Until Yesterday

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Good Bye,Muzaffarpur: may god bless you all!

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Yesterday I finally left Muzaffarpur with all my baggage. Mangoes of my backyard—oh no, they are now for anybody and everybody that deserves to enjoy them. And while posting this text I’m in the middle of my return trip to Coimbatore, just enjoying a 2-day halt at Bhubaneswar. As time passes me by there is feeling that makes me look back wistfully on everything that happened to me during last three years of my stint in Bihar. To say the least, the days were full of muse and I have reasons to feel that the time was well spent.

In fact there can be no satisfaction as profound as the one that comes with the realisation that one’s time is well-spent! With two short story collections in Hindi, well received and selectively reviewed, I should not have expected better. Now at this juncture when the hassles of relocation has already taken a toll on my creativity, the question that demands a bit of reflection is that how I could manage to sustain my muse that long! Well, that’s really a difficult question to answer. There was no leisure time as such at my disposal to make me creative in the ordinary course of things; the workload in my service had increased manifold during that time to make me so very restless. There were, of course, attempts on my side to “steal” time, but I can’t say for sure if I had ever succeeded in it. Yet creativity did visit me; my muse was so very considerate to me. As an explanation of the phenomenon, the nearest I can recall is that there were friends and well-wishers who loved to see me create more. Inspiration came riding piggyback on the words of friendly encouragement. Sometimes I think my literary ambitions had also its role; I have never thought writing in Hindi is just the exclusive domain of people who have learnt it from their childhood. With the broadmindedness of Hindi readers, writers whose mother tongue is not Hindi can carve a niche for themselves. The only condition is that he or she should be able to connect with the readers.

So, the bottom line is love, love that inspires one to give something back in return. This is my best explanation. I’m sure people liked me to appear different, out of the ordinary. I don’t think it is always easy to live up to such expectations, but then again one cannot but try. That’s exactly what I did; that was exactly what happened to me. In fact I had always resisted the easy conclusion that Bihar is a difficult place to work. In that case where on earth is the place which is not difficult these days?

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By

A. N. Nanda

Bhubaneswar

21-07-2011

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