Most people look back at the city of their childhood and early youth with yearning and nostalgia. But Amitava Kumar, in his short biography of Patna, A Matter of Rats (Aleph Book Company), gives a totally different perspective when he talks about his revisits to his hometown. Patna for him will always be about parents and children, and each of his return trips is linked to the middle-aged writer’s apprehensions about his parents’ mortality.

“To return to Patna is to find the challenging thought of death, like the tip of a knife, pressing against my rib. Rheumatoid arthritis has seized my mother’s limbs and she finds it impossible even to comb her hair.” Add to this the limp his father has developed, leaving Kumar wondering about “the circumstances under which I will need to return.” A sentiment bound to find an immediate connect with his reader.

The book is a delightful read, thanks to the pithy portraits Kumar draws in this rather slim volume. But before the living, let’s take stock of the dead — statues of “important men…with shallow chests, small paunches, sunken cheeks. On street corners and traffic roundabouts they stand on tall pedestals, solemn men saying not much at all, as if they have paan in their mouth and are getting ready to spit. Nearly all of them wear dhotis, and sometimes sport a khadi vest. They all wear glasses.”

The book begins with a vivid description of the presence of rats at all important points in the city. The railways tracks of Patna have been burrowed by these “warm, humble, highly sociable, clever, fiercely diligent rats”. The police even claim that rats were drinking from the seized bottles of illegal liquor!

A section of Patna University’s library was so badly infested by rats that it had to be closed. And they, of course, had a huge presence in Beur jail, where political worthies such as Lalu Yadav and Pappu Yadav had stints. There were news stories of babies bitten by rats, with one helpfully explaining that it was the “traces of food on the unwashed faces of infants” that attracted the rodents.

Visiting his Patna home with his family from New York, Kumar introduces his two-year-old son to two enormous rats walking away from them, looking like “stout ladies, on tiny heels, on their way to the market”. The child confuses them with rabbits while telling his mother the next day; she is alarmed, but not the rest of the family. But when a rat sneaks away with his mother’s dentures, Kumar tries to press pest control into service, but can only get a solitary fellow to come in and place rat poison in different rooms.

Then comes our first portrait — of Vijay Prakash, Principal Secretary in the Rural Development Department, who causes a stir by suggesting that restaurants have rat meat on their menu. Engaging Prakash, a trained astrophysicist, in a conversation, the author finds that the bureaucrat is only trying to change perceptions about the Musahars, known all over Bihar as a rat-eating caste. Among the poorest and most marginalised, Musahars are considered to be at the bottom of the caste ladder. Prakash says he visited the Musahar Toli and was served a rat meal — rats fried and cooked in a curry — which “tasted delicious”.

But the city is defined by more than rats. By enterprises such as that of Anand Kumar, who gained admission to Oxford but couldn’t make it due to financial woes, and whose mission now is to train - free of cost - unprivileged students for IIT entrance exams. For the past 10 years he has been running his Super 30 programme. The first year, 18 succeeded, followed by 22 in the next. In 2012, 27 of the 30 trained poor students made it to the IITs. In an article about him, The New York Times reported that against 10 per cent at Harvard, the acceptance rate at IIT was a mere two per cent.

A perceptive passage in this interesting book is about a get-together of his school friends, which Kumar attends in the posh home of a friend in Gurgaon. They discuss why all of them had left Patna. One said the school they attended was like “a rocket; it gave us an escape velocity”. When the author asks if they hadn’t all abandoned their parents by doing so, the answer is: “Our parents are the reason we are here. They pushed us to leave.”

Kumar says he is often asked, “But hasn’t Patna changed in recent times?” Refusing to answer this question, the author sees in edifices such as the mall built by filmmaker Prakash Jha, the city’s “pretensions to development”. And yet, in 300 BCE, when the Greeks sent their ambassador Megasthenes to India, he called what is present-day Patna the greatest city in the world. All along the banks of the Ganga river, for a stretch of nine or 10 miles, there were palaces and pleasure gardens.

The prose is simple and racy, the anecdotes interesting and laced with humour. My single grouse - the portrait and story of Raghav and Leela are too long and tend to drag. Full marks also to Aleph, for bringing out a very elegant, hard-bound edition with a beautiful illustration.

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