There are two Indias: the big-city India of power and privilege and the India of the smaller cities where the former are conspicuous by their absence in the lives of the ordinary, educated but lower middle-class Indians. And if religion is added to this matrix, the equation gets further skewered. Patna Blues opens a window into the lives of provincial Indian Muslims, their dreams and despairs, their many failures and some slender successes, and their relentless search for a better future in the face of a grim, overwhelmingly crushing reality.
Patna Blues heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice. Its author, Abdullah Khan in this debut novel, has written an important novel and a timely one. At a time when the majoritarian discourse is insisting that everyone must be kneaded into the same dough so that they come out identical, as though cut from a cookie-cutter, his novel reminds us of the others, isolated from the mainstream by differences of class, caste and religion. Khan talks with empathy and clarity of Muslims who feel cut off from the mainstream, who defy all odds to join that mythical mainstream because it holds a lifeline to lift them out of the morass of hopelessness in which they have wallowed for generations. Once prosperous landowners, their estates squandered or nibbled away by greedy relatives and the vagaries of fate, not to mention the body blow delivered by the 1947 Partition which witnessed large-scale migration of Muslims to the new homeland across the border, they have fallen on hard times. Some lift themselves out of the pit of poverty and illiteracy through dint of hard labour and a dollop of good luck; others don’t or are unable to do so for a variety of reasons.
Khan talks with empathy and clarity of Muslims who feel cut off from the mainstream, who defy all odds to join that mythical mainstream because it holds a lifeline to lift them out of the morass of hopelessness in which they have wallowed for generations
The protagonist of Patna Blues, Irfan Khan, is a young Pathan boy dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, a new life that will take them out of their hand-to-mouth existence from a cramped flat in a harsh city and will change them from invisible persona non grata to people of significance and stature. Like many other youth from the state of Bihar, Irfan aspires to join the civil services – a career that offers a route of instant mobility for many across the Subcontinent coupled with instantaneous, virtually overnight, enhancement of stature for the bureaucrat and his/her family. The novel traces Irfan’s journey from a third-year student of B. Sc (Honours in Chemistry) who is studying hard and manages to clear both the preliminaries and the written exams but, even after four attempts, is unable to clear the interviews. His father, a sub-inspector in the Bihar military police, is an upright officer who takes no bribes or favours and consequently lives a life of hardship and deprivation. He can’t, for instance, afford to send Irfan to a coaching institute in Delhi to help crack the competitive exams. Nor can he afford better housing for his family after retirement save a rented rat-hole of a flat in a filthy Muslim ghetto.
Title: Patna Blues Author: Abdullah Khan Publishers: Juggernaut Books Year: 2018 Price: Rs 499
Arif’s struggles are marked by several milestone events that rock his city and the country at large: protests against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission that sets aside reserved seats for students from the underprivileged class thus cutting the employment/education pie into further smaller slices; the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya followed by communal clashes in distant parts of the country; growing communal rift fanned by the RSS and its affiliates; breakdown of law and order in Bihar; the coming of the first right-wing lead coalition government at the Centre and its implications for the rest of India; bomb blasts in Delhi which make every Muslim a ‘terror suspect’; the forging of a new Muslim-Yadav alliance; the coming of a new political dispensation to Bihar. And studded like jewels, all along this co-mingling of the personal and the political, are fragments of Urdu poetry and snatches of film lyrics that capture a mood or a moment more effectively than many words.
Khan talks with empathy and clarity of Muslims who feel cut off from the mainstream, who defy all odds to join that mythical mainstream because it holds a lifeline to lift them out of the morass of hopelessness in which they have wallowed for generations
A ‘parallel track’ runs alongside Arif’s successive but equally fruitless jabs at the various entrance examinations. Against the weft of Arif’s life is the warp of his love affair with Sumitra, an older woman, a married mother of two and a Hindu to boot! Like all his other dreams it too dies a prolonged and painful death. Arif’s struggle to clear the competitive exams and maintain some sort of relationship with Sumitra over the years ends, in the words of T. S Eliot, not with a bang but with a whimper. In fact, there is much in Patna Blues that is reminiscent of Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow...
The shadow falls not just on Arif’s life but on his parents and brother as well; his brother Zakir, younger by a year, a promising actor in his own hometown runs away to the tinsel town of Mumbai, the dream city for all aspiring actors to pursue his dream of making it big as an actor in the Hindi film industry. The success that eludes Arif in his repeated attempts to clear the entrance tests proves to be equally mirage-like for Zakir who finds himself reduced to playing bit parts and even an ‘extra’ in crowd scenes till he returns home to Patna driven by the harshness of abject failure. But more ill fortune awaits Zakir; he goes away to Delhi in search of a job but falls under the police dragnet under a false terror charges. He returns home to his family after years in illegal police custody, a broken shattered man having wasted his youth, his life wasted for no fault of his.
Read Patna Blues for its many charming descriptions of small-town India, its tales of rustic beauty about the countryside in Bihar, its many ironic asides such as the electricity poles that wait for electricity in the state of Bihar. Read it also as a sweeping saga of unrelenting despair, as a tragedy of Grecian proportions where an unkind fate is massed against the human will. But read Patna Blues also for its depiction of the resilience of the human spirit and the fragile but nurturing bonds of familial love.
