Patna
I have a piece in today’s Business Standard about my hometown in literature and Hindi film. An excerpt:
In recent decades several films have been made which cast light on Bihar’s poverty or corruption (Damul, Mrityudand, Shool, Paar, Calcutta Mail, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) but none moved me as much as Rituparno Ghosh’s Raincoat.
The other films had greater authenticity in their settings, and they were all made by film-makers I very much admire, but it was in Raincoat that I found bits of my middle-class past and the anxieties of my downwardly mobile cousins. What made it even more poignant was that the disappointments and fears of that setting were put in a delicate love-story, offering the consolation of caring while the cracks in the walls grew wider.
The former lovers in Raincoat, who are both, unknown to each other, in straitened circumstances, meet in a crumbling house in Kolkata. The two of them, Manoj and Neeru, are from Bhagalpur in Bihar.
To keep their spirits up, they lie to each other. Neeru is pretending to be the wife of a tycoon. Manoj claims he produces television serials. At one point, Neeru, played by Aishwarya Rai, tells Manoj, the Ajay Devgan character, about the sort of serial she’d like to watch.
“A serial about girls like me… A village girl comes to a new town after marriage … with a dream that … she’ll love her husband very much … look after him … But he’s always on tour … She’s always waiting … Suddenly waking up from sleep, thinking … ‘Did the door bell ring?’”
When she pauses, Manoj begins to speak. “And then one day the bell rings. She opens the door and sees it’s not her husband, but someone else. Someone she used to know but can’t recognise anymore. He’s turned dark, his hair is thinning.”
I was moved by this because even without wanting to, the two were at last telling the story that they had hidden from each other. And that is perhaps the point I have been making about stories from places like Patna.
These are places whose stories we have not told yet, and it is a matter of time before they will come tumbling out of us.
More.
Share your sentiments on this. On the rare occasion when I’d come across Patna being mentioned in a book or a movie, I’d start thinking about the character and which part of the city he came from.
Perhaps the stories will start coming from those who have been displaced but still hold fond memories, who have seen more than what Patna/Bihar became in the 90s.
Comment by sthira — February 28, 2007 @ 6:16 pm