Where nothing works, yet everything does: Notes from Bihar

Every Chhath Puja, returning home to Bihar turns into an adventure — trains bursting with passengers, traffic jams that defy physics, and conductors who redefine honesty. Atul Thakur relives his experiences

It was 2014. End-October. I was in Delhi — where I work — but needed to go back home to Bihar for the Chhath Puja. I called up a cousin, who teaches at Delhi University, hoping he could help get my waitlisted railway ticket confirmed. I still remember what he told me laughingly: “Every Bihari wants to get the hell out of the state, and now everyone’s trying to go back!” Broad generalities dispensed with, his tone turned sombre. “It’s difficult to reach Bihar, and even if you do, it will be a one-way ticket. How will you return?” My cousin, I realised, could never become a motivational speaker.

Word about my unconfirmed ticket had spread in our office. I must have told someone, and then he or she must have told someone else, and so on. I think everybody feels a little better when someone else is down. Schadenfreude, pure and simple.


After a miserable day at work, I headed to the Press Club . Alcohol might do you harm, but very few things come close when you are trying to drown your sorrows. You are probably thinking what a stupid thing I did, but you are wrong. I couldn’t have made a better decision. I was at the right place at the right time. A senior colleague, by now much mellowed by the effects of alcohol and having ascended a moral plane where schadenfreude had no place, spotted me and took me over to another senior journalist who could get any railway ticket confirmed. Long live the special quota.

Bihar, I said, here I come.

The Train Ride

I did get on the train. I had a confirmed berth. But… Hello, what was this? A human ocean? I had seen crowds, but this was something else. Sardines, packed inside cans, probably have more space for themselves.
I somehow survived, and when morning dawned, and the train chugged into Bihar, I felt... happy, maybe? After all, I was home. I had made the journey I wanted to make. But I also knew that I would never make this journey ever again.

The Journey Back

My cousin, the Delhi prof, had been partly right. There were no available tickets on the regular trains. But being an eternal pessimist, he had not budgeted for the number of special trains the Railways runs during Chhath and other festivals.

I managed to get a confirmed ticket on one such train. It would leave from Patna at 8.30pm. I was in Muzaffarpur, my hometown. Strangely, on the day I was to leave, my parents insisted I leave home at 11am. “But Patna is barely 70km from here!” I argued, uncertain if my parents were showing early signs of senility or if they were truly fed up with my company.

But it turned out they were approaching the 70km journey from a rooted Bihari perspective. A distance that one could reasonably expect to cover in no more than one and a half hours could often take much, much longer in Bihar. “We are speaking from experience,” my mother said.

Banished with tiffin and a lecture, I set out. Within an hour I was marooned near Hajipur, facing the Mahatma Gandhi Setu — the bridge over the river Ganges that connects Hajipur in the north to Patna in the south. You hear of monster traffic jams in Delhi and Gurgaon, but this was a whole new level.

I did catch the train, which — surprise, surprise — was on time, but it involved a sprint in the end, and a timely leap into the compartment as the train was gently pulling out of Patna Junction. So, net net: about 70km in nine and a half hours. Now do the maths.

Once seated — unlike the train to Bihar, this had a limited number of humans on board — I dialled my mother. “You were lucky,” my mother said. “Your father’s uncle’s son-in-law once got stuck on that bridge in peak summer, AC gone, ended up admitted to a Patna hospital. His ailing father-in-law had to leave home to visit him there.”

Good lord! I had been lucky indeed.


Fare Play

Next time, I thought, I’d book a plane. Unfortunately, so did every other Bihari with a credit card, and the fares during Chhath shot up like Diwali rockets. On one visit, I landed in Patna, where an uncle picked me up from the airport and dropped me at a bus stand. I wasn’t expecting a bus like this. A gleaming, low-floor, air-conditioned govt bus to Muzaffarpur. Wow! It felt like a hallucination crafted by a particularly optimistic urban planner. I took the last seat.

Seated next to me were a couple from Delhi. The conductor arrived. “Muzaffarpur,” I said. He quoted something like Rs 200. And then he winked. “For you, I will make it Rs 150.” Sure! Maybe some discount scheme. I didn’t think too much about it, just handed over Rs 150. But there was no ticket forthcoming. And then the penny dropped.

The Delhi couple beside me were giving me the dagger look. And then the man took out Rs 400, and, pointedly, told the conductor: “Give us tickets, we’ll pay Rs 200 each.” The conductor looked personally betrayed. “Look at this man,” he told the bus, “insisting on paying extra.”

A murmur rose — passengers, it turned out, are fiercely united against the principle of receipts. The wife asked me: “Would you do this on a DTC bus in Delhi?” The husband added, “This is why nothing works — the passengers and the staff.” Backed into a corner, the conductor printed their tickets. I felt like I needed a place to hide, something like a dark, mossy cave where no light ever entered.

After half an hour, still feeling raw inside, I finally plucked up courage, and whispered to the couple: “You did the right thing, Sirji. I feel terrible.” They smiled, magnanimous in victory.

When 30 Becomes 15

On another trip, last year, I bypassed the bridge altogether and flew into Darbhanga. Outside the airport, I got on a bus to Muzaffarpur and sat beside the driver. On board were the driver, conductor, and cleaner, plus about 30 passengers. We soon pulled into a petrol pump, where a man climbed aboard to count heads. “Thirty,” he declared. The conductor laughed. “Fifteen, boss. Try again.” The man looked unconvinced until a small parcel of persuasion slid into his pocket. He cleared his throat: “Fifteen.”

I, the suburban moralist, couldn’t help myself. “Won’t the owner find out?” The conductor shrugged. “He owns 200 buses. He’s not an idiot.” Pause. “This is expected. Our salaries haven’t changed in years. I’m not thinking only of me — the driver and the cleaner have families too.” He said it without malice or secrecy, someone merely stating undisputable facts like how the sun rises in the east. Strangely enough, I managed to see things from his point of view.

Back in Muzaffarpur, a journalist friend offered the tidy thesis. “Bihar runs differently,” he said. “For generations, the state never really showed up. Colonial hangovers, feudal leftovers, thin institutions. People learned to get by without the system, so now the system gets by without the people. Autopilot.”

Collective Survival Strategy

I’ve replayed those trips while planning every subsequent Chhath. There’s the train that turned into a human aquarium, the endless bridge, the AC bus that looked like a mirage, the conductor’s discount that wasn’t a kindness so much as a custom, the auditor whose arithmetic improved with a little encouragement, and the conductor’s calm defence of cheating. None of this is heroic, but it also doesn’t feel villainous. It feels like a collective survival strategy.

And each year I find myself plotting the same pilgrimage — rail versus road versus sky — telling myself I’ll do it better this time, knowing fully well that I most likely won’t.