Amid a flurry of books examining Bihar on all sorts of parameters?development, politics, governance and growth?comes Amitava Kumar?s A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna.
Refreshingly, Kumar talks about none of these factors, but gives us a human perspective of Patna. From Chinese monks and kings of the past to present-day artists, litterateurs and TV personalities, he outlines Patna through the people connected with the city. In fact, he also comes up with three different faces of the city depending on the kind of people behind the faces. The Patna of immigrants, the emigrants and its residents. One Patna belongs to those who come to the city with dreams in their eyes and hopes of a better tomorrow. However hard it may seem to visualise Patna as a mecca for immigrants, relativity is in full play here. The writer says for these people, Patna is a need, making the city not great, but meaningful and necessary.
Then there are those who have managed to emigrate from the city, again with dreams in their eyes and hopes of a better tomorrow?Patna that is elsewhere. Their achievements contribute to the mythology of the city, even if they are of the ?saccharine, Photoshopped variety? encountered on the Web.
The third face is of those who are stuck in the city, and their horizons, however forced, are limited to Patna and Bihar, and ?nowhere else?. The ones who truly belong.
The book starts on a promising note, with the author reminiscing about his visits to Patna and encountering rats in profusion. There seem to be no solutions, except one. A bureaucrat who advocates eating rat meat, simultaneously solving the problems of malnutrition and the rodent menace. The writer is inspired to visit a village and see for himself how the Musahars, a community that eats rats, catch the rodents. When he asks them if it is like chicken, one of them replies, ?it?s better?.
However, in the intense competition between humans and rats, vying with each other for Patna?s space and its resources, the writer finds it?s the rats who have won. At least they haven?t fled Patna, like its many emigrants, and have found ways to thrive in the city.
Despite a sterling start, the book jumps, quite abruptly, back into time, for a completely unnecessary crash course in Patna?s history. From rats to history and on to stories of Patna?s emigrants, the book makes more such abrupt transitions. The stories of people like artist Subodh Gupta and TV personality Ravish Kumar are interesting, the one about writer Shiva Naipaul absolutely delightful, but that of Raghav, a poet, is long-drawn, leaving the reader perplexed with the unfinished story of the poet?s troubled marriage.
This sense of dissatisfaction heightens as the book draws to a rather quick close. The idea is good, the writing style is great, the stories are interesting, so why does one feel somewhat shortchanged at the end of the book? Because, the book feels like a short preview of what could have been a much richer read. Had the writer dwelt more on his memories of Patna, his experiences there, his dilemma of being an immigrant who cannot forget his roots, we would have got a much more nuanced book. The conflict in all the stories, including the writer?s own, is the question of belonging. The same Patna that seems dirty and filthy to outsiders, but symbolises home to its residents, the place that is everything to them?is the story one wants more of.
One does not know if brevity was the brief given to him by the publishers, as this is the first book of a series on cities Aleph wants to publish, but in this case, one surely wishes for a fatter book. An irony in this age of short airport reads? No, because good stories deserve to be told well.