The delights of litti, whiskey & circular time

The first story, The Importer of Blondes, is the collection’s longest and most action- packed. Hriday has just lost his job at a soft- porn magazine that he had got thanks to Patna poet Ritwik Ray ( the star of Chowdhury’s 2005 collection, Patna Roughcut). Serendipitously, Hriday meets Jishnu Da, his college housemate from Day Scholar, while getting a shave: “Of all the saloons in the world, he of course had to walk into mine”, he muses. Jishnu has become an event manager and explains: “We are that very extinct commodity now, that never- do- well younger chacha or cousin who was earlier found in all middle- class homes and was indispensable to all social occasions and oddball jobs. Nowadays everybody works. Nobody is unemployed. And that is where we come in, the Bihar friend who will manage everything for you.” In this case, Jishnu manages dancers from the former Soviet republics.

Importer is the only story in Patna Manual that has menace, suspense and a quirky ending. It is a story with movement. It is also a story that packs much into its sentences and still manages to be breezily paced. Characters who will appear in other stories are casually mentioned — as if introducing the cast of a Chekhov play. The sentences manage to be elliptical without seeming to be at a loss for words ( unlike the novel I reviewed last time in these columns. Delhi will lose the literary war, February 22).

The title of the last and secondlongest story, Death of a Proofreader, evokes Arthur Miller’s famous play on a man’s memories and his illusions. It originates on Christmas Eve 1998, the day that Importer took place, wherein Hriday had planned to have litti, a Bihari specialty. In Death… it is later that night that he finally sits down to have litti and meets Samuel Aldington Macauley Crown, lover of books and Peter Scot whiskey, who claims to have a bit of Scottish ancestry and whose name evokes a multiplicity of ironies. The story takes place five months later, at Crown’s funeral, with Hriday hoping for closure in Crown’s relationships, all failures because though he was only a proofreader — and an exemplary one at that, in the classical tradition — he is the one character in this book who immersed himself in the world of the written word, a world that the other characters spend their lives aspiring to. It gives Hriday his final if grim epiphany: “Hriday would realise that family and friends were more important than the artistic life he was striving for.”

Indeed, Crown’s publishing house that Hriday joins is called Proscenium, underlining not just the stage- like nature of each story but also how the characters act out their lives. ( Hriday is a dropout from his M. Phil in Shakespeare Studies: as the Bard said, “all the world’s a stage” and “the play’s the thing”.) One thing that gets constant and noticeably heavy in detail is each character’s clothing — everyone is apparently in costume for the play in progress. The fact that what is foretold at the end of the first story is the same event as what happens to introduce the last story — Hriday eating litti — not only gives a three- dimensional space around which the stories of Patna Manual are woven, a space in which the rest of the characters are located, but this three- dimensionality also underlines the plays- within- aplay nature of the collection — as opposed to the flat of the cinematic canvas.

I liked Patna Manual as I have liked Chowdhury’s earlier works and while reading it I was reminded — for no logical reason, I admit — of another Aleph publication, Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats ( 2013). Both Chowdhury and Kumar are nonresident Biharis and both have written about what Patna means to them. Kumar’s is a compact and lucid piece of excellent reportage whereas Chowdhury’s title tells you what his idea is: the internal Patna as opposed to Kumar’s external Patna. When I reviewed Rats I had expressed a wish that it were longer, which in hindsight might have been unfair ( not least because the book stuck to the parameters of Aleph’s cities project). However, it is not unreasonable to expect that after three slim volumes, a writer like Chowdhury, who has mastered his craft and knows his craft’s masters, ought to create something epic. Maybe I am being unfair, but isn’t it always the case that when you taste something delicious, you want more? Aditya Sinha is a journalist

based in New Delhi