Chinki Sinha - Patna, City of Perpetual Wait
‘How sterile is all human endeavour to pilot one’s own life.’
—From my grandfather’s diary, 5 January 1988, Arrah
He, my grandfather, would sit in the verandah with a bottle of rum and listen to Loha Singh, a popular Bhojpuri series on All India Radio penned by Rameshwar Singh Kashyap about the adventures of a Sikh army veteran. He did this while waiting for the electricity to come back. There were other things he waited for—a gas connection, his pension and death. All this he wrote in his diaries, three of which I found when he died a decade ago.
Sometimes a visitor would arrive. A man, whom I addressed as the ‘old man’, would sit with my grandfather lamenting the plight of the country while they both, and million others across Bihar, waited for the next election to change something.
In that decade that he was waiting for death, he read Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach many times over and wrote in his diaries. He wrote about the cold in Patna, the rains, the people, the telegrams he sent his sons. Most of all, he wrote about waiting.
If you grew up in Patna in the 1980s and 1990s like me, you’d know that there were too many things wrong with the city. All you could do was wait.
Power cuts lasted for hours and as we waited for electricity, Umesh, our domestic help, would tell us stories of ghosts in his village: witches, feet turned backwards, asking for jalebis, benign ghosts and vicious ones. Waiting was pleasurable. We almost looked forward to it. But I am still afraid of ghosts. I sleep with the lights on.
We were in no particular hurry to get anywhere in Patna. That’s what I got from my city. I can spend an eternity waiting and not complain.
We waited for my father to earn more, or for admissions, or for Lalu Prasad to be ousted from office, and for Bihar to be a lovely place to live in unlike the ‘stopover’ it had become in the great migration. Everything was delayed. Sessions in colleges ran late. I was forever planning my exit strategy.
Now, I am waiting to return. Again, there is no hurry.
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Waiting was full of possibilities. We’d take the midday shuttle train from Patna to Arrah. It was only 60 km away but the journey took four hours with a halt at every station. Chain pulling was routine.
There wasn’t much to do in Patna. During summers, we’d pay Re 1 to be members of a day library from which we could borrow comics like Bankelal, Super Commando Dhruva and Nagraj, and spend the long vacations reading as we waited for school to reopen. We went to the botanical garden once a year for a picnic, and sometimes we’d go eat ice-cream at a fancy restaurant. I still love stories. I have learned to tell a few. But I wait for my mother to narrate how Lord Krishna suffered because he cheated in the great war of Mahabharata. Even gods have to make amends, she would say. I wait to hear that again.
Life was still. Even the river, which flowed past the city, assumed a lazy pace here. It lingered, reluctant to move on. I spent too many evenings watching the river flow.
Here, I was always planning my escape. Now, I come back to it looking for an anchor. I am always returning to Patna. It doesn’t mock me for running away. It is like a childhood lover, who stays back while you roam the world, cross mountains and rivers and cross them back. He is there. He is old, but he has been waiting. It is reassuring... read more:
