An Explosive Sorrow

A story of Patna

01 July 2013
Traffic over the Ganga on Patna’s Mahatma Gandhi Setu, one of the longest bridges in the country.
TOM PIETRASIK
Traffic over the Ganga on Patna’s Mahatma Gandhi Setu, one of the longest bridges in the country.
TOM PIETRASIK

THIS IS THE 18TH MARCH OF 1974. It was the day after my eleventh birthday, and I stood on the roof of my parents’ home in Patna, along with my family and some visitors from Arrah and faraway Saharsa, who had been unable to leave because of the curfew imposed all over Patna. There were reports that police had fired into the crowds of rioting students who had marched on the state assembly. We were playing antakshri, in our small group, because one young woman with us, a distant relative, was a wonderful singer. She had light brown eyes, and her hair curled over her forehead in the manner of a Hindi film-star of that decade. The horizon was grey with smoke rising from burning buildings.

The student protests, which would soon find their leader in the septuagenarian activist from Patna, Jayaprakash Narayan—JP, as everyone called him—went on unabated for the rest of that week, resulting in the deaths of 27 people. The movement gathered strength, and soon spread to other states; the following summer, feeling besieged as her power eroded, Indira Gandhi would suspend civil liberties and declare a state of emergency. None of this meant much to me then; 26 June 1975, the date the Emergency began, was memorable to me for years afterward because my tonsils were removed that day. When I regained consciousness, after having been put under anaesthesia, I remember hearing my father and uncles discussing the arrests that were taking place outside the ward at the Patna Medical College and Hospital.

Workers transport a car across the Ganga on a boat, from Hajipur to Raghopur, both localities near Patna.. ALOK JAIN Workers transport a car across the Ganga on a boat, from Hajipur to Raghopur, both localities near Patna.. ALOK JAIN
Workers transport a car across the Ganga on a boat, from Hajipur to Raghopur, both localities near Patna.
ALOK JAIN

Amitava Kumar is a professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York, USA. His latest book, A Time Outside This Time: A Novel, will be published by Aleph next year.

Keywords: culture poetry malls Patna cities Emergency small-town India marriage
COMMENT