The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)
H/1: Bumbaiyya Bhaijaan in Bhaiyyaland
Khaliq Parkar
This is an attempt at a semi-sardonic, quasi-journalistic and petty-academic chronicle of the 60-odd days I plan to spend in Bihar.
This time is spent for fieldwork on a job with a research institute which has deemed me worthy of being appointed a
“consultant” to study the transformations in large villages and small towns. It is also a great way to spend some time away from my metropolitan Scylla and Charybdis of Delhi and
Mumbai. It has also been my long wish to visit the land of the people that many of my
denizens hate. It has been a few days here already, and I might be falling in love with this place.
I will be writing mostly from Madhubani district — about 180 km northeast of state capital Patna — which you might know for its art, but I also hope to spend time in
Saharsa, Darbhanga and Sitamarhi districts, in Patna and maybe a short jaunt to Nepal, which seems a stone’s throw away on the map. (East Champaran district in Bihar shares a border with Nepal)
The title is inspired from experience.
When I first came to study at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, I met a myriad of people and made quite a few friends from Bihar. After the initial introduction, most would give me a benign smile and say “Bumbaiyya, hmm” with what I perceived as a derisive snort.
My hometown of Dapoli in Maharashtra has seen an influx of immigrants over the past few years, largely from Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. I was shopping in the central market last winter when I heard a shopper ask the vendor, “
? (
, how much are the tomatoes?)” He flared in reply, “
!”(I am a
! not a
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, well, because I am Muslim and it is a variation of what close friends and little cousins are prone to call me.
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Bhaiyya is often used derisively to refer to people from eastern and northern states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, many of whom have migrated to
Maharashtra and Gujarat in search of a livelihood. In Maharashtra, they have often encountered regionalist aggression and violence.
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The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)
I do hope the reader forgives, nay, enjoys the political incorrectness, a present continuous tense (most of the time), and digressions.
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Bhaijaan’s “notes from the ground” begins with a view from the air. As we descend, we see fields, wet and flooded.
There are squares of sugarcane, paddy and banana plantations.
The plane banks sharply revealing the expanse of the Ganga rushing towards us. Gardens, seemingly clear roads, squat colonial bungalows and a sprawling Raj Bhavan come into view. Slightly before, I have — mistakenly — identified an
Ashoka pillar in a garden: as it sweeps closer into view, we realise it to be the chimney of a brick kiln. It is a short runway and the pilot brakes so hard I finally appreciate the use of the seat belts on an airplane.
The Jaya Prakash Narayan International Airport is like any other transport hub — people swarm us, wanting to know if we want a taxi and promising us the prepaid auto counter is just around the corner. We finally reach it and pay Rs 160 for a 5km journey, on the way perusing the receipt which tells us this is a private pre-paid service approved by the Bihar government.
The government seems to have a good job with its roads — but, of course, this is expected of roads to and from an airport, as Gowda points out. What is not expected is a bloated dead dog in the middle of the street that autos, bicycles, taxis and
SUVs drive around smoothly, pretty much like a roundabout.
As we reach the junction that connects to the main street, a school bus roars past.
It has rained the night before and the by-lanes are flooded. As we drive away from the airport and past the Raj Bhavan gates, the roads become wetter and garbage piles are higher. There are goats tied up waiting for Eid. We pass by the National Law
School and National Institute of Fashion Design whose gates are surrounded by slush and washed out garbage. Gowda says
National Law Schools have come up in almost every state and a snide remark is made about all the lawyers needed to deal with the scams. The cream walls of the institutions are painted with bright vermillion slogans that call for agitations under the banner of “Mithilanchal Mukti Morcha”.
There is an advertisement that shows the versatility of plaster of
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The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)
Paris — it can be moulded into anything from a Grecian urn to a Roman bust to a tacky ceiling design. Kapil Dev and a random white man with an authoritative white beard seem to be significant poster boys. We pass by a roundabout on a flyover, something never seen in Delhi. A huge chimney of an abandoned factory looms over us: it is modelled after those wide nuclear station steam chimneys.
We arrive at Mithapur bus stand. There is a two inch thick layer of muck. My well-tended, recently polished Hush
Puppies are now two-toned: black with a layer of brown.
Denims were a good idea, leather shoes, not so much. There are 17 buses trying to make their way out from three exits that merge into a single lane, another 30-odd wait for passengers and another 30-odd are submerged in brown water until the footboard. In the midst of the calls for different places, I keep hearing people say “this is Bihar”. I don’t know what it means but it is a harbinger of sorts: Reminds me of
.
Half the people seem to be Brahmins. The coolies, the bus drivers, the bottled water sellers, the sprouted beans and groundnut vendors, the men sitting at the cash counters of the transport companies all have a tell-tale tail on their heads.
There is one policeman and he is clearly trying to head home like in the Joan Osborne song. He is not a Brahmin. As he tries looking for a bus, he stops coolies and asks around but is largely shoved out of the way. The Bihar Police have a Bodhi tree on their emblem.
Not wanting to wait eight hours for the state transport Volvo bus, we spot a Madhubani signboard among the 17 others and hop on and find the last few seats behind the driver.
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The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)
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We estimate a four-and-a-half hour journey for the 180 km from Patna to Madhubani. We take six.
Thus bus is owned by a transport company called Shahi
Durga.
“A secular Hindu,” remarks Gowda.
It costs Rs 150 and a little square receipt is signed with
Rs 300 for the two of us. It takes us 30 minutes to clear the gates at Mithapur. As we crawl towards the north-eastern border of Patna, trucks, buses, rickshaws start crowding the roads. Everyone seems to want to head outward. The highway road signs and milestones remind one of Bihar’s status as an eastern state. Guwahati doesn’t seem too far, nor does Siliguri; nor Kalimpong, where I celebrated my 14 th birthday. It takes us another 30 minutes to get out of Patna.
People have told us that Bihar chief minister Nitish
Kumar has built good roads. They are there. There are fourlane highways, which suddenly become one-lane — or half.
Then back to two, then four. A game of hopscotch at 60 kmph is not a lot of fun. Occasionally, when there are four lanes with a cement divider in the middle, a truck barrels down towards us
— on our side of the road, on the innermost lane. We think this is an aberration. It isn’t. An occasional bus, or a truck, or a rickshaw, or a bicycle follows suit. As traffic slows, vendors hop on and off a bit like those at Kalyan Junction on the Bombay-
Pune trains. They sell plastic pouches of peanuts with little packets of salt inside and a green chilli on request. I get one
the chilli. There are others, sprouts (gram and
) sold with chopped onions. And bottled water, which costs Rs
15; not Rs 20 like in the city.
There isn’t a horn in the bus. There is a piece of metal with a red wire snaking off down. Whenever nudged, the piece of metal makes contact with a part of the dashboard where the paint has been scratched off to reveal a patch of metal. The contact completes a circuit and a horn sounds. The driver has a hair trigger reaction to this circuit at the sight of any person, animal, bicycle, rickshaw, tempo, truck, bus or a pebble.
Sometimes there is no one around and he nudges it perhaps to keep himself awake.
Out of Patna, we retrace the route out the plane flew over. I realise what look like sugarcane from the air are the much larger leaves of plantain and banana. There are no policemen in sight until we reach the Gandhi Setu across the
Ganga (Gandhi’s Ram Rajya, Ram going to Lanka using a Setu to save Sita, Sita had prayed to Ganga after crossing her safely.
The mind is boggled at the possibilities of self-referential nomenclatures).
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The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)
The bridge is fantastically long and grand. A bit upsetting that one builds such a lovely long road, but makes it narrow. Many segments of its lanes are under repairs, seemingly constantly. A thought crosses me — the time it takes to repair one segment of a lane means there is denser, slower and heavier traffic on the alternate lane. In retrospect it reminds me of the opening lines of
: “Yossarian looked at the patient in the hospital bed next to his. The patient's entire body was swathed in bandages. Tubes containing unidentifiable fluids went into the bandages at one end and tubes containing unidentifiable fluids come out of the other end. Yossarian wondered why the hospital staff didn't just eliminate the middle man — the patient — and link the two sets of tubes.”
Somewhere midway on the bridge there is a cobbler. A solitary cop is getting his shoes polished. While the traffic is slow, should I get off to get my Hush Puppies scrubbed and polished? People must be doing it, why else is he at least 2 km from the nearest shore?
There is no construction on the other side of the Setu.
Patna has set us free. Probably in relief, a pregnant woman sitting on top of the engine switches places with a young man sitting next to me at the window as she has a bout of morning
— err, brunch — sickness. Three hours into the journey, they talk to each other and I figure they are married. Slowly the road widens. The horn continues; I try to catch a nap as the driver’s horny lullaby continues. Gowda is sitting right behind the driver. He must be having a blast.
We stop at a petrol pump. We haven’t had breakfast. A packet of chips and one of Little Hearts (biscuits shaped like hearts) is shared between Gowda and me. We do not want to spoil the upcoming lunch halt at Muzaffarpur. The driver, his spotter, and the coolie disappear. They return when some passengers start yelling and the driver bites into a pan from his packet of ten before starting the engine and nudging his metal piece. I want to cut that fucking wire.
Nap again. Heat. Dust. Regular rural road trip clichés.
We stop at Muzaffarpur. People squat or pull down their pants to pee. Not the zipper, the pants. Gowda reminds me not to make Bihari jokes. We amble toward where the others head.
. We raise an eyebrow at the oil and the tins and the jugs and the plates and go to the stall to get chips and
Little Hearts. Spoilt city brats.
Back on the bus, the road is now consistently wide. We are now on a new National Highway. Co-passengers discuss whether the bus will go via the Zero-Mile Road after
Darbhanga or via Sakuri. It gets breezier and cooler. I fish out my phone and start testing the GPS apps I have installed for
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The Four Quarters Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015) field work. Over the course of the next hour, I determine GPS
Essentials tops FollowMee by a margin of many a degrees (pun intended). Google Maps is like a floppy disk. 11 satellites locate us with an error of 4 m on the NH, travelling at an average speed of 46.7 kmph over 15.6 km, clock us at a ground speed of
69.6 kmph, and the altitude ranges from 756 to 85 m.
I stop the recording at N26º20’42.4” E086º04’21.3”
[Darbhanga] and start looking out of the window as we get closer to Madhubani.
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