The city of waiting
"How sterile is all human endeavour to pilot one's own life." From my
grandfather's diary. Date January 5, 1988, Arrah
Chinki Sinha
He, my grandfather, would sit outside in the verandah with a bottle of rum, and listen to Loha Singh, a popular Bhojpuri series penned by Rameshwar Singh Kashyap, about the adventures of a Bihari army veteran, on AIR radio. While he waited for power to come back on, and other more significant things. Among them, a gas connection, and his pension. He was also waiting to die. This he wrote in his diaries, three of which I managed to get hold of when he died a decade ago.
Sometimes a visitor would arrive. A man, who I addressed as the 'old man', and sit with my grandfather lamenting the plight of the country while they both, along with million others, waited for the next elections to change something. While they waited for such radical changes, they discussed inflation, weather, and old age.
"Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful."-- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
In his diaries, he wrote about how so few of his friends came to see him.
In that decade that he was waiting for death, he listened to radio, read Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach many times over, and drank whiskey or rum depending on which was made available. He wrote his diaries. Wrote a great deal of stuff about the cold in Patna, the rains, and people, telegrams he sent to his sons. Most of all, he wrote about waiting. Over the years his eyes became weak. But in that immense confusion of life and death, one thing was clear to him. He was waiting, and while he waited, he listened to stories. Waiting is a form of assertion of existence. In fact, of all human endeavour, waiting is one of the most difficult, and most rewarding. Depending on how you look at it.
If you grew up in Patna in the eighties and the nineties like I did, you'd know how to wait. There were too many things wrong with the city. All you could do was wait.
All those evenings when there was no electricity and power cuts lasted for several hours, Umesh, our domestic help, would gather us, and tell us stories about ghosts in his village. I suspect these were concoctions of his mind, but the stories sounded wonderful. He'd tell us how a witch would climb down a tree, and you could tell if she were a witch by looking at her feet, which were turned backward, and ask for jalebis from a woman who sat frying them late in the night. Benign ghosts, or vicious ones. All this while we waited for electricity to come so we could sleep. In fact, waiting was a pleasurable exercise. We almost looked forward to it.
I am still afraid of ghosts. I sleep with the lights on. The view from the window is nothing unusual here in this metropolis. It is a green tree.
We were in no particular hurry to get anywhere. That's what I got from my city. The joy and the pain of waiting. The patience and maturity of waiting. The innocence of it. I can spend an eternity waiting and not complain.
Then there were stories of Sindbad, the sailor. As my aunt recounted his adventures in exotic lands, we'd wonder how it would be to sail on a sea. While we waited for my father earn more, or for admissions, or Lalu Prasad to be ousted from office, and Bihar to be a great place to live in unlike the 'stopover' it had become in the great migration that was part of our stories. Everything was delayed. Sessions in colleges ran late. I was forever planning my exit strategies. The tyranny of waiting was too much for me. Now, I am waiting to return. Again, there is no hurry.
***
There's something about waiting. Life is divided between before and after. Ours was more bout inhabiting that space that lay in between. There were prolonged power cuts, and traffic was a mess. While we
waited, many things happened. In fact, we loved waiting. It was full of possibilities. We'd take the midday shuttle train from Patna to Arrah, which was only 60 kms away, and it stopped at each halt, every station. That journey took us a good four hours, and often the train would stop at an obscure halt, and we knew waiting was the only way out. Chain pulling was routine affair on trains. All this uncertainty about when we'd be thrown into this 'waiting mode' was part of being there in that time.
We didn't have mountains or seas. Patna isn't a beautiful city. There's filth, and chaos, and an endless wait for things to get better. Regime to change, people to fare better, justice to be meted in so many cases, including the one that makes me feel a bit betrayed. The Shilpi Jain rape and murder case which was closed by the CBI long
ago. But we are waiting for justice, and it is like being in that twilight hour. There are many things that need a closure. But Patna was pushed behind several decades when Lalu reigned, and now it is trying to limp forward.We are waiting for central government's largesse, and industry to come. Meanwhile, Niitsh is waiting for the third innings, and Lalu is waiting for change.
Everyone told each other stories while they waited for something or the other. My mother told me stories from mythology, hoping the vision of hell she painted - a bed of burning coals of which you'd walk to get to the other with bloodthirsty crows plucking out your eyeballs as you stagger towards redemption only to be cast again in the fires of hell - would deter us from doing wrong things. There was morality in every story, a lesson to be learnt. During summers, we'd pay Rs. 1 to be part of a day library where we could borrow comics like Bankelal,
Super Commando Dhruv, and Nagraj, and cola bottles, and spend the long summer vacations reading as we waited for school to reopen. 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 Mahabharat. 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 on, reluctant to move on. It carried its own share of stories and listened to those that were told to her as part of entreaties. People giving up their dead with all their prayers and complaints, and the river took it all in. I spent too many
evenings watching the river flow.
Here, I was always planning my exit strategies. Only to come back to it looking for an anchor. Patna, bereft of mountains and seas, or everything I had always yearned for, is what I am always returning to. It doesn't mock me for running away. It is like a childhood lover, who stays back, while you run around the world, cross mountains and rivers, and cross them back. He is there. He is old, but he has been waiting. It is reassuring - this waiting.
Because at the end of it all, it is only in this city that I can sleep at 11 pm after my father has switched off the lights. As I lie in my bed waiting for sleep to come, my bachelor uncle staggers into his room to drink his whiskey in no company. I can see him from my room. He is old, and weak, and very, very lonely. I want to ask him if he will forgive us all. But I never say anything. I wonder if anything changed at all. He is waiting for the final farewell. But while he waits, he drinks a lot. He has kidney problems. Perhaps other medical issues, too.
His lover is dead. They waited for blessings for too long. It took a lifetime of waiting.
My room looks shrunken. So do my mother and father. And so does everyone else. But I am in this time warp. I have lived in many different places. I come here to wait. There's a certain comfort in waiting. Movement makes one dizzy, too. I tried to live in America. Not New York, or Boston, or San Francisco, but in small town America - one of those nondescript cities that lay on the rust belt.
I even bought a home theatre system, and a black leather couch. On the weekends, I went to the malls, did laundry, baked brownies and watched reality television, and later hit the pubs like everyone else, and spent the Sundays running errands, or just cooking a hell lot of food that I would later pack into the freezer.
I owned ugly snow shoes, and down jackets. I even checked the weather channel for warnings of storms and tornadoes, and other calamities known to visit such extreme places. But I couldn't live there. With all its promises, it didn't feel like home. It was full of refugees, and they were waiting to return home. They'd speak about home with
fondness.
But they had been assigned this country, and this city. In some refugee camp, they must have been cheered by the others when the list showed their names against America.
I was in exile too. I had graduated from Syracuse University, and they had hired me as a reporter at the Observer-Dispatch in Utica. On most evenings, holed up in my apartment as snow fell outside, I wrote poems
about home. It was strange how I remembered Patna. It was like I was carrying it with me everywhere.
"I don't belong here...
in America...
...
I live as if I live in a motel...
some bags are still packed...some boxes I never opened
I never belonged here
I never belonged there either
Find me a home, a home where I am not a misfit, a home that can contain me
So that I am no longer torn and shuttling between worlds
Maybe I should learn to walk without memory."
Some evenings, holed up in my apartment that had strange yellow wallpaper, and big windows that looked out on nothing particularly beautiful - a street, and a row of crumbling houses, I'd flip through the pages of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.***
"Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away.
But if you can't walk away?
I guess that's when it's tough." Death of a Salesman
The city glitters in the night. I drive through it aimlessly. I try to reconstruct from beneath the glass, and metal, and the shimmer, the places of my childhood, of my youth. I can climb on the Biscoman Tower, sit in the revolving restaurant and go around in circles, and measure the darkness against the lights. After all, we waited our entire childhood, and youth for it to open. We'd wonder how it would feel to go around the city in the sky.
I can smell the river. We are near it. The driver tells me it has shrunk, retreated by at least a kilometer. It makes me sad. I don't live here anymore. But it should have continued, as has my memory of it.
I am not here to reclaim what's lost.
That night, as the restaurant started moving, I looked out on the city, and on to the darkness beyond it. I go around in circles, returning to the point of departure, and again launched into the orbit.Each year I returned, pushing my own perception of space, the city looked as if someone chipped away at it. Emaciated, dull, and
shrunken.
Was I to revel in the news that malls had come up, restaurants were making money, and a floor beneath, young men sat in leather couches and drank their rum and coke, or sipped their whiskies. For it in no longer was a curfewed city, no more a city where streets would be deserted waiting for daylight to purge it of its shadows.
Angry. Yes, for the years that I lost to chaos, and anarchy, and kidnappings and everything else that was Bihar. All that time I waited for our city to be good again.
There is a peculiar smell when October begins in Patna. Burnt wood, concrete, filth. I have tried to understand the smell, break it down, name its ingredients but that smell is peculiar to my city. I have looked for it elsewhere. It doesn't belong anywhere else. So I wait to smell it again.
This lack of ambition, the ability to let one day dissolve into another, is because of this city. I am happy it is this way.
I was 22 years old when I eagerly boarded the train to Delhi to study Information Technology. I needed to get out. It didn't matter what I studied. In our migration narrative, the need to escape was bigger than to make it anywhere in particular.
But I have never believed in final farewells. I wish I did.
There's so much of my city inside me that I have often felt heavy with the weight of nostalgia. Almost guilty of trying to do away with it. But there was a world outside of this city, and I had to experience it.
***
I would always wonder what lay on the other side of the river. An island, an isolated patch of land where the poor lived, or just sand where the boat could take you. I am afraid of water.
Last time I had returned home, I asked the boatman to take me to the other side. It was dusk, and the bells of the temple were ringing. From some corner, the muezzin was calling the faithful for the prayers.
But he stopped the boat midway, lit a bidi and started to speak about politics. There we were, in the middle of the river, the sky a deep shade of blue. Both of us weren't in a hurry. He wasn't doing so well. But the government had started some welfare schemes for the Mahadalit category, and he was glad he was among them. He hadn't thought of leaving ever. He knew the river, and understood its moods. He could
steer the boat, and it felt nice being on the water. Waiting for customers, and waiting for a lot of other things to change. Maybe not in his lifetime. But certainly for his children. At least that's what he hoped. That's the beauty of it all. There's no hard feelings.
That's one thing that I never quite understood. The zeal for waiting. Like my mother, who put away crockery, and other nice things, waiting for an auspicious occasion to use them. Virginal in their preservation, waiting to be brought out. Perhaps, if you come from a place that went through an erosion of almost everything, and you knew
it had seen better days, you wait for the change of guard. Patna is that kind of place - of memories transferred, of nostalgia that made you sick with longing.
We were that generation where we knew we had to go away. Sooner or later. The city was a trap. Those that were trapped in it were people like my parents, who weren't very ambitious, who liked their afternoon siestas, and who didn't want fancy cars or foreign vacations. They were content with unbranded bags, or shoes, or shirts. The others were mostly from villages or towns that had come to one of the city's colleges to study. Streets near Patna University were lined with shabby hostels. The young men looked emaciated, yet determined. They were waiting for opportunity.
Patna isn't a cruel city. It is not like New York City, or Bombay, where depending on whether you are rich or poor, the city reveals itself to you. Patna had nothing to hide.
Life is always divided between before and after. After I left, or before I left. I try to think in those terms. But I am forever straddling the middle space. And finally I have found an anchor in life. I am happy to wait. Because it means not giving up.
I remember a photograph of a refugee sleeping at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees in Utica taken by Bosnian refugee Tatjana Kulalic.
The caption of Kulalic's photo described how refugees are always waiting for something.
"It hit me that you are always waiting," a student had told me this as
I stood making sense of the photo.
I nodded yes.
Like how Estragon says in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot 'We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?'
And Vladimir responds 'Yes, yes, we're magicians.'
The realm of magic is about waiting. Waiting for miracles.
One of the stories of waiting
She doesn't stand in the window anymore. But the house is still there. There are a few few students from villages that live here now. A few years ago, they turned it into a hostel of sorts. These young men can
sometimes be seen bent over the kerosene stove, pumping it, and cooking in the evenings.
Husnara used to stand at all hours chewing betel leaves. Her fine complexion hadn't faded over the years, and the wrinkles crisscrossed her face like rivulets on a rainy day.
Her eyes darted everywhere. Some days, as I sat in my grandmother's room, I'd think she was some sniper, ready to take on anyone that dared to glance towards their house.
She had been married once. But she left her husband, and came to live with her two brothers.
They say when her husband raised the veil on the wedding night, she almost fainted. He belonged to the same family, and they had been cousins of some sort and must have been pledged to each other by their mothers years ago when they were toddlers. But Husnara bua was fair with a flawless skin. Her skin was so pure than even the veins showed. She had delicate features, and a slender body. She had some streak of rebellion in her.
Her husband, who wasn't from the Patna, was dark as charcoal. In those days, they never exchanged photographs of the bride and the groom. But Husnara expected a good deal from life.
All day, the groom's sisters teased her, and she sat demurely waiting for the moment when her groom would arrive and fall at her feet praising her beauty. She had never liked Kishan Ganj, a small town in the north of the state. She might even be able to convince him to move to the town in due course.
They sat her in a room that was bare except for a bed and a table and chair. The walima had been planned for the next day. The groom walked in. He latched the door.
The veil was lifted. Husnara lifted her eyes. And shut them in the next instant. The groom was dark, and had pock marks all over his face. That night, Husnara decided she would not yield to this betrayal of fate.
She never returned to Kishanganj after they took her home
Her husband went back, married again and forgot all about her.
What I found most interesting was her resilience to the stories that circulated in the neighborhood. Some said she was "loose character", while others said she had white marks all over her body.
In many ways, Husnara's life was all about waiting. She waited for a closure. The other truth is that she saw her husband with other women
