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Amitava Kunar is someone who has spent a major part of his life in United States now, but Patna never left him although he left the town where he grew up. Coming from someone who earned two master’s degree over there and now teaches at one of the famous liberal arts college in upstate New York, A MATTER OF RATS, A short biography of Patna is a delightful meditation on life in this city without being judgemental or falling prey to cliché. Living here, I found the book fascinating and can definitely relate to it at a subliminal level. There is this old chestnut of how it was the seat of the powerful Mauryan Empire in the ancient India. But this history is older than old, in fact so old that it has acquired a mythical quality which makes you wonder if the time really existed. When you think of it, it is no doubt one of the shabbiest capital city anywhere, so much so that Shiva Naipaul, the writer and brother of the formidable VS Naipaul, who came to the city in the sixties, was so appalled by the dehumanizing poverty that he said that this place defies reason and alienates compassion. There is also another account by another scholar who maintains that Patna can be found everywhere in the world and compared the sheer vividness of the human scale to the ancient Roman Empire. More than anything, as Amitava Kumar rightly mentions, Patna brings you face to face with your own immortality, this looping circle of regeneration and decay and how every life is a failure in the ultimate analysis.

PS  I didn’t know that the great Marlon Brando once visited back in 1965 and spent a night here. He was working with the American charity CARE at the time of severe famine in this part of the country. 

Of late I’ve listening to a lot of film music and also English music from the 80’s, and it got me thinking about that particular period. But before I go any further let me just say that hindi film music from the 80’s was not a very glorious period in terms of melody but every now and then you discovered some priceless gems and also those seductive disco numbers were really peppy, foot thumping kind. But more than anything else, the music took me down the memory lane of my formative years spent in that nondescript small town called Nawada. I am truly a child of the eighties, and when I think about it, a kaleidoscope of vivid recollections floats across my mind. It was a time of command and control economy and it was so bloody difficult get hold of some of the goodies that we take for granted today like cookies, soft drink and butter. There was scarcity all around and the problem was more acute in smaller towns. What surprises me after all these years is how happy I was. I did not know many things but ignorance was bliss; somebody asked me at that time, what is the capital of America is (yes it was simply America for everybody then no US or States) and when I said I have no idea, he solemnly pronounced New York and I quietly swallowed it, he might as well have said Moscow for all I cared. And my English was as good then as my French is now which is to say not good at all. The point being that I was so immersed in a world of my own, a world where I was umpiring on a wheelchair in neighbourhood cricket matches and also trying to collect twenty Rupees for the replacement ball ! Pocket money was unheard of, at least in our case. Those hot afternoons of interminable power cuts and whiling away the time playing Doctor Patient where I would always play doctor and my younger sisters would be forced to play poor patients. But soon they will have their turn at getting back at me for when they played neighbouring housewives, I would be the doorman at one of the houses.

It was the era of renting VCR and whole night of movie marathon depending of course on availability of electricity because we had to get our money’s worth. I also associate that time with first LP record and then cassette players and enjoying Kishore Kumar who had acquired a real grainy voice by then that was, if anything even more enriching and at one fine evening hearing the news of his demise on the All India Radio. The memories are too numerous to enumerate but judging from the vantage point of today, I notice a curious symmetry. Nowadays I am depressed most of the time, back then I was happy all the time. Now I spend all my time indoors, then I’d be outdoors mostly. Now in the virtual world I have many friends but none in the real world, then I had friends in the real world and there was no virtual world. Now I know many things about the world, back then I was a reckless fool who’d try to burst a firecrackers in his hands! The more I think of this symmetry or asymmetry depending on one’s point of view, I think I have lived two lifetimes.