A piece on A Matter of Rats in the Hudson Valley magazine, Chronogram:
A Matter of Rats was inspired by E. B. White’s 1949 essay Here Is New York, for which White traveled to Manhattan during a heat wave, staying at the Algonquin Hotel and going on daily foraging trips.
Kumar followed his lead, visiting Patna in August and going out every day to interview residents and observe such phenomena as gleeful crowds massing around the city’s first escalator, inside a five-story mall. Their eagerness to experience the new struck a chord.