Manto: Selected Stories

The Mice of Shah Daulah

Salima was twenty one when she was married. And though five years had passed, she had not had a child. Her mother and mother-in-law were very worried. Her mother, more so, for fear that her husband, Najib, would marry again. Many doctors were consulted, but none were of any help.

Salima was anxious too. Few girls do not desire a child after marriage. She consulted her mother and acted on her instructions, but to no avail.

One day a friend of hers came to see her. She had been declared barren and so Salima was surprised to see that she held a flower of a boy. ‘Fatima,’ she asked indelicately, ‘how did you produce this boy?’

Fatima was five years older than Salima. She smiled and said, ‘This is the benevolence of Shah Daulah. A woman told me that if I wanted children, I should go to the shrine of Shah Daulah in Gujarat and make my entreaty. Say, “Hazur, the first child born to me, I will offer up in your service.” ’ This child would be born with a very small head, she told Salima. Salima didn’t like this. And when Fatima insisted that this firstborn child had to be left in the service of the shrine, she was sadder still. She thought, what mother would deprive herself of her child forever? Only a monster could abandon its child, whether his head be small, his nose flat or his eyes crossed. But Salima wanted a child badly and so she heeded her older friend’s advice.

She was, in any case, native to Gujarat where Shah Daulah’s shrine was. So she said to her husband, ‘Fatima’s insisting I go with her. Would you give me permission?’ What objection could her husband have? He said, ‘Go, but come back quickly.’ Salima went off with Fatima.

Shah Daulah’s shrine was not, as she had thought, some old, decrepit building. It was a decent place which she liked well enough. But when in one chamber, she saw Shah Daulah’s ‘mice’, with their running noses and their minds enfeebled, she began to tremble. There was a young girl, in the prime of her youth, whose antics were such that she could reduce the most serious of serious people to laughter. Watching her, Salima laughed to herself for an instant. Then immediately her eyes filled with tears. What will become of this girl, she thought. The shrine’s caretakers will sell her to somebody who’ll take her from town to town like a performing monkey; the wretch, she’ll become somebody’s source of income. Her head was very small. But Salima thought, even if her head is small, her heart can’t be similarly small; that remains the same, even in madmen.

The Shah Daulah’s mouse had a beautiful body, rounded and proportionate in every way. But her antics were those of one whose faculties had been decimated. Seeing her wander about, laughing like a wind-up doll, Salima felt as if she’d been made for this purpose.

And yet, despite her misgivings, Salima followed her friend Fatima’s advice and prayed at Shah Daulah’s shrine, swearing that if she had a child, she would hand him over.

Salima continued her medical treatment as well. After two months, she showed signs of pregnancy. She was thrilled. A boy was soon born to her, a beautiful boy. There had been a lunar eclipse during her pregnancy, and he was born with a small, not unattractive, mark on his right cheek.

Fatima came to visit and said that the boy should be handed over at once to Shah Daulah saab. Salima herself had accepted this, but she had been delaying it for many days; the mother in her wouldn’t allow her to go through with it; she felt as though a part of her heart was being cut out.

She had been told that the firstborn of those who asked a child of Shah Daulah would have a small head. But her son’s head was quite big. Fatima said, ‘This is not something you can use as an excuse. This child of yours is Shah Daulah’s property. You have no right over him. If you stray from your promise, remember that a scourge will befall you, the likes of which you won’t forget for a lifetime.’

So, with her heart breaking, Salima went back to Gujarat, to the shrine of Shah Daulah, and handed to its caretakers, her beloved flower of a son, with the black mark on his right cheek.

She wept. Her grief was so great she became sick. For a year, she hovered between life and death. She couldn’t forget her boy nor the pleasing mark on his right cheek, which she had so often kissed.

She had strange dreams. Shah Daulah, in her distressed imagination, became a large mouse gnawing, with its razor edged teeth, at her flesh. She would shriek and implore her husband to help her. ‘Look, he’s eating my flesh!’ she would cry.

Sometimes her fevered mind would see her son entering a mouse hole. She would be holding onto his tail, but the bigger mice had him by the snout and she couldn’t pull him out.

Sometimes the girl whom she’d seen in a chamber of Shah Daulah’s shrine, the girl in the flower of her youth, would appear before her, and Salima would let out a laugh. Then a moment later, she would begin to cry. She would cry so much that her husband wouldn’t know how to quell her tears.

Salima saw mice everywhere, in bed, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the sofa, in her heart. Sometimes she felt she herself was a mouse: her nose was running, she was in a chamber of Shah Daulah’s shrine, carrying her tiny head on her weak shoulders, and her antics made onlookers fall over themselves with laughter. Her condition was pitiable.

Her world had been marked, like a face on which the fragments of a dead sun had become stuck.

The fever subsided, and Salima’s condition stabilised. Najib was relieved. He knew the cause of his wife’s illness, but he was in the grip of superstition himself and hardly conscious that he had offered up his firstborn as a sacrifice. Whatever had been done seemed right to him; in fact, he felt that the son that had been born to him was not even his, but Shah Daulah saab’s. When Salima’s fever, along with the storm in her mind and soul, cooled, Najib said to her, ‘My darling, you must forget your son. He was meant for sacrifice.’

Salima replied in a wounded voice, ‘I don’t believe in any of it. All my life I will curse myself for committing so great a wrong and handing over a piece of my heart to those caretakers. They cannot be its mother.’

One day, Salima disappeared to Gujarat and spent eight or nine days there, making enquiries about her son, but learnt nothing of his whereabouts. She returned, depressed, and said to her husband, ‘Now I won’t remember him any longer.’

Remember him, she did, but deep within herself. The mark on her son’s right cheek had branded itself in her heart.

A year later Salima had a daughter. Her face bore a great resemblance to her firstborn’s although she didn’t have a mark on her right cheek. Salima called her Mujiba because she had intended to name her son Mujib.

When she was two months old, Salima sat her in her lap, and taking a little kohl, made a large beauty spot on her right cheek. Then she thought of Mujib and wept. When her tears fell on her daughter’s cheeks, she wiped them with her dupatta and laughed. She wanted to try and forget her grief.

Salima had two sons thereafter. Her husband was now very pleased. Finding herself in Gujarat for a friend’s wedding, she returned again to the shrine and made enquiries about her Mujib, but to no avail. She thought that perhaps he had died. And so, one Thursday, she organised a memorial for him.

The women of the neighbourhood wondered whose death these rites were being so carefully observed for. Some even questioned Salima, but she gave no reply.

In the evening she took her ten year old Mujiba by the hand and led her inside. She made a spot on her right cheek with kohl and kissed it profusely.

She had always imagined her to be her lost Mujib, but now she gave up thinking about him. After the ceremony the weight in Salima’s heart lightened. She had made a grave for him in her imagination, and still in her imagination, she would place flowers on it.

Salima’s three children were now in school. Every morning she dressed them, made them breakfast, got them ready and sent them off. When they’d gone she’d think for a moment of Mujib, and the ceremony she had done for him. Her heart was lighter and yet she felt sometimes that the mark on Mujib’s right cheek was still branded on it.

One day her three children came running in, saying, ‘Ammi, we want to see the show.’

‘What show?’ she asked lovingly.

Her eldest daughter replied, ‘Ammi, there’s a man who does the show.’

Salima said, ‘Go and call him, but not in the house. He should do the show outside.’

The children ran off, came back with the man and watched the show.

When it was over Mujiba went to her mother to ask for money. Her mother took out a quarter rupee from her purse and went out onto the veranda. She had reached the door when she saw one of Shah Daulah’s mice moving his head in a crazed fashion. Salima began to laugh.

There were ten or twelve children around him, laughing uncontrollably. The noise was so great that no one could hear a word.

Salima advanced with the quarter rupee in her hand, but just as she was about to give it to Shah Daulah’s mouse, her hand was flung back as though struck by an electric current.

This mouse had a mark on its right cheek. Salima looked closely at him. His nose was running. Mujiba, who was standing near him, said to her mother, ‘This, this mouse, Ammi, why does he look so much like me? Am I a mouse too?’

Salima took Shah Daulah’s mouse by the hand and went inside. She closed the door and kissed him and said prayers for him. He was her Mujib. But his antics were so moronic that Salima laughed even though her heart was filled with grief

She said to Mujib, ‘My son, I am your mother.’

At this, the mouse laughed uproariously, and wiping his runny nose on his sleeve, stood with his hands open before his mother and said, ‘One paisa!’

His mother opened her purse, but by then her eyes had begun to overflow with tears. She took out a hundred rupees from her purse and went out to give it to the man who had made a spectacle of Mujib. He refused, saying that he couldn’t part with his means of income for such a small amount. In the end Salima got him to settle on five hundred rupees. But when she came back inside, Mujib was gone. Mujiba told her that he had run out of the back door.

Salima’s womb cried out for him to return, but he’d gone, never to return.