By Amitava Kumar
Published in The Times of India, January 17

Have you ever visited a town that remained hidden in perpetual darkness?

All that you will remember later will be the ghoulish faces of the people talking to you. Faces lit by a smoky lantern. Or sometimes by harsh flash-light, the bright light turned away from you, as if the person holding it were pissing in the night.

That is how it is when I visit Bettiah, a small town in Bihar where my uncle lives. The inhabitants of Bettiah are satisfied, especially during summer, if the power supply revives for a few hours every three days.

The last time I was there, I was interviewing people who were old childhood friends of the Bollywood actor, Manoj Bajpai. Bettiah is where Bajpai was born and had grown up.

I had arrived late in the evening. A gentle, middle-aged man named Sudhanshu was telling me that in school, back in the mid-seventies, Bajpai used to recite one particular line from the Hindi film “Kuchhe Dhaage.” Kabir Bedi played a dacoit in the Chambal ravines. His rival was Vinod Khanna. In one scene, Bedi said to his rival’s mother, “Eh budhiya, dekh inn aankhon mein. Tumhe lakhon ki maut nazar aayegi.” “Old woman, look into my eyes. You will see here the murders of many.”

But I could not look into my interlocutor’s eyes. It was already very dark. I only heard the words, and the steady singing of mosquitoes.

The light from the hired jeep in which I was travelling bounced and fell on the shuttered doors of shops. Bettiah had been suffering from a spate of kidnappings. The dacoits slipped into the nearby forests and then made ransom calls on their cellphones. This was the reason why businesses closed as soon as it was dark.

But there was one shop called Vaishnavi Jewellers that was still open. A petromax lit its interiors. The shop was owned by Umesh, another old friend of Bajpai’s. He was waiting for me.

Umesh quickly closed his shop and we walked to his house in a lane nearby. His son unlocked the chains that were wrapped around the front door. We drank tea. Umesh said that the first film he might have seen with Bajpai was “Gora aur Kaala” in 1975. This was at the inauguration of the local Priya Cinema. Umesh remembered the film. His eyes had looked hollowed by the dark but I could see a twinkle in them. He said, “Rajendra Kumar in a double role. Opposite Hema Malini.”

We went to Priya Cinema. Umesh’s torch raked the patches of cowdung in our path. At the movie theatre, a loud generator was providing power. The film showing that night was a Salman Khan starrer “Tumko Na Bhool Payenge.” The projector room was hot and the light that tunneled out of that room picked out the slow swirls of beedi-smoke in the hall.

Umesh bought me some sweets at a mithai-store that he said had a fine local reputation. He had high blood-pressure, Umesh said, but there was nothing to hold me back. In the dark, I ate greedily the ras-malai that was heaped on my plate.

We got back in the jeep and went to meet Pawan, a building contractor, who was also a great childhood friend of Bajpai’s. But Pawan wasn’t at home and we were asked to wait. In Pawan’s front-yard, two boy-servants were busy, lanterns swinging in their hands, with a black cow that was about to give birth. The youths explained that the last time one of the cows had given birth, it had been in the middle of the night. No one was around to take care of the new-born calf. In that crowded stall, the mother had accidentally trampled the calf to death.

Within fifteen minutes, the calf arrived, its legs thin and crooked as in a child’s drawing. The mother licked her young and would pause only to loudly low with her neck close to the ground. I was so happy I wanted to knock on all the barred doors on the street and give everyone the good news.

When Pawan didn’t come for an hour, Umesh said we could go and look up another friend. The light from the jeep scoured the dirty walls in the narrow streets. In the vivid darkness of the night, our presence was an intrusion. Lives had been carefully constituted, out of sheer habit, around a routine of darkness. Whole families sat out on cots or on the steps of the houses we passed. Again and again, we surprised people who were eating or resting. Women turned their faces away, and men shaded their eyes, whenever we turned a corner, headlights blazing.

Umesh rattled the door of a decrepit house. A woman appeared on the roof above. I didn’t know it was a woman till I heard her voice. Her husband was not at home. Umesh asked her where he could have gone in the dark. She remained silent.

We made our trip back to Pawan’s house. Once again the terrible embarrassment: the head-lights tearing into shreds the thin cover of privacy that the night offered. I felt as if I was party to a crime. We were revealing to the people of Bettiah the unprotected dimensions of their cramped lives.

Pawan was now back. He was a short, squat man with a thin moustache and mischievous eyes. He laughed a lot even though we weren’t saying much. He spoke of the time when Bajpai had come to town with Raveena Tandon. The film “Shool” was being made there. It was probably the first time that a film had been shot in Bettiah. Pawan was happy that Bajpai had acted with him as if nothing had changed despite the years and the changes in fortune.

I decided I would watch the film as soon as I could, although I knew that, in the dark, all the towns in Bihar look alike.