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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.