I saw a young man on a cycle overtake an auto-rickshaw at a rather sharp turn. For a few moments the auto driver bore an expression of shock at the cyclist's dangerous manoeuvre. And then I saw the cyclist grinning impishly. The auto driver's face relaxed in a tired smile.
I peeked into cars, overcrowded buses, the faces of pedestrians, driving along the busy streets of Patna. I somewhat naively expected to find disappointment, anger, unhappiness, at least, frustration in these faces. But I mostly saw contentment, even frolic. This city, stuck in time, poverty, squalor lives another life, rather distanced from the critical newspaper articles you read that dissect poverty and aspire for riches for all.
Towns in India, I guess like towns all over the world, have unique individualities. I grew up in Patna in the 70's and 80's. At that time, the only other cities I knew of were Delhi and Kanpur. When I first saw these other cities I realized, rather strikingly, that Patna was really a very literate place. Signboards in English were rarely misspelled. In places like Kanpur this was pretty common. After several years in Pune, which has a remarkable concentration of colleges, I realized, in contrast, the vast richness of book stores in Patna. In the older parts of the city, you could find book stores catering to the weirdest of tastes.
There are many things unique to small towns and many things that are the same. I am always amazed at the openness in conversation. The other day I stood by a tea stall sipping hot sugary tea. Two boys sat on a bench. One was short in height, perhaps showing the long-range effects of undernourishment, the other more or less, of average height. The tea stall owner was like the owner of any other road-side tea stall dotting the breadths of India - the road his god, yielding periodic bounties in the form of pedestrians and travelers, who would infrequently suspend their struggle with time, to stop by and have a cup (or more commonly, a glass) of tea; he had the resigned look of a person who has long abandoned expectation and lives by time. His time versus the time of gods - secure in the knowledge that while his wait will end, the gods will wait much longer.
The boys were in the middle of a conversation centered around the height of humans and its effect on intelligence. The short boy proposed the thesis that short people are smarter. That nature makes them smarter because it has to spend less making them taller and can channel its finite resources into building up the intelligence of the person. Various short and tall persons were cited and there were occasional objective debates like - was Nehru tall? Shastri was cited as a smart prime minister whose lack of height was, undoubtedly, the cause of his meteoric rise to glory. The debate was going nowhere. Objective evidence was not clear enough to clinch it one way or the other. As a final step, the boys appealed to the stall owner, who was busy rinsing out some glasses, at the moment he was addressed. Without looking up, he nodded his head. This could have meant anything. The shorter boy, who seemed to be more aggressive, and probably had more at stake, took this as conclusive proof that his thesis was correct.
We were all sitting just outside the high compound walls of an all-girls government school. Suddenly the boys moved on to discussing the mysterious happenings inside such schools. And that was that.
During this visit, I was looking after my father who had had a short surgery. I had a lot of time to hang around the hospital premises, watching and looking at people. Somehow all of this brought me closer to the thoughts and feelings of my boyhood. Adrift from my usual modern moorings of messages, emails, TV programs, game shows, traffic snarls, water shortages, and all the other usual features of my life, brought me back to things which were more primitive, more human, more like I was when younger and probably happier.
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