Patna’s the same as Pataliputra? Fresh from images of lavish palaces and untold wealth in an Amar Chitra Katha retelling of the life of possibly Chandragupta Maurya or Chanakya, I still remember my childish amazement at realising the havoc time can wreak on the grandest of human settlements.
We had friends in Ranchi and Jamshedpur, but Patna, in the undivided Bihar of the 1970s and 1980s, was a wayside station where no one we knew disembarked. Jhumpa Lahiri zeroed in unerringly on the middle-class nervousness about Bihar in The Namesake, when she described how Gogol’s father slips on his “special garment... with hidden pockets to carry cash, and his mother and Sonia remove their gold jewels” while travelling through the state. If Bihar was the badlands, Patna was the capital.
This is the point from where son-of-the-city Amitava Kumar takes off in this strongly individualistic, deeply introspective biography of Patna. A Matter of Rats is as much self-portrait as it is a portrait of the city itself. Using the sharp edge of his vision as a prism, Kumar burrows through the layers—now you begin to see where the rat analogy comes from—to discover Patna in the popular imagination, in history, in literature, building up to a triumphant triptych (Leftover Patna, Other Patnas, Emperor of the World) that alone is worth the cover price.
Like Kolkata in recent years, Patna used to be the city left behind by people one encountered elsewhere. The author admits to being one of those people. Does that make the city a sinking ship? If so, what does it make Kumar? Never one to avoid subverting the issue—especially if it can be laced with humour and irony—Kumar launches the collection of essays with an examination of rats with urban legends (the Patna police claim that rats were getting themselves drunk on illegal liquor), eyewitness accounts (“two enormous rats... (that) looked like stout ladies, on tiny heels, on their way to the market. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them carrying small, elegant handbags”) and an encounter with a bureaucrat keen to re-engineer society by introducing the Musahar diet of rat-meat to restaurant menus.
Similarly, history comes in—Patna’s all-time-greats gallery features, among others, Chandragupta Maurya, Chanakya and Ashoka—through the medium of Kumar’s childhood artistic ambitions (“I would not have turned to writing if I was able to draw.”). The section on literature, after touching on Lahiri and Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut, considers the depictions of the city by foreign and Indian-origin writers, always appreciative of efforts to eschew what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie calls “the dangers of a single story”.
But Kumar’s skills as a local-born storyteller are best showcased in the three-essay heart of the book. “There are three Patnas,” he writes. “One Patna is made up of those who were born or grew to adulthood here and then moved elsewhere... The second Patna is of those who were not able to leave... and they are the only ones who truly belong here... There is also a third Patna –the city that is the destination of those for whom it is a matter of life and death.”
Weaving together consummate reportage with an unnerving feel for the stories behind real people—artist Subodh Gupta, journalist Sankarshan Thakur, English professors Sami and Dutt, IIT-admissions guru Anand Kumar, poet and professor Jagdish Narayan Chaubey, young Naxalite Irfan—Kumar presents a textured, roiling picture of a city that spurns pigeon-holes with the same phlegmatism it accepts its position as the cesspool of urban India. Patna is everything a city should not be, yet it’s impossible to miss its great beating heart in these pages. It’s just as well, you think at the end of this provocative, intense anthology, that Kumar couldn’t draw.