How Patna taught me the true meaning of despair

There wasn’t much to do here except go to the river back then. Cities change as you approach them again. They shrink or expand. They confuse, and they soothe. You walk on the streets, and see from memory. Here, it doesn't hurl at you its past at the first encounter. It lurks in the streets, and in the buildings you cross, and bides its time, and in the nights, it comes to you. All over again. There’s no escaping what you carry within. Like the city of Patna where I was born and where I grew up. And we sat by the ghats in the evenings sometimes, and watched the boats float on the water, and the bridge in the distance. In those days, there wasn't much to do in Patna. Those were the dark days of anarchy, and chaos. That's when we learned our first sorrows. And our unfreedoms.

We mourned our invisibility, and we learned to write poems in the evenings when there would be a lantern, and a silence that is unique to a place. It was bereft of mountains and lakes. It was becoming a concrete jungle. A haphazard place. Like a child’s corrupted drawing when the age of innocence has passed. It wasn’t a beautiful city. But it was a city that held us, and here, we learned to scribble thoughts in diaries. Almost everyone kept a diary. My grandfather’s diaries were testimony to a lonely man grappling with a fading life. I kept three of them. I don’t know where the rest disappeared. The house where I had spent many summers was sold, and the books, and diaries were ruined. Except the three that I had managed to bring home. In that house in Arrah, I first encountered Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, and Alberto Moravia. I read about the brutality of Siberian winters, and the miracles of Chestnut Grey, the magic horse, on hot summer afternoons and learned to imagine snow, and fur, and despair.

And sometimes, in the evening, my grandfather would recite to me Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach about the recession of faith. He was old, and he would drink whiskey in the evenings, and remember the poems.

I left because that was the only thing to do. Everyone left. Growing up, we wanted to leave Patna, and its limited life, and so we lived in the future for most part. Patna changed over the last 15 years that I have been away. There are malls, and coffee shops and even a discotheque now. But there's a city that belongs only to you, and there's a notebook with memories of those that are no more. Here, I lay a claim to my past.

We learned never to show them to anyone but to ourselves, and we learned despair, and after we were done with all this learning, we unlearned them again in another city, another country, and we returned to the river to learn the lessons we learned in our childhood, growing up in a city that wasn't occupied by force, but by despair.

The river has shrunk, and the revolving restaurant that we wondered about when we were in school is now a part of the night outs in Patna. It revolves slowly, and from the 18th floor, you can see the city turn surreal. The lights look like molten lava flowing in its streets, and then in the distance, there is darkness. That's where the Ganges flows. Silently, and a witness to the many histories of this city, and its many pasts.

***

We encountered our first stories when we perhaps weren't even looking to write them. Lives unfolded before us, and the skewed balance of justice and injustice were manifest in these lives, and therefore, these stories had a lot of anguish and richness.

And I ask about the people I knew in my childhood. Like Idhris Mian. Like Husnara Bua. They defined the city's character then. Of its despair, and of its resilience.

He used to sit under a tattered tarpaulin sheet on hot summer afternoons, and in the evenings when they would sprinkle water on the streets to settle the heat and the dust, he would be bent over this sewing machine, and would repair and refit clothes. Idhris Mian was a frail man. Lean, and scrawny, but his eyes glinted. I couldn't tell if it was sadness or happiness. Or was it mischief in anticipation of the day when he would break free from the dystopian world? I remember that he was always polite.

Idhris Mian had three children from his first wife, who had passed away. One of the boys was a sick child, and had boils all over his body. He would sit in a corner, and look at everything and everyone, and sometimes would cry in pain. But nobody came to him. There was nobody to come to him. The two other boys would come to my mother and grandmother to ask for flour some evenings. They would then go home and make themselves rotis. Idhris Mian married three more times. They say the fourth wife said something to him one evening. She was much younger, and Idhris Mian couldn't keep pace with the needs. This was when they had moved to another locality as the piece of land where they had their hut had belonged to another person, and they were asked to leave. One of the memories of summer afternoons in this mohalla was Idhris Mian rattling his machine in his skull cap and check lungi.

My mother says he was a good soul.

Not that I was around at the time when he died, and when you grow up, you cross over into other worlds, and the one that you leave behind, or are in a hurry to leave behind, changes so fast in your absence that you begin to wonder if you completely missed out on something that belongs to you so wholly. Suddenly, you remember people, and they have vanished into that oblivion called death, and you know you missed out on saying goodbye. Not that it is possible to say so many goodbyes. But one would want to.

They say around 15-20 years ago, he went to the railway tracks, and lied down. A train must have went over him. A man found his body the next day, and informed his sons. They buried him, and they had come to our house to tell us about the death. He had admitted defeat. Some people just die. Just like that. Their lives never change. They have no solace. No respite from the ordeal of deprivation.

We don’t know what happened to the family later. But Munna, one of the two brothers who had a pockmarked face, comes home sometimes. He is also a tailor, and repairs and refits clothes.

When I was young, I used to ask my grandmother and mother to adopt them so I would have company. My brother was young, and there wasn’t anyone around to play with except a friend who lived next door. But Munna and his brother made things for me like the doll house, and they told me stories of their lives, and I found them fascinating.

But of course they were never adopted, and then they went away.

When I rummage through the old clothes, a few things remain, and they had been stitched by Idhris Mian. He always kept his head down. He would come often, and bring his children who I badly wanted to be friends with. But they had work to do. I had nothing to do. That was the difference. I understood much later. The difference between having to do nothing on summer afternoons, and doing everything mostly had to do with where we came from, and our inheritances. These were my earliest lessons about the world.

“They were a poor man’s children. They weren’t so free. They had to be responsible,” my mother tells me as we go over my notes. “But you wanted to bring them home. A poor man won’t give up his children. But they used to come to play. You had nobody to play, and that’s why you must remain grateful.”

That's what returning means. To pick up threads, and weave narratives.

I have kept returning to Patna hoping to find myself again. The freedom that we eventually found was because of the tyranny of a state and city that had slipped into anarchy, and we left to secure ourselves. When I left, I hadn’t known that I’d someday be writing the memoirs of disappearances. You wanted to get out, and you long to get back. And each time you returned, you’d find your city altered.

***

Memory, I have always believed, is deceptive. It is emotional. It doesn’t need facts. It can create its own context. Here, when you saw the city from the plane window as it descended on the runway, you knew you had to return to places you can't walk away from. Patna is that place.

Husnara Bua doesn't stand in the window anymore. But the house is still there. It is now a lodge for young men from villages to stay while they study in colleges here. A few years ago, they turned it into a hostel of sorts. These young men can sometimes be seen bent over the kerosene stove, pumping it, and cooking in the evenings. No flyovers have been built here yet. My own house went through some reconstruction, but the rooms remain, and the little balcony of my grandmother’s room is where she would stand and chat with Husnara Bua.

Husnara Bua used to stand at all hours chewing betel leaves. Her fine complexion hadn't faded over the years, and the wrinkles crisscrossed her face like rivulets on a rainy day.

Her eyes darted everywhere. Some days, as I sat in my grandmother's room, I would think she was some sniper, ready to take on anyone that dared to glance towards their house. She had five young nieces to guard, and there was no dearth of roadside Romeos in those days who would stand in the corner to have a glimpse of the woman they had fallen in love with.

She had been married once.

They say when her husband raised the veil on the wedding night she almost fainted. He belonged to the same family, and they had been cousins of some sort and must have been pledged to each other by their mothers years ago when they were toddlers. But Husnara Bua was fair with a flawless skin. Her skin was so pure than even the veins showed. She had delicate features, and a slender body. She had some streak of rebellion in her.

In those days, they never exchanged photographs of the bride and the groom. But Husnara Bua expected at least a good-looking husband.

She had never liked Kishanganj, a small town in the north on the border of Nepal. She might even be able to convince him to move to the town in due course, she had thought.

The walima had been planned for the next day. The groom walked in. He latched the door.

The veil was lifted. Husnara Bua lifted her eyes. And shut them in the next instant. The groom was dark, and had pockmarks all over his face. That night, Husnara Bua decided she would not yield to this betrayal of fate.

She never returned to Kishanganj after she left.

What I found most interesting was her resilience to the stories that circulated in the neighborhood. Some said she was "loose character", while others said she had white marks all over her body.

In many ways, Husnara Bua's life was all about waiting. She waited for a closure.

***

I keep updating my memories of them, and the city. I still don’t go to the new malls, and the new cafes. What I keep looking for is a “sweet home” where we bought our birthday cakes in those days.

And I remember these lines from Amitava Kumar, who is an author from Bihar, and a man who writes about nostalgia often. In his writings, I can find a little bit of my city. But we all have our own memories, and only we keep them. He once wrote, "What I am always going back to is the moment when I was going away," he writes in Bombay, London, New York. "One place is home, the other the world.”

And between the world and home, there are million encounters, and hundreds of notes.

I had returned many times to Patna, and to Bihar to write articles. I never wrote about the people who made up this city. The ones nobody remembered, the ones who never found a closure. And in writing about those, there's a closure that I hope I can find.