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?