Mukund Rai

Patna, April 6: His brother ruled the state, but Mukund Rai still tended to his cows and buffaloes.

The man who raised Lalu Prasad — more as a “father figure” than older brother — preferred the uncluttered anonymity of life away from Patna’s teeming durbar. The hay-and-mud hut, where this correspondent had met him nearly two dozen years ago, was still his home. So what his brother was chief minister?

Rai remained like that till the end. He died on Wednesday following a long illness. He was 78.

For Lalu Prasad, it is a loss that can never be recompensed. “Whatever I am today, it is solely because of Mukund bhai. I cannot repay what he did even if I take 10 births,” the former Bihar chief minister said when The Telegraph spoke to him today.

“I wouldn’t have been what I am today had Mukund bhai not brought me to Patna and taken care of me. It is like losing a father who sacrificed everything without taking anything from me.”

Sixty years ago, this older brother-turned-“father figure” — merely 13 years older — had taken Lalu Prasad under his wing at their mother Marachiya Devi’s bidding.

Mukund had found his mother sobbing. It was hard to arrange two meals for six sons. He was then living in Patna, where he sold milk. His mother told him to take his kid brother with him to the capital. That was sometime in 1955.

Thirty-five years later, the kid brother was chief minister.

This correspondent met Mukund, his mother Marachiya and brother Gulab Rai in Phulwaria, their village in north Bihar’s Gopalganj district.

The two brothers — Gulab too is no more — were herding cows and buffaloes near their hut made of hay and mud where Lalu Prasad was born.

Mukund and his mother brought out a crumpled sheet and smoothed it across a wooden platform in front of the hut. It was an unspoken request to sit.

Soon the conversation turned to Lalu Prasad’s childhood, about the boy who sometimes drove his fellow villagers up the wall with his pranks.

“Lalu bahut natkhat ladka thaa (Lalu was a very naughty kid). Once, a hing (asafoetida)-seller had placed his bag of asafoetida on the edge of a well in front of our hut. Lalu threw the bag into the well, infuriating the seller and villagers who had gathered to buy hing,” Mukund recalled.

“One day,” Mukund went on, recalling another prank, “he (Lalu Prasad) slapped a boy while bathing in the pond. The villagers rounded on him. Our mother later suggested that I take Lalu to Patna and raise him.”

That was how the man who would one day rule Bihar came to the capital, where he stayed in a two-room tenement on the premises of the veterinary college where Mukund worked as a peon. Mukund admitted Lalu Prasad to Miller High School.

Lalu Prasad’s wife Rabri Devi became chief minister in 1997 and her brothers, Sadhu Yadav and Subhas Yadav, went on to become lawmakers. But Mukund’s lifestyle didn’t change.

After Lalu Prasad became chief minister, Mukund put a lock on the door of one of the two rooms of the tenement. It was both a mark of respect to his younger brother’s achievements and a reminder not to forget his humble roots.

“He treats me like a father and I treat him like my son,” Mukund said a few months before his death when The Telegraph had chanced upon him.

The family has a house on Patna’s outskirts. But Mukund preferred to live most of the time in the tenement. “I enjoy living here. I don’t enjoy living in a big house,” he would say.

Asked if he met Lalu Prasad often, Mukund said his brother was always “bahut byast” (very busy). “But he takes utmost care when I go to him.”