Each book, like a place on a map joined by roads and rivers to other places, is always connected to other books. That is certainly true for this book about my hometown, Patna. There is another facet to this argument: places seemingly unconnected might well be very near each other in terms of literary representation. In my book, New York is closer to Patna than is usually imagined.
When a publisher in Delhi asked me to write about Patna, he mentioned as a possible model E. B. White’s classic essay Here Is New York. I bought a used copy from a bookstore. The little book had an inscription in blue ink: “Nancy, You may be leaving New York but hopefully New York will never leave you. It has been a pleasure and a delight. Best always, Robert. 06.08.2001.” Was he saying that he wished and hoped that she would never forget him? Was the city a giant stand-in for his presence in her life? And what was one to make of the fact that the book had been sold to a second-hand bookstore? I wondered whether the owner, or some-one else, had sold it after the September 11 attacks. White’s essay had been given a prophetic tone during the aftermath because of the following lines near the end: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers.”
For me, the book’s promise lay in the very first sentence of White’s foreword: “This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” It gave me hope that if I braved Patna’s heat and humidity, I too could put together an essay about a city. Maybe even before the year was out. When the summer ended, I was going to start teaching a writing course, and my new mantra for my students was going to be: “Write every day and walk every day.” A hundred and fifty words daily. And a brief round of mindful walking. But producing the small number of words was key. Even if I stuck just to that target, I’d have nearly twenty thousand words before the semester was over. That would be three times the length of White’s essay. Roger Angell was White’s stepson, and in the edition of the book that I had bought, he had noted that White came down to New York by train, from New England, and took a room at the Algonquin Hotel. After his brief stay, White went back home to Maine and wrote Here Is New York. As if it were a secret talisman, I took White’s book with me to Patna.
“New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.” White had written that in a city like New York, people are always insulated from all kinds of events going on around them: “The biggest ocean- going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers.” When I read lines like these, I felt that they expressed a truth not about cities but about writers. Or at least the kind of writer that E. B. White was. He wasn’t hunting for headlines. He wasn’t even outgoing. He didn’t want to be everywhere or, in fact, anywhere.
Unlike White, who had no interest in claiming the role of witness to the Lions’ Convention, or the governor’s visit, or the death of a man from a falling cornice, I wanted to be a camera with a thousand eyes. Like New York, Patna is a big city and a heavily populated one. But there is a difference. In Patna, an individual like me can never really be removed from the events around him or her, not least because everyone is most likely to be surrounded by family. I didn’t desire insulation, but neither did I seek out the chief minister’s rally or a Bollywood star’s banquet. I wanted only the fullest encounter with the ordinary and, although this became clearer to me later, I was often inclined to search for that which would have engaged me most fully if I were living and working in Patna. Each day I would go out with a Moleskine notebook with its brown paper cover. Here, chosen almost at random, is a log of a single day, August 21, 2012, based on observations I had made that day in my notebook, this one number 18.
9:00am. On a visit to Patna railway station to pick up brochures at their tourism booth. Women with bright yellow vests with anti-polio slogans. A coolie leading a blind man to his train. Then I see a father holding the hand of a crippled child. And immediately afterward, an old man who manages to walk by himself but his arms and even his torso are propped up by his three sons. His less frail wife lags behind. You want tenderness – a sapling that is to be watered daily – come to the train station.
Just like the old times, the A. H. Wheeler bookstand on Platform 1. And like before, along with treatises by Vivekanand and Nehru, also displayed for sale is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I notice that there are now electric outlets for charging mobile phones. Outside, the line of lepers sitting in a line, begging bowls in front of them, just as I remembered from my youth.
10:00am. I sit crammed in the back of a Maruti with a journalist and a young cultural activist. The car belongs to a soft-spoken magistrate, who sits in front. The air-conditioning is not working; we are all sweating at the back. The activist belongs to a group called Abhiyan Sanskriti Manch. He tells me he is interested in “cultural studies,” and his model is Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights. I mention to him that I’m supposed to watch a play rehearsal that evening, and he says that Patna is an important center of theater, with twelve to fifteen groups active at any given time.
11:00am. Our small party reaches Patna City. The government press in Gulzarbagh is there. This building served as the opium warehouse under the British. The journalist has promised to take me inside, but then we learn that permission is required. We wait in the office of the area’s Deputy Superintendent of Police, a man in his thirties, a graduate in English literature from Patna University. He is candid and admits that his degree was of no use to him. He goes on to say that his daughter has been learning about lilies at a local school run by missionaries. She doesn’t know what lilies look like. He would prefer that she learn about marigolds.
Noon. Permission has not yet been granted. A fax needs to be sent with a document attesting to my scholarly interest in the press. But then there is a power cut. More time passes while the electric generator is started. The police officer tells me that the best opium is still made in the area, in a nearby town called Raghopur. His district, he says, is the main site of transportation. I have an appointment elsewhere at 3:00pm, so rather than wait for the bureaucrats to fax the permission letter, I walk over to the press building.
The sun is hot, and out on the dusty street the heat produces a feeling of near suffocation. Any shade is a blessing. On the boundary wall of the press are painted graphic warnings, with prominent yellows and reds, listing the diseases that result from using open areas for passing human waste. In a picture painted alongside, a man with a can looks at the blue door of pink brick toilet. He looks unhappy, perhaps because he is waiting. There is another figure in the picture. He is washing his hands under a tap. He is smiling. Next to this wall poster is another showing a couple with a newborn baby. The man, with a mustache covering his upper lip in such a way that you doubt the lip’s existence, is saying something. The man’s words are painted below in Hindi. He is saying, “We will give each other another child in another three years.” The condom that is being advertised has as its symbol a black stallion standing up on its hind legs.
The press is a large, two story, white washed building with wooden doors and borders around the windows painted an earthy red. I see that it is dark and cavernous inside, but don’t try to get access. The heat has a way of making you feel dull and opiated.
1:00pm. I am a few minutes late for class at Patna College. Professor Muniba Sami has allowed me to attend her lecture on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
3:00pm. Lunch with Professors Sami and Dutt. Masala dosa and kaathi roll.
5:00pm. I stop at the Tricel bookstore and ask Raghu – the owner, whom I have known since my boyhood – what kinds of books do his customers buy these days. He says, without hesitation, Wings of Fire, the autobiography of the former President of India, Abdul Kalam. In Raghu’s shop there are children’s books on the floor; a separate shelf of scholarly titles from Oxford; two shelves with Penguin India titles; a shelf devoted to Hindi literature; and on the opposite side, in a riot of blood, lust, and loathing, titles by John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, and Ayn Rand.
6:00pm. The traffic constables are women, and yes, I see this as empowerment. We pass a small restaurant called Subah Ka Nashta. The menu is painted under the name (6 puris, 2 jalebis, Price: 23 rupees). It doesn’t get less crowded away from the railway station. In a few minutes, the car creeps up to Exhibition Road. We move so slowly it gives me time to look out and search for the hardware shop owned by a friend who was in school with me. I haven’t seen him since that time, decades ago, when his father was knifed in a hotel room by a boy he had brought up since childhood. I had imagined a bull in a small courtyard, bleeding from a thousand cuts. I don’t find the shop but, after some difficulty, am able to locate the building where the rehearsal is taking place. There are no lights on the ground floor. I’m told to go a floor up for the elevator. A small red glowing button in the dark to tell me that I’m in the right place. Then, in the near total darkness, the elevator appears and the doors part. A thin old man sitting on a stool inside asks, “Which floor?”
On the seventh floor, members of the Patna branch of Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) are rehearsing a Girish Karnad play. The original was in Kannada, but the Hindi version is called Rakt-Kalyan. Shoes have been left outside. On one of the walls, framed portraits of Bhagat Singh and the poet Kaifi Azmi. Red plastic chairs are arranged in a large rectangle in the room. The actors sit with the script in their hands. The play is about Brahmins and the revolt against caste. While the actors read out their lines, I study the dirty soles of their feet.
Most of the actors are young. But the older ones, three men and two women, are experienced theater activists. When they speak their lines, time seems to slow down. There is enough time for meaning to take shape and even grow. One of the older actors plays a Brahmin who has renounced all trappings of caste. He is impressive. But so is the actor who plays the low born king. The play is set in the twelfth century but it has great relevance for Patna, where caste is the currency of social exchange. The king has a crude, candid manner – it makes me think of Lalu Yadav – and he tells his interlocutor that his low birth is branded on his forehead: “You ask the most innocent child in my empire: what is Bijjala by caste? And the instant reply will be: a barber! One’s caste is like the skin on one’s body. You can peel it off top to toe, but when the new skin forms, there you are again: a barber – a shepherd – a scavenger!”
10:00pm. My sisters are talking in the room that is at the far end of the house. This used to be my room when I was a boy. I’m downloading photographs on my computer, but I eavesdrop on their conversation. My elder sister is a doctor, married to a doctor. He has a sister, who is a doctor – and her husband, also a doctor, is having an affair. The woman with whom he is having the affair is not a doctor. She is the receptionist at his hospital. They meet for sex at a gym that is across the street from the hospital.
THE CITY IS HOME to a multitude of facts. And yet, how ordinary is the ordinary? In the public imagination, in India at least, Patna is an open city. It has surrendered to the might of scandalous stories. Kidnappings! Corruption! Crime! Here is a case that was a favorite of mine for several years. The journalist Arvind Das wrote in The Republic of Bihar about a conversation overheard in a train from Patna in 1991: A woman, distraught at her husband’s prolonged illness, was telling her son that she sometimes found herself wanting to commit suicide. The son responded that his father’s death would be more welcome. Das had written, “Why should you die, why not kill Babuji instead? If he goes away, we will get his gratuity and provi-dent fund money and it is possible that I might even get a job on compassionate grounds. What use will your dying be?” Das noted in his book that the boy was only twelve years old.
And yet, as often happens in Bihar, the state of which Patna is the capital, it is also possible to tell the opposite story. Das features in this one too. In Delhi, during a visit last summer, I went for a walk in the garden around Humayun’s tomb. My companion was the esteemed social thinker Ashis Nandy. We were talking about Bihar, and Nandy said that there were many news reports back in the 1990s about young Bihari men being forced to marry at gun point. In most cases, a youth traveling in a train would find himself looking up into the barrel of a gun. He would be asked to disembark and would be taken to a town or a village where he would be married to a girl whose family had guns but not the means to pay an expensive dowry. Nandy told me that he had asked Das, who was from a village only a couple of hours away from Patna, whether there wasn’t a lot of fear on the part of the bride’s family that their daughter would be abandoned or killed? Das had said to him: “But that too is Bihar! So far I have not heard about a single such case where the young woman has been harmed.”
But that too is Bihar! When Nandy finished telling me his story, I thought of a line from John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel, G.: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” It could be a credo for nonfiction writers. To show on the page that despite what you’re saying, there is another story waiting in the wings. The ordinary kept from being made extraordinary – the tame fascination with the exotic – because it is never removed from the context of surrounding facts. Rats are to be found in my parents’ home in Patna, yes, but they become real to me, as I sit listening to them at night, because of the research done on rats in New York City.
“It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among.” This was V. S. Naipaul writing in Beyond Belief, an account of his travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. What Naipaul was saying about travel to foreign countries is also true for the writer who is only returning home. This long essay is about my hometown, Patna, but at its heart are stories about people. People, not political programs. “Has Patna improved?” Questions of this nature are often directed at those who know Patna. I have little interest in answering such questions. The emphasis on the ordinary means that my attempt here has been to present stories of daily lives. My themes here are similar to what I would have explored if I were writing about people elsewhere: success, failure, love, death. I have written earlier that there are no people in postcolonial theory. Almost the same can be said about place. A term like “postcolonial” swallows up whole continents and nations. This book is about a particular place called Patna, and I cannot deny that my portrait is personal. In this, too, I’m reaching for the ordinary, paying attention to what re-mains obscure and whose value is overlooked. In the last paragraph of Here Is New York, E. B. White wrote about an old, battered willow tree in the city. He wanted the tree saved. White hadn’t ignored the vision of the tall towers and the terrible errands of the flying planes, but what mattered was the tree: “If it were to go, all would go.” In the pages of this book that I have written about Patna, I too have something that I want to save. I have in mind two residents of Patna who have spent a lifetime there. They have survived the city’s troubles and celebrated its achievements, and they will not be around forever. Patna is the place where I grew up, but those two are my real place of origin. And when they are gone, my link to Patna will be broken.
One final prefatory remark. The place of place is also in writing. In other words, a writer arrives at a sense of place not by mere accident of birth or habitation but by creating, again and again, a landscape of the imagination. I’m flooded with memories of my past grant applications: “Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to apply for funds to travel to Patna to conduct research in areas of peasant unrest. My primary interest is in the cultural production of protest.” Articles, travel pieces, memoirs. A practice carried out over years of return, akin to a pattern of writing and revision. In a changing city, the urgent need to record my deepest associations. Even in fiction, the desire to put down precisely the arrival of the monsoon in Patna:
"Rains lashed the house, driving water inside through the cracks in the windows, making the wooden window frames swollen and gray. The ceiling in the bathroom turned green and began to drip. If the front door was left open in the evening, frogs hopped in and took their place on the floor around the sofa, looking very much like well-fed but malcontent guests. The pages of the notebooks reserved for homework got stuck together and could only with some ingenuity be used to make paper boats. Binod and Rabinder would return from school with their hair damp and their clothes soiled with mud. Wet garments were spread to dry on every available piece of furniture and also under the sluggishly turning blades of the ceiling fans. There was a clothesline even in the kitchen. Most of the walls became furred with peeling paint and centipedes of different colors crawled on them and found their way onto beds and pillows. It suddenly seemed during those months that there was very little space in the house for its real inhabitants."
The mere act of typing these words, copying them from the page open in front of me, provides an entry into that place of writing. The location of culture is not so much a place but an active practice – the practice of writing.
THE LATEST STEP I took in that place of place, immediately before beginning this book, was writing a short piece for the India Ink blog for the New York Times. I had just read Jeff, One Lonely Guy, by Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields, and Michael Logan. Ragsdale, a New York writer and unemployed comedian, had reacted to a breakup by posting flyers near his home that simply said: “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. (347) 469-3173. Jeff, one lonely guy.”
Jeff, One Lonely Guy was fashioned out of the 60,000 calls and text messages that Ragsdale received in response to his flyers. The responses were varied and fascinating:
“I called to see what the story was.”
“We live in a disconnected society. Did you think up this idea while you were smoking a blunt?”
“I just flew in from L.A. and was in a bad mood, then I saw your sign on the street. Ha! I cast reality shows.”
“Heathcliff it’s me Catherine!”
“Pablo Escobar had a hit out on my father, who was a Communist. My father fought against Escobar and got political asylum in the U.S.”
All this in the first handful of pages. The writer David Shields, who was one of Ragsdale’s teachers, helped edit these field notes from that occult zone Shields calls “Occupy Loneliness.”
In my piece for the Times I proposed that I could put up flyers on the busy streets near my parents’ home asking questions like “Does the best opium still come from Patna?” In one of my writing notebooks is a picture I had torn out from a glossy magazine several years ago. I was in a gym in Florida, and the page left open on a treadmill showed a nineteenth-century drawing of swarthy, dhoti-clad men at work in an immense hall, arranging in neat lines circular mounds of – what?
The text above the picture offered a clue: “Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges.” My flyer would be an attempt to find out if that was still true.
I also had other questions.
In 1967 there was a famine in Bihar. I knew of this only because my father, a career bureaucrat, served in places like Purnea, a city to the east of Patna. But then I discovered a newsreel, in which I saw the actor Marlon Brando listening to villagers near Patna. I learned that Brando had come to Bihar as the ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund. You can hear voices in the background, complaining in Hindi of hunger and of grain being denied to them by corrupt officials.
And then the Englishman providing the voice-over says, “All in all, it was a modest performance from Brando, and definitely a non-speaking part.”
So that could be another flyer: “Did you see Brando in Patna in 1967?”
I never posted flyers, but this book is made up in part by the answers I received in response to the questions like the one above. It bears mentioning that a man who had met Brando in 1967 in Bihar was not in Patna but in upstate New York. He was an American engaged in famine relief in India in the 1960s.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In the mirror of literature representation, places find a new intimacy, not only to us but also to each other. Nonetheless, what the above record doesn’t reveal is the writer’s anxiety. What does it matter that Patna and New York are connected? When I was waiting to hear news about the novel that I have quoted from above, news about whether it had been accepted for publication in the United States, a friend from Patna – a fellow writer – expressed his feelings of impatience in a letter: “I truly believe that getting published in the West is not that important. At best it is a bonus and one earns more, which is a good thing. But as Indian writers, our primary market lies here and it is here in India that we will be finally judged, though I do realize that some critics here do look towards publication in the West as final validation of a writer’s worth. But tell me, is Paul Auster ever bothered about how he is perceived in India? Or whether his books sell at all in India?” I don’t know; I have no idea whether he has heard of Patna. But in the pages that follow, I have written of Patna in the belief that Patna would be of interest to anyone, particularly Paul Auster.
The Place of Place is the introduction to the US edition of Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats, forthcoming from Duke University Press in April. The Indian edition is published by Aleph Book Company.
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When a publisher in Delhi asked me to write about Patna, he mentioned as a possible model E. B. White’s classic essay Here Is New York. I bought a used copy from a bookstore. The little book had an inscription in blue ink: “Nancy, You may be leaving New York but hopefully New York will never leave you. It has been a pleasure and a delight. Best always, Robert. 06.08.2001.” Was he saying that he wished and hoped that she would never forget him? Was the city a giant stand-in for his presence in her life? And what was one to make of the fact that the book had been sold to a second-hand bookstore? I wondered whether the owner, or some-one else, had sold it after the September 11 attacks. White’s essay had been given a prophetic tone during the aftermath because of the following lines near the end: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers.”
For me, the book’s promise lay in the very first sentence of White’s foreword: “This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” It gave me hope that if I braved Patna’s heat and humidity, I too could put together an essay about a city. Maybe even before the year was out. When the summer ended, I was going to start teaching a writing course, and my new mantra for my students was going to be: “Write every day and walk every day.” A hundred and fifty words daily. And a brief round of mindful walking. But producing the small number of words was key. Even if I stuck just to that target, I’d have nearly twenty thousand words before the semester was over. That would be three times the length of White’s essay. Roger Angell was White’s stepson, and in the edition of the book that I had bought, he had noted that White came down to New York by train, from New England, and took a room at the Algonquin Hotel. After his brief stay, White went back home to Maine and wrote Here Is New York. As if it were a secret talisman, I took White’s book with me to Patna.
“New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.” White had written that in a city like New York, people are always insulated from all kinds of events going on around them: “The biggest ocean- going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers.” When I read lines like these, I felt that they expressed a truth not about cities but about writers. Or at least the kind of writer that E. B. White was. He wasn’t hunting for headlines. He wasn’t even outgoing. He didn’t want to be everywhere or, in fact, anywhere.
Unlike White, who had no interest in claiming the role of witness to the Lions’ Convention, or the governor’s visit, or the death of a man from a falling cornice, I wanted to be a camera with a thousand eyes. Like New York, Patna is a big city and a heavily populated one. But there is a difference. In Patna, an individual like me can never really be removed from the events around him or her, not least because everyone is most likely to be surrounded by family. I didn’t desire insulation, but neither did I seek out the chief minister’s rally or a Bollywood star’s banquet. I wanted only the fullest encounter with the ordinary and, although this became clearer to me later, I was often inclined to search for that which would have engaged me most fully if I were living and working in Patna. Each day I would go out with a Moleskine notebook with its brown paper cover. Here, chosen almost at random, is a log of a single day, August 21, 2012, based on observations I had made that day in my notebook, this one number 18.
9:00am. On a visit to Patna railway station to pick up brochures at their tourism booth. Women with bright yellow vests with anti-polio slogans. A coolie leading a blind man to his train. Then I see a father holding the hand of a crippled child. And immediately afterward, an old man who manages to walk by himself but his arms and even his torso are propped up by his three sons. His less frail wife lags behind. You want tenderness – a sapling that is to be watered daily – come to the train station.
Just like the old times, the A. H. Wheeler bookstand on Platform 1. And like before, along with treatises by Vivekanand and Nehru, also displayed for sale is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I notice that there are now electric outlets for charging mobile phones. Outside, the line of lepers sitting in a line, begging bowls in front of them, just as I remembered from my youth.
10:00am. I sit crammed in the back of a Maruti with a journalist and a young cultural activist. The car belongs to a soft-spoken magistrate, who sits in front. The air-conditioning is not working; we are all sweating at the back. The activist belongs to a group called Abhiyan Sanskriti Manch. He tells me he is interested in “cultural studies,” and his model is Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights. I mention to him that I’m supposed to watch a play rehearsal that evening, and he says that Patna is an important center of theater, with twelve to fifteen groups active at any given time.
11:00am. Our small party reaches Patna City. The government press in Gulzarbagh is there. This building served as the opium warehouse under the British. The journalist has promised to take me inside, but then we learn that permission is required. We wait in the office of the area’s Deputy Superintendent of Police, a man in his thirties, a graduate in English literature from Patna University. He is candid and admits that his degree was of no use to him. He goes on to say that his daughter has been learning about lilies at a local school run by missionaries. She doesn’t know what lilies look like. He would prefer that she learn about marigolds.
Noon. Permission has not yet been granted. A fax needs to be sent with a document attesting to my scholarly interest in the press. But then there is a power cut. More time passes while the electric generator is started. The police officer tells me that the best opium is still made in the area, in a nearby town called Raghopur. His district, he says, is the main site of transportation. I have an appointment elsewhere at 3:00pm, so rather than wait for the bureaucrats to fax the permission letter, I walk over to the press building.
The sun is hot, and out on the dusty street the heat produces a feeling of near suffocation. Any shade is a blessing. On the boundary wall of the press are painted graphic warnings, with prominent yellows and reds, listing the diseases that result from using open areas for passing human waste. In a picture painted alongside, a man with a can looks at the blue door of pink brick toilet. He looks unhappy, perhaps because he is waiting. There is another figure in the picture. He is washing his hands under a tap. He is smiling. Next to this wall poster is another showing a couple with a newborn baby. The man, with a mustache covering his upper lip in such a way that you doubt the lip’s existence, is saying something. The man’s words are painted below in Hindi. He is saying, “We will give each other another child in another three years.” The condom that is being advertised has as its symbol a black stallion standing up on its hind legs.
The press is a large, two story, white washed building with wooden doors and borders around the windows painted an earthy red. I see that it is dark and cavernous inside, but don’t try to get access. The heat has a way of making you feel dull and opiated.
1:00pm. I am a few minutes late for class at Patna College. Professor Muniba Sami has allowed me to attend her lecture on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
3:00pm. Lunch with Professors Sami and Dutt. Masala dosa and kaathi roll.
5:00pm. I stop at the Tricel bookstore and ask Raghu – the owner, whom I have known since my boyhood – what kinds of books do his customers buy these days. He says, without hesitation, Wings of Fire, the autobiography of the former President of India, Abdul Kalam. In Raghu’s shop there are children’s books on the floor; a separate shelf of scholarly titles from Oxford; two shelves with Penguin India titles; a shelf devoted to Hindi literature; and on the opposite side, in a riot of blood, lust, and loathing, titles by John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, and Ayn Rand.
6:00pm. The traffic constables are women, and yes, I see this as empowerment. We pass a small restaurant called Subah Ka Nashta. The menu is painted under the name (6 puris, 2 jalebis, Price: 23 rupees). It doesn’t get less crowded away from the railway station. In a few minutes, the car creeps up to Exhibition Road. We move so slowly it gives me time to look out and search for the hardware shop owned by a friend who was in school with me. I haven’t seen him since that time, decades ago, when his father was knifed in a hotel room by a boy he had brought up since childhood. I had imagined a bull in a small courtyard, bleeding from a thousand cuts. I don’t find the shop but, after some difficulty, am able to locate the building where the rehearsal is taking place. There are no lights on the ground floor. I’m told to go a floor up for the elevator. A small red glowing button in the dark to tell me that I’m in the right place. Then, in the near total darkness, the elevator appears and the doors part. A thin old man sitting on a stool inside asks, “Which floor?”
On the seventh floor, members of the Patna branch of Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) are rehearsing a Girish Karnad play. The original was in Kannada, but the Hindi version is called Rakt-Kalyan. Shoes have been left outside. On one of the walls, framed portraits of Bhagat Singh and the poet Kaifi Azmi. Red plastic chairs are arranged in a large rectangle in the room. The actors sit with the script in their hands. The play is about Brahmins and the revolt against caste. While the actors read out their lines, I study the dirty soles of their feet.
Most of the actors are young. But the older ones, three men and two women, are experienced theater activists. When they speak their lines, time seems to slow down. There is enough time for meaning to take shape and even grow. One of the older actors plays a Brahmin who has renounced all trappings of caste. He is impressive. But so is the actor who plays the low born king. The play is set in the twelfth century but it has great relevance for Patna, where caste is the currency of social exchange. The king has a crude, candid manner – it makes me think of Lalu Yadav – and he tells his interlocutor that his low birth is branded on his forehead: “You ask the most innocent child in my empire: what is Bijjala by caste? And the instant reply will be: a barber! One’s caste is like the skin on one’s body. You can peel it off top to toe, but when the new skin forms, there you are again: a barber – a shepherd – a scavenger!”
10:00pm. My sisters are talking in the room that is at the far end of the house. This used to be my room when I was a boy. I’m downloading photographs on my computer, but I eavesdrop on their conversation. My elder sister is a doctor, married to a doctor. He has a sister, who is a doctor – and her husband, also a doctor, is having an affair. The woman with whom he is having the affair is not a doctor. She is the receptionist at his hospital. They meet for sex at a gym that is across the street from the hospital.
THE CITY IS HOME to a multitude of facts. And yet, how ordinary is the ordinary? In the public imagination, in India at least, Patna is an open city. It has surrendered to the might of scandalous stories. Kidnappings! Corruption! Crime! Here is a case that was a favorite of mine for several years. The journalist Arvind Das wrote in The Republic of Bihar about a conversation overheard in a train from Patna in 1991: A woman, distraught at her husband’s prolonged illness, was telling her son that she sometimes found herself wanting to commit suicide. The son responded that his father’s death would be more welcome. Das had written, “Why should you die, why not kill Babuji instead? If he goes away, we will get his gratuity and provi-dent fund money and it is possible that I might even get a job on compassionate grounds. What use will your dying be?” Das noted in his book that the boy was only twelve years old.
And yet, as often happens in Bihar, the state of which Patna is the capital, it is also possible to tell the opposite story. Das features in this one too. In Delhi, during a visit last summer, I went for a walk in the garden around Humayun’s tomb. My companion was the esteemed social thinker Ashis Nandy. We were talking about Bihar, and Nandy said that there were many news reports back in the 1990s about young Bihari men being forced to marry at gun point. In most cases, a youth traveling in a train would find himself looking up into the barrel of a gun. He would be asked to disembark and would be taken to a town or a village where he would be married to a girl whose family had guns but not the means to pay an expensive dowry. Nandy told me that he had asked Das, who was from a village only a couple of hours away from Patna, whether there wasn’t a lot of fear on the part of the bride’s family that their daughter would be abandoned or killed? Das had said to him: “But that too is Bihar! So far I have not heard about a single such case where the young woman has been harmed.”
But that too is Bihar! When Nandy finished telling me his story, I thought of a line from John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel, G.: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” It could be a credo for nonfiction writers. To show on the page that despite what you’re saying, there is another story waiting in the wings. The ordinary kept from being made extraordinary – the tame fascination with the exotic – because it is never removed from the context of surrounding facts. Rats are to be found in my parents’ home in Patna, yes, but they become real to me, as I sit listening to them at night, because of the research done on rats in New York City.
“It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among.” This was V. S. Naipaul writing in Beyond Belief, an account of his travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. What Naipaul was saying about travel to foreign countries is also true for the writer who is only returning home. This long essay is about my hometown, Patna, but at its heart are stories about people. People, not political programs. “Has Patna improved?” Questions of this nature are often directed at those who know Patna. I have little interest in answering such questions. The emphasis on the ordinary means that my attempt here has been to present stories of daily lives. My themes here are similar to what I would have explored if I were writing about people elsewhere: success, failure, love, death. I have written earlier that there are no people in postcolonial theory. Almost the same can be said about place. A term like “postcolonial” swallows up whole continents and nations. This book is about a particular place called Patna, and I cannot deny that my portrait is personal. In this, too, I’m reaching for the ordinary, paying attention to what re-mains obscure and whose value is overlooked. In the last paragraph of Here Is New York, E. B. White wrote about an old, battered willow tree in the city. He wanted the tree saved. White hadn’t ignored the vision of the tall towers and the terrible errands of the flying planes, but what mattered was the tree: “If it were to go, all would go.” In the pages of this book that I have written about Patna, I too have something that I want to save. I have in mind two residents of Patna who have spent a lifetime there. They have survived the city’s troubles and celebrated its achievements, and they will not be around forever. Patna is the place where I grew up, but those two are my real place of origin. And when they are gone, my link to Patna will be broken.
One final prefatory remark. The place of place is also in writing. In other words, a writer arrives at a sense of place not by mere accident of birth or habitation but by creating, again and again, a landscape of the imagination. I’m flooded with memories of my past grant applications: “Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to apply for funds to travel to Patna to conduct research in areas of peasant unrest. My primary interest is in the cultural production of protest.” Articles, travel pieces, memoirs. A practice carried out over years of return, akin to a pattern of writing and revision. In a changing city, the urgent need to record my deepest associations. Even in fiction, the desire to put down precisely the arrival of the monsoon in Patna:
"Rains lashed the house, driving water inside through the cracks in the windows, making the wooden window frames swollen and gray. The ceiling in the bathroom turned green and began to drip. If the front door was left open in the evening, frogs hopped in and took their place on the floor around the sofa, looking very much like well-fed but malcontent guests. The pages of the notebooks reserved for homework got stuck together and could only with some ingenuity be used to make paper boats. Binod and Rabinder would return from school with their hair damp and their clothes soiled with mud. Wet garments were spread to dry on every available piece of furniture and also under the sluggishly turning blades of the ceiling fans. There was a clothesline even in the kitchen. Most of the walls became furred with peeling paint and centipedes of different colors crawled on them and found their way onto beds and pillows. It suddenly seemed during those months that there was very little space in the house for its real inhabitants."
The mere act of typing these words, copying them from the page open in front of me, provides an entry into that place of writing. The location of culture is not so much a place but an active practice – the practice of writing.
THE LATEST STEP I took in that place of place, immediately before beginning this book, was writing a short piece for the India Ink blog for the New York Times. I had just read Jeff, One Lonely Guy, by Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields, and Michael Logan. Ragsdale, a New York writer and unemployed comedian, had reacted to a breakup by posting flyers near his home that simply said: “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. (347) 469-3173. Jeff, one lonely guy.”
Jeff, One Lonely Guy was fashioned out of the 60,000 calls and text messages that Ragsdale received in response to his flyers. The responses were varied and fascinating:
“I called to see what the story was.”
“We live in a disconnected society. Did you think up this idea while you were smoking a blunt?”
“I just flew in from L.A. and was in a bad mood, then I saw your sign on the street. Ha! I cast reality shows.”
“Heathcliff it’s me Catherine!”
“Pablo Escobar had a hit out on my father, who was a Communist. My father fought against Escobar and got political asylum in the U.S.”
All this in the first handful of pages. The writer David Shields, who was one of Ragsdale’s teachers, helped edit these field notes from that occult zone Shields calls “Occupy Loneliness.”
In my piece for the Times I proposed that I could put up flyers on the busy streets near my parents’ home asking questions like “Does the best opium still come from Patna?” In one of my writing notebooks is a picture I had torn out from a glossy magazine several years ago. I was in a gym in Florida, and the page left open on a treadmill showed a nineteenth-century drawing of swarthy, dhoti-clad men at work in an immense hall, arranging in neat lines circular mounds of – what?
The text above the picture offered a clue: “Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges.” My flyer would be an attempt to find out if that was still true.
I also had other questions.
In 1967 there was a famine in Bihar. I knew of this only because my father, a career bureaucrat, served in places like Purnea, a city to the east of Patna. But then I discovered a newsreel, in which I saw the actor Marlon Brando listening to villagers near Patna. I learned that Brando had come to Bihar as the ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund. You can hear voices in the background, complaining in Hindi of hunger and of grain being denied to them by corrupt officials.
And then the Englishman providing the voice-over says, “All in all, it was a modest performance from Brando, and definitely a non-speaking part.”
So that could be another flyer: “Did you see Brando in Patna in 1967?”
I never posted flyers, but this book is made up in part by the answers I received in response to the questions like the one above. It bears mentioning that a man who had met Brando in 1967 in Bihar was not in Patna but in upstate New York. He was an American engaged in famine relief in India in the 1960s.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In the mirror of literature representation, places find a new intimacy, not only to us but also to each other. Nonetheless, what the above record doesn’t reveal is the writer’s anxiety. What does it matter that Patna and New York are connected? When I was waiting to hear news about the novel that I have quoted from above, news about whether it had been accepted for publication in the United States, a friend from Patna – a fellow writer – expressed his feelings of impatience in a letter: “I truly believe that getting published in the West is not that important. At best it is a bonus and one earns more, which is a good thing. But as Indian writers, our primary market lies here and it is here in India that we will be finally judged, though I do realize that some critics here do look towards publication in the West as final validation of a writer’s worth. But tell me, is Paul Auster ever bothered about how he is perceived in India? Or whether his books sell at all in India?” I don’t know; I have no idea whether he has heard of Patna. But in the pages that follow, I have written of Patna in the belief that Patna would be of interest to anyone, particularly Paul Auster.
The Place of Place is the introduction to the US edition of Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats, forthcoming from Duke University Press in April. The Indian edition is published by Aleph Book Company.
