Small-town Sisyphus

As Hindutva forces augment the volume of their divisive ideology, a book such as Patna Blues quietly makes a poignant, undeniable statement, an appeal to our humanity

A  little more than halfway through Abdullah Khan’s stunning debut novel, Patna Blues, when the daughter of the woman that Arif Khan, the protagonist, is courting starts calling him brother, he feels “like he was a character in a Greek play”. It is instructive that Khan does not tell the readers if the play is a tragedy or a comedy. The character Arif most represents in Greek mythology is Sisyphus, cursed to be trapped by the repetitive rhythms of his lower middle-class life. 

The narrative of the tribulations he encounters in the pursuit of his ambitions and desires is sometimes hilarious and at others, heartbreaking.

Such existential narratives were once the mainstay of Indian literature, but seem to have all but disappeared, at least from English writing. Patna Blues is a successor of the tradition of Raja Rao, R K Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Ruskin Bond. Like their books, this is set in a small town (Patna) and revolves around an unremarkable character. Arif, like so many young men from Bihar, is a civil services aspirant. He is also in love with Sumitra, a married woman older than him and Hindu to boot, making their match almost impossible — especially because the novel begins in the early 1990s, at the heyday of the Ram Mandir movement.

Khan has chosen a Spartan style for this novel; there are no flourishes, no window dressings. This is perhaps the perfect vessel for such a narrative. The reader is not put off by unnecessary obtuseness, but is lulled into a sense of security from which he or she is jerked out when least expected. It’s a malleable style that can turn humorous, sentimental, or tragic at the drop of a hat. Seemingly easy, it is like walking a tightrope for a writer. In a recent interview for Scroll.in, Khan revealed that he started writing this novel in 1997, after Arundhati Roy won the Booker. The endless revision the novel must have gone through over two decades is evident in the fact that there is not an iota of fat.

Patna Blues Author: Abdullah Khan Publisher: Juggernaut Price: Rs 499; Pages: 294

How versatile the narrative is becomes evident quite early in the novel, when after watching a pornographic film with his friends, Arif feels his desire for Sumitra awakened. His dreams turn erotic and wet. He cannot listen to the song “Roop tera mastana” from the Rajesh Khanna-Sharmila Tagore starrer Aradhana on the radio without imagining Sumitra. He can hardly read Love in the Time of Cholera and not have a feverish desire choke him. All this is narrated in the deadpan manner in which the novel has progressed till then, making it even more hilarious than it would have otherwise been.

This short episode, when Arif is racked by guilt for feeling physical desire, is a metaphor for the entire narrative. The primary emotion that moves it is desire — to be successful, to escape poverty, to find love — and the realisation that our best-laid plans are most likely to be spoilt. As the novel nears its end, Arif finds his dreams and his youth leaking away. In a despondent mood one evening, he walks to Gandhi Maidan, buys a coneful of roasted gram and recalls a song from the 1984 cult classic, Umrao Jaan: Tamaam umra ka hisaab maangti hai zindagi / Yeh mera dil kahe to kya, yeh khud se sharmsaar hai (Life asks me for an account of all my years / What will this heart of mine say? It is ashamed of itself). Few scenes in contemporary fiction have evoked pathos like this one without sinking into 

banal sentimentality.   

Though, the novel veers very close to it. In the Scroll.in interview quoted above, novelist Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, who interviews Khan, describes the novel as very “atmospheric”. The atmosphere it most evokes is that of the Muslim social that was a common genre in Hindi cinema even in the 1980s. (Khan has written scripts and lyrics for films.) 

The pages of Patna Blues are filled with Hindi film songs and ghazals of Momin and Ghalib. Arif and Sumitra are both amateur Urdu poets, but their poetry is full of sentimental clichés. 

Towards the end as Arif finally manages to get a job, the readers get to read an English poem by him, called “A Workable Dream”. Written in free-verse quatrains, completely devoid of sentimentality, this is a sort of epiphany for Arif, making him a more realistic man.

It is beyond the scope of this short review to explore every nuance of this novel, but it would be unfair to not comment at all on the political undercurrents in it that focus on the precarious existence of Muslims in post-Babri India. As Hindutva forces augment the volume of their divisive ideology, a book such as this one quietly makes a poignant, undeniable statement, an appeal to our humanity.