PATNA BLUES

Chapter 1

Dream

ONE

Arif shivered when a gust of wind hit him. I should have worn a jacket, he thought as he stopped his bicycle in front of a two-storeyed yellow building. He had just returned home from college. Parking his bicycle in the stairwell of the building, he pulled a notebook from the luggage carrier and climbed up a flight of stairs. The banister of the staircase was broken in places and cobwebs hung from the ceiling.

On the first floor, Arif pushed open a door and entered the balcony of his family's flat. He placed his notebook on a tangerine wooden chair. Next to the chair was a cheap grey-coloured three-seater rexine sofa. Arif bent to remove his black leather shoes. Holding them in his hands, he clapped them together to free them of the mud. Placing the shoes in the corner next to the entrance, he rubbed his palms to get rid of the dust, picked up his notebook and walked to his bedroom.

Arif was tired and wanted to rest for a while, but he turned back from the door of his room when he saw two strangers there. One of them, a short, stocky boy with closely cropped hair, probably in his early twenties, was sleeping on his bed, and the other, a pot-bellied, middle-aged, bearded man, was sitting on a chair, and intently going through the latest issue of India Today.

Arif went straight to his mother, who was chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

'Who are these people, Amma?'

'The old man is a distant cousin of your father's. He has come to Patna to get his son treated at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. They will be staying with us for the next four or five days,' Amma said as she placed the chopped vegetables in a big bowl.

'Guests again! Is this a house or a serai? Every second day we have guests,' Arif said, pulling his hair. 'We have just three rooms and that's not enough even for the eight of us.'

'Keep your voice low, beta. They'll hear us,' Amma said in a whisper as she washed the chopped eggplants, potatoes and radishes in running water.

'So what!' Arif said and stomped out of the kitchen to a tiny room at the end of the corridor.

The storeroom with its three gunnysacks of wheat and rice also held a small bookshelf, a table and chair, to serve as Arif's backup study. The smell of pesticides from the sacks aggravated Arif's allergies and made him sneeze. There was no window and he had to keep the door propped open. He could not sit there for too long; the odour was overpowering.

Guests were a perennial problem in his house. Relatives visiting Patna always stayed with them. Who would spend thousands of rupees on lodging when it was available for free? Most of them came for medical treatment, some to participate in mass recruitment of police constables or to appear for a case at the Patna High Court. Some of their guests were so distantly related that Abba and Amma had never met them before. They came with references, either a letter from his uncles or a call made to Abba's office.

Abba too resented this incessant flow of guests. 'These people think that my house is a dharamshala,' he would say in a fit of anger, once the guests had left. However, while they stayed, he was the perfect host, which probably encouraged them to come again.

Amma was always overburdened with work. At times she cooked for as many as twenty people on the coal chulha. Abba had been trying to buy a gas connection for the last three years. He had applied for a connection the previous year, but his turn had not come. Even a single-cylinder connection was expensive in the black market. Every morning Amma left her bed early to light the chulha. Because of the heavy black smoke that it emitted she took the brick-and-mud chulha to the terrace, filled it with raw coal, lit it there and then brought the lit chulha back to the kitchen. She never woke her children up to help her. Even if her children were awake, she did not allow her daughters to lift the heavy chulhas. 'Carrying weights can affect the menstrual cycle in young girls.' She couldn't come up with an excuse for her sons, so Arif and Zakir did help her on the few days they woke up in time to do so. 'Starting tomorrow, I'll wake up early to help Amma. At least I can help her with the chulha,' Arif had resolved last year, but most mornings Amma would have lit the chulha before Arif woke up.