The author, A one-time resident of patna, bemoans that literature now ignores his city. | |
| I confess that the name Patna brings me great pleasure, particularly when I encounter it at a distance. For example, in the pages of Indian fiction in English. Patna occurs once in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (p. 259). In Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting, the name comes up early (p. 5). |
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| In her daughter's more recent book, The Inheritance of Loss, there's a "fellow from Meerut" (p. 217) but, alas, not Patna. There's a fellow from Meerut also in Upamanyu Chatterjee's marvellous English, August. No Patna, however. In fact, Upamanyu Chatterjee said rather ruefully in an interview last year, "I was born in Patna, I can't efface that from my history, it's in my passport." |
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| The place is present only in spirit in the pages of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. In the novel, we come across the following line about a train journey from Howrah to Agra: "Gogol is aware of the dangers involved: his cousins have told him about the bandits that lurk in Bihar, so that his father wears a special garment under his shirt, with hidden pockets to carry cash, and his mother and Sonia remove their gold jewels." |
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| It would seem that Patna has suffered in the last few decades, at least if we go by the evidence offered in fiction. |
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| In his epic novel A Suitable Boy, writing about an India immediately after independence, Vikram Seth describes his elderly character, the politician Mahesh Kapoor, "pulled towards Patna every second day or so by the momentous events occurring there, events that were likely, in his view, to alter entirely the shape and configuration of the political forces of the country" (p. 816). |
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| In the past few years, there has been only one book, Siddharth Chowdhury's gem of a bildungsroman, Patna Roughcut, that has put Patna at the heart of its narrative. |
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| Unlike all the other writers I have described, Chowdhury's is the voice of the insider, giving the most brutal or bizarre realities just that little touch of humour and tenderness that is the mark of true intimacy. But where are the other books that celebrate small beginnings? |
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| I am bemoaning an absence, of course, but I'm also describing a small preoccupation of mine. It was a thrill, when I was in my twenties, to read a somewhat dated report by Shiva Naipaul, describing his visit to Patna. He had called Bihar "the subcontinent's heart of darkness". I wasn't upset that he had called Bihar "a dying state." I was just happy that he had accurately described the streets of my hometown and the shabby hotel that was across from the government quarters where I had lived as a boy. For a writer, judgements are important, but often not as important as the authentic detail. |
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| These details are often visual, and evidence of details about Bihar have been scarce in what is the most visual medium "" the only film about Bihar that I was aware of during my youth was Teesri Kasam. Made in the sixties, with Raj Kapoor playing a bullock-cart driver, the film was directed by the famous lyricist Shailendra. Raj Kapoor was fair-skinned and had light eyes. |
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| To make him look more like a peasant, the film was produced in black and white. But the film, a remarkable attempt at capturing a vernacular idiom, was a failure at the box-office. Shailendra lost all his money and died a year later of a heart attack. |
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| Teesri Kasam told a story of unrequited love. In recent decades several films have been made which cast light on Bihar's poverty or corruption (Damul, Mrityudand, Shool, Paar, Calcutta Mail, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) but none moved me as much as Rituparno Ghosh's Raincoat. |
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| The other films had greater authenticity in their settings, and they were all made by film-makers I very much admire, but it was in Raincoat that I found bits of my middle-class past and the anxieties of my downwardly mobile cousins. What made it even more poignant was that the disappointments and fears of that setting were put in a delicate love-story, offering the consolation of caring while the cracks in the walls grew wider. |
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| The former lovers in Raincoat, who are both, unknown to each other, in straitened circumstances, meet in a crumbling house in Kolkata. The two of them, Manoj and Neeru, are from Bhagalpur in Bihar. |
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| To keep their spirits up, they lie to each other. Neeru is pretending to be the wife of a tycoon. Manoj claims he produces television serials. At one point, Neeru, played by Aishwarya Rai, tells Manoj, the Ajay Devgan character, about the sort of serial she'd like to watch. |
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| "A serial about girls like me... A village girl comes to a new town after marriage ... with a dream that ... she'll love her husband very much ... look after him ... But he's always on tour ... She's always waiting ... Suddenly waking up from sleep, thinking ... 'Did the door bell ring?'" |
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| When she pauses, Manoj begins to speak. "And then one day the bell rings. She opens the door and sees it's not her husband, but someone else. Someone she used to know but can't recognise anymore. He's turned dark, his hair is thinning." |
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| I was moved by this because even without wanting to, the two were at last telling the story that they had hidden from each other. And that is perhaps the point I have been making about stories from places like Patna. |
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| These are places whose stories we have not told yet, and it is a matter of time before they will come tumbling out of us. |
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| Amitava Kumar is the author of Home Products, a novel to be published this month by Picador. He teaches English at Vassar College |
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