the best medicine. Antibiotics is the second best,’ read a signboard in his chamber.

‘This is very serious,’ my uncle told my mother and wrote me a prescription – playing violin for the next six months. One practice session each after every meal. We had to buy the violin from his music store. I was also admitted to his music school for lessons.

I met my friend for the first time in that school. ‘What’s your affliction?’ He asked me. He was seven.

‘You mean my problem?’ I asked.

‘Do you think it’s a problem?’

‘I don’t know. What’s yours?’

‘I talk a lot.’ He smiled.

It was true. He did talk a lot. He learned to speak when he was only four months old. Since then, he never stopped. At eleven, he memorised the entire dictionary so that he was never at a loss for words. The only time his tongue got tied when he tried to ask a fellow violin player out. She was thirteen. At least a foot taller than both of us.

‘It’s because I had to look up to her,’ he told me during a bathroom break. ‘The words that were at the top of my tongue slipped back into my stomach.’

‘You better not talk looking up then,’ I said with some concern.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘I must not fall in love with any girl taller than me.’

We didn’t learn violin but we became friends. None of our conditions improved. I still stared at things. He still talked.

He handled the news of our imminent extinction with his usual pragmatism. ‘It’s not as bad as you think. The dinosaurs were also wiped out because of an asteroid hit. After we are gone, in another million years, there will be a species which will be better than us. They will rule the world.’

‘Do you think they will come up with computers and stuff as well?’

‘Better. They will cure cancer.’

‘Too bad for my uncle then.’ He was diagnosed with lung cancer a little while ago. Strangely, he chose chemotherapy over harmoniums for his treatment.

A week after the first announcement, there came the second one which changed our lives forever. We were told – this time by a surprisingly young-looking scientist – that they had found a way to avoid the catastrophe. The press conference was telecast live.

‘Are you going to destroy it in the space?’ A journalist asked.

The scientist smiled, ‘Not at all. This is not Hollywood.’

‘What then?’

‘We are going to stop time.’

There were a few whispers in the room.

‘What do you mean you will stop time? How is that possible?’

‘It’s a complex process,’ the scientist was unfazed, ‘but we have devised a technology by which we will put ourselves, that is, the entire humanity, in a time loop. We will live one day over and over again so that the day on which the asteroid hits the Earth never comes.’

The whispers became louder. ‘What nonsense!’ Someone shouted, ‘Do you want us to be stuck in a single day? This is a prison!’

‘Do you want to die?’ The scientist leaned forward.

Everybody fell silent.

I was desperately trying to find something to stare at. The room in which the press conference was being held did not have anything remarkable except a cupboard at one corner. Was there somebody hiding in the cupboard? Was it a skeleton?

The conference ended abruptly amid a lot of hullabaloo. The Prime Minister’s smiling face appeared on the screen. He congratulated the scientists for their brilliant innovation. ‘This is a great day for us. We have conquered death.’

It took us some time to understand the actual implication of the time loop. Indeed, we had conquered death. Nobody was going to age or die anymore. Except those who would die on the very day the loop was scheduled. They would be alive again in the next morning though, perhaps to die again later or survive owing to a timely dose of the right medicine.

‘This is fantastic!’ My friend almost jumped in joy, ‘We would never have to work. We would never have to get up early in the morning. We can spend all our savings in one day and we will get it back the next day.’

‘There is no next day,’ I reminded him.

‘Exactly! Every day is today! We will live without any care for tomorrow!’ He was laughing like a maniac.

My friend was not alone. Since the day of the first announcement, everybody was acting crazy. News of violence – murder, robbery, rape, vandalising – was coming from every corner of the world. Nobody seemed to have any sense of morality anymore. The societal norms that dictated our individual behaviour were forgotten. The need for civility was gone. The purpose of good manners was lost. The neighbourly smile was replaced by a cruel smirk of personal vindictiveness. Even the police became inactive. Some of them participated in the mayhem. The proverbial state of nature was no longer a mere academic proposition.

The governments, of course, had to intervene. All the countries came together and declared that unless the violence stopped, they won’t initiate the time loop. This worked like magic. Voluntary organisations sprouted like mushrooms which kept watch on the potential lawbreakers. We became normal once again. Civilised, disciplined, pretending to be friendly. But for how long?

‘Now that the mask of civility is lifted,’ I asked my friend, ‘what do you think will happen after they initiate the loop?’

‘There is very little chance we will go back to the initial days of frenzy,’ he replied. ‘Violence, like all other forms of entertainment, loses its appeal on repeat viewing.’

The governments didn’t announce the date of initiating the loop. It happened unceremoniously as most of the big events of life happen.

‘You mean to say marriage is not a big event?’ My friend asked when I pointed it out.

‘Marriage is not a big event, I told him. ‘Its failure is, though. So poignantly unceremonious. Love fades without us realising it. For the first few weeks, or even months, we still feel the itch in the amputated leg.’

‘What made you this dark? Are you drinking a lot of domestic whiskey these days?’

For the last five-six years, we met almost every evening for drinking in some of the pubs of our liking. I was a light drinker, never had more than a couple of beers or whiskey, occasionally rum, never anything else. My friend loved to mix his drinks. Like his theories about everything that piqued his interest, his alcohol consumption was over-the-top and, equally regularly, cause for visits to the doctors.

It was during one of those evening sessions, we both felt something was amiss.

‘Didn’t we have the same conversation last night?’ My friend asked.

‘You mean this conversation about bartender/bartendress?’

‘Yes,’ he looked at me, bewildered and, perhaps, a little scared. ‘Is it happening?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The loop. Are we in the loop already?’

‘There hasn’t been any announcement yet, has it?’

We asked the barkeep who was serving us. He was equally baffled, ‘Didn’t you ask me the same question last night?’

‘Oh, shit!’ All three of us said in unison.

It was not as absurd as you might think. People seldom pay attention to the little incidents, the slightest of movements and gestures, the tiniest of pains and disruptions, the smallest bits of everyday action and reaction that separate today from yesterday or from tomorrow. We think all the time about pasts and futures which are undifferentiated masses of yesterdays and tomorrows, but very rarely do we care about their singular trajectories. No history is bothered about yesterday in itself. No policy talks about tomorrow.

We were no exception. We woke up, had breakfast, went to work, had lunch, came to the pub, talked about shit, took piss, came home, went to bed. This continued for weeks, perhaps months, before we realised that the itch in the amputated leg was not real. We were scratching in vain.

‘This just proves how predictable our lives are,’ my friend did not hide his irritation.

‘Or that we are not as unique as we think we are,’ I added.

Now that we knew that we were stuck in this loop for eternity, we started talking about our next plan of action.

‘Do you think we should go to work tomorrow, I mean the next day, I mean the day after today…?’ My friend was looking for the right word. I felt sorry for him. This was not something which happened to him usually.

‘I understand,’ I patted him on the back, ‘what do you want to do?’

‘Why not come here in the morning and keep on drinking till the end? We can also do bar hopping.’

‘OK, why not!’ I said. ‘But what about your students?’

‘Oh, come on, we have the eternity,’ he smiled like a child with a new toy and a fake medical certificate. ‘Wait, we can go to The Bunker and check that ‘bartendress’ out.’

It was the biggest mistake of my life – agreeing to come with him to that wretched bar. We reached the place at around six in the evening. It was still peaceful. Not many people around. No music. No smell of junk food. The woman at the counter smiled like we owed money to her. Did we?

‘We are going to stay here till the night ends,’ my friend was extra cheerful. ‘Give us two large pegs of your best whiskey.’ The woman nodded and reached for a strange looking bottle.

‘Are you sure we can afford that?’ I whispered.

‘How does it matter? We will keep on drinking till the end and then it’s the next day. Or not. The same day but a new morning.’

‘You have to pay upfront for each serving,’ the woman put two glasses in front of us. ‘It’s the house policy now.’

‘Motherfuckers,’ my friend muttered and brought out his purse. ‘Let’s go to another place after we finish this drink.’

I would have agreed but by then I had already discovered her. She was sitting at one of the shadowy corners of the bar, her face was slightly away from my vision like a dream without sound. She was not alone. Two men, probably work friends, were seated on her sides and arguing about something. I thought people would stop arguing since there was no tomorrow. I was wrong. All arguments were about the present. And the present was the only thing that we had.

‘Go and talk to her,’ my friend said. ‘God, this whiskey tastes like shit.’

I pretended that I hadn’t heard him. ‘It’s not that bad.’

‘You want to stay, don’t you? Do you know her?’

Did I know her? I couldn’t remember. Her face did seem familiar. I knew we were all having recurrent déjà vu since we got into the loop. I might have met her before but was it here at this bar? She stood up now as if she was leaving. She wasn’t too tall, my height maybe, and she looked directly at me with her lips parted and eyes slightly widened. I thought she was going to call out my name.

My phone was ringing. I had to take the call. It was my boss.

‘Where are you?’ Her voice wasn’t friendly.

‘Um,’ I looked around, ‘I am still in my bed. Why?’

‘Still in bed? It’s nine already. We need the report on polio vaccination today. Have you forgotten?’

‘No,’ I yawned, ‘I think it can wait. Let’s do it tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? There is no tomorrow,’ she barked. ‘Come to office immediately.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I cut the call and went back to sleep.

I wanted to know if she knew my name. That would make a wonderful story. Not like this one.

Allahabad

Allahabad is grey.

This was the first impression I had when I got down at the station. The station, quite prosaically named Allahabad City, was located at the vague end of the town. The River was quite close to the station. There was a faint moisture in the air. On my way, I crossed a long bridge. I tried to peek, through the opaque window of the train, down to the river. It was patchy. Few children were looking for something in the mud. The Sun shone on them like a cruel joke.

Two middle-aged men approached me immediately; one of them was the driver of an auto, the other his assistant, probably. They were friendly in the way that the auto drivers are supposed to be at an almost empty station. They suggested few hotels. I asked for the cheapest one. ‘Don’t worry. This is not the season,’ they said, together. When was the season? ‘The Kumbh is going to happen in a couple of months. The hotels will double their rate.’ For the first time in my life, I felt grateful for arriving early.

We came out of the station into a greyer city. I looked around and found a town which was coming apart. It looked like a city which had recently been attacked by the aliens. Beautiful, colonial-looking buildings were mutilated, smashed like bad memories. I breathed their remainders. I smelt their helplessness which smelt like old books. The roads were being renovated for the Kumbh, I was told. But why demolish the buildings? The divers didn’t reply. They skirted the heaps of debris and my repeated inquiries quite deftly. By the time I reached the hotel, my nose was clogged with despair.

The next morning, I went to the Sangam where the Ganga and the Yamuna were playing hide-and-seek with the mythical river Saraswati. ‘Why should I accept its existence when I can’t see it?’ I asked the auto driver – one of the two from the previous day. ‘Can you see the wind?’ He asked back, eyes on the road.

We took a turn around the Allahabad Fort, once built by the great Akbar, now a military camp. The riverside was populated by hundreds of boats and boatmen. They offered a discount rate to a happier reincarnation. ‘Just take one dip,’ a lanky teenager pulled me towards his boat, ‘all your sins will be cleansed.’ His earnestness was as ancient as the Sangam itself, his need for money too. ‘Look how the colours of the waters are different,’ he shouted when we reached the meeting point of the rivers. The colours were indeed different but my sinful eyes couldn’t see the line parting the finite and the infinite, life and afterlife. I stared hard. The rivers didn’t return the stare. ‘Lots of Muslims from the Arab countries come to see this miracle,’ the driver told me on our way back.

I took an e-rickshaw to see the other side of the town – the Civil Lines. ‘Don’t you want to see the Hanuman Mandir?’ The new driver asked. ‘No, the other places.’ I uttered the word ‘secular’ in my mind. We stopped first at the Museum inside a nicely maintained park. ‘I’ll park close by. Keep my number,’ the driver said. ‘By which name should I save it?’ I asked. ‘What’s the need?’ He said after a little hesitation, ‘Just give me a missed call now. I will see your number and come to pick you up.’

The museum was neat. It had a lot of matchboxes from the colonial time. It also had the pistol with which Chandrashekhar Azad killed himself after refusing to surrender to the British. The pistol looked peaceful now, showcased at a corner of a room smelling of naphthalene. We also stopped at Anand Bhawan, the residence of the Nehrus. All of their beds were single. Gandhi’s bed was, of course, the smallest. I was particularly taken by an electric toaster used by Jawaharlal. He also had an electric shaver. Did Gandhi know about these little indulgences? Did they ever have a debate over the utility of automated personal hygiene, Mohandas and Jawaharlal? History textbooks are often inadequate on these important matters.

On our way to the All Saints’ Church, a magnificent building but terribly kept, we stopped at a school to pick up the kids of the rickshaw driver. ‘Don’t worry saab. They won’t take much space.’ The kids – three girls – didn’t pay any attention to me. When the silence became too awkward, I asked them their names. Nazneen, Nusrat and Falaq. It struck me immediately why the driver didn’t want to share his name with me. He assumed I was Hindu and I might have a problem riding his rickshaw had I known his name.

‘Will you go and see the temples tomorrow?’ He asked after dropping me at the hotel. ‘No, I am leaving tomorrow,’ I said and added hesitantly, ‘have fifty rupees more.’ ‘No saab, I have enough. Shukriya.’ He started his cart and left.

I stood outside on the street for a few minutes more and breathed deeply. The city, its dust, its ancient greyness and its dilapidated history, entered my lungs, my blood, my brain.

I had a fever on my way home.

Indian Politics, Now

'Should I be alarmed?' I asked with some alarm in my voice.

Actually, if you think about it, it is impossible to ask this question without the alarm already in your voice. It's like asking a man for direction in a small town. You should ask only if you know it already; otherwise you will be lost forever in the currents and crosscurrents of local history, geography, and quite possibly, botany. Very soon they will spin mythologies about you also. 'Have you seen the shadowy figure in the bush behind our house last night? It must be the traveller from 1987 who asked Shambhu-da for direction to a post-office.' 'Of course I saw him. He was still carrying the letter for his dying mother which he couldn't post.' Urban legends are often born out of dying mothers, headless postmen and thorny shrubberies.   

I could think of all this because the doctor took an unusually long sigh before responding to my question. 'Yes. You should be alarmed.' Then he started to take another long sigh. Does he have asthma? 
'What is the degree of the alarm?' I interrupted his sigh. 
'Very,' sigh, 'high.' 
'And?' I asked. 
'And,' he now got his composure back, 'you should start meeting your family, friends, and family friends. Tomorrow you should get admitted in the hospital. I will make the reservation.' 

Really? I thought. That easy, huh! I went out of the clinic with a tumour and looked at the world with clearer vision. Although, in reality, my vision was blurred because of the tumour in my brain. Seldom does it happen, when the literal, the metaphorical, and the ironical have an orgy outside of a cancer hospital. 

The first stop I made was of course at my wife's. Ex-wife's, actually. We separated last year over a sofa. She liked it brown. I liked it gone. I made it gone but relented later. I had to sleep on the floor that night. 

'I got cancer,' I told her with an impassive face. 
'What's new?' she replied. We were sitting on a brown sofa. 
'You didn't lose your wit, I guess.' She didn't. She never had it. 
'I have got the sofa on sale,' she told me when I was getting up. 
'Good for you,' I said and tried to leave. By the time I was reaching the door, the sofa was already converted into a bed. 'It's the latest design,' she shouted. Her voice felt like coming from the other end of the sofa. I nodded from my end and left. 

'Arre you! After such a long time!' My friend was ecstatic. 
'I got cancer,' I told with an impassive face.
'OK. What else is happening?'
'Nothing much!'
'Did you know we had a reunion last Sunday.' 
I didn't. They didn't invite me. 
We had tea and pakoda and watched an episode of a science fiction series on Netflix. It was excruciatingly dark. Or maybe my vision was playing tricks. At one point I discovered my friend was crying. Now, now, that's nice, feel bad for me. 
'Don't feel so bad,' I comforted him, 'I will have a surgery soon.' 
'But Mishiko won't. She will die in the next episode.'    
It took me some time to realise I wasn't Mishiko.   

The next stop was at my mother's. She lived with my sister. None of them were home. I remembered perfectly that I had texted them before coming. Were they trying to avoid me? I called my sister, 'Where are you?'
'We are at the new sushi place. Wanna come?'
'I don't like fish, you know that.'
'Yeah, sorry. We will be home in a couple of hours.'   
'I can't wait that long. I have to be admitted in the hospital' 
'Which one?'      
I told the name.
'Oh, but that's on the other side of the town.'
'Can I talk to mother?' I said, not wanting to talk to my sister anymore.
'Sure, hold on.'
'Mother,' I stared at a nearby cat, 'I am getting a surgery in a few hours.' 
'Don't be daft,' I could smell the sushi from the other side of the phone, 'first they will do some tests. It will take at least a day before they take you to surgery.'
'The tests are done. I have cancer.'
'There are other tests...' she said, her final words wrapped in rice, raw fish and wasabi. 

The nurse who put me to sleep had big boobs. 'Will you go on a date with me when I wake up?' 
'You won't,' she said plainly and left. 

Rumless in Patna

I landed in Patna on 15 August, the day the Great Britain had lost its colony in India. I had also left behind an empire of my own – an empire of lethargy and joblessness. Day-sleeping in the last few months had become such an integral part of my life that I almost missed my afternoon flight. When my mother (yes, I lived with my parents, what a shocker) nudged me, I was lying on the sofa, eyes half closed, and dreaming about a road without potholes. It’s an achievable dream, I thought, when I was getting dressed for the airport. If only we could find a road in most of our country.

The flight was uneventful. I have never had an exciting flight. Once I was bitten by a mosquito. When I complained to the sweet-looking air hostess, she offered me a wet towel. I didn’t know what to do next, so I cleaned the handle of my seat and tried to look beyond the closed door of the pilot’s cabin.

This flight was very short. I sat down in my seat, buckled the belt, pondered at the brevity of life and the infinity of the universe, and the strangely accented air hostess announced that we had reached Patna.

I didn’t expect the Patna Airport to be this small. Nitish Kumar’s drawing room must be bigger than this. When I got out, my friends were there to receive me. One of them was from Patna but had spent most of his life in Delhi, Calcutta and abroad. The other friend was from Calcutta like me. The three of us would be working at the same place. What we do is not important.

On our way to my native friend’s place (he lives with his parents, what a shocker), we stopped at a chemist’s. English Dawaiki Dukan – Store for English Medicine. Do the stores for Homeopathic medicine proclaim their German roots? We took a left turn from Bailey Road, and then another left, and I sensed a water body through the closed window of our AC car. ‘What is this?’ I asked. ‘This is the nala – a canal that connects to the River and dumps garbage into it.’ ‘Oh, lovely,’ said I and realised it was not the expected reaction.

The neighbourhood around the nala is populated by rich, retired or semi-retired (on extension), government officials. One side of the neighbourhood has a chequered history involving farmers selling their lands, government’s desire to acquire, resistance from middleclass urban citizens and everlasting court cases. All in all, the roads are not pucca and rain water overstays its welcome. Our colleague M lives in this neighbourhood named after an ex-prime-minister who died young as if to give this neighbourhood a moral legitimacy. M’s parents treated us to littis soaked in ghee. The conversation in the dining room was filled with jokes about Bihar. Unlike the Bengalis, the Biharis never joke about other communities than themselves. In that sense, they are quite selfish, and hence, selfless.

The next item in the agenda was to find a place of my own. The other colleague from Calcutta also wanted to rent a place. We decided to share a flat. None of us had spousal commitments and/or liked cats. It shouldn’t be difficult for us to get an apartment.

I was wrong. 

2.

‘So your name is Mitra? I once knew a Mitra. When I was in Calcutta. He was a master thief.’

We were sitting at Mr. Jha’s house. His was a peculiarly pliant stature, tall and bent, with a protruding belly that bore testimony to his affection for complex carbohydrate and milk products. Humidity and carbohydrate make the man in India. How many times have you seen a man sweating and eating roti or rice at the same time?

Mr. Jha’s house was a three-storied one, with multiple folds where tenants were inserted like rabbits inserted in a magician’s armpits. Indeed the house looked like an amateur magician with too many armpits. And they smelled too. The house’s protruding belly – an unevenly shaped balcony – opened to an ocean-like dumpster. ‘The whole neighbourhood dumps their garbage here,’ Mr. Jha stated in a matter-of-fact voice. Was there a hint of pride as well?

R, my colleague, and I were brought to Mr. Jha by M’s family carpenter. He was a meticulous procrastinator, M told me. Once he took three months to finish a computer table. The table actually looked quite serious in its bright white paint. Only complicated academic stuff could come off this table.

We had been looking around for a habitable place for days. There were few things about us which were putting the potential landlords off. One, we ate fish and meat. Two, we were not married, neither to each other, nor to two different women. For years, my relatives had been telling me to tie the knot. Now I realized how foresighted they were. They already knew one day I would come to work in Patna and the entire rentier class would consider me an unsuitable boy.

  

The first place we visited was closer to M’s house. The house was being painted as we entered. There were big rectangular holes on top of each door. ‘They will be filled,’ the owner informed.

‘When?’

‘When the painting is done.’

‘Then the filled-up parts won’t have paint, won’t they?’

‘Yes. Good observation.’

We were served cow milk and tea. I would have been happier if they were served separately, but alas.

‘So you don’t have any problem if we eat meat or fish?’

‘No problem with me.’ The owner smiled broadly. ‘I eat everything. I will eat human flesh, if cooked well.’

The milk in my tea turned into curd. What were those rectangular holes for? Was this a torture chamber once? Where did the milk come from? We got up and left without saying another word.

If anything, the owner was liberal in his outlook. In fact, too liberal. The rest we met were adamant on seeing the marriage certificate before starting any conversation. Being thirty-plus yet unmarried was a bigger scandal than cannibalism, it seemed. The stray cows on the road painted the town brown with gobar. We painted the town grey with our despair.

The carpenter appeared as an angel. We were having our morning tea at M’s terrace. He was there for some reason. ‘Yes, yes, getting house is no problem,’ he took a slurp, ‘you just need to know the right person.’

He seemed the right person. He was supposed to fix the garage door at Mr. Jha’s. We went along with him. ‘He was in Calcutta once,’ we were told.

We were told this many times more. Again and again. Everybody or their cousin once lived in Calcutta. The person from whom we bought our beddings was the most appreciative of our home town, but sadly not of its biryani, ‘We cook better biryani at home.’ Those who are not as lucky as him eat at the famous ‘Biryani Mahal’ – the ‘authentic’ home of Calcutta-style biryani (with aloo) in Patna.

    

 ‘So your name is Mitra? I once knew a Mitra. When I was in Calcutta. He was a master thief.’

This was the first thing Mr. Jha said to me. I didn’t know how to respond. Was it somebody related to me? But more importantly, would that deter us from getting this flat?

‘I am a CA. Chartered Accountant, you know? My father sent me to study in Calcutta. I worked really hard and did well in all my exams. Then one day I got a job at Burrabazar. An audit firm, you know? This Mitra guy was my subordinate. Typical Bengali baboo. Dhoti-wearing-pan-chewing type. And he used to steal left and right. I caught him once. He threw himself at my feet. I told him: Arre Bangali baboo, why steal so much? Is fish that expensive? He promised me he would never steal again.’

‘And then what happened? Did he become a mahatma?’ The carpenter was engrossed.

‘No. I got transferred to another section. Mitra baboo was the manager’s nephew.’

I wanted to apologise on behalf of all the Mitras in the world. And all the expensive fish-eaters. And all the nephews. But would he rent his flat to us?

‘Do you know how I got myself familiarized with Calcutta? We had an English burra sahib, you know? Foreigner. He told me: Jha, walk to all the shops you are auditing. Don’t take the car. That’s how you’ll get to know the city. I walked up to Jadavpur from Burrabazar, you know? Long distance. Very long. One day I forgot to wear my tie. Sahib told me: Jha, this is not Bihar. Go home and come fully dressed. You look like a monkey. I went home and came back wearing my tie. Then sahib poured milk in my tea.’

I looked at Mr. Jha once again. He was wearing a lungi and a sando genjee. He looked complacent.

‘I don’t like hungama. Do you eat beef?’ He narrowed his eyes.

We had a fraction of a second to decide, ‘No. we don’t.’

‘Very good. You may shift to the flat on the first floor. What is tomorrow? Saturday? I don’t do business on Saturday. Shift on Sunday then?’

We needed to buy many things. Most importantly, ceiling fans. Before coming here, I didn’t know that the fans were part of the furniture. When I saw the word ‘unfurnished’ in the advertisements of flats for rent, I assumed that I needed to buy bookshelves and flower vases. Now I know it means only the walls, the floor and the ceiling. If you are lucky, you will get a toilet pan. Whenever we were shown the interiors of the ‘unfurnished’ houses, I was struck by their fierce nakedness. When the rooms were freshly painted, they were even more frightening. They looked and smelt like amnesia. Thankfully Mr. Jha’s previous tenants had a kid. At least the walls looked like Altamira. Mr. Jha offered to paint the walls. We stalled his benevolence. Also we were not sure if this was our final abode.

We carried our suitcases to the house on a particularly humid Sunday. Patna’s humidity is world famous. All the authors from abroad complain about it. Coming from Calcutta, we did not have much to complain, but again this Sunday was excruciatingly moist. You could almost drink the air. The most urgent task was to attach the fans to the ceilings so that the compound word ‘ceiling-fan’ could acquire its meaning. The carpenter was working in the garage. He seemed quite confident with his hammers and hooks.  

‘Can you help us?’ We approached.

‘Of course I can,’ he waved his hammer, ‘hey you, why don’t you fix the fans?’ He motioned to his lanky assistant. The assistant didn’t seem too willing. But we kept standing there. For one, the garage had a functioning fan.

Three hours later, the assistant was sitting on the floor of our flat. He was fanning himself with his gamcha. Our towels were still in the suitcases. We were sweating like pigs.

The fans were still unattached.

There was something wrong with the fans. Or the electric system. Or the universe. The guy tinkered with his tools incessantly and still the blades didn’t move. For most of the time, we looked up at the ceiling like a drought-affected farmer who looks up at the sky hoping for clouds. The fans were dissembled and reassembled, the main switch was pulled up and down, the hooks were measured and cussed at. The blades didn’t move. My whole life paraded in front of my eyes like a power point presentation. Never did I ever have it easy. Why? Why? Why?

Mr. Jha came to greet us upstairs. He had more bad news.

‘Listen, we close our gate at nine-thirty at night. Try to come before time.’

‘Nine-thirty! That’s too early. What if we have an emergency?’

‘Being late will be an emergency itself. The door won’t be open after nine-thirty.’

I thought of running out of this place with the fans on my shoulder. Only they were too heavy.

‘What is happening here? Fans don’t work?’ Mr. Jha was now curious.  

‘No. There must be a problem with the electric line.’

‘Electric line is fine. Nobody complained before. This young man is a novice. Let me get you my electrician. He will fix it.’

For the next half an hour, he called numerous handymen. All lived across the River, it seemed. Or maybe they didn’t want to sacrifice their Sunday siesta for two unmarried gentlemen from Calcutta. Who would blame them?

‘Hmm, it’s a problem. Let me see what can be done.’ He said and did the opposite of what Aladdin’s Genie does – vanished without a solution. 

We came to the garage again and pleaded with the carpenter. ‘Is there anybody else?’

‘Don’t worry. I have already called somebody. He might come. But then it’s a Sunday.’

We cursed the person who invented Sundays and came back to the room where the young man was sitting. He seemed to have given up hope as well.

‘Do you do this for living?’ We wanted to lighten the mood.

‘No, no. I have come to Patna to prepare for the entrance to the police force. Fifty thousand new jobs have been advertised.’  

‘What are you doing then fixing fans?’

‘The man in the garage is my mama. I’m staying with him. He asked me to help him instead of sitting idle at home.’

‘Don’t you have to prepare for the exam?’

‘What preparation? The only preparation you need is to find a proper agent and offer him the bribe. That takes a lot of time. To find the real broker, I mean. Many people have lost money bribing the wrong person. They open an office, take the money and run. There has to be some honesty in dishonesty. Bihar lacks that too.’ The young man grimaced and smiled at the same time. He looked tired. The drops of sweat under his firm eyebrows had started to grow large. He wiped his face with his gamcha, ‘If I get the job, I will try to be imandar in my chori.’

The air in the room had become unbearable. Once again I felt the urge to run out and shout from the bottom of my belly. I was sure no sound would come out. All the fat that had accumulated there over the years would swallow my scream.

An hour or so later, magic happened. An electrician and his assistant dropped in on a rickety cycle. They came, they saw, they pressed a switch hanging from a thin cable at one corner of the flat, and we heard the sweet, familiar sound of metal blades slicing the air above. Middleclass comfort was raining over our heads.

The young man was now standing at a corner, disbelief and anger in his eyes, still sweating and unsure about what just happened. All what was needed was pressing one magic switch. It was always there in front of us. And yet.

His Bihar is still looking for that switch.        

3.

Patna is intense.

Whenever somebody asks me how Patna is, this is what I say. I don’t know how the word came to me. It’s not one of those words like ‘interesting’ or ‘however’ which I am supposed to insert in a conversation as a professional academic. It’s a word which I use to describe a televised debate on who is sleeping with whom or how to eat poha with fork. It’s like saying morning is blue. Which sounds clever but what the hell does it mean?

I say Patna is intense because that usually stops people from asking more questions. They nod as if they know. I am amazed by the interest people have in Patna. After moving to the town, whenever I visited my friends and relatives in Calcutta or Delhi, everybody looked hungry. Hungry for information. Hungry for scoop. Hungry for gossip. ‘Have you met Lalu? Have you eaten litti? How are the roads in Patna? Do they still have horse-drawn carts?’ Those who are more civil and intellectual would ask, ‘How is the caste dynamics in the city? How much is being spent on the urban infrastructure? What is the government doing for flood relief? Have you met Lalu?’ 

Why is Lalu so iconic? Not only my non-Bihari friends, my Bihari friends are also obsessed with him. Not a single day passes without mentioning his name in some context or the other. He is loved. He is hated. He is joked about. He is lampooned. He is always in the rear view mirror of your thinking. What intrigues me is how instinctively my friends and family are right – Lalu and Patna are inseparable. They are bound forever in politics and charisma, corruption and haircut, wisecracks and accent. Nitish may build all the flyovers in the world, but it is Lalu who will have the last paan.

He is also somebody whom the Patna middleclass loves to hate. ‘In the nineties, Patna became a graveyard,’ N told me, ‘all because of that man’. N is my colleague and a proud Patnaite. His family holds a ‘campus’ of 20 bighas on the eastern side of the town – a site which is fondly called the old Patna, where colonial pedagogy is now punctuated by postcolonial private tuition. We have lunch together every day and N spins marvellous yarn that fills the canteen-type room with stories, anecdotes, truisms, histories, jokes and abracadabra. He is a master storyteller but most of his narratives end in desolation – ‘everything has gone to the dogs.’ ‘Why?’ I ask him every time, like the time when we were talking about Lalu. ‘Why did Patna become a graveyard in the nineties?’

‘In the nineties,’ N carefully folded his roti around the bhindi fry, ‘after Lalu came to power, began the jungle raj. Uneducated, unruly, uncivil elements were seated at the top. Patna was the centre of all kinds of crimes – decoity, petty thievery, snatching of jewellery, kidnapping, rape – you name it! All the fathers in the city were frightened. What will happen to their sons? They were growing up. Will they also become badmash? The hapless fathers sold whatever land they had in the village and told their sons, “Look beta, this is what I have, my last penny, and I am spending all of it to send you to Delhi. You have to become a big somebody.” The beta went to Delhi and studied hard. Became a somebody – big, middle, or small, doesn’t matter – and never came back. Only recently some of them have started to buy plots and erect houses in Patna, but they will never settle here. Why should they?’

‘So what happens to these houses? Do they remain empty?’

‘No, no, they are rented out.’

My antenna stood up. R and I were tenanting at Mr. Jha’s place, but not entirely. We didn’t buy any furniture (apart from two cheap wooden beds and the two ceiling fans). I was literally living out of one suitcase to another (I have two suitcases; one suitcase is relatively empty; I take clothes out of one suitcase, wear them, and put them in the other so that they don’t get mixed up with the fresh ones; yes I am horrible). We had this great ambition of finding a better place – better located (closer to our workplace), less restrictive (we had a curfew of nine-thirty), more private (the landlord and the lady often visited us unannounced), and less crowded by cows (no explanation needed). Cows in Patna never came home; they are always found on the streets, lazily chewing their own tongues, deeply entrenched in a meditative state. What do the cows dream about? Do they have REM? I have never seen any cow sleep. But they always seem to sleepwalk.

‘Can we go and see those places?’ I asked eagerly. N tore a roti in half and offered me the other half, ‘Sure. Why not? We can go even today. Oh no, today I have some business. Let’s go tomorrow then? Final?’ We never went and saw those places.  

On one weekend, R and I decided to explore the city. It was August end. The sun was working in two shifts; even the evenings were unbearable. We took a bus to the main city and roamed in the Eco Park for a while. It was eleven in the morning. The gatekeepers looked at us with narrowed eyes. The eyes of the few couples who were sitting here and there were narrower.    

Wikipedia says the Park was created to reduce the pressure on the Patna Zoo. How they were comparable, I didn’t get. There was a replica of the Nalanda ruins at one corner of the Park. Did the Zoo have a replica of Nalanda too? I won’t be surprised if they did.

After seeing the replica of the ruins, the obvious next stop was the Patna Museum where one could see the originals. Replica of ruins lessens the seriousness of decay. The plasticity makes ageing a ludicrous proposition – like a toothpaste commercial. Toothache is probably the most painful experience of human existence; yet who doesn’t laugh at the ad where somebody bites an apple and screams in pain?

The person in the Museum office informed us there were two types of tickets – one for ten rupees and the other for hundred. ‘Hundred rupees?’ I was shocked, ‘Is that for a ride in an actual time machine?’ ‘No sir,’ the man calmly explained, ‘it’s extra for a room which has the last remains of the Lord Buddha and some scriptures written with gold ink – all smuggled from Tibet.’ R was an archivist himself and I had always had interest in smuggled goods; so we paid him two hundred rupees and motioned towards the main gate where a policeman was waiting for us. He took us to the first floor and requested us to take off our shoes before entering the room. Writings in gold must be shown respect.

I don’t want to describe what was inside. For that you have to pay hundred rupees. The AC in the room was in mint condition though.

The rest of the Museum was actually quite rich. Bihar, as everybody here loves to remind you, was the centre of the earth once. Every room in the Patna Museum detailed the days of its past glory in large volumes and with magnificent seriousness. The columns, statues, coins and all the other relics were acquired, sorted and allotted to different dynasties and carefully arranged in different rooms. Density was the word that was hanging over my head when I was strolling through the corridors. The air was heavy with the smell of antiquity. The women in stone were all larger than me. Standing in front of them, I felt cold.

I started to feel warm again when we visited the Rajendra Prasad gallery. The first President of independent India had quite a collection of gowns – few in purple – probably gifted by the national universities when they conferred upon him the honour of Chancellorship. The one frame that caught my eyes had a collection of hammers and spades with which he inaugurated numerous infrastructure projects in the fifties. Many of these bridges, dams, and roads are lost in history but the hammer remains, proving that the symbol is more durable than the cement.

As latest news reveal, the Bihar government is moving the entire museum to a state-of-the-art new site called the Bihar Museum. From the outside, the new museum looks like the wet dream of an architect recently exposed to postmodernism. There are concrete steps which lead to nowhere and patches of grass planted out of context. The only missing link is the purple gown of Babu Rajendra Prasad.   

I wonder what Lalu thinks about this structure.  

4.

When I was moving to Patna, somebody told me, ‘Don’t worry! You’ll definitely find a Bengali club there.’ I took that as an insult. Did I look like somebody who would immediately start looking for the Bengali club? Also did these clubs exist anymore anyway?

There was a time when the Bengalis had an interesting concept called the ‘paschim.’ Primarily a geographical nomenclature, its implications extended to health issues, dietary practices, casual racism and the tourism industry. In short, when the Bengalis got sick under the British rule (pre-penicillin, pre-antibiotic days), they used to travel to the west of Howrah and spend a couple of months in the small towns of Bihar, Orissa and the erstwhile United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (now Uttar Pradesh). There they rented huge mansions built by the local zamindars (many of whom were Bengalis themselves); tasted prohibited meat cooked by the guards/caretakers of the mansions (no beef; only chicken which was not eaten by the Hindus at home due to its association with Muslim dietary habits; wonderful days even then); made strange remarks about the local populace (‘these people are so simple’ – simple meaning idiotic); and contributed to the local economy by baksheeshing whomever they met. The paschim thus defined was a social space where the urbane Bengalis practiced their own small-scale orientalism. 

There was another group of baboos who had to settle in the paschim for their government jobs. They flocked to Bhagalpur, Munger, Ranchi, Allahabad and other paschima (not paschimi – which meant Europe) towns and, since there was no Facebook, they had to form actual clubs to discuss literature, women, culture, sports, politics and local gossip. These Bengali clubs seldom admitted the locals as the sessions were held in Bengali and the topics were largely related to happenings at home. The baboos who came to these towns for medical tourism often visited these clubs and played carom and cards with the sarkari jobholders. When the lonely afternoons slid into lonelier evenings, the shadowy figures in the sparsely lit rooms ruminated about their time in the big city, sighed about the long-distance marriages, and told each other ghost stories that featured the frightfully sad experience of coming home and discovering that everybody had died in cholera. 

  

Patna had always had a considerable Bengali population. Many of the lawyers and doctors were Bengali, I was told. Some of the lanes were named after them. They had a role to play in shaping Patna’s highbrow public culture by patronising Indian classical music and theatre performances during the Durga puja. I could visualise the smile that adorned the corners of their mouths when a Bihari kid recited Tagore’s poems in broken Bangla. It was the same smile that hung from the lips of their British masters when they recited Shakespeare.

The relationship between the Biharis and the Bengalis was not particularly complicated. The latter assumed a pedagogical function in tutoring the former in the language of aspirational subordination. The limit of aspiration was tuned to the magnitude of subordination – the typical formula for creation of a middleclass everywhere in the world. Soon the Biharis outmatched the Bengalis at subordinating and flicked them off like a dead fly out of rabri. Bihar separated from the Bengal Presidency in 1912 and Patna became the capital city of the new province.

The Bihari urban middleclass remained almost the same as their Bengali cousins up to the seventies. There was the same apathy toward the popular and similar appreciation of the literary snobbishness that found an easy balance between high modernism and simplified Marxism. The public culture in Patna reached its peak in the sixties when the giants like Renu and Dinkar brightened the corners of the coffee houses and lectured the young writers on progressive poetry. Those who still mourn the end of this era blame the arrival of a fresh group of university students in the scene, some of whom would later become the followers of Jayprakash Narayan, and subsequently the chief ministers of Bihar and rail ministers at the Centre.

Interestingly, left ideologies in Bihar have not become flaccid like in today’s West Bengal. Certain political descriptions are still meaningful and elicit a spirit of vibrancy and pride. I personally went through this experience when I was introduced by an elderly person at an exhibition as a ‘progressive young man.’ In Calcutta, it would have been considered a joke about my political double standards. Here the affection with which the words were uttered seemed genuine and transported me to a time when Stalin was a hero and CPI was an underground organisation.

The elderly man at the exhibition was our colleague A’s father-in-law. An octogenarian and a tireless reader, he often hosts us with his wife for evening tea at his flat in Jagdeo Path, a beautifully noisy and knotty neighbourhood. With a background in law and left politics, he is friends with famous historians like D. N. Jha and Brajadulal Chattopadhyay. The centre table in his drawing room has no space for tea cups; books by Lenin, Romila Thapar, Arundhati Roy and Ambedkar have displaced the hapless china.

After moving to Patna, I have once again become aware of the intellectual potency of evening tea. Since alcohol is banned, all sorts of academic and semi-academic discussions are held over cups of hot tea – without milk and sugar for the aficionados like R; milky and sugary for the uninitiated like me. I have only read about these addas in books where mature people will commence a discussion on existentialism with tea cups in hands; sometimes they will take a slight bite of a Thin Arrowroot biscuit. The prohibition has been able to freeze time between the nineteen forties and sixties.

‘My husband can speak and write Bengali,’ A’s mother-in-law told us one day. Her husband smiled shyly and added, ‘Now I don’t have practice but I used to speak in Bangla with my Bengali friends.’ I sipped my tea and nodded like a monk in training. He continued, ‘College Street! So much memory there in the bookshops and the Coffee House!’ I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the bookshops now only sold engineering and medical textbooks. ‘Once we went to Calcutta for a brief period,’ the old man was almost whispering, his thick glasses moist with nostalgia. ‘We visited College Street one day. I got hold of a bookseller and told him, “We are looking for a book.” Ah, what’s the name of the author? She is from Bangladesh and very controversial.’

‘Taslima?’ R interjected.

‘Yes. Taslima. I told the bookseller, “We want her book Dwikhandito” – which was banned then – “you have to get it for us.” He was not complying at first. Then I told him we were from Patna and we had come all the way to his shop for the book. Within half an hour, he returned with the book wrapped in brown paper.’

I tried to make sense of the story and left it hanging from the balcony of my jealousy. I still harbour the dream of becoming a fiction writer when I am done with academics. Will I ever have a reader like him? Will anybody have a reader like him in the next ten-twenty years? The intellectual scene in Patna is awful, I have been told repeatedly. Once again, the nineties was the watershed when the popular submerged whatever existed of the intellectual elite. Still a lecture organised by a left party with minimal electoral presence in the rest of the country is attended by at least a hundred people who engage with the speaker and challenge her with their grounded inquiries and opinions. If it were Calcutta, I can’t help but think, most of the questions would have been puerile and pre-answered.

What makes Patna different from Calcutta or Delhi? The careful nurturing of the vernacular. They have resisted the academic hegemony of both English and Hindi by injecting words, expressions, attitudes surreptitiously in the masters’ discourses. Maybe the nineties was also the watershed in that respect. Make no mistake, without Lalu we couldn’t have had Ravish or Kanhaiya.

In the afternoon, A’s father-in-law helps his seven-year old grandson with his homework. The last time I visited their place, I saw the kid keenly observing a moth on the wall of the middle-aged building. ‘How was your school today?’ I asked, half-expecting an answer. ‘Nik,’ he said. ‘Come again,’ retorted I, thinking it was one of those made-up words which kids use to dismiss unwarranted probing. ‘Nik, nik, you don’t know nik? How buddhu are you! It’s “good” in Maithili.’ The kid resumed his moth-observing activity. I stood there like a fool.

What makes Patna different from Calcutta or Delhi? This kid.

5.

It’s been two eventful months. R and I have shifted to a new apartment in Jagdeo Path. A has found us a flat in the sixth floor of her in-laws’ building. Now I have a balcony which looks over to a flyover that doesn’t seem to have any beginning or an end. On the other side there is a giant bill board with Gulshan Grover’s face – the once famous villain in Hindi cinema. After eleven at night, it’s only Mr. Grover and I who are awake – not a particularly comforting thought. Beneath the flyover, a small shop is populated by the late homecomers. What does the shop sell? Stooping from the balcony, I try to speculate. Maybe some kind of food? Beverage? Alcohol? Can’t be. Not in the open anymore.

Winter is spreading its wings over Patna. The early mornings are now making people pull a chadar over their half-asleep bodies. Evenings are less moist; the office AC is not turned on; going out for tea or a smoke seems less arduous. ‘There will be fifteen days in late December and early January when we will not reach the office in time,’ N informed me. ‘Why? We won’t get up in time in the morning?’ ‘No, no. There will be an impossibly dense fog everywhere. We won’t be able to recognise us from our own shadows.’

Is everybody a poet in Patna? Even the most horrible incidents when described by a Patnaite acquire a lyrical quality. The poetry doesn’t lie in the elongated, serpentine expressions; not even in the beautiful drawl. It’s the effacement of the boredom of everyday in repeated performance of its unwitting circularity. There is a strange rhythm to the mundane which seldom makes its appearance, like when a wound on your skin dries up and forms a pattern. There is something in the air here which heals the wound fast but leaves the pattern back for occasional side glances.

What I like about Jagdeo Path is that every inch of the street is occupied. Occupied by people, shops, buildings, autos and attitude. There are, of course, empty spaces but no vacuum anywhere. The attitude is often direct and rough but never alienating. Alienation has nothing to do with modesty, humility, pehle-aap-ness. In fact, more often than not, the niceness hides predation of higher degrees.

But that can’t be said about the secretary of our building. A young man – probably younger than us – and our next door neighbour, he is the nicest representative of the rental fraternity. Not only did he get us an electrician to fix the fans, he gifted us a table fan, an air cooler and a table made of cane, and invited us to his place for dinner.

I was nervous about the fans because, although it was a Saturday, the Prime Minister of India was coming to the town for the centenary celebration of the Patna University. The entire Ashok Rajpath was closed for his safety and the rest of the city was having an arterial thrombosis. The soft-spoken secretary cautioned us earlier about the difficulties of shifting on the same day Modi was lecturing on university education in India, but we couldn’t afford to heed his advice. Mr. Jha told us to pack up and leave before Sunday morning. They were going to their daughter’s place in Bhagalpur.

Mrs. Jha served us frozen laddus when we went to say goodbye. Her smile was warm though. Mr. Jha made us promise that we would find him another tenant. ‘It’s a huge loss for me. I had to refuse another “party” because of you. Anyway since you have no choice….’ We lied to him. We told him our office was forcing us to take an apartment closer to work.

Why did we lie? Why didn’t we tell him on his face that his place stank? R and I are not overtly confrontational but we are not pushovers either. Did we start liking the Jhas? Maybe in the last two months we had grown some affection for the rooms, the kitchen, or the unmanageable grill gate that separated us from our landlord and lady. I do miss the drawings on the walls of my room. They had beautiful patterns.

Jagdeo Path has another great feature. The whole neighbourhood is a bazaar. No wonder there are three ATMs at the mouth of the main road. The bazaar is mostly about food. All sorts of food. From raw vegetables to phuchka, from Chinese to chicken roll. The most popular breakfast corner is informally called Jaddujika Dukan – the shop of Jadduji – where people sit for hours with tea and jalebi and kill paper tigers with paper rifles. Nobody seems to have heard the word ‘diabetes.’

Jalebi must be the most popular street food in Patna. The mithaiwalas will always prosper because of the huge age-range of their customers – from the toddlers to the ancient. There is a dispute about the second place. Few years ago, litti would have won the silver, no question asked. With the mushrooming of mobile burger shops in the last decade or so, they might have had to concede. Jagdeo Path has at least five burger thelas in a hundred-metre stretch. I can’t remember seeing a single litti shop. But even a dead elephant fetches a million bucks. There was a litti shop close to Mr. Jha’s house. In the evenings it looked like a ration shop. ‘They must put cocaine in the stuffing,’ M told us once.

 

In most of Patna, phuchka is called phuchka. And it’s served with tamarind water, not pudina water. While expressing my joy at finding a familiar taste in an unfamiliar land, I remembered most of the phuchkawalas in Calcutta were actually from Bihar. The taste was already here. It was I who came late. 

Such a lovely spread of unhealthy snacks, but when darkness beckons they start to look like the characters from Waiting for Godot. Unsubstantiated. ‘Isn’t alcohol being sold in black?’ I asked N.

‘Of course it is. Before the ban, you had to go to the shop; now they will deliver it to your home.’

Isn’t that wonderful, I thought. When ever in world history has the alcohol ban stopped people from drinking? It is during these trying times, humanity proves its mettle. Dionysus rides a Scooty in Patna; he rings the bell at your place; the transaction takes place; and later, when you are happy, you dump the bottle at least ten kilometres away from home. ‘Consumption of alcohol is a non-bailable offence,’ N said nonchalantly.

‘I don’t want to get into the debate whether it was needed,’ he said. ‘There are both positives and negatives, like in every situation in life. But it’s true that there are less reports of domestic violence. It’s also true that a lot of women have lost their livelihood because of the ban.’

Whenever I asked around, I heard a lot of bizarre stories. Mythmaking is at its peak right now. I have a name for the outlaws who run the home delivery system – Robin Hood of Royal Stag. Looting they are, undeniably – they charge fifteen hundred rupees for a bottle of five hundred and it’s only cheap whiskey – but whether the loot is being distributed among the needy is unclear.

‘There is a reason why only a handful of people are drinking and not everybody,’ N continued with his morning wisdom. ‘It’s not that they can’t afford. The poor in Patna didn’t drink Royal Stag anyway. I am telling you, most people are not afraid of the law; they are afraid of their neighbours.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s the truth. Everybody has some kind of beef with their neighbours. Imagine you open a bottle and the angry neighbour gets wind of it – I mean literally smells it – what do you think will happen?’

‘They will report me to the police?’

‘Exactly. The police don’t even need a search warrant to raid your house in these cases.’

‘That’s terrible!’ Now I was feeling cold.           

‘But people here are patient. They have been waiting for development, end of casteism, rain, flood relief, revolution and so many other things for so long. They will wait out the ban as well,’ N dipped a tea bag in his cup. ‘Meanwhile some people have dug their gardens and buried all the expensive daru. When the ban is lifted, they will dig them up and throw a party. It’s another thing that you and I won’t be invited to that party.’  

That makes sense. Bihar has always had a rich history of excavation. Think about the surprise of an archaeologist from future when she will dig up a bottle of yellow liquid near the ruins of the ancient city of Patna. The bottle will be preserved at a museum under high security. Then it will be stolen by a master thief who looks like Sean Connery. I wonder what its price will be in the black market in thousand years.  

Fifteen hundred seems a pittance now, doesn’t it?