To travel with a foreigner through India is to unlearn India. Or to explaining things that you thought were like oxygen, whose value for all living creatures is so vital that it needn't ever be talked about. What you might have internalised about your land as someone who was born here, has to be processed and dished out. For example: why do our women colour their hair-parting? And I, as a soul who has criss-crossed Bihar with a number of foreign journalists, tell you that it is often no great fun, except for the money it brings in. Very often mortifying, at times peeving and at times quite hilarious, taking a New Yorker or a Parisian through the thick of rural Bihar is like an atheist's pilgrimage: one finds everything but the deity.Let worry be dismissed: I am not going to undo the spirit of this slot by writing about how a rat-eater woman's nakedness was sealed in a Canon camera free of cost. Or, how a teenaged Yadav murderer was safe in the hands of a Yadav judge.A fellow Bihari, also a part-time scribe, once took a visiting American journalist to a village in central Bihar. Seeing a white man perhaps for the first time, a big band of villagers assembled. The American was asking questions and the local interpreting. Pointing at a seedy old man, the Yankee said: "Ask him his name." He asked: "Apka naam kya hai?" But before he could reply, a restive young fellow chimed in: "Ask the firangi what's his name." The poor interpreter obliged. The visitor was pleased. He said, "My name is Todd. Todd, Todd."Rural humour is so brazen, it would give Groucho Marx a run for his money. What the villagers had heard was "Third. Third, Third."And your `title' (Biharis use this word for surname)? The still smiling visitor said: "Davidson. Davidson, Davidson." He was never to be understood. What the assemblage had heard was: Division.So his name became Third Division. They all went to pieces laughing, chanting the two words of academic shame in Bihar. Our guest, however, didn't give up. He asked: "Now tell me, what's your name?" The youth said: "First Division." Another lungi-wrapped, betel-ravaged youth shouted: "Second Division." And the last nail in field reporting's coffin was pushed by the old man who first gave a ear-to-ear grin and then said: "Non-matric."And now to my own little experience in the Yadav heartland of Madhepura. I was there with a French friend of mine. The district magistrate, Rajendra Prasad, a dalit, has been so reckless a Laloo Yadav devotee that T. N. Seshan had to get him chucked out of Yadav's constituency during the 1995 elections. When we went to see him he made us a part of his evening darbar of local businessmen and other heavyweights.There was no problem as long as I was interpreting the initial pleasantries. But once Prasad started speaking English, my French companion thought: hey, I can talk to this guy straight. The first query he shot was on the state of the caste-system and relations in the district. Prasad said: "Many development projects have been started under the revolutionary leadership of honourable Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav." (I try to intervene. Mr Prasad snubs me. I look at my friend. He gestures that it is OK.) "This land is down so when there was no dam on Kosi river the whole area was flooded with water, but now, whatsitsname, sugarcane is major cash-crop."But is the caste-structure relenting? "What is caste? Laloo Yadavji's focus is development."And land reforms? "Forces of social justice will prevail."There was much to this soliloquy about the district's economy. What Prasad never came to was what my friend had come from Paris for.
