A Bihar Story
Five or six years ago, when I had gone to meet him at the Granta office in London, Ian Jack had told me the story of his sickness and his stay at the Holy Kurji Family Hospital. As it happens, I passed by the hospital in a boat just a few days ago but, reading this piece, discovering Ian’s original reason for going to Patna, I suddenly felt a strong desire to return. (”I was going to Patna to try to find the lawyer who had represented (and eventually freed) a man who had spent 30 years in jails and lunatic asylums for the crime of being found without a ticket on the Assam Mail.”) Do read the story. I liked it especially because of Ian’s characteristic clarity, a quality which is close to honesty and gives his writing a rare kind of warmth.
I woke up in the dark. I sometimes think about this scene: the utter blackness and the sounds of men—I think they were always men—moaning and whimpering around me. One or two, I later realised, were dying. I was in the windowless intensive care ward. Worse than that, I was in the windowless intensive care ward during a powercut, as it hit the Kurji Holy Family Hospital just as it did the rest of Patna. Sometimes a nurse would pick up a telephone, perhaps to summon help or ask advice, and then, finding it dead, would give a small shout and bang it down again. Perhaps two days went by like this, of my knowing and then not knowing where I was, until the moment came when I saw a woman standing by my bed and realised after a minute or two that she was my wife, who had flown from London. A newspaper account would have read: “She flew three thousand miles to be at his bedside.” I was too dazed to weep.
Mr Banerjee said, “You are lucky. You have been very ill, you know. Your appendix had burst. I was worried about peritonitis. You were vomiting even during the operation itself.”
Slowly, I recovered. I got a room with a view of the Ganges and watched country boats with their rough brown sails move up and down the river. On the far bank, men towed them against the current with a rope. I watched this living, toiling world with a new respect and affection.
