What Happens in Patna, Stays in Patna?

By AMITAVA KUMAR

When the travel writer Trevor Fishlock went to my hometown of Patna, a journalist greeted him by saying, “Welcome to hell.” A few days later, that particular journalist, who had been zealous in his defense of the freedom of the press, was beaten unconscious.

I read the above story in a piece by Norman Lewis titled “Through the Badlands of Bihar.” But it is not only Western visitors like Mr. Fishlock and Mr. Lewis who portray Patna thus. If you have been keeping track of recent Bollywood movies, the badlands of Bihar have become fertile ground for reaping cinematic violence.

I am writing a book about Patna where I want to present what the people who live there think about it. A part of me believes that Patna might be the victim of bad press. Did you know, for instance, that somewhere in the dark recesses of history, Patna produced the best opium?

I remember making this discover y when I stood on a treadmill in a steamy gym in Florida. Bending down, I looked at what had drawn my attention. The picture in the glossy magazine left open on the treadmill showed swarthy, dhoti-clad men at work in an immense hall, arranging in neat lines circular mounds of - what?

The text above the picture offered a clue: “Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges.”

Anything good is so rarely said about Patna that my seldom-exercised heart burst with joy. I stole the magazine from the gym. And on returning home, I cut out the picture and the text and stuck it in my notebook.

That was 12 years ago. I have unearthed my notebook now because I have been seized by a simple idea. I am currently in Patna to see my parents. I would like to post flyers on the city's busy roads that ask, “Does the best opium still come from Patna?”

The ins piration for acquiring knowledge about a city in this way came to me from a recently published book, “Jeff, One Lonely Guy.” This book was fashioned out of the 60,000 calls and text-messages received after Jeff Ragsdale, a writer and unemployed comedian, reacted to a breakup by posting flyers in New York City that simply said: “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. (347) 469-3173. Jeff, one lonely guy.”

The responses were varied and fascinating:

“I called to see what the story was.”

“We live in a disconnected society. Did you think up this idea while you were smoking a blunt?”

“I just flew in from L.A. and was in a bad mood, then I saw your sign on the street. Ha! I cast reality shows.”

“Heathcliff it's me Catherine!”

“Pablo Escobar had a hit out on my father, who was a Communist. My father fought against Escobar and got political asylum in the U.S.”

All this from the first handful of pages . The writer David Shields, who was one of Mr. Ragdale's teachers, helped edit these field notes from that occult zone Mr. Shields calls “Occupy Loneliness.” In Patna, however, where I have a dense network of family and friends, more mundane mysteries need to be solved.

In 1967, there was a famine in Bihar. I knew of this only because my father, a career bureaucrat, served in places like Purnea, a district in Bihar. But then I discovered a newsreel where I watched the actor Marlon Brando listening to villagers near Patna. I learned that Mr. Brando had come to Bihar as the ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund. You can hear the voices speaking in Hindi in the background complaining of hunger and grain being denied to them by corrupt officials.

And then the Englishman providing the voiceover says, “All in all, it was a modest performance from Brando, and definitely a nonspeaking part.”

So that could be another flyer: “Did you see Brando in Patna in 1967?”

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a railway platform at Patna Junction, saying goodbye to an uncle leaving for the United States. My aunt, who is waiting for her visa, is standing with me along with other family members. It is probably the year 1967.

Inside the railway carriage where my uncle is sitting, there is another man, with garlands around his neck. This man is Jayaprakash Narayan, the political leader who just a few years later would lead the country in the fight against Indira Gandhi after she had declared a state of emergency. I saw J.P., as he was known then, in my adolescent years. On a ferry on the Ganges, I once even had him autograph my school notebook.

This leads to the question: “Did you meet J.P. in Patna?”

A local rangbaaz, a ruffian, on the street where I lived would ask the man selling soft drinks at the corner to give us free drinks. This rangbaaz gave up his denim jacket and began wearing kh adi. He was now J.P.'s follower. The state of emergency hadn't ended. The reformed man went to jail, where the Bihar politician Lalu Prasad Yadav and others were his cellmates.

After Mrs. Gandhi was thrown out of power, the rangbaaz I had known became a junior statesman. By the time I was in college, he had become a corrupt minister.

“What happened to the idealistic young men and women of the '70s?” I would like to ask that question, or another one belonging to the same caste: “Where is the black money in Patna?”

At a garage sale in a small town in upstate New York, I bought an old copy of “India: The Rough Guide.” If I remember right, the book cost me 25 cents. Thumbing through the section on Bihar, I made the discovery that Napoleon's four-poster bed is in a museum in Patna. “What is Napoleon's bed doing in Bihar?”

It is easy for visiting writers to dismiss Patna. Shiva Naipaul set an example in 1982 by describing it as “a town wit hout the faintest traces of charm, a sprawling caravanserai of dusty roads and fenny lanes; a junk-heap of peeling, crumbling buildings, of squatter colonies earthed in tracts of mossy mud; a swarming hive of pan-chewing, meager-limbed men.”

But I know the sewers and the stench that Mr. Naipaul portrayed with such zeal. In fact, my parents have been living with a specific municipal problem - Patna is a city where rats carried away my mother's dentures. And so this question is urgent and unavoidable: “Are you knowledgeable about killing rats?”

Amitava Kumar is a writer and a professor of English at Vassar College in New York. If you have answers to his questions, write to him at patna.patrakar@yahoo.com.