Abdullah Khan’s debut novel, Patna Blues, is a coming-of-age story set in Patna and other parts of Bihar in the 1990s. In a 2018 interview with Scroll.in, Khan described it as three stories in one: a young man’s personal growth, the experience of being Muslim in post-Babri India, and life in the villages and small towns that sit outside the big-city frame. His phrase for the whole is “the story of India itself.” The novel is fiction, not a documentary, but Khan’s account of how it was written and what it is meant to show is useful for reading it.
What the novel is
Khan is a Mumbai-based novelist, screenwriter and banker. According to his author biography, he was born in a village near Motihari in Bihar, and Patna Blues is his first novel. The book follows Arif, a young man from a lower-middle-class Muslim family in small-town Bihar, as he works through love, desire and ambition. The family is the centre of the story, and the setting is a Bihar that Khan says he deliberately evoked through the markers of that decade.
Three stories in one
Khan’s central claim is that the novel operates on three scales at once. The interview presents them in roughly this order:
- The personal scale. Arif’s coming of age, as he negotiates love, desire and his own ambitions.
- The communal scale. The challenges and anxieties of being a Muslim boy in post-Babri India. The Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 is the historical backdrop Khan points to, and the book treats it as lived experience in a family’s daily life rather than as a news event.
- The regional scale. Life beyond the metropolitan frame, in villages and small towns. This is the scale Khan links to the phrase “the story of India itself.”
In Khan’s words: “The third is the story of India itself, not the India that exists in the cities, but the India of villages and small towns.” The three scales are not separate plotlines that take turns. Khan’s point is that Arif’s private decisions are shaped by the other two, so a reader following one thread keeps running into the others.
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How much of the family is Khan’s own
Khan says Arif is fictional and is not based on one specific person. He does say that he shares Arif’s moral values and that, like Arif, he lived in police colonies in Patna and Darbhanga. He describes Arif’s household as a typical lower-middle-class Bihari family, and he says some incidents are inspired by real events. One example he gives is the storyline in which Arif’s sister marries a much older man, which draws on an event in Darbhanga from Khan’s childhood. He also says that Arif’s mother and grandmother were inspired by his own mother and grandmother.
These are Khan’s accounts of where his material came from. They describe the sources of individual scenes and characters. They do not turn the family into a documentary record, and the novel should be read as fiction shaped by lived detail.
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From a romance to a different book
Khan says he began writing in 1997, the year Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize. The first version was a romantic drama focused mostly on Arif’s love life, and it was titled The Remains of a Dream. Feedback from writer friends and literary agents led him to rewrite the plot and the characters. The excerpts that the interviewer had read on Khan’s blog in 2010 came from about the third draft, which is well into that rewriting.
The interview also explains the book’s long gestation. Khan says he queried British and American literary agents after finishing a draft and collected more than 200 rejection slips before turning to Indian publishers. That figure is his own account and has not been independently verified. He says the manuscript reached Renu Agal at Juggernaut Books, who connected with the story and asked for changes. She then recommended it to senior editor Sivapriya.
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Urdu poetry as part of the narrative
Arif and Sumitra, the novel’s two central characters, are both interested in Urdu poetry. Khan wrote original poems for both of them rather than quoting existing verse. He does not present these poems as decoration. He says they do narrative work, and he states: “I believe that this novel couldn’t have been written without using Urdu poetry.” Readers who approach the book expecting poetry as an ornament will find that Khan treats it as one of the ways the characters think and communicate.
Plans for further books
In 2018 Khan named Zakir, Arif’s younger brother, as one of his favourite characters. He said Zakir’s story was too large for this book and described a planned sequel, Zakir’s Dilemma. He also described a third book, Sumitra’s Choice, to be told from Sumitra’s point of view. These were plans at the time of the interview. The sources available for this article do not establish whether either sequel has been published, so treat both titles as Khan’s 2018 intentions rather than confirmed releases.
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What the interview does and does not establish
- The novel’s publication date, its first-novel status and its setting are established by the interview and by Khan’s author biography.
- The start date of 1997, the rejection count and the account of the editorial path to Juggernaut Books come from Khan himself, in the 2018 Scroll.in interview.
- A 2019 Punch Magazine interview repeats Khan’s three-scale framing, which supports the way he describes the book’s structure.
- Current editions, marketplace availability and the status of the planned sequels are outside what these sources cover.
Read together, the interview gives a clear account of what Khan set out to write: a family story that refuses to stay inside one neighbourhood, one religion or one city. Its strongest claim is the one in its title, and it is worth testing against the text.
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