An excerpt from 'A Matter of Rats' by Amitava Kumar

PROLOGUE: THE RAT’S GUIDE Rats have burrowed under the railway tracks in Patna.

As citizens of a literal underworld, I imagine the rats inhabiting a spreading web of small safe houses and getaway streets. We could choose to call it a city under the city, or if that is too sophisticated a description for at least one of the two entities, then let’s just call it a dense warren of subterranean burrows. In places, the railway platform has collapsed. In my mind’s eye, I watch a train approaching Patna Junction in the early morning.

The traveller sees the men sitting beside the tracks with their bottoms exposed, plastic bottles of water on the ground in front of them, often a mobile phone pressed to the ear. But at night the first inhabitants of Patna that the visitor passes are the invisible ones: warm, humble, highly sociable, clever, fiercely diligent rats.

In the library at Patna University, I heard that rats had taken over a section of the stacks and the library was closed. Also, there are rats—always in these stories, rats as big as cats—in the Beur Jail. After he was shifted there from an air-conditioned clubhouse that had served as a makeshift prison, the jail was home for a while to the former chief minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav. He tended a vegetable garden in prison and issued orders to visiting politicians and bureaucrats. Another inmate of Beur Jail is the former parliamentarian, Pappu Yadav, on trial for

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the murder of a communist leader, but awarded degrees in human rights and disaster management while behind bars. But, I digress.

For some reason, even in the Patna Museum, home to Mauryan art and Buddhist relics, including, some say, the ashes of Lord Buddha, there are stuffed rats nailed to black wooden bases. About fifty feet away stands the magnificent, glistening third-century-BCE sculpture of the Didarganj Yakshi. A long and heavy necklace dangles in the gap between her globular stone breasts. In her right hand, she holds a fly-whisk flung languidly over her shoulder. And running away from her are the stuffed rats, a small procession of them, rotting and seemingly blinded with age, breathing the air of eternity under dusty glass.

Outside in the city, however, and, one can be certain, in other parts of the museum too, the rats are alive and dangerous. Newspapers periodically carry reports that babies have been bitten by rats. One such report helpfully explained that it was the traces of food on the unwashed faces of infants that attracted the rodents.

Rats are curious, especially about food, and they will eat anything. In the hospital in Patna where my sister works, nurses play the radio at night because they are firmly of the belief that the music keeps the rats from nibbling at their toes.

In the middle of the night one winter, during a visit to Patna, I was sitting at the dining table with my jet-lagged two-year-old, watching a cartoon on

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my computer. I had only switched on a single, dim light as I didn’t want my parents to be disturbed. We must have been sitting there quietly for about half an hour before my little boy asked, ‘Baba, what is that?’

He was pointing beyond the screen. There were two enormous rats walking away from us. They looked like stout ladies, on tiny heels, on their way to the market.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them carrying small, elegant handbags.

The next morning, when my son told my wife about the rats he had seen—he was confused at first and said they were rabbits—my wife was alarmed. But no one else was. Despite how ubiquitous the rats were in Patna, or perhaps because they were ubiquitous, no one seemed to pay much attention. I would bring them up in conversation, and people would laugh and launch into stories. One person told me that the Patna police had claimed that rats were drinking from the bottles of illegal liquor seized by the authorities and stored in warehouses. I didn’t believe the story—I said that I smelled a rat—and so a link was duly sent to me. In the press report, a senior police officer named Kundan Krishnan was quoted as saying, ‘We are fed up with these drunken rats and cannot explain why they have suddenly turned to consumption of alcohol.’

For a while I had hoped to get a professional pest control agency to come and trap rats in the house in Patna. The problem was a pressing one—rats had carried away my mother’s dentures.

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