Recollections (2): The Sahas of Patneshwari Bakery

Recollections (2): The Sahas of Patneshwari Bakery

January 6, 2015 at 10:52am

Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running stream.

In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of the village where I live.

I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am.

I load my little boats with shiuli flower from our garden,

and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land in the night.

I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky

and see the little clouds setting thee white bulging sails.

I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the air to race with my boats!

When night comes I bury my face in my arms

and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars.

The fairies of sleep are sailing in them,

and the lading is their baskets full of dreams.

Tagore has been superbly successful in delving deep into the psychology of children. Every child has dreams and fears and the desire to be loved and appreciated. My childhood was spent in very happy surroundings. Though my mother, as a pivot of the extended family was very busy, had a unique way of reaching out to children, all the members of the family and even the outsiders. My grandfather was our constant companion. Right from the early morning to the time of going to bed. My father, a busy man, had a great love of reading. In the Lord’s room (‘Thakur Ghar’ a room for the deities and daily worship) he had his library: books of Indian and English literature, books of other kinds which my father loved to read: Welles Hangen’s After Nehru Who (1963), Gandhi’s Emissary (1967) by Sudhir Ghosh, Out of Dust (1944) by D. F. Karaka and a host other books with all the leading newspapers and magazines of that time: Illustrated Weekly of India, Reader’s Digest, Dinman, Dharmyug, Hindustan, Kadambini, Navneet and for us children: Chandamama, Parag, Nandan, Champak, Balak, Lot Pot etc. My parents were exceptionally generous and that’s why they did not stop us from taking from the hawker any children’s magazine we wanted to read.

Like every child I was eager to have friends and to share my fears and confusions of adolescent days. Whenever I look back I find that my journey has been a quest for a friend, a friend who I have never found (and sometimes found and lost), the complete friend, the one who is so trustworthy and devoted to you, the one who accepts you as you are. Later as my horizon broadened I found and realized that friendship as narrated in the works of fiction is a fiction. People in this world do what they want to do and very often they rationalize to prove themselves right. I grew up as a very aggressive child, ready to point out wrongs and to fight. An incident at the school with one of the teachers who was my father’s colleague changed my personality. After that I didn’t immediately react, I kept quiet. In other words, I grew wiser! Several times my colleagues blamed me that I should not have kept quiet. I kept quiet and did my duty as directed. My colleagues did not understand that one should follow work ethos by sacrificing our sense of right and wrong. We should not always be practical and logical.

There was a good friend as I was looking for in my grandfather, my parents, K.B’s mother, Chhota Dadu, Bada Dadu, and late Smt. Saraswati Devi of 61, Pataliputra Colony! What I meant by friend here is they were imbued with the immense capacity to connect with me. Their ability to share and care emotionally was superb! That’s why, K.B’s mother used to write letters to me when I was in the hostel, my father and Mrs. Saraswati Devi (who I called Ma) wrote letters to me regularly. After I got married and came to Patna with Jyotsana, my wife, we stayed at 61, Pataliputra colony before we flew to Mumbai on our way to Sana’a, Yemen. Ma was very affectionate towards Jyotsana and me. Even today whenever I remember my visits to seek her blessings, I still feel the heaven of her tiny palm over my head.

It is not that in today’s world when we are living in a post-literate society with recorded sounds (CDs, audio books), broadcast spoken word and music (radio), pictures (JPEG) and moving images(television, film, MPG, streaming video, video games, and in this virtual reality we have dearth of such people who will be able ’to connect.’ We have the advantage of the disappearance of geographical boundaries and a new dimension of interactions between time and technology. I have found people with such ‘transport of cordiality’ who are more than my own brothers and sisters from who, I feel, was separated in a crowded village fair and met miraculously again after so many years! We have so much to share with one another! And I also ruefully recall that there are some who were lost never to be found again!

At the age of seventeen I left my native place to do my B.A. in English at the L.S.College, Muzaffarpur. There I was introduced to Prof. Kamta Charan Shrivastav (known popularly as KCS) by Prof Dev Nath Sahay. After I completed my B.A (Hon’s) in English and went to see KCS; he told me to go to Patna University to do my M. A. I followed his advice and came to Patna. It was not easy though. This I will narrate sometime later.

Coming back to my stay at Patneshwari Bakery…..

Invariably, in the late Saturday afternoons Bada Dadu’s wife would come to the garden and near the coconut tree she would pray to Shani, the Saturn and would call us, me and my cousin Rajesh, to take the ‘prasad’: the holy basil leaf with the holy water of the Ganga river. Before she put the ‘prasad’ (offering of god) in our palms she would start reciting the couplet:

“Ashlen shoni boshlen khate

Prashad dilo hathey hathey !”

This amused both of us. Bada Dadu would be there with his ever smiling face. He was a handsome man in his early sixties, clad in immaculate spotless white dhoti-kurta with Vidyasagar slippers in his feet. Bada Dadu was a member of almost all the cultural societies of Patna. For the first time he took me to Nritya Kala Mandir to attend the live performance of the soulful Sitar of late Pandit Nikhil Banerjee.

During the Dussehra festival we used to go from Gandhi Maidan to Maruf Ganj, all the way walking, enjoying the bliss that was Patna once when such great personalities of classical dance, music and singing as Gopi Krishna, Birju Maharaj, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Girija Devi, Dr. N. Rajam, B. G. Jog, Ustad Bismillah Khan, Kishori Amonkar, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Sunanda Patnaik, Kishan Maharaj and many others would visit. One can understand the glory of the cultural richness of Patna from the following write-up by Ustad Amjad Ali Khan Saheb:

“I have been very fortunate to have received love in abundance from the people of Punjab and Bihar. Even though today their profile has become quite ‘Non Classical’, there was a time when both these states had a very musical profile. Back in the sixties, all the performing musicians and dancers of India use to be in Patna during the Durga Puja celebrations.” (http://www.sarod.com/week/oct_2008_week.html)

(To be continued)