Small-town Sisyphus

As Hindutva forces augment the volume of their divisive ideology, a book such as Patna Blues quietly makes a poignant, undeniable statement, an appeal to our humanity

A  little more than halfway through Abdullah Khan’s stunning debut novel, Patna Blues, when the daughter of the woman that Arif Khan, the protagonist, is courting starts calling him brother, he feels “like he was a character in a Greek play”. It is instructive that Khan does not tell the readers if the play is a tragedy or a comedy. The character Arif most represents in Greek mythology is Sisyphus, cursed to be trapped by the repetitive rhythms of his lower middle-class life. 

The narrative of the tribulations he encounters in the pursuit of his ambitions and desires is sometimes hilarious