A city remembered

Siddharth Chowdhury talks about revisiting Patna in his new book, “The Patna Manual of Style”

March 04, 2015 05:15 pm | Updated 05:15 pm IST

Siddharth Chowdhury

Siddharth Chowdhury

In his stories, Siddharth Chowdhury visits a Patna we don’t often read about. Each picture he paints is a little open window into the soul of a city, a revelation for those who don’t know it, and a memory for those who do. In his third and latest, “The Patna Manual of Style” (Aleph), Chowdhury brings back the familiar characters from Patna, as they navigate a Delhi of the late nineties.

Excerpts from an interview

The structure of Patna Manual of Style, like your other books, is interesting, a non-linear collection of snapshots…

I tend, if you read “Patna Roughcut”, to not go for a linear structure. Because I write very short books but I want to cram in many things, a structure like this helps me. If I was to use a linear structure for something like this, it would be a 500 to 600 page big novel. But I want to write a big novel in as few words as possible. This kind of structure works for me. I do not get much time to write. It usually takes me four to five years to write a book.

Did this book take that long too?

Yes, it took over four years.

And since it isn’t a linear novel, with a clear beginning and a clean end, how do you maintain the flow from one story to another?

One of the things a novelist must have in very good nick is a memory. And I tend to have my memories in a good nick. I’m also always constantly revising. So you see, when I pick up a piece, like maybe the last section, which was written last year and took over four to five months, I would do one draft, then I would go back to it and write it again and write it again. It was written almost when the book was in production but I needed one more section to balance the Sophia Lauren section.

And for a book like this, how do you know which piece should be the last one? How do you know when to stop?

I’ll tell you what; I really don’t come to a closure because I know that I’m going to write about these characters again in maybe a year’s time. I’ll look at them again from a slightly different lens. Maybe three years from now, I’ll look at what Charulata was like when she was very young. There is no closure in that sense, but I usually get exhausted when I reach about 40,000 words, so that way the books are contained. But yes, I do try to give a feeling of closure to the reader, and say that this mood is coming to an end here. You are looking at Hriday and he’s married and somewhat settled in life; still trying to be a published writer, he has come a long way from Day Scholar and Importer of Blondes. That restlessness is under the surface for now.

The autobiographical story you’ve slipped in between the stories is also very unique. While it is a kind of “About the Author”, it’s also a story in itself.

The autobiographical thing was one of the first things I wrote, in 2006, when my first book had come out. I had been asked to write an autobiographical piece. I had said that I only write stories and they said fine, write it as a short story.

Patna has seen mockery, it’s been maligned, and it has been defended fiercely. How is writing about a city that has seen so much in the past few years?

One of the things I’ve felt was that one is partly driven to defend Patna, which I don’t want to do. I don’t feel like there should be anything to defend. Because when I was growing up in Patna I never felt that I was in a mofussil town or a small town, just waiting to get out of it. There was no such feeling like that. I liked growing up there and I still like visiting it. My family is still there. But yes, of course, it has gone through bad times; politically the nineties were not very good. But all through it I felt like there was resilience in the people of Patna, of not buckling down to it. And people always knew how to enjoy themselves. That is an important part of “The Patna Manual of Style”. I felt like it was one of the codes with which people from Patna lived, and also one of the codes they brought to Delhi.

Of course, memory is selective. Someone else might be very bitter about their time in Patna, might remember a very different city. I don’t have that.

You bring a very real, very detailed picture of Patna, and considering it is not very often written about with such familiarity, do you think it becomes, to an extent, your responsibility to paint this picture right?

Many times Patna is written about by people who never visit it.

Or they visit it for a day and see only the dirt and the filth and not the people, and write about it. Which is fine; it’s a tourist like thing to do. But you see, I can’t do that. I’m someone who has spent seventeen to eighteen years there and is in constant contact with it.

One of the problems I do face is that either I’m seen as someone who writes not “Patna Roughcut” but the rough guide to Patna or someone who is seen as a PR for the place. Both of which I’m not. I’m a novelist.

I feel that to read my books you don’t have to go to Patna. I’m not bringing news from Patna, I’m trying to tell a story. I give details to people who need to know Patna, and I have to be careful with people who know Patna, that they shouldn’t feel it to be a fraud. But at the end of the day I’m telling a story which should be universal.

Why do you think, considering there is no dearth of material in the city, that there haven’t been more Indian writers in English from Patna writing about the city?

I find it very strange that after us…Tabish Khair, Amitava Kumar and I… there hasn’t been any writer from Patna writing about the city. I would have thought there would be many more. Times are also easier now. It was much harder for us in 90s and early 2000s. I think they will come. We should give it a few more years. I’m sure there will be more young writers, more women writers too, from Patna and smaller towns in Bihar...Darbhanga, Bihar Sharif and more.

Why do you think it’s important to capture a city in fiction?

I feel it’s much more important to explore a city in fiction than in non-fiction because in fiction if you capture even the essence of the city at even a sixty to seventy per cent, it’ll stay for at least ten to fifteen years. In non-fiction even if you capture even a 100 per cent, it’ll stay for only a few years. Something like a great non-fiction book about a city…“Maximum City” is going to stay I’m afraid only for ten to fifteen or maybe twenty years at the most. But a similarly great novel like “Midnight’s Children”, is going to stay for fifty years at least. Non-fiction gets dated very quickly.

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