When the morning's papers were brought to Nitish Kumar the next day, what he saw left him so irate he couldn't hold his cup of tea straight.

Full-page advertisements had appeared in two of Patna's largest circulated Hindi dailies -- Jagran and Hindustan -- thanking Narendra Modi for the Rs 5 crore flood relief money...

''The text on it was irrelevant, it was the subtext that burned into Nitish -- the Ludhiana photograph leapt off the page: there it was again, Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, palms clutched and held aloft.

''Nitish thought it a distasteful and offensive taunt; worse than a rude joke, a makhaul, mockery...'A fascinating excerpt from Sankarshan Thakur's new book, Single Man, The Life & Times of Nitish Kumar of Bihar, Harper Collins India.  Read