Amitava Kumar’s technique of putting books together has, since he began to publish, been modelled on the cinema— but on the serious art film or well-made documentary rather than the masala mix.

In his writing itself, he studies for the prosaic, the understated: Realism in the cinematic sense is his style. It is the editing that makes his books: the cut, the slow dissolve, the pan in time as well as space, the splicing together of the unforeseen.

In Home Products the theme matches the form, for the story is loosely hung on the Mumbai journalist Binod’s attempts to write a screenplay for a mainstream director. He knows his principles are compromised.

He has been influenced by George Orwell’s essays and his own upright (but ultimately ineffectual) father’s insistence on truth. Social realism, however, does not sell in the Hindi movie, and the aura of the cinematic constantly lures Binod away from what he knows to be most significant.

Binod is from Bihar, and knows and understands it well. He knows (as Kumar does) not only the Bihar geographically situated near India’s heart, but also the Bihar of the diaspora, the Bihar every emigrant carries within him safe from prying eyes and mocking voices.

The tensions at play in Bihari society and those within his own family, are far more attractive than some mythical tale of adultery and revenge.

They are all there in the story of his aunt, his father’s sister. Bua’s husband went insane long ago. She joined JP’s movement and is a senior member of Lalu Prasad’s party. (In Kumar’s usual fashion, it is a thin dotted line, and one easily crossed, between the fictional and the factual.) Her own secret needs, her struggles, and especially her son Rabinder, make a drama even Binod’s truth-driven pen could never tell.

Rabinder is in some ways the hero of this book— if it has a hero— though Binod is the protagonist— if there is a protagonist. Rabinder is the type of young man who is very common in Patna and becoming distressingly more common in all our cities.

Partly brought up on ‘Bombay Dreams’, he means well but somehow manages to go wrong. A turn for violence makes his life less manageable. He goes into politics but lacks the cold cunning required. He is jailed for an impulsive crime; his girlfriend is murdered and he is elbowed out of his mother’s political space.

Binod finds the drama he had been seeking for his screenplay in Patna, but cannot quite assimilate it: In Delhi… he had watched a retrospective of… Shyam Benegal. Binod wanted to write reports on the social realities that those films depicted.

But for that he needed to leave Patna. The terrible things that were to be seen in Benegal’s films could be found in Patna too, of course, but those were already familiar to him and he wanted to explore their richness elsewhere.

From a distance

This is a romantic point of view, and Binod is doomed to carry that romanticism to Delhi and Mumbai. His broken marriage, his family’s past, his father (“an old man who used words like culture and justice”) belong to Patna, but cannot be analysed there.

Amitava Kumar is an uncannily keen observer of the minutiae of daily life. These scenes are home products of daily life in Patna: the murders, the rapes, the greed, the abuse of human qualities, the senseless violence.

Kumar offers them sensitively, often movingly, but Without Comment. They have their drama no doubt, but these are home products and offered without drama, as the mistress of the home offers you tea and barfi.

It is novel, but it is not a novel and leaves you unsatisfied in the same way a film by Benegal may leave you unsatisfied. It is a slice of life, several slices of lives, and if there is no plot it is because real life is not a ‘Bombay Dream’.

Two complaints: There is no sense of fun in this book. I know that Patna can be full of fun, ironic perhaps but still enjoyable. Second, the editing is appaling. The nadir is surely reached on page 256, when a character’s name is supplanted by the name of the real-life film actor on whom the character is based.