Naked Voices: Stories And Sketches

INTRODUCTION

In an impudent epitaph written for himself a year before his death, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote: ‘Here (Manto) lies buried — and buried in his breast are all the secrets of the art of story-telling.’ Immodest, yes, but by no means outrageous, for it is true that whatever the merits of Manto’s style and craft, he was a storyteller par excellence. He had the rare gift of being able to narrate the most blood-curdling events with faithful accuracy and an unsparing eye for detail.

Dismissed variously as a voyeur, a purveyor of cheap erotic thrills, a scavenger of human misery, a compulsive scraper of the wounds of a sick and ailing society, or at best a mere rapporteur and no more, Manto upset every conceivable notion of literary propriety and license. An under-achiever all through school and college (he even flunked in Urdu!), Manto drifted through various jobs in All India Radio and the Bombay (now Mumbai) film industry before he found his true calling as a storyteller. Like his near contemporary, Ismat Chughtai, he too loved to handle bold and unconventional themes that had so far been taboo in Urdu literature. However, unlike Chughtai’s homely and colourfully idiomatic language, Manto chose a stark, spare, almost staccato style, unembellished and unaffected, deliberately shorn of all appendages of style and convention.

Never one to impose his own interpretation of events, Manto could look at people and events with a consciousness uncoloured by notions of nationalism, religion, morality, least of all sentimentality. He wrote what he saw and felt, and wrote compulsively and prodigiously. In the forty- three years that he lived, he published twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five (some say seven) collections of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of sketches of famous personalities (one called, rather evocatively Bald Angels!). Though much of his writing was in the nature of ‘command performances’ — to feed the twin demons of drink and acute, chronic poverty — there is still a great deal in his vast and variegated oeuvre that is touched by greatness. Of his various collections, many stories appear in more than one collection, occasionally appearing under different names. Always hard up, Manto was known to ‘sell’ his stories to different publishers at different times, sometimes he would tweak a story or its ending to make it somewhat different.

Manto, meaning ‘weight’ in Kashmiri, belonged to a family of wealthy Kashmiri traders who had moved to the plains and settled in Lahore. His grandfather, a dealer in pashmina, later went to Amritsar where the family prospered but remained deeply, quintessentially, religious. Manto’s father, Maulvi Ghulam Hasan married twice and had twelve children in all. Manto, born from the second wife, was in awe of his stepbrothers who were not only older but much better educated. While he was fond of his mother, his relations with other family members remained distant. He lived in especial dread of his father, who had retired as a sub-judge from Samrala, a town near Ludhiana, and returned to Amritsar to live in the Kucha Vakilan neighbourhood of the old city. Manto’s rebellious streak can be traced to living under threat from the sharp edge of his father’s acerbic tongue and authoritarian ways. Harshly critical of films, theatre, music and other forms of plebian entertainment, Maulvi Ghulam Hasan wanted Manto to study hard and do as well as his other sons, who had studied abroad and become barristers. He despaired of Manto’s growing irreligiosity and impertinence. Yet, despite all his chaffing against his father’s harshness, Manto dedicated his first collection of short stories, Aatish Parey (Slivers of Fire), to his father and hung his somewhat grim and disapproving portrait in his room.

Bent upon ploughing his own furrow from an early age, Manto’s early waywardness and willfulness soon took the form of an idiosyncratic individuality. Having failed twice in the intermediate exam, Manto embraced a life of hedonism with single-minded dedication. Gambling, drinking, smoking charas, keeping the company of idle but idealistic and impetuous men like himself, these were Manto’s trivial pursuits all through the early 1930s. Things would have continued along this trajectory of despair and dissipation had Manto not met Bari saheb, editor of Mussavat. Bari saheb introduced Manto to the great Russian novelists, to the skilfully crafted stories of Oscar Wilde and Guy de Maupassant, to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and, most significantly, the curious possibility of earning a living by wielding the pen. Manto took to dabbling in revolutionary poetry, writing articles for magazines, translating Wilde and Hugo with the enthusiasm of the neo convert.

Manto was twenty-three or so when he was struck by tuberculosis. Initially he tried to stifle the pain by drinking more country liquor than usual but when even that didn’t serve to dull the ache in his chest, he was packed off to the mountains. Born to Kashmiri parents but raised in the Punjab, this was Manto’s first visit to Kashmir. Though he never managed to go beyond Batot, he was clearly enchanted by the land of his forefathers and its people. He also had his first, and some believe his only romantic experience, with a tantalizing shepherd girl. Many of his stories draw on the time he spent among these idyllic hills and vales. In A Letter, he speaks (presumably) of her as a girl who was ‘young and totally young … one who left some beautiful inscriptions on the pages of my life.’

Manto went to Bombay in search of work sometime in 1935, landing a job as editor of a weekly called Mussavvir. The glamour and gaiety of the city’s high society, as also the grit and grime of its underbelly, provided ample fodder for a man of Manto’s disposition. The red light district of Forres Road, the chawls of Nagpara, the paanwallas, taxi drivers, washermen, Parsi landladies and Jewish hotel keepers, the editors of motley Urdu newspapers became rich sources of inspiration. Manto wrote prolifically and some of his most memorable characters are drawn from the people he met in these halcyon days in Bombay from 1935 to 1947. Manto hobnobbed with film stars, first as a film journalist and then as a scriptwriter, made money and frittered it all away on drinking, gambling and the good life. He did, briefly, live in Delhi for a year and a half when he worked at the All India Radio but irreconciliable differences with the legendary Pitras Bukhari, the station director, made him give up the only job he enjoyed, one that also fetched him a regular salary.

No one quite knows why Manto went away to Pakistan. Was it in a huff or on a whim? Was it to seek a better future, broken as he was by chronic drinking and acute poverty? Was it the thought of starting afresh, on a clean slate as it were, that attracted him whenever he did think of his wife and three daughters whom he loved dearly? Was it out of genuine disenchantment with the increasingly strident and communally charged atmosphere of the so-called bohemian film industry? Or was it, as some suggest, the dream of owning an ‘allotted’ mansion the moment he crossed over? One gets a glimpse into Manto’s state of mind when he made the journey across in Sahay and in Zehmat- e-Mehr-e-Darakhshan, but with Manto there never are any clear answers.

Manto migrated to Pakistan in 1948 and lived there for the next seven years. These were years of hard drinking, acute penury, a near hand-to-mouth existence and a time of ever-mounting frustrations and humiliations. The mansion of his dreams did not materialize, nor did he, by all accounts, seriously pursue the ‘allotment’ issue. The film industry in Lahore was in doldrums and there was very little work for a writer who wanted to write his own sort of stories. Yet Manto wrote like a man possessed, often producing one story a day, a bit like a hen laying an egg a day! Some of his finest work was produced during these years of near- manic productivity, poverty and profligacy. Manto died on 18 January 1955 in Lahore of cirrhosis of the liver. His last wish, literally made with his dying breath, was for a drink of whiskey.

This collection — subjective as all collections inevitably are — attempts to provide a glimpse into the formidable body of work that is Manto’s legacy. There is far more to Manto, I do believe, than Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do or Kaali Shalwar. While these stories have been most anthologized and are therefore most well known, they are by no means representative of Manto’s writings. Most of these provocative stories belong to the last years of his life when the shadows were darkening not just in his personal life but over the subcontinent too and when Manto’s demons had begun to trouble him to the extent of driving him, briefly, into a mental asylum. These are dark stories, unrelieved by even a tinge of the humanity and liberalism that one sees in his early work. Unfortunately, it is these stories that are understood, in popular perception, to define Manto’s oeuvre. The truth, however, is that his world is peopled by the good as much as the bad; if anything, Manto possesses the rare knack of making the reader share his delighted discovery of goodness and beauty whenever he comes across it in the midst of wickedness and ugliness. Maybe it was the age he was born in, or the circumstances of his own life that made Manto see the darkness more acutely than others. But Manto was not blind to light. He cherished goodness whenever he stumbled upon it.

Manto was many things but he was definitely not a poseur. He wrote what he saw or felt; his stories, therefore, cover many subjects. There is, of course, the Partition and the communal divide that left a gash on not just men like Manto but on millions who were affected by the terrible events before and after 1947. Some writers shape their oeuvre, others have it shaped by events and circumstances larger and beyond them. The cataclysmic events of the Partition influenced many writers who lived during that period. So, while Manto wrote almost obsessively about the events that lead to the division of the subcontinent and the terrible suffering it inflicted on innocent people, he wrote on other subjects too. Most notably on sex! So much so, that those who do not see Manto’s prolific outpouring over a period of twenty-odd years, often regard him as a writer unhealthily obsessed with sex.

Having read Manto in driblets over a longish period of time and then systematically and comprehensively at the time of making this selection, I can say that Manto wrote about human nature in all its diversity. And he wrote about all sorts of people. While he wrote with particular empathy about women, simulating a certain naturalness in speech and behaviour that can only come from close interaction and minute observation, he wrote with astonishing perspicacity about fellow men as well. And all sorts of men: writers, film-makers, photographers, social workers, office workers, village folk, tinsmiths, tongawallahs, washermen, water-carriers, pimps, shopkeepers, in short he could claim a nodding acquaintance with every form of low life, high society-types and those in the middle rungs as well.

In this selection, I have strived to give as broad-based a sampling of Manto’s work as possible. There are dark stories of the evil that lies hidden in the hearts of men. There are stories of exploitation, double standards, greed, corruption, lust, in short every imaginable vice and venality. Bismillah is one such story as is Comfort. The Maker of Martyrs and Loser All the Way are light-hearted spoofs on man’s degeneracy and moral bankruptcy. But there are other stories of the goodness too that Manto saw in men who lived less-than-exemplary lives, like the pimp in Sahay. Then, there are stories such as Sharifan in which otherwise decent men are forced to commit acts of bestiality; the culprits here are not the men but the circumstances that they find themselves in. The horrors of Partition are central in some stories like Sharifan and incidental in others like By God. In Hundred Candle Watt Bulb, a woman kills her pimp because she hadn’t slept in a long, long time and he keeps forcing her to sleep with customers. No one knows how long the woman’s torment had been going on, who the woman was or how she met the pimp. Nothing matters in the explosive end when the woman, agonized beyond endurance by her lack of sleep, clobbers the pimp with a brick and finally sleeps, her head covered with her dupatta, lying in the blinding glare of a hundred candle watt bulb, blissfully oblivious. What did this woman want from life? Sleep. And the pimp stood in the way of her and sleep. So she kills him.

Although Manto wrote obsessively about sex, and the kind which happened between those who were equally obsessed with it, he often treated sex as part of life’s essential pangs — hunger, sleep and love. In Naked Voices, for instance, Manto paints a very realistic picture of a group of robust but hard-working families living on the fringes of acute poverty and dealing with not just the demands of their bodies but also the constraints of communal living. What is a man to do when the instinct for privacy is as strong as the instinct for sex? How does one consummate a marriage behind a screen of sack cloths strung on a bamboo frame in the midst of a sea of sleeping, coughing, copulating couples crowded on a tiny roof top on a summer night? Only Manto would consider this a perfect scenario for a short story. And only Manto can do justice to it. Just as he portrays an ordinary young man’s obsessive-compulsive need for a woman, any woman in the story called Coward. Despite his sexual fantasies, when Javed in the story eventually fails to pluck the courage to go up the seedy brothel of a soiled, sorry looking prostitute, he takes solace as only a coward can; by occupying the high moral ground and seeking the sanctuary of religion that would have deemed Javed’s act — had he committed it — a sin!

Then there are stories that reveal Manto’s take on contemporary politics. A Day in 1919 is a recasting of the terrible slaughter visited upon the poor benighted city of Amritsar in the wake of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Drawing upon popular accounts of the French Revolution which ascribe the first bullet fired in the revolution hitting a prostitute, here Manto makes a ‘hero’ out of the good-for-nothing brother of the city’s two most famous prostitutes. An early story, this is, to my mind, a fairly sophisticated one and shows Manto’s propensity for busting myths and forcing his readers to revisit both past shames and legacies. I have chosen Slivers and Slivereens not just for its needle-sharp take on politics and politicians, especially the murky politics of Kashmir, Manto’s home state, but also because it is a most unusual little story. Not a story in the conventional sense, since it has no beginning, middle or end, not even a plot or character, it is striking nevertheless for its staccato sound and the slivers of biting satire.

A gentle story, most unusual for the Manto of popular imagination, is Yazid. It shows a glimmer of the pacifist in Manto, a man who hated wars, who espoused reflection and contemplation, who urged his fellow men to look within. By placing his protagonist in a rural setting, Manto also makes a point about rough-hewn country folk being repositories of the wisdom distilled from the ages. Karimdad, who decides to call his newborn baby Yazid, is an evolved man, willing to think outside the straightjacket of convention and stereotype, and name his child after one of the worst offenders in Islamic history. ‘What’s in it? It’s only a name!’ he tells his horrified wife, reasoning thus: ‘It needn’t be the same Yazid. He had closed the river; our son will open it.’

Manto wrote about women in a way that no other writer from the Indian sub-continent had or has till today. By the Roadside is a beautiful elegy to a mother forced to abandon her illegitimate baby. Here Manto, quite literally, gets under the skin of a woman, and describes the very physical changes that take place in a woman’s body as it prepares to nurture life deep inside it — and the equally ‘real’ physical trauma when the baby is snatched from her and tossed on a rubbish heap by the roadside. And again in The Rat of Shahdole he talks of a mother’s despair in giving up her son as mannat at a saint’s shrine where a perfectly healthy baby is ‘miraculously’ disfigured and mutilated into a rat-boy before being sold to an itinerant tamashawala. A scathing attack on the shrines that thrive on poor, desperate and superstitious people, The Rat of Shahdole derives it punch from a mother’s steadfast desire to keep her son’s memory alive inside her heart.

Similarly, By God is a mother’s refusal to accept that her daughter may have been killed in the riots. Old, blind and nearly half-crazed with grief, she refuses to believe that anyone can kill a girl as beautiful as her daughter. In the end, she finds peace in death when she spots her daughter unexpectedly on the street one day, married though she is to the man who abducted her. A most unexpected story in this collection is Comfort. A young widow is raped at a family wedding. Initially angry and inconsolable, she finds comfort in the arms of another man immediately thereafter!

In several stories, the woman is both ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’. In Bismillah, a woman by the strange, eponymous name, is the object of a man’s lust, though she appears to be the legally wedded wife of another man. Saeed is attracted, in equal measure, by Bismillah’s large, sad- looking eyes as well as the lush fullness of her breasts and is torn between the voyeuristic delight that Bismillah’s body offers him and the prick of his own conscience. In the end, it turns out that the sullen, sphinx-like young woman is not his friend Zaheer’s wife; she is a Hindu girl who got left behind during the riots and was forced into prostitution by Zaheer who had been, all along, posing as a loving husband and budding film- maker.

The only three examples of Manto’s non-fiction writing here are autobiographical and each tells the story of Manto’s complex love-hate relationship with himself and the world at large. Saadat Hasan for instance, reveals the schizophrenia that Manto carried all along: between the man called Saadat Hasan and his far-more (in)famous alter-ego, the writer who masquerades as Manto or vice-versa, that is the less-than- likeable man called Manto who pretends to be a great writer. Zehmat-e- Mehr-e-Darakhshan is a rambling account of his early days in Pakistan, plagued as he was by penury and the threat of punitive damages imposed by harsh judges bent upon browbeating him into submission. (This, incidentally, is the only story I have taken the liberty of abridging for I found the original unwieldy and long-winded.) A Letter to Uncle Sam’ one of a series of such letters, pretending to be written by a fawning nephew in awe and admiration of his vastly-superior uncle, is a trenchant critique of the Pakistani judicial system but takes several impertinent swipes at Uncle Sam who had just begun to woo the newly- established Islamic Republic of Pakistan drawing it towards the hedonistic pleasures of capitalism in the early 1950s.

Rebutting charges of voyeurism and sacrilege, Manto had written: ‘I am no sensationalist. Why would I want to take the clothes off a society, civilization and culture that is, in any case, naked? Yes, it is true I make no attempt to dress it — because it is not my job; that is a dressmaker’s job. People say I write with a black pen, but I never write on a black board with a black chalk. I always use a white chalk so that the blackness of the board is clearly visible.’ And that is precisely what he does in story after story.

March 2008

Rakhshanda Jalil

New Delhi

STORIES

BISMILLAH

Saeed met Zaheer in connection with making films and was very impressed. He had seen Zaheer a couple of times at the Central Studios in Bombay and made some small talk but they met each other properly for the first time in Lahore.

There were countless film companies in Lahore but Saeed knew the grim reality behind most of them. He knew that many did not exist beyond the boards proclaiming their names. When Zaheer sent word through Akram and called him to his office, he was convinced that Zaheer was as hollow as most other film producers who spoke of producing films worth lakhs of rupees. They set up offices, took furniture on rent and, in the end, ran away without paying the bills of several small restaurants in the vicinity of their office.

Zaheer explained to Saeed earnestly how he wanted to make a low budget film. For five years, he had worked as an assistant to a stunt film director in Bombay. He was about to get the opportunity to direct a stunt film all by himself when India got partitioned and he had to come to Pakistan. He had been out of work for almost two and a half years but during this time had met some people who were willing to invest in a film for him. As he told Saeed, ‘Look here, I don’t wish to make a first- class film. I am not a very learned man. I can make a stunt film, and God willing, make a good stunt film. Within fifty thousand rupees, with a hundred per cent guaranteed profit … I can assure you that. What do you say?’

Saeed thought for a minute, then said, ‘Yes, at least that much profit seems assured.’

Zaheer said, ‘I have told the men who are ready to put their money in my film that I shall have nothing to do with keeping accounts. The financial aspect is their headache … I shall take care of everything else.’

Saeed asked, ‘Tell me, how can I help you?’

Zaheer answered with disarming sincerity, ‘Almost all the distributors in Pakistan know you, whereas I don’t know any of them. I would be extremely grateful if you could arrange for the distribution of my film.’

Saeed said, ‘You make your film; God willing, your work shall be done.’

‘You are very kind.’ With these words, Zaheer began to doodle with a pencil on the pad in front of him. He drew a flower and said, ‘Saeed sahab, I am hundred per cent convinced that I shall be successful … my wife shall be my heroine.’

‘Your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has she worked in any other film before?’

‘No.’ Zaheer added a branch to the flower on his pad and said, ‘I got married when I came to Lahore. I hadn’t thought of bringing her into the film line, but she is keen — very keen. She watches one movie every day. Let me show you her photograph.’

Zaheer opened his desk drawer and pulled out an envelope. He took out his wife’s photograph and nudged it towards Saeed.

Saeed looked at the picture; it was of an ordinary looking young woman. She had a narrow forehead, a thin nose, thick lips, and eyes that were big and sad looking.

Her eyes were her most remarkable feature compared to the rest of her face. Saeed wanted to look closely at her eyes, but thinking it inappropriate, put the photograph back on the table. Zaheer asked, ‘So, what do you think?’

Saeed had no ready answer for such a question. As a matter of fact, those eyes had caught him in their spell. Those big, sad-looking eyes! Without meaning to do so, he picked up the photograph, looked at it once again and kept it back. He said, ‘You know better.’

Zaheer began to draw another flower on the pad. ‘This photograph is no good … it is a bit out of focus.’

Suddenly, the curtain on the back door rustled and Zaheer’s wife entered the office. The same big, sad-looking eyes! Zaheer looked at her and smiled. ‘She has the strangest name … Bismillah!’ And gesturing towards Saeed, he said, ‘Meet my friend, Saeed sahab.’

Bismillah said, ‘Adaab.’

Saeed got to his feet to greet her and said, ‘Please, do sit down.’

Bismillah adjusted her dupatta and sat down in the chair beside Saeed. The curve of her breasts sneaked from under the sheer, starched, pale pink mulmul dupatta. Saeed turned his eyes away.

Zaheer slid the photograph back into the envelope and told Saeed, ‘I am convinced that Bismillah will be a huge hit in her very first film, but I can’t think of a new name for her. Bismillah doesn’t seem like an appropriate name for the movies. What do you think?’

Saeed looked at Bismillah. For a minute, he nearly drowned in her big, sad-looking eyes. Quickly, he averted his gaze, and said, ‘Yes, you are right. Bismillah is not an appropriate name. She should be called something else.’

They talked about this and that for some time. Bismillah sat quietly. Her big, sad-looking eyes were silent too. Saeed plunged into those eyes several times. He and Zaheer talked. Bismillah kept sitting quietly, hiding her big, sad-looking eyes behind the curtain of her jet-black eyelashes. While the curve of her breasts kept tattling from beneath her sheer, pale- pink, starched mulmul dupatta. Every now and then, Saeed would steal a glance towards her but, almost immediately, his eyes would ricochet in the other direction.

Bismillah had a fairly dark complexion. The photograph gave no clue about her complexion. Against that dark skin, the big black eyes looked still sadder. Saeed wondered what had caused the sadness to lurk there. Were they so shaped that they merely looked sad, or was there a reason for the sadness? Saeed could reach no conclusion.

Zaheer was about to launch into a story about the Bombay days when Bismillah got up and left. There was an awkwardness in her gait as though she had recently begun wearing high-heeled slippers and was not accustomed to them. The way her gharara was tied too wasn’t quite right; its pleats fell sloppily. Saeed sensed that she didn’t possess many social graces but those two big black eyes on her face, despite their sadness, seemed steeped with many, unknown emotions.

Over the next few days, Saeed’s relations with Zaheer deepened. Zaheer was amazingly simple at heart, and this had a profound effect on Saeed. There was no trace of guile or artifice in anything Zaheer did or said. Any thought that arose in his mind, in whichever form or shape, would be clothed in the simplest of words, and find expression on his tongue in as straightforward a manner as possible. He preferred the same simplicity in matters of food and clothing.

Zaheer was extremely hospitable to Saeed whenever he visited his home. Saeed often told him not to take so much trouble, but Zaheer would never listen. He always said, ‘What trouble? Consider this your home.’

Saeed scolded himself one day when he realized that he had been going to Zaheer’s house every day. He berated himself, ‘The man respects me. He considers me his friend whereas I meet him only because I am interested in his wife. How awful!’

His conscience pricked him several times but he continued visiting Zaheer’s house.

Often, Bismillah would join them. In the early days, she would sit quietly. Gradually, she too began to speak up occasionally. But her conversations were pretty basic. It saddened Saeed to realize that she didn’t know how to speak well.

Once, when Saeed came calling, Zaheer wasn’t home. Bismillah answered from inside, ‘He has gone out.’ Saeed stood, undecided, thinking she would ask him to come in and wait. But she didn’t.

Zaheer’s film continued to be talked about. Almost every day, there was some discussion or the other concerning it. Zaheer would say, ‘I am in no hurry. Everything will be done at the right pace. And at the right time.’ Saeed wasn’t the slightest bit interested in Zaheer’s film. His only interest was in Bismillah, in whose large, sad eyes he had plunged many times. His interest was, as a matter of fact, increasing every day. This realization was quite painful for Saeed because he could no longer hide from the fact that he was desirous of establishing a physical relationship with his friend’s wife.

Days passed. Work did not start on Zaheer’s film. One day when Saeed went to meet him, he wasn’t home. He was about to go away when Bismillah called out, ‘Come in; he hasn’t gone very far.’

Saeed’s heart began to beat very fast. After a moment’s hesitation, he entered the room and sat down on a chair. Bismillah was standing beside a table. Gathering all his courage, Saeed said, ‘Please sit down.’

Bismillah sat down in a chair facing him. She remained quiet. Saeed looked into her eyes and asked, ‘Zaheer hasn’t returned as yet?’

Bismillah answered briefly, ‘He will, soon.’

Silence reigned once again. During this time, Saeed looked at Bismillah’s eyes several times. Each time a desire rose in his breast: to begin kissing those eyes till every trace of sadness gets washed away. But Saeed controlled it and said, ‘You are very keen to work in films, aren’t you?’

Bismillah yawned and answered, ‘Yes, sort of.’

Saeed suddenly began to sermonize. ‘It isn’t a good line … I mean, you hear all sorts of stories.’ And he launched into a litany of complaints against the film industry. He remembered Zaheer and changed track. ‘It is another matter if you are really interested. If one is strong of character, one can do well in any field. And, then, Zaheer is making his own film. But you must never work in anyone else’s film.’

Bismillah remained silent. Saeed did not like her silence. This was the first occasion he had had to meet her on his own, yet she had nothing to say. A couple of times, Saeed stole a few scared, searching glances at her but it had no effect. After another prolonged silence, he said, ‘All right then, so get me a paan at least.’

Bismillah rose. The considerable curves of her bosom moved beneath her silken shirt. Saeed’s eyes skittered away. Bismillah went into the other room and he began to think fearful but wicked thoughts. In a little while, she returned with the paan and stood close beside him. She handed it to him, saying, ‘Here.’

Saeed said, ‘Thank you’. His fingers touched hers as he took the paan from her and lightning coursed through his entire body. And with that the thorn of conscience pricked his heart.

Bismillah sat down once again in the chair facing him. Saeed could make out nothing from her dark-complexioned face. He thought how any other woman would have guessed by now what was going on in his mind. Perhaps she, too, knew, or guessed. Or, maybe, she didn’t. It was hard to tell anything from her poker face.

Saeed was in a dilemma. On the one hand, there was Bismillah’s disturbing presence, her large, sad eyes, and the lush fullness of her breasts. On the other hand, there was Zaheer, the prick of his own conscience. It was all very confusing! And from Bismillah — there wasn’t the slightest sign of anything. Obviously, there was no hope for the dreams Saeed was nursing. Yet, he continued looking at her with the same longing in his eyes.

He broke the long silence and said, ‘There is no sign of Zaheer; I think I should go now.’

Uncharacteristically enough, Bismillah said, ‘No, no, don’t go. Stay.’

‘But you don’t say anything,’ said Saeed and rose to his feet.

Bismillah asked, ‘So you really are leaving, are you?’

Saeed looked searchingly at her as though trying to read her true intentions. He said, ‘All right, I will stay. That is, if you have no objection to my being here.’

Bismillah yawned, ‘Why would I have any objections?’ Soon, her eyelids began to droop.

Saeed said, ‘You look very sleepy.’

‘Yes, I was awake all night.’

Saeed asked with an uncalled-for frankness, ‘Why?’

Bismillah yawned once again and said, ‘We had gone out somewhere.’

Saeed sat down. In a short while, Bismillah dozed off. The lush curves of her breasts rose and fell gently under the silken cloth of her shirt. Her large, sad eyes were now closed. Her right arm lolled to one side. The cuff of her right sleeve had ridden up her arm. Saeed saw something in Hindi lettering tattooed on her dark-brown wrist. Suddenly, Zaheer showed up.

Saeed was rattled by his sudden appearance. Zaheer shook hands with him, looked towards his wife and said, ‘Oh, she is sleeping.’

Saeed said, ‘I said I should leave but she said you won’t be long. She asked me to sit and when I did she went off to sleep.’

Zaheer laughed. Saeed, too, joined in.

‘Come on, get up,’ Zaheer patted Bismillah’s head.

Bismillah sighed deeply and opened her large, sad eyes. They looked not just sad but desolate too.

‘Get up, get up, we have to go out; it’s important.’ Zaheer turned towards Saeed, ‘Forgive us, Saeed sahab, but we have to go out for an urgent meeting. God willing, we shall meet tomorrow.’

Saeed left. The next day, as he set off towards Zaheer’s house, he prayed that he shouldn’t find Zaheer home. He reached Zaheer’s house and found a crowd gathered at the door. He found out from them that Bismillah wasn’t Zaheer’s wife. She was a Hindu girl who had got left behind during the riots. Zaheer had forced her into prostitution. The police had rescued her and taken her away just a short while ago.

Those big black eyes still chase Saeed wherever he goes.

BY THE ROADSIDE

It was this time of the year. The sky was blue like his eyes — clear and sparkling — as it is today. There was the same gentle sunlight. The earth had smelt of sweet dreams, exactly as it does now. And, lying beside him, I had given him my fluttering heart.

He had said to me, ‘My life was empty; you filled it with these moments that you gifted me. I shall be forever thankful to you, for without you I would have been incomplete … I don’t know what else to say to you … I feel sated … completely satisfied. I feel I don’t need you anymore.’ And he had gone away, forever, never to return.

My eyes had cried. My heart had wept. I had tried to plead. I had tried asking him a million times why he didn’t need me anymore when my need for him, with all its enormous urgency, had just begun. Especially after these moments that had filled the empty spaces of his being.

He had said, ‘During these moments, every single one of them, you filled and strengthened me, bolstered my being with every particle, every atom of your being. But now that is done, my relationship with you has automatically petered.’

How cruel were his words! I couldn’t take the pain of these words hurled at me like stones. I had begun to cry. But my tears had no effect on him. I had said, ‘These particles and atoms you talk of — they were once part of me. If I have given away parts of my self to you, am I not missing those fragments today? In making you complete, have I not emptied myself? Did I make you my all, my God, my idol, for this?’

He had said, ‘The honeybee sucks buds and flowers off their nectar to produce honey but it never lets the honey touch the lips of the flowers it has drained. God lets others worship Him; He never accepts another as His master. He spent a few moments alone with Adam and created the universe, but where is Adam today? Does the universe need him? Adam was like the mother who destroyed herself on the very bed on which she gave birth to Creation.’

A woman can cry but she can’t argue. Her greatest argument are the tears that flow from her eyes. I had said to him, ‘Look at me, I am crying. My eyes are raining tears. Go, if you must, but take some of my tears with you, wrapped in the shroud of your memories. I shall cry now for the rest of my life, but I shall have the comfort of knowing that you provided the shroud for the burial of at least some of my tears — if nothing else, at least to make me happy.’

He had said, ‘I have given you enough happiness. Why can’t the remembrance of the pleasure you got from me be enough to support you for the rest of your life? You say that strengthening me has made you incomplete. But isn’t this incompleteness enough to sustain what remains of your life? I am a man — today you have completed me; tomorrow someone else will do that. I am made like that. I shall often find myself wanting to feel whole and complete. There will be other women willing to fill the empty spaces in my being and make me feel whole and strong again and again.’

I had kept crying and feeling frustrated.

I had thought, ‘These few moments that were within my grasp … no, no, I was in their grasp … Why did I give myself up so completely to them? Why did I put my fluttering heart behind that cage with its mouth wide open? Yes, there was a pleasure in it, a certain delight, in giving myself up. But what sort of struggle is this? He remained whole and strong, whereas I have been left cracked and broken? He does not need me any more, whereas my need for him is stronger than ever. He has emerged stronger and I have become weaker. It is as though two clouds meet in the sky: one bursts out crying while the other turns into a thundercloud, plays with the raindrops and flees after unleashing a few bolts of thunder and lightning. Whose justice is this? The sky’s? The earth’s? Or His who made the two?’

I had kept crying and feeling frustrated.

‘Two spirits come together to become one, and from that union encompass the universe. Was all this mere poetic claptrap? While it is true that two spirits come together and merge into a single dot that can then expand and become Creation itself — but why does one spirit sometimes get bruised and damaged and left behind? Is it so punished because it had helped that other spirit to reach its zenith? What sort of Creation is this?’

It was this time of the year. The sky was blue like his eyes — clear and sparkling — as it is today. There was the same gentle sunlight. The earth had smelt of sweet dreams, exactly as it does now. And, lying beside him, I had given him my fluttering heart.

But he is no longer here beside me. Lightning has streaked across the skies and is somewhere far away, making some other raincloud shed its tears. He fortified himself and went away. Like a serpent, he bit me and slithered away. But the trace he left behind, why is it twisting and turning in my womb? Will it be the cause of my fulfilment?

No, no, how can that be my fulfilment; it can only be my destruction.

But why are the empty spaces in my body filling up? What is this debris that is filling up the dips and hollows of my body? What is this susurration that is coursing through my blood? Why is it gathering momentum and racing towards one single spot in my womb? Why has my sunken boat bobbed up to row across unknown seas?

Who is this unknown guest for whom milk is being warmed on raging fires inside my body? Why is my heart carding my blood to prepare baby-soft blankets, and for whom? Why is my mind weaving new clothes out of my multi-coloured thoughts, and for whom?

Why am I looking better, more glowing, by the day? Why are the hiccups, trapped in every part and fibre of my body, turning into lullabies?

It was this time of the year. The sky was blue like his eyes — clear and sparkling — as it is today. But the sky has come down and spread itself over my distended belly. And why are those blue-blue eyes running around coursing through my veins?

Why are my breasts becoming rounded like the domes of mosques? No, no, it is a mere whim. I shall flatten these orbs. I shall douse all those fires raging inside me on which potions are being prepared for this unwanted guest. I shall tangle the skeins of my mutli-coloured thoughts.

It was this time of the year. The sky was blue like his eyes — clear and sparkling — as it is today. But why do I remember those days from which he had removed every trace of his footprints?

But what is this? Whose footprint is this that I feel deep inside my belly? Does it belong to a stranger? Shall I have it scraped away? Is it a sore, a lesion, a terrible festering pustule?

But why do I feel as though it is a balm? And if it is a balm, a balm for which wound? Is it for the wound he gave me? No, no, this feels as though it is a balm for a wound I have had since the day I was born, a wound that I scarcely knew existed till now, a wound that had been lying fast asleep in my womb all this while.

What is the womb? Isn’t it a worthless make-believe clay pot, a plaything to play house-house? I shall smash it to bits.

But who is this who speaks in my ear: ‘The womb is the crossroad of the world. Why do you want to break it in front of the whole world? Remember, fingers will be raised and pointed at you.’

Why will fingers not be pointed in the direction in which he has gone? Do the fingers not know the road he has taken? The womb, you say, is the crossroad of the world but he had left me at a fork in the road where there was incompleteness on both sides. And tears.

Whose tear is this that is turning into a pearl in my shell? Where will it be strung?

Fingers will be raised when the oyster opens its lips and the pearl slips out to land on the pavement. Then, the fingers shall be raised — both at the pearl and the oyster. And these fingers will turn into snakes and bite both and turn them blue with their venom.

The sky was blue like his eyes — clear and sparkling — as it is today. Why did it not fall down? Where are the pillars that hold it up? Was that day’s earthquake not severe enough to shake them to their very foundations? Why is the sky still stretched over my head, as it was then?

My spirit is drenched in sweat. Every pore is wide open. A fire rages all around me. Deep inside me gold is being melted in a crucible. A furnace is roaring. Sparks are flying. The gold rises inside me like lava erupting from a volcano. Blue eyes are coursing through my blood, huffing and puffing. Bells are ringing. Someone is coming … Someone is coming ….

Close the doors … clamp down!

The crucible has overturned. Molten gold has spilled out. The bells are still ringing. He is coming … My eyes are closing … The blue sky is darkening and coming down.

Whose cries are these? Quieten it. Its cries are striking my heart like hammer blows. Quieten it. I am turning into a lap. Why am I turning into a lap?

My arms are opening wide. The milk is fast reaching a boil. The rounded fullness of my breasts are turning into saucers. Bring that bundle of flesh and put it beside my warm and soft blood-carded breasts.

Don’t snatch it away … Don’t … Don’t take it away from me. For God’s sake, don’t take it away!

The fingers … let them rise! I don’t care. The world is a crossroad. Let all my skeletons come tumbling out at this crossroad. My life will be ruined … Let it be so … Return the flesh of my flesh to me … Don’t snatch this piece of my soul… You don’t know how precious it is … This jewel was given to me during those long-ago moments, in those moments when every atom of my being had fulfilled someone who had left me incomplete and alone with my thoughts and gone away. I have been fulfilled today.

Believe me … believe me… If you don’t, ask my womb … Ask my breasts brimming over with milk … Ask the lullabies that are putting the hiccups to sleep in every pore and fibre of my body … Ask the swings that are being put on my arms.

The fingers … let them rise! I shall cut them down. There shall be an uproar. I shall pick the chopped fingers and stuff my ears with them. I shall become dumb. Deaf and blind. The flesh of my flesh will understand my every gesture and I shall recognize it with my fingertips.

Don’t snatch it … Don’t … It is the vermillion on the parting of my womb. It is the bindiya on the forehead of my motherhood … You say it is the bitter fruit of my past? That people will spit upon it? Let them … I shall lick it clean.

Look, I am folding my hands in entreaty. I am touching your feet.

Don’t overturn the full saucers of my breasts. Don’t burn the warm and soft blood-carded globules of flesh. Don’t break the ropes of the swings that hang from my arms. Don’t rob my ears of the songs that I hear in its cries.

Don’t snatch it… Don’t … Don’t take it away from me.… For God’s sake, don’t take it away!

Lahore, 21 January: The police recovered a newborn baby girl from the washermen’s colony. It was found by the roadside shivering with cold. Some heartless beast had wound a piece of cloth tightly around the infant’s neck. A dripping wet cloth had been wrapped about its delicate body so that it would die of hypothermia. But it was alive. It was a beautiful girl. It had blue eyes. The police took her to the hospital.

COMFORT

It was exactly eight years ago. My friend, Vishveshwarnath’s bridal party was lodged at the beautiful banquet hall in front of the Hindu Sabha College. It was a party of about three hundred to three hundred fifty guests who, having listened to the songs of Lahore’s famous courtesans, now lay fast asleep on their cots in the many rooms of the banquet hall.

It was 4 a.m. I was still somewhat tipsy from all the whisky a small group of friends and I had consumed with the groom in a separate room. When the round clock in the hall struck four, I opened my eyes. Perhaps I had been dreaming, because I felt something lodged between my eyelashes.

I looked at the floor of the hallway with one eye, keeping the other closed so it could sleep some more. Everyone was fast asleep. Some lay on their stomach, some flat and some huddled up. I opened my other eye and remembered that last night Asghar Ali had insisted on sleeping with a bolster pillow. The bolster lay a short distance away from my head but there was no sign of Asghar Ali.

I thought perhaps he had been awake all night and was now sleeping it off on the grubby bed of some cheap prostitute in Rambagh.

Whisky, whether it was local or foreign, was like a fast train for Asghar that took him post haste to a woman. Almost ninety-nine per cent men are drawn towards beautiful objects after downing a couple of drinks, whereas Asghar — who was actually a very fine painter and photographer who knew how best to use lines and colours — always made the most crass pictures after he got drunk.

The smithereens of a dream dislodged from my eyes and I began to think of Asghar Ali who was certainly no dream. I could clearly see the imprint of his heavy, long-haired body on the pillow.

Despite having observed him at close quarters, on many occasions I could never quite fathom why Asghar turned ‘silly’ after a couple of drinks. Maybe I shouldn’t say silly because he actually became terrifyingly crude and coarse, and could stumble through the darkest lanes and by-lanes and find his way to some woman selling her body. The next morning, when he would arise from her filthy bed, go home, take a bath and reach his studio to take pictures of well-scrubbed and well-groomed young girls and women, there would be no trace left of the previous night’s bestiality that had been so plainly visible through his drunken stupor.

Believe me when I say he was like a man possessed when drunk. For a brief spell of time, his mind would lose the power to think and feel. How much can a man drink? Six, seven, eight pegs? With him, even six or seven sips of that deadly brew were enough to push him into the fathomless sea of oblivion. You can mix whisky with soda or water, but mixing it with a woman is beyond my comprehension. Some drink to forget their sorrows, but a woman is not a sorrow. Some drink to create noise and confusion, but a woman is neither noise nor confusion.

Last night, Asghar got terribly drunk and noisy. Most weddings are noisome affairs, so Asghar’s din got absorbed in the general bedlam; or else there would have been hell to pay. At some point in the evening, he picked up a glass full of whisky and walked out of the room saying, ‘I am a superior person, and I shall find a suitably high place to sit and drink.’

I thought he had wandered off in search of a suitably ‘high’ brothel somewhere in Rambagh, but a short while later the door opened and he walked in carrying a stepladder. He propped the ladder against the wall, climbed it and sat sipping his whisky on the highest rung, with his head nearly touching the ceiling.

With some difficulty, Vishveshwar and I managed to persuade him to climb down, telling him all the while that such antics are all right only when no one else is around. The banquet hall was full of guests and he must be quiet and decorous. God knows how, our entreaties penetrated his thick skull and for the remainder of the party he sat quietly in one corner sipping his share of the whisky.

Thinking of last night’s events, I got up and went to stand in the balcony outside. In front of me the red brick building of the Hindu Sabha College stood mutely in the still darkness of pre-dawn. I looked towards the sky and saw stars trembling in the muddy sky.

As I crossed the long verandah and reached the staircase, I could hear someone coming down. A few seconds later, Asghar came into sight and walked past me without so much as a glance in my direction. It was dark, I thought as I started climbing the stairs slowly, perhaps he didn’t see me.

Whenever I climb a staircase, I count the stairs. I had just mumbled ‘twenty-four’ when, suddenly, I found a woman standing on the last step. I got flustered because I had very nearly collided with her.

‘Forgive me.… Oh! It’s you!’

The woman was Sharda. She was the eldest daughter of Harnam Kaur, one of our acquaintances, and she had been widowed just one year after her marriage.

Before I could ask her anything else, she spoke with urgency, ‘Who was that man who has just gone down?’

‘Who?’

‘The man who just went down the stairs … Do you know him?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Asghar.’

‘Asghar!’ She very nearly bit the name through clenched teeth and in a flash I understood what must have transpired between them.

‘Did he do something impolite?’

‘Impolite?’ Sharda’s body trembled with rage. ‘Who does he think I am…?’ Tears welled up in her small eyes. ‘He …He ….’ Her voice caught in her throat and, covering her face with both her hands, she began to cry loudly and with complete abandon.

I was in a strange dilemma. I began to worry that if someone were to hear her cry and come up, there would be a hue and cry.

Sharda had four brothers and all four were sleeping somewhere in the building. Two of them were especially fond of picking up violent quarrels. Surely, nothing could save Asghar Ali now.

I began to reason with her, ‘Look here, I say, stop crying … someone will hear.’

She removed her hands from her face and spoke in a loud petulant voice, ‘Let them … I want people to hear … Who does he think I am? A whore? I … I ….’

Once again, her voice caught in her throat.

‘I think it would be best to bury this matter here and now.’

‘Why?’

‘It will cause disgrace.’

‘To whom? To him or to me?’

‘It will be his disgrace, of course but no good ever comes of putting your hands in mud.’ So saying, I pulled out my handkerchief and gave it to her. ‘Here, wipe your tears.’

She flung the handkerchief away and flounced off to sit on the topmost stair. I picked up my handkerchief, dusted it and put it back in my pocket. ‘Sharda, Asghar is my friend. I seek your forgiveness for whatever mistake he has committed.’

‘Why are you asking for forgiveness?’

‘Because I want this matter to end right here. Though, if you want, I can bring him here and make him draw lines on the floor in front of you with his nose.’

She turned her face away in disgust. ‘No, don’t bring him in front of me … he has offended me grievously.’ Once again her throat caught. Sitting on the marble step, her elbow touching the cold stone floor, she tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the pain that seemed to well up from deep inside her.

By now, I was out of my mind with worry. A robust young woman was crying in front of me and I could do nothing to stop her. Once when I had driven that same old Asghar’s car, I had blown the horn to miss a dog in front of me. The horn had got stuck and its sound had become a never-ending scream. No matter how hard I tried, the horn wouldn’t stop screaming. People turned to stare and I had kept sitting, helplessly.

Thank God, there was no one else on the roof except Sharda and me. But my helplessness at that moment was greater than at the time of the incident of the horn. A woman sat crying in front of me, a woman who had been hurt very badly.

Had it been any other woman, I would have done my duty and gone away, but Sharda was the daughter of an acquaintance and I had known her since she was a baby.

She was a very nice girl, somewhat less pretty than her three younger sisters but certainly more intelligent.

She was good at reading and sewing. And last year when we had heard that she had lost her husband barely eleven months after her marriage, we had been much saddened. The grief of losing her husband must have been intense, but this pain, caused by my immoral friend, was of a totally different sort, one that I could see was causing her such distress.

I tried once again to quieten her. I sat on the marble step beside her and said, ‘Sharda devi, it isn’t seemly to go on crying like this. Go down and try to forget whatever it is that has happened. That wretch was drunk, or else, believe me, he is not such a wicked fellow. God knows what happens to him once he is drunk!’

Sharda’s tears did not stop.

I had an inkling of what Asghar must have done, for men usually have only one approach — through the body — but I wanted to hear from Sharda’s own mouth the exact nature of bestiality that Asghar had perpetrated on her. And so, I spoke to her sympathetically, ‘I don’t know exactly what discourtesy he has shown you, but I can attempt a guess. Why had you come up here?’

Sharda spoke in a quavering voice, ‘I was sleeping in the room downstairs … two women started talking about me.’

And her voice got muffled in her throat.

I asked, ‘What were they saying about you?’

Sharda rested her face against the cool marble slab and began to cry loudly. I softly patted her broad shoulders. ‘Hush, Sharda … quiet … shhh.’

In between large tearful hiccups, she choked, ‘They were saying … that … why has that widow been called here?’ And as she said the word “widow”, she thrust one corner of her tear-drenched dupatta in her mouth. ‘I heard these words and left the room to come up to the roof … and ….’

Her words made me sad. How cruel women can be, especially older women! Regardless of whether someone’s wounds are fresh or old, how gleefully they scrape them! I took Sharda’s hand in mine and pressed it with the deepest, most heartfelt sympathy. ‘One should never pay any heed to such things.’

She began to bawl like a baby. ‘That is precisely what I had told myself … then I fell asleep on the terrace … Your friend came and pulled at my dupatta … he opened the buttons of my kurta and…’

The buttons of her kurta were still undone.

‘Let it be, Sharda. Forget whatever happened.’ I plucked the handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe her tears.

A corner of her wet dupatta was still in her mouth; she had clenched it tighter between her teeth. I pulled it out of her mouth. She wrapped its wet corner around her fingers and asked despairingly, ‘Your friend molested me because I am a widow, isn’t it? He must have thought who’s there to protest this woman?’

‘No, Sharda, no,’ and I pulled her head to rest against my shoulder. ‘Forget whatever he thought, or what he did, and quieten down now.’

I wanted to sing her a lullaby and put her to sleep.

I had wiped her eyes a minute ago, but they glistened with fresh tears. Once again, I pulled out a corner of the dupatta that she had once again put in her mouth, and wiped her tears. Then, softly, I kissed both her eyes.

‘Enough! Don’t cry any more now.’

Sharda nudged her head against my breast. I patted her cheek gently, ‘Enough, enough, enough.’

Sometime later when I came down, Sharda stood on the marble steps with her mulmul dupatta swaying in the balmy breeze of a late March morning. Asghar’s misbehaviour entirely forgotten, she felt light as a feather. The shock and pain in her heart had been replaced by pleasure and excitement.

SAHAY

Don’t say one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims have died; say two lakh human beings have died. As a matter of fact, it isn’t such a tragedy that two lakh people have died. The real tragedy is that those who killed and those who got killed failed to move from one account to another. After killing one lakh Hindus, the Muslims must have thought that Hinduism is dead. But the Hindu religion is alive and shall always remain. Similarly, after killing one lakh Muslims, the Hindus must have been jubilant, believing that they have wiped off Islam. But the truth is before all of you — you know there isn’t so much as a scratch upon Islam. Only fools believe that they can hunt down religions with guns. Religion, faith, belief, conscience — they live in our soul, not in our bodies. They can never be destroyed with knives and swords and guns.

That day Mumtaz was filled with a strange fervour. The three of us had gone to see him off at the ship. He was leaving us — no one knew for how long — and going away to Pakistan, to a country that none of us knew anything about.

The three of us were Hindus. We had relatives in west Punjab who had borne loss of lives and property. And perhaps that was why Mumtaz was leaving us today. Jugal had received a letter from Lahore saying he had lost his uncle in the riots. The news had devastated him. One day, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, Jugal had said to Mumtaz, ‘You know, I have been wondering what I would do if we have riots in our neighbourhood.’

Mumtaz had asked, ‘What will you do?’

Jugal had answered with complete seriousness, ‘I have been thinking, you know, that I just might kill you.’

Mumtaz had heard this and become completely silent; his silence had lasted almost eight days till he abruptly broke the news to us that he was leaving for Karachi by the 3.45 steamer. The three of us did not probe the reasons for his sudden departure. Jugal was acutely aware that his statement — ‘I have been thinking, y’know, that I just might kill you’ — might be the reason. And perhaps that was why he was the quietest of the lot. However, strangely enough, Mumtaz had become uncharacteristically talkative, almost garrulous a few hours before his departure.

He had been drinking since morning. He finished his packing in a carefree manner as though he was off on a pleasure trip, chattered non- stop and laughed at his own jokes. If someone were to see him in that state they would think he was thrilled to be leaving Bombay. But the three of us knew he was trying to fool us — and himself — by hiding his true feelings.

I tried several times to ask him why he had suddenly decided to leave. I made signs to Jugal, urging him to introduce the subject. But Mumtaz didn’t give us the slightest opportunity to do so.

Jugal downed three or four pegs, becoming quieter than ever till he finally went to the other room to lie down. Brijmohan and I stayed with Mumtaz while he went about settling his accounts. He chattered and laughed as he paid the doctor’s bills and retrieved his clothes from the laundry. But when he bought a paan from Govind’s corner shop, his eyes welled up. He put a hand on Brijmohan’s shoulder as he turned away and said, ‘Remember, Brij, ten years ago when times were lean, Govind had loaned us one rupee.’

Mumtaz stayed quiet all the way back but once home he started his non-stop monologue. The words kept tumbling out, with neither head nor tail, yet they were so entertaining in themselves that, willy-nilly, Brijmohan and I got caught up in the banter. As the hour of his departure drew closer, even Jugal joined in. But as the taxi took us towards the dockyard, all four of us fell silent.

With his eyes, Mumtaz seemed to be bidding adieu to the wide streets and boulevards of Bombay.

The taxi deposited us at our destination.

The dock was crowded with thousands of refugees. Very few looked happy and prosperous; the vast majority looked poor and dishevelled. In that milling crowd, I felt it was only Mumtaz who was leaving, not the others. He was leaving us and going away to a land he did not know, a country that would remain a stranger to him no matter how hard he tried. But those were my views. I couldn’t fathom what Mumtaz was thinking of at that moment.

Mumtaz took us up to the deck as soon as his luggage was stowed away. For a long time he kept gazing at the horizon — where the sea and the sky seemed to meet. He took Jugal’s hand in his own and said, ‘It’s only an illusion — this meeting of the sea and sky — but what a delightful illusion this union is, isn’t it?’

Jugal stayed silent. Perhaps at that moment too, his own words — ‘I have been thinking, you know, that I just might kill you’ — were tormenting him.

Mumtaz ordered some brandy from the ship’s bar. He had been drinking brandy since early morning. Glasses in hand, the four of us stood by the ship’s railing. Refugees were pouring into the ship and gulls were skimming over the almost-still sea.

Jugal swallowed his brandy in a single gulp and blurted out in an awkward hurry, ‘Forgive me, Mumtaz, I think I hurt you that day.’

After a moment’s silence, Mumtaz asked, ‘That day when you said “I have been thinking, you know, that I just might kill you” did you really mean it? Tell me honestly.’

Jugal nodded his head to say ‘yes’ and said, ‘But I regret it sorely.’

‘You would have regretted it more had you killed me,’ Mumtaz sounded philosophical. ‘But only if you considered that you had killed Mumtaz, a Muslim, not a friend but a human being. If he was wicked you didn’t destroy his wickedness. If he was a Muslim, you didn’t destroy his Muslim-ness, but only the living proof of his being. If his corpse had fallen in the hands of Muslims, there would have been one more grave in some graveyard but one human being less in this world.’

Mumtaz was quiet for some time, as though lost in thought, then he started speaking again, ‘Maybe my fellow Muslims would have regarded me as a martyr. But, by God, if it was at all possible, I would have burst through my grave and shouted, “I refuse to accept this mantle of martyrdom. I don’t want a degree for an exam that I haven’t taken.’’ A Muslim killed your uncle in Lahore. You heard the news in Bombay and killed me. Tell me, what medal would you and I deserve? And, in Lahore, what prize would your uncle and his killer deserve? I would say that those who died, died a dog’s death and the killer got his hands stained with blood needlessly — absolutely needlessly.’

Mumtaz became very emotional as he talked. But there was love even in his excitability. His words made a strong impact on me. At that moment I believed that religion, faith, belief — whatever they might be — resided in our souls, not in our bodies. They could not be destroyed by knives and swords and guns. And so I said to him with great feeling, ‘You are absolutely right.’

Mumtaz took stock of his thoughts and said with some restlessness, ‘No, not at all, I mean this is all very well but perhaps I am not able to say very clearly what I truly want to say. By religion I don’t mean the sort of thing in which ninety-nine per cent of us are trapped. By religion, or faith, I mean that other quality that elevates us above our fellow men, one that gives us a certain special aura that truly makes us human. But what is that thing? Unfortunately, I can’t place it on my palm and show it.’ A strange gleam came into his eyes and he began talking to himself, ‘What was so special about him, after all? He was a staunch Hindu. He had a most despicable profession yet his soul was resplendent.’

I asked, ‘Whose?’

‘A pimp’s.’

The three of us were startled. There wasn’t the slightest trace of false modesty in his accent. I asked with complete seriousness, ‘A pimp’s?’

Mumtaz nodded, ‘I am surprised that he was a mere mortal. In fact, I am more surprised that for most people he was just a pimp, a man who traded in women, but his soul was pristine.’

Mumtaz was quiet for some time, as though he was refreshing old incidents in his mind. Then, he started speaking, ‘I don’t remember his full name — it was “Something Sahay”. He was from Benares. He was very fastidious. He operated from a tiny room but kept it immaculately clean. He had it neatly curtained off to ensure privacy. There were no beds for the clients, but there were mattresses and pillows. The sheets and pillowcases were always spotlessly clean. He had a servant yet he cleaned the place himself. In fact, he did everything himself. He never lied or cheated. If it was very late in the night and the only liquor available was likely to be cheap booze mixed with water, he would tell his customers not to throw their money. Or, if he had qualms about a girl, he would come clean and say so. He once told me that he had earned twenty thousand rupees in the last three years — by taking two-and-a-half rupees as commission on every ten rupees that his girls fetched him. He wanted to earn another ten thousand — I don’t know why only ten thousand, why not more. He told me he would return to Benares when he had earned his thirty thousand and open a cloth shop. I can’t say why a cloth shop, why not some other trade.’

At this point, I could no longer contain myself and interrupted, ‘What a strange man!’

Mumtaz continued, ‘I used to think he was bogus through and through, a fraud from head to toe. Who could believe that he thought of the girls who plied his trade as his daughters? I found it very surprising that he had opened a savings account for each girl in the post office where every month he would deposit her earnings. It was equally preposterous that he paid for the boarding and lodging of ten or twelve girls. I thought there was guile and artifice in everything he said and did.

‘One day when I went to his establishment, he said, “Amina and Sakina are on leave today. I give them a weekly off so that they can go out and eat non-vegetarian food. Here, as you know, I run a strictly vegetarian kitchen.” I smiled to myself thinking he was trying to pull a fast one on me. Another day he told me about the Hindu girl from Ahmedabad he had got married to a Muslim customer. She lived in Lahore now and had written to say that she had prayed at the shrine of Data Sahab and her prayers had been answered. Now she was praying for Sahay to collect his thirty thousand rupees so that he could go home and start his draper’s business. I heard this and laughed out loud. I thought, “He is saying all this to please me because I am a Muslim.”’

I asked Mumtaz, ‘And were you wrong?’

‘Absolutely; there was no difference between what he said and did. The man must have had his faults, no doubt. He must have made mistakes, like we all do. But, I tell you, he was a fine man, one of the best I have known.’

Jugal asked, ‘How did you discover that?’

‘Upon his death.’ With these words Mumtaz fell silent. He began to look at the horizon where the sky and sea met in a hazy embrace. After a long silence, he resumed, ‘The riots had started. Early one morning, I was passing through Bhindi Bazaar. The curfew was on and there were very few people about. The trams were not running. As I walked up to J. J. Hospital in search of a taxi, I saw a man lying on the footpath huddled beside a large straw basket. I thought it must be a homeless person sleeping on the footpath. But I stopped when I saw large clots of blood on the road. Clearly, this was a case of murder. I was about to walk away when I noticed some movement in the body. I looked around. There was no one on the road. I stooped to look closely at the man’s body. I spotted Sahay’s familiar face, covered though it was with blood and gore. I sat down on the footpath close beside him and began to inspect him closely. His white shirt that was always so immaculately white was drenched in blood. Obviously, he had been wounded in the chest. When he began to groan softly, I took him by the shoulders and shook him gently as one does with someone who has been sleeping. I called out to him by the half name I knew. I was about to get up and leave when he opened his eyes. For a long time he kept looking unblinkingly at me with his half-open eyes. Then, suddenly, a shiver ran through his body and he recognized me, ‘You … it is you!’

‘I immediately unleashed an avalanche of questions. How did he reach here? How did he get wounded? How long had he been lying on the footpath? Should I inform the hospital close by?

‘He didn’t have the strength to answer. When I had finished all my questions, all he could do was utter these words: “My time has come — it is God’s will.”’

‘I didn’t know what was God’s will but I knew what was clearly unacceptable to me: that I a Muslim should be standing in an all-Muslim neighbourhood to watch a man die — a man I knew to be a Hindu — knowing fully well that whoever had attacked him must have been a Muslim and I who stood beside him as he lay at Death’s door was also a Muslim. I am not a coward but at that moment I was more scared than any coward I know. I was terrified that I would be caught with a dying man, and even if I were not charged I would, at the very least, be arrested and interrogated. I thought of taking him to the hospital, but I hesitated: what if he were to falsely implicate me, just in order to take revenge on whoever had so grievously injured him? After all, Sahay knew he was dying; what did he have to lose? I was about to go — you might as well say I was about to flee — when Sahay called my name. I stopped. I didn’t want to stay, yet I stopped. I looked at him as though I was saying: hurry up and die; I have to go.

‘Doubling up with pain, he unbuttoned his bloodied shirt and put his hand inside. The effort exhausted him and he could do no more. He said to me, “Look under my vest. You will find some jewellery and twelve hundred rupees … They belong to Sultana … I had left them with a friend for safekeeping … I had gone to get them back … I wanted to send them to Sultana because … as you know … every day it is getting more and more unsafe … Take them … Give them to Sultana … Tell her to leave … immediately … and you … you look after yourself.”’

Mumtaz finished his story and lapsed into silence. I began to imagine that his voice and Sahay’s voice — that had last been heard on a footpath beside the J. J. Hospital — were becoming one just like the sea and the sky were meeting in a hazy embrace on the distant horizon.

The ship blew its whistle and Mumtaz said, ‘I went to meet Sultana. I gave her the money and the jewels and watched her eyes fill up with tears.’

We said our farewells and got off the ship. Mumtaz stood on the deck, waving his right hand. I said to Jugal, ‘Don’t you get the feeling that Mumtaz is beckoning the spirit of Sahay, asking him to accompany him?’

Jugal said, ‘I wish I was Sahay’s spirit.’

THE CANDLE’S TEARS

Planted in the grubby niche in the peeling wall, the candle had cried all night long.

Wax had fallen on the damp floor, scattering like milky frozen droplets. Little Lajo had been crying for a pearl necklace. Her mother strung the candle’s waxen tears on a string and made a necklace for her. Lajo placed the string of wax pearls around her neck gleefully and went out, clapping her hands with joy.

Night fell. A fresh candle was lit in the grime-encrusted niche. Its one-eyed light took in the room’s darkness and for an instant flickered brightly with surprise. But after some time, as it grew used to its grim surroundings, it began to look all round with a steady unblinking gaze.

Little Lajo lay fast asleep on a cot, fighting with her friend Bindu in her dreams, telling her vehemently that she would not marry off her doll to Bindu’s boy-doll because he was terribly ugly.

Lajo’s mother stood at the window, looking yearningly at the mud splattered on the silent and dimly lit street. Across the road, hanging from an iron pole, a lantern dozed like a sleepy watchman in the cold December night. Directly in front of her, on the stoop of a closed restaurant, embers from a half-dead fire, flared fitfully like wilful children, and fell in little, unexpected showers. The clock tower struck twelve in a sleepy haze; the last note shivered briefly in the December night, then pulled the blanket of silence over itself and went to sleep. The sweet song of sleep sighed in Lajo’s mother’s ears but by then her nerves had already relayed another message to her brain.

Like a chilly blast of air, the sound of tinkling bells reached her ears. To hear the sound fully well, she concentrated with all her will power.

In the stillness of the night, the bells sounded like the last bit of breath left rattling in a dying man’s throat. Lajo’s mother sat down with satisfaction. Soon, the tired neighing of a horse rent the silent night and a tonga came and stood beside the lantern. Its coachman got off, patted his horse and looked towards the window. The blinds on the window were rolled up and he could see the shadowy figure inside.

The coachman wrapped his coarse blanket snugly around himself and put his hand in his pocket. He had three and a half rupees, of which he kept aside a rupee and four annas for himself and the rest he hid beneath the cushion on the tonga’s front seat. Then he moved towards the stairs going up to the brothel.

Lajo’s mother, Chando Sunyari, got up to open the door.

The coachman, Madho, came in, bolted the door and clasped Chando Sunyari to his bosom.

‘God knows how much I love you! Had I met you in my youth, my horse and cart would have been sold off long ago,’ and with that he placed one rupee in her hand.

Chando Sunyari asked, ‘Is that all?’

‘Here, take this too,’ and he placed a silver anna in her other hand. ‘I swear on your life, this is all I have.’

The horse stood neighing softly in the cold night. And the lantern atop its pole dozed on, as before.

Madho lay on the iron cot, dead to the world. Beside him Chando Sunyari lay with her eyes wide open, looking at the drops of molten wax as they fell on the damp floor and froze into small milky balls. Suddenly, like a woman possessed, she flew out of her bed and went to sit beside Lajo’s bed. Drops of wax trembled on Lajo’s chest. To Chando Sunyari’s bleary eyes it seemed as though her Lajo’s childhood crouched, hidden among those drops of frozen tears. She raised a trembling hand and plucked the wax beads from Lajo’s throat.

The thread slipped from the nearly-empty puddle of molten wax in the niche and fell to the floor, where it promptly went to sleep in its stony embrace. Now, the room became not just quiet but dark too.

THE MAKER OF MARTYRS

I am a native of Gujarat, Kathiawad to be precise. And a Bania by caste. I was at a loose end last year during the tanta of Partition. Forgive me for using the word tanta, though there is nothing wrong in using this word. Urdu must get words from other languages, even if it is Gujarati.

As I was saying, I was without work. There was a small cocaine business still running which got me a little money. At the time of the Partition when thousands of people from here went there, and those from there began to pour in here, I, too, thought of leaving for Pakistan. If not cocaine, I could begin some new venture. So I left, and after doing several odd jobs along the way, I eventually reached Pakistan.

I had left with the intention of starting some lucrative business. So the moment I reached Pakistan, I began to study the situation there closely. I chose the business of ‘allotments’. I was an old hand at greasing the system and saying the right things to the right people. I befriended some people and managed to get a small house allotted in my name. I made a neat profit on this and decided to travel to different cities, scout for homes and shops and get them allotted in my name. No matter what the work, a man has to work hard. I had to do my share of running around to make money in allotments. Some flattery here, some greasing of palms there, invitations to dinner, to evenings of song and dance and…. What I mean to say is that there were endless headaches. I would toil all day long, sniff around deserted mansions, scour the city in search of handsome homes that could yield the maximum profit after allotment.

A man’s hard work never goes waste. Within a year, I had amassed several lakh rupees. I had everything a man can ask the Good Lord to provide — a wonderful house to live in and countless maal-pani stashed away in my bank.

Forgive me again. I have used a slang from my Kathiawad. But never mind, Urdu must take in more words from outside — as I was saying, by the grace of God, I had everything — a fine house, plenty of servants, a Packard car, two-and-a-half lakh rupees in the bank, besides several shops and factories. I had all this but somewhere along the way I had lost my peace of mind. It is true that while I was in the cocaine trade, I had felt an occasional burden on my heart. But now it was almost as though I had no heart. Or maybe, the burden was such that my heart had quite disappeared under it. But what was the burden that so weighed my heart?

I am a clever man. If a question arises in my mind, I invariably find an answer for it. With a cool heart (even though I didn’t quite know where my heart was), I tried to think my way through — what was the reason behind my unease?

Women?…Yes, maybe. I had no woman of my own. The one I had to begin with had died in Kathiawad, Gujarat. But there were plenty of women belonging to other men. For instance, there was my gardener’s wife. There is no accounting for tastes, my dear sir! To tell you the truth, for me, a woman just needs to be young; it is not necessary that she be educated, or be able to dance. Any nubile woman will do — as we say in a piquant, difficult-to-translate way in our Kathiawad, Gujarat.

So there was no question of a woman and money was certainly not an issue. I am not a greedy man. I am happy with whatever I have. But then why had this matter of the heart arisen?

I am a clever man. I try to get to the bottom of things. My factories were flourishing, so were the shops; money was rolling in practically on its own. I went off on my own and tried to think carefully till I came to the conclusion that my unease stemmed from the fact that I had not done any good deed since I had come here.

I had done countless good samaritan acts in Kathiawad, Gujarat. For instance, when my friend Pandurang had died, I had installed his widow as my mistress in my house. This way I kept her from peddling herself for over two years. When Vinayak’s girl broke her leg, I bought her a new one. That cost me a cool forty bucks. When the ‘heat’ got Jamuna Bai, and the bitch (forgive me) didn’t know what had hit her, I was the one who took her to the doctor. No one ever came to know. I got her treated for over six months … But I hadn’t done any good deeds since I had come to Pakistan and this could be the only reason behind my uneasy heart. For everything else was just fine.

I thought: so, what should I do? I thought of charity but I spent one day roaming around the city and found that every man was a beggar. Every other man was either naked or hungry. How many could I feed or dress? I toyed with the idea of opening a public kitchen. But what good could one kitchen do and where would I get the rations? The thought of buying from the black market immediately led me to ponder the merit of buying from the black market on the one hand, and doing good deeds on the other.

I spent countless hours listening to people narrating their tales of woe. To tell you the truth, the world seemed full of sad people — those who slept on the uncovered stoops of shops as well as those who lived in high-rise mansions. The man who walks about on foot worries that he doesn’t have decent shoes to wear. The man who rides the automobile frets that he doesn’t have the latest model car. Every man’s complaint is valid in its own way. Every man’s wish is legitimate in its own right.

I had once heard a ghazal by Ghalib recited by Ameenabai Chitlekar of Sholapur — God bless her soul — now I remember just one couplet from it: Kiski hajat rava kare koi (Whose wishes should one satisfy). Forgive me, perhaps it is the second line of the couplet, or maybe it is the first.

Yes sir, whose needs should I satisfy first when of any given hundred people all hundred are needy. I also thought that giving charity was not such a great idea. You might not agree with me but I had gone to several refugee camps and seen things at close quarters and come to the conclusion that charity had made nincompoops out of the refugees. They would sit idle all day long, or play cards or do jugar (forgive me, jugar means gambling or rolling the dice) or use bad language or loll about eating phoket, meaning free, meals. How could such men make the foundations of a strong Pakistan? So I reached the conclusion that giving charity was by no means a good deed. But what was a good deed?

Men were dying like flies in the refugee camps. It was cholera one day; the plague on another. There wasn’t an inch of space left in hospitals. I was overwhelmed with pity. I almost thought of getting a hospital built but when I thought some more, I abandoned the idea. I had the ‘scheme’ almost worked out in my head. I would have invited tenders for the building, collected money through applicants’ fees, set up a spurious company of my own, and had the tender passed in its name. I thought of allocating one lakh on building costs. Obviously, out of that I would have had the building up in seventy thousand; the remaining thirty would have gone into my pocket. But I had to abandon the entire scheme when I thought that if I ended up saving more, people what would happen to the exploding population? How would I help in lessening the numbers?

If you think about it, the real lafda is one of numbers. By lafda I mean problem, the problem that has the connotation of nuisance, though that does not, by any means, provide the exact shade of meaning I wish to convey.

Yes sir, the entire lafda is due to a booming population. If the numbers keep increasing, the earth won’t expand to keep pace, neither will the sky stretch, nor will more rain fall, nor more grain grow to feed more and more people. And so I reached the conclusion that constructing a hospital can not be regarded as a good deed. Then I thought of having a mosque built. But then a sher I had once heard sung by Ameenabai Chitlekar of Sholapur — may God bless her soul! — came back to haunt me: Naam manjoor hai to faij ke asbab bana. She used to pronounce ‘manzoor’ as ‘manjoor’ and ‘faiz’ as ‘faij’. (If you want your name to live on, build bridges, build tanks and mosques and such like.)

But which poor sod wants name and fame? Those who have bridges built to earn a good name don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. What rubbish! So I said to myself — no, never, this idea of getting a mosque built is all wrong. It does the common weal no good to have several scattered mosques; it divides the people.

Tired and dispirited, I was preparing to go on the Haj pilgrimage when God Himself showed me the way. There was a public function in the city. By the time it ended, there was a stampede. Thirty people died in that mad scramble. When the newspapers reported this incident the next day, we learnt that those thirty people had not died; they had become martyrs.

I began to think. I also began to consult religious leaders and thinkers. I learnt that those who die in sudden accidents reach the level of martyrdom — above which there is no other station. I began to think that it would be wonderful if people were to become martyrs instead of dying ordinary deaths. Those who die ordinary deaths, obviously gain nothing by dying. It is only when someone becomes a martyr that it means something.

I began to examine this distinction more closely.

Everywhere I looked, I saw broken-down dilapidated human beings. Wan-faced, sunken-eyed, dressed in rags, weighed down by worries and anxieties, besieged by the fear of earning their daily bread, there they were — dumped in some poky shack-like discarded railway goods or wandering aimlessly around shops and markets like ownerless animals with upturned snouts. Why are they alive, whom do they live for and how — no one has the answers. Thousands die every time there is an outbreak of some disease or the other; if nothing else, they die slowly, painfully, dissolving bit by bit, due to hunger and thirst. In winter they freeze to death; in summer they dry up. Sometimes someone sheds a tear or two at their passing away; most die unwept. So they didn’t make much of life … hat is all right. It gave them nothing … that too is all right. But as Ameenabai Chitlekar of Sholapur — may God bless her soul! — used to sing so soulfully: Mar ke bhi chain na payaa to kidhar jaayenge (where will we go if death brings no respite.) What I mean to say is this: if things don’t improve significantly after death, then what the hell is the point of all this! I thought why not do something for these wretched souls, these down-at-heel miserable creatures who have never known any pleasures in this life? Why not do something that will give them a special status in the other world when those who don’t even wish to look at them in this world, will swoon with envy when they look at them there. There was only one way to achieve this, that they should not die ordinary deaths; they must be martyred.

The question then arose: would they be ready to become martyrs. I thought: why not? Show me a good Muslim who does not want to become a martyr! In fact, the copycat Hindus and Sikhs too have devised a special category of martyrs. But I was in for a surprise when I asked a frail, half-dead man: ‘Do you want to become a martyr?’ And he said: ‘No.’

I couldn’t figure out why that man wished to live on or what he hoped to achieve by living some more. I did my best to convince him. I said, ‘Look here, old man, you can’t expect to live for more than a couple of months. You don’t have the strength to walk. The way you double up when a spasm of coughing catches you, one would think you are going to fall down and die right now. You don’t have a paisa to call your own. You haven’t known a moment’s happiness in your entire life, neither are you likely to in the future. Why do you want to live any more? You can’t enlist in the army, so you obviously can’t lay down your life fighting for your country in a field of honour. So don’t you think it would be far more appropriate if you make preparations for your martyrdom — either here in the marketplace or in the night shelter where you doss down for the night?’

He asked: ‘How can that be?’

I answered: ‘You see that banana peel lying over there? Suppose you were to slip on that … obviously you would die. And you would become a martyr.’ But he couldn’t understand the simple logic of my words. He said: ‘Why would I step on a banana peel when I can see it lying over there … do you think I don’t care for my life?’

It made me sad, sadder still later when I heard that the wretched old man, who could so easily have attained martyrdom, coughed and coughed till he died on a rusty iron cot in a charitable hospitable.

There was an old woman — a toothless old hag — counting her last breaths. She filled me with pity. She had spent her entire life in poverty and misery, worrying and anxious all the time. I picked her up and took her to the railway pata (forgive me, where I come from, we say pata for the railway tracks). But believe me sir, she heard the sound of the approaching train and jumped off the track and bounded away like a wound-up toy.

It nearly broke my heart but, still, I didn’t give up. The son of a Bania, they say, is the persevering sort. I did not, for a minute, allow the straight and narrow path of virtuosity that I could see gleaming ahead of me disappear from my sight.

A large, derelict compound, dating back to the Mughal times, was lying empty. It had a hundred and fifty-one tiny rooms. They were in a terrible state of disrepair. My experienced eyes sized them up and figured that the first heavy rains of the season would bring the roof crashing down. I bought the compound for Rs 10,500 and settled a thousand of the homeless and very poor. I collected two months’ rent — at the rate of a rupee a month from every tenant — and as I had calculated, within three months the first heavy downpour brought the roof down, killing seven hundred people including young and old alike, martyring every single one of them.

The burden on my heart lightened somewhat. Seven hundred people were removed from our land; moreover, all seven hundred became martyrs — the scales were tipped in my favour.

I have been doing this ever since. Every day, according to the fitness of things, I manage to make at least two or three people drink from the cup of blessed martyrdom.

As I have said before, no matter what the work, a man needs to work hard. May god bless Ameenabai Chitlekar of Sholapur who used to sing a sher which — forgive me — is actually not entirely appropriate in this context. Be that as it may, what I mean to say is that I have had to work very hard. For instance take the case of the man (whose existence was as meaningless as the fifth wheel of a horse-drawn carriage) for whom I had to spend one entire day chucking banana peels on the road so that he could drink from the cup of martyrdom. But, as far as I have been able to understand, there is an appointed time for martyrdom, just as there is an appointed hour for death. That man eventually gained martyrdom on the tenth day when he slipped from a banana skin on a hard floor.

These days I am having a huge building constructed. One of my own companies has got the tender — worth two lakh rupees. A clear seventy-five thousand will go straight into my pocket. I have bought all sorts of insurance policies as well. By my reckoning, the whole building will collapse like a house of cards by the time the third floor goes up, because of the materials I have used. Three-hundred workers would be at work at the time. I have complete faith in the House of God — all three hundred shall become martyrs. However, perchance, if one or two remain alive it can only mean that they must be scoundrels of the first degree and God does not — cannot — accept their martyrdom.

SHARIFAN

When Qasim opened the door to his house, he could feel the searing pain of a single bullet, the one embedded in his right calf. But a film of crimson blood blinded him when he entered his house and saw his wife’s corpse. He was about to pick up the axe used for chopping firewood and go and unleash blood and mayhem on the streets and bazaars outside when he suddenly remembered Sharifan, his daughter.

He began to call out loudly, ‘Sharifan … Sharifan!’

The two doors leading to the verandah were both shut. Qasim thought, she must be hiding from fear. He went to the door, put his mouth close to a crack in the door and called out, ‘Sharifan … Sharifan … it is me … your father.’ But there was no answer from inside. Qasim pushed the door with both hands. It flew open and he fell flat on his face into the verandah. He gathered his wits and tried to pick him- self up when he felt as though … He let out a terrible shout and sprang to his feet.

Barely a yard away, lay the dead body of a young girl — naked, absolutely naked. Fair complexioned, taut and nubile; the small pert breasts were raised towards the ceiling. Qasim felt shaken to the very core of his being. A scream, one that could rent the skies, emerged deep from within his innards but he had pursed his lips so tightly that it could not escape. His eyes had shut of their own volition. Still, he covered his face with both his hands. A muffled sound emerged from his lips, ‘Sharifan…’ With his eyes still tightly shut, he groped around and picked up some clothes, flung them over Sharifan’s body and left the verandah without stopping to see that the clothes had fallen some distance away from her.

Once outside, he did not see his wife’s dead body. It is entirely possible that he could not see it because his eyes were filled with the sight of Sharifan’s naked dead body. He picked up the axe he used to chop fire-wood and left the house.

Axe in hand he swept through the deserted bazaar like a stream of molten lava. He reached the chowk and came face to face with a Sikh. The Sikh was a tall strapping fellow but Qasim struck him down with such force that he fell like a tree uprooted in a fierce storm.

The blood coursing through Qasim’s veins grew hot and began to splutter as boiling oil does when the smallest drop of water falls on it.

Far away in the distance, across the road, he saw some men. Like an arrow, he made his way towards them. The men saw him and raised cries of ‘Har Har Mahadev!’ Instead of responding with a slogan of his own, he spat out the worse mother-sister oaths he knew and pushed his way into them.

In a matter of minutes, three fresh corpses lay quivering on the road. The others in the group ran away. Qasim kept swirling his axe in the empty air. His eyes were shut. He jostled against one of the dead bodies and fell down. He thought someone had pushed him and began to scream obscenities and shout, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’

But when he felt neither a hand at his throat nor a blow on his body, he opened his eyes and saw — the road was empty except for the three dead bodies and him.

For a minute he felt disappointed, for perhaps he wanted to die. But, all of a sudden, the image of Sharifan — naked Sharifan — appeared before his eyes and turned his whole being into a pile of burning gun- powder. He got to his feet, picked up the axe and once again began to sweep through the street like a stream of molten lava.

He crossed several bazaars but they were all deserted. He entered an alley but it had only Muslim houses. Thwarted, he turned the stream of his lava in another direction. He reached a bazaar. Raising his axe high in the air, he began to twirl it ferociously and spew the most god-awful mother-sister profanities that he could think of.

Suddenly, he made the painful discovery that all this while he had been uttering only mother-sister curses. Now he began to scream daughter-related obscenities and in one single breath spat out all the daughter curses he knew. Still he felt no better. Irritable and dissatisfied, he walked towards a house whose doorway had something written over it in Hindi.

The door was locked from inside. Like a madman, Qasim began to strike it with his axe. In a matter of minutes, the door broke into pieces. Qasim entered the house. It was a small house.

Qasim forced the choicest profanities from his parched throat and shouted, ‘Come out! Come out!’

The door to the verandah directly in front of him creaked. Qasim kept forcing a stream of obscenities from his parched throat till, finally, the door opened and a girl appeared.

Qasim clenched his teeth then thundered, ‘Who are you?’

The girl ran her tongue over dry lips and answered, ‘A Hindu.’

Qasim stood ramrod erect. He looked at the girl with fire-shot eyes. She was barely fourteen or fifteen years old. He dropped the axe from his hand. Like a falcon he pounced upon the girl and shoved her into the verandah. And, then, began to tear her clothes with both his hands like a man possessed. Scraps and shreds of fabric began to fly in all directions as though someone was carding cotton. Qasim remained busy taking his vengeance for about half an hour. The girl offered no resistance because she had become unconscious as soon as she had fallen on the floor.

When Qasim opened his eyes he found he had both his hands wrapped tightly around the girl’s throat. With a jerk, he removed them and jumped to his feet. Drenched in sweat, he looked once in her direction so that he could fully satisfy himself.

Barely a yard away, lay the dead body of a young girl — naked, absolutely naked. Fair complexioned, taut and nubile; the small pert breasts were raised towards the ceiling. Qasim’s eyes shut tightly of their own volition. He covered his face with both his hands. The hot sweat that drenched his body turned into a sheet of ice and the lava coursing through his veins hardened into a rock.

In a little while a man entered the house, brandishing a sword. He saw a man with eyes tightly shut trying to throw a blanket with trembling hands over something lying on the floor. He thundered, ‘Who are you?’

Qasim was startled. His eyes flew open. Yet he couldn’t see a thing.

The man with the sword shouted, ‘Qasim!’

Once again, Qasim got startled. He tried to peer at the man standing not far away but he couldn’t recognize him because his eyes refused to see anything.

Nervously, the man asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

With quivering hands, Qasim pointed at the blanket lying on the floor and in a hollow voice uttered only one word, ‘Sharifan…’

The man stepped forward urgently and pushed the blanket aside. The first sight of the naked corpse made him tremble; abruptly he shut his eyes tightly. The sword fell from his hand. With his hand over his eyes, he left the house on wobbly legs, muttering ‘Bimla … Bimla …’

NAKED VOICES

Bholu and Gama were brothers. Both were extremely hard working. Bholu was an itinerant tinsmith. Every morning he would set out on his rounds with his little torch perched atop his head. He would roam the streets and alleys of the city calling out to people to get their dishes and utensils tin-coated. Every evening when he returned he would invariably have three or four rupees tucked into the fold of his tehmad.

Gama was a hawker. He too roamed the streets all day long with his basket on top of his head. He too earned three or four rupees every day, but he had the bad habit of drinking. Every evening after buying his evening meal he had to buy a quart of country liquor. The liquor would go straight to his head. Everyone knew he lived to drink.

Bholu tried his best to make Gama, who was two years older, see sense: drinking is not a good habit; you are a married man; why do you waste money; your wife will live a far better life if you save the money you throw on drink every day; do you like to see her go around half- naked dressed in those rags; and so on and so forth. Bholu’s words would go into Gama’s one ear and come out of the other. Till, finally, Bholu admitted defeat and stopped saying anything on the subject.

Both were refugees. They had found a large building with many servant quarters. Like many other squatters, they had staked their claim to a quarter on the second floor. This was home for them.

Winter passed easily enough but when summer came, life became difficult for poor Gama. Bholu would spread a cot on the roof and sleep comfortably enough but what was poor Gama to do? He had a wife and upstairs there was no provision for any sort of curtain. Gama was not alone in this; all the married men who lived in these quarters faced the same dilemma.

One day Kallan came up with a bright idea. He put a screen of sackcloth all around his cot. And so a shield of sorts was created. The others followed suit and put up similar scaffolding around the beds they shared with their wives. Bholu pitched in to help his brother and in a few days the two dug bamboos and made a curtain of jute sacks and old blankets. While it was true that the screen blocked the wind, it was still much better than the inferno downstairs in the quarter.

Sleeping on the roof brought about a strange change in Bholu’s character. So far, he had never been much of a believer in marriage. In fact, he had decided never to get caught in the marital trap. Whenever Gama raised the subject of his marriage, he would always say, ‘No, brother, I don’t want to take on unnecessary troubles.’ But with the coming of summer and sleeping on the roof for ten or fifteen days, he soon changed his mind. One evening, he told his brother, ‘Get me married or I shall go mad.’

Gama asked, ‘Is this some sort of a joke?’

But Bholu became even more serious and said, ‘You don’t know … I have been awake for fifteen nights.’

Gama asked, ‘Why? What has happened?’

‘Nothing much, except that left, right … on every side there is some thing happening…there are strange voices and peculiar sounds from every direction. Can anyone sleep in such circumstances?’

Gama laughed heartily from behind his thick moustaches.

Bholu became suddenly bashful. Then he said, ‘That Kallan, he is the limit! He talks such rubbish all night long … And that wife of his … she is as unstoppable as he is! Their kids are lying around sleeping, but do they care!’

As always, Gama was sitting and drinking. When Bholu went away, he gathered his cronies and told them with great relish that his brother could not sleep these days. And when he came to the reason why poor Bholu could not sleep and began to explain it at some length in his inimitable style, his audience began to hold their sides and roll with mirth. The next time Gama’s drinking buddies met Bholu, they teased him mercilessly. One asked, ‘Tell us, what does Kallan say to his wife?’ Another said, ‘So, you get your thrills free … you watch films all night long … that too talkies!’ Others said other, far more naughty things. Bholu got irritated with their bawdy jokes.

The next day he caught hold of Gama at a time when Gama was sober and said, ‘You have turned me into a joke. Look here, whatever I told you was not a figment of my imagination. I am human. By God, I tell you, I can’t sleep! It has been twenty days since I have been awake. You get me married quickly or else, I swear by all that is holy, I shall crack up. Your wife has the five hundred rupees that I have been saving … use it to make all the necessary arrangements.’

Gama twisted his moustache thoughtfully and then said, ‘All right, everything will be taken care of. I shall talk to my wife tonight and ask her to find a suitable girl from among her friends.’

Within a month and a half a bride had been found and all the necessary preparations made. Gama’s wife chose Aisha, the tinsmith Samad’s daughter. She was a pretty girl, knew household chores and Samad too was a decent sort. People in the neighbourhood respected him. Bholu was a good catch — he was hard working and healthy. A date for the wedding was fixed for the middle of June. Samad protested that he didn’t want to get his daughter married at the peak of summer, but when Gama insisted, he had to give in.

Four days before the wedding, Bholu made arrangements for his bride by erecting jute matting around the cot. He fixed stout bamboo poles and made sure the matting was securely tied. He got the cot strung with fresh ropes and bought a brand new earthen pot to keep on the ledge beside his bed. He even bought new glasses to drink from. He did all this with great care and enthusiasm.

The first night he slept behind the sack curtain, he felt a bit odd. He was used to the fresh cool air but decided he better get used to this. He had begun to sleep behind the curtain four days before the wedding. The first night he lay there and thought of his wife-to-be he became drenched in sweat. The voices began to echo in his ears — voices that wouldn’t let him sleep and would make the strangest of thoughts race through his head.

‘Will we also produce the same sounds?… Will the people around us listen to our sounds? … Will they also stay awake all night long because our voices will not let them sleep? … What if someone were to peer?’

Poor Bholu grew even more agitated. Only one worry niggled away at him: is a sack cloth any sort of curtain at all? There are people scattered in every direction; the smallest rustle can be heard in the still of the night. How do people live such naked lives? There is only one roof; the wife lies on one cot, the husband on the other. Countless eyes and ears are wide open in every direction. Even if they can’t see in the dark, they can hear everything. The smallest sound can make an entire picture come to life … What can the sack curtain do? The moment the sun comes up, everything is laid bare … There is Kallan pumping his wife’s breasts … There in that corner lies his brother Gama. His tehmad is undone and lying crumpled in one corner. You can see the exposed stomach of Shanda, the sweetmaker Eidu’s unmarried daughter, peering through a gap in the sack curtain.

The wedding day dawned and Bholu felt like running away, but where could he go? He was caught in a trap of his own making. Had he run away he would surely have committed suicide! But what a disgrace it would bring to the poor unfortunate girl! And the fuss everyone would make!

‘All right, let it be! After all, everyone does it. I shall get used to it, too.’ Bholu tried to bolster his courage as best as he could and brought his bride home.

A ripple of excitement ran through the quarters. People congratulated both Gama and Bholu. Some of Bholu’s close friends teased him and tried to teach him a trick or two for the wedding night. Bholu heard them in silence. Gama’s wife spread the bedding for the newly-weds behind the sack curtain. Gama placed four large garlands of fragrant jasmine flowers beside the pillow. A friend bought some jalebis dunked in milk.

For a long time Bholu sat with his bride in the quarter below. The poor girl sat huddled under her bridal finery with her head covered and bowed. The heat was stifling. Bholu’s new kurta stuck to his body with sweat. He tried to fan himself with a hand-held fan but the air was still and heavy. Bholu had earlier decided that he wouldn’t go up to the roof, that he would spend the night here, below in the quarter but when the heat became unbearable he got up and asked his bride to come with him.

They reached the roof and found utter stillness and quiet. As the bride walked demurely towards the bed, her silver anklets spoke up with every shy step. Bholu felt as though the sleep that lay blanketed all about them was jolted to life. People began to toss and turn on their cots. Others began to cough and clear their throats. Whispers and murmurs began to float in the turgid air. Flustered, Bholu grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her hurriedly towards the sack curtain. The sound of muffled laughter reached his ears. His anxiety grew. He tried speaking to his wife but the whisperings all around him seemed to increase. In the far corner where Kallan had his bed, the cot began to creak insistently: chur-choo, chur-choo. When it died down, Gama’s iron cot began to speak.

Shanda the sweetmaker’s unmarried daughter got up several times to drink water. Every time her glass knocked against the pot, it sounded like an explosion to Bholu’ ears. The sound of a match being lit came repeatedly from Khaire, the butcher’s son’s cot. Bholu abandoned all attempts at making a conversation with his bride. He was scared that the ears around him would swallow his words and all the cots would begin a chorus of chur-choo, chur-choo. With bated breath, he lay still and silent. Occasionally, he would steal a timid glance at his wife, who lay huddled up in the cot near his. She lay awake for some time and then fell asleep.

Bholu wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Every few minutes some sound would reach his ears … the sounds would cause entire, life-like pictures to come to life and stand before him.

His heart had been filled with such hopes and so much excitement at the prospect of marriage. From the day he had decided to get married, his head had been buzzing with all those tantalising delights with which he had for so long been unacquainted. The thought of marriage would make a strange sort of heat course through his body, a nice, pleasurable sort of warmth. But now the very thought of his ‘first night’ left him cold! He tried several times to rekindle those warmth-inducing feelings but the voices — those picture-painting voices — would destroy everything. He began to feel naked, absolutely naked, and everyone all around him was staring wide-eyed at him and laughing.

At about 4.00 in the morning he got up and drank a glass of cold water. He thought a bit. Sternly, he tried to dispel the anxiety that gripped him. A cool breeze was blowing. Bholu turned towards Kallan’s corner. The frayed edges of his sack curtain were moving in the breeze. Kallu was lying stark naked beside his wife. The sight nauseated him; it also made him angry: why must the breeze blow on such roofs? And, if it must blow, why must it tease sack curtains such as these? He felt like pulling down all the sack curtains and tearing off his own clothes and dancing naked on the rooftop.

But he didn’t do that; instead he left for work as always. His friends looked at him knowingly and asked him about his first night. Fuji, the tailor, called out, ‘So, how was it? Hope you haven’t blotted our name?’

A little later he met a tinsmith who asked him in a mysterious sort of way, ‘Look here, let me know if there is something amiss; I have this great recipe that works wonders.’

Another fellow thumped him on the shoulder and exclaimed, ‘So, my dear wrestler, how was the bout?’

Bholu remained quiet.

According to custom, Bholu’s wife went to her parents’ home. She returned after five or six days and once again, Bholu found himself in the same dilemma. It was as though everyone who slept on the roof had been waiting for his wife to return. The past few nights had been quiet but the night he came to sleep there with his wife the same things started all over again: the whisperings and murmurings, the chur-choo, chur-choo, the coughing and clearing of throats, the knocking of the glass against the pot, the tossings and turnings on creaking beds, the stifled laughs. Bholu would lie awake all night long and stare at the sky. Once in a while, he would sigh deeply and look longingly at his wife and he would fret, ‘What has happened to me? … What has happened to me? … Oh, what has happened to me?’

This continued for seven nights. Till, finally, in despair Bholu sent his bride away to her parents’ home. Twenty-odd days passed. One day Gama said to Bholu, ‘You are a strange fellow! How can you send your newly-wed bride to her parents’? She has been gone for so many days, how the hell do you sleep alone?’

Bholu answered briefly, ‘It is all right.’

Gama asked, ‘What is all right? Why don’t you tell me? What is the matter? Don’t you like Aisha?’

‘It isn’t that.’

‘What is it, then?’

Bholu did not answer. A few days later, Gama raised the subject again. Bholu got up and left the quarter. A cot was placed outside their house. He went out and sat down on it. He could hear his sister-in-law’s voice. She was talking to Gama inside and saying, ‘You know, you are wrong when you say that Bholu does not like Aisha.’

Bholu heard Gama ask, ‘What is the matter then? He doesn’t seem at all interested in her.’

‘And why would he be interested in her?’

‘Why not?’

Bholu couldn’t hear what Gama’s wife said to him, yet he felt as though someone had put his very being, his identity in a pestle and mortar and ground it to smithereens. Then he heard Gama say loudly, ‘No, no! Who told you that?’

Gama’s wife answered, ‘Aisha told one of her friends … it reached me in a roundabout way.’

Gama spoke in a shocked sort of way, ‘This is terrible!’

Sitting outside, Bholu felt a knife penetrate his heart. Something snapped inside him. He got to his feet and climbed up to the roof. He began to pull and tear all the sack curtains that hung on poles. People heard the commotion and came running. They tried to stop him but he began to fight with them. Soon matters became ugly. Kallan picked a pole and hit him on the head. Bholu fell down in a swoon and lost consciousness. When he came to, he had lost his mind.

Now Bholu roams around buck-naked. If he sees a sack curtain, he pounces on it and tears it to shreds.

LOSER ALL THE WAY

There are people who only enjoy winning, but he liked to lose everything after he had won it.

He never found it difficult to win, but he often had to put in a lot of hard work to lose. In the early days, when he used to work in a bank, his friends and relatives made fun of his desire to amass wealth. But when he left his job at the bank and came away to Bombay, all too soon he had begun to help out his friends and relatives by lending them money.

Bombay offered him many avenues, but he had chosen the world of films for himself. There was money in it, and there was fame. He could wander at will in this new world, amass wealth with both hands, and lose it too with both hands if he so wished. And that was why he had chosen to be a player in this field.

He made — and lost — not lakhs but crores of rupees. It didn’t take him as long to make that money as it did to squander it away. He wrote songs for a film and demanded a lakh of rupees. But it took him some time to fritter it all away at brothels, gay parties, horse racing and gambling dens.

He made a film. It earned him a profit of ten lakh rupees. Now rose the question of spending it here, there, everywhere. So he devised a way in which there was a slip at every step. He bought three cars — one new, two old which he knew were no good at all. He parked the old cars outside his house — to rot and rust away. The one that was new was locked up inside the garage on the pretext that there was no petrol to be found. A taxi would do very well for him. He would take one in the morning. After a mile or two, he would have it stopped. Then he would enter a gambling den and emerge the next day after losing a couple of thousand rupees. The taxi would remain parked outside. He would get into it, return home and knowingly forget to settle its bill. In the evening he would come out and, upon finding the taxi still waiting, pretend to scold the driver, ‘You oaf, you are still standing here! Come with me to the office and I will have your account settled ….’ And he would once again forget to pay the money on reaching the office ….

One after the other, several of his films became ‘hits’. He broke all previous records of success. Heaps of wealth grew around him. His fame touched the skies. In a fit of pique, he produced a couple of the most awful films imaginable whose failure too was in a league of their own. As he went down, he pulled others down into rack and ruin. But soon enough he rolled up his sleeves. He consoled those who had been destroyed because of him and produced a film that became the proverbial gold mine.

He displayed a similar streak of winning and losing when it came to women. He would pluck a woman from a brothel or a party, groom her to perfection, place her on the high pedestal of fame, and then after he had destroyed every last bit of her womanhood, give her ample opportunities to take her affections to another man.

He met and played with the wealthiest of men and the prettiest of boys. Many fierce battles were fought. The dice was rolled and the game of politics played. But, always, he would thrust his hand in the thorniest bush, pluck the choicest flower and emerge unscathed. The very next day he would strut about with the flower in his buttonhole and create an opportunity to allow an opponent to pounce and get away with his trophy.

Once when he had been visiting a gambling den on Forres Road for ten days in a row, he became obsessed with the desire to lose. Though he had lately lost an extremely pretty actress as well as ten lakh rupees in a movie, the two events were still not enough to bring solace to his hungry heart. These two losses had occurred rather precipitously and were not entirely his doing. Miffed by his own lack of foresight, he was now determinedly losing a certain fixed amount everyday at the Forres Road gambling den.

He would set off every evening with two hundred rupees in his pocket. His taxi would cruise past the grilled cages of the prostitutes and stop beside an electric pole. He would step out, place the thick-rimmed spectacles firmly on his nose, adjust his dhoti, look to the right where an extremely beautiful woman would be sitting holding a broken sliver of glass and meticulously applying her make-up inside her iron-grilled room, and climb the stairs to the casino above.

For ten days now he had been coming to this casino in Forres Road to lose two hundred rupees every single day. Some days the two hundred rupees would go in a couple of rounds, some days it would be nearly dawn by the time he managed to lose them all.

On the eleventh day, when the taxi stopped beside the electric pole, he placed the thick-rimmed glasses firmly on his nose, adjusted his dhoti and happened to glance to the right, he suddenly realized that for the past ten days he had actually been looking at an extremely ugly woman. As always, she was sitting on a wooden settee looking into a broken hand mirror and was engrossed in putting on her make-up.

He approached her iron grill and looked closely at her. She was middle aged, with a smooth dark complexion, and the small blue dots tattooed on her cheeks and chin were nearly the same colour as her skin. Her teeth were crooked, her gums rotting with tobacco and paan. He wondered who in his right mind would come to this woman.

He took another step towards the iron cage and the woman looked up and smiled. She kept the mirror to one side, and asked crudely, ‘So, seth, will you stay?’

He looked more closely at the woman who even at her age seemed to think that she could still get clients. He was amazed. And so he asked, ‘How old are you?’

This seemed to hurt the woman somewhat. She made a face and flung an obscenity at him, probably in Marathi. He realized his mistake and so, with complete innocence, said, ‘Forgive me. I made an idle query, but I am surprised by one thing: I see you sitting here every evening, all dolled up. Do you get any clients?’

The woman didn’t answer. Once again, he realized his mistake. This time, without any particular eagerness, he asked, ‘What’s your name?’

The woman, who was about to part the curtain and go inside, stopped and said, ‘Gangubai.’

‘How much do you earn everyday, Gangubai?’

There was genuine sympathy in his voice. Gangubai approached the iron grill. ‘Six or seven rupees … sometimes not even that.’

‘Six or seven rupees and sometimes not even that,’ repeating Gangubai’s words he remembered the two hundred rupees in his pocket which he had brought along solely with the intention of losing. Suddenly he was struck by a thought. ‘Look here, Gangubai, you say you earn six or seven rupees every day — I will give you ten rupees every day.’

‘To stay?’

‘No, but if you like, you can think it is for staying with you,’ and he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a ten-rupee note and passed it though the iron bars of the cage. ‘Here, take this.’

Gangubai took the note but there was a huge question mark on her face.

‘I shall give you ten rupees everyday at this hour, but I have a condition…’

‘What condition?’

‘That you take the ten rupees, eat your dinner, and go to sleep. I should not see your light on at night.’

A strange smile flickered across Gangubai’s face.

‘Don’t smile; I am a man of my word.’

And so saying, he went up to the casino. On the stairs, he thought, ‘I had to lose this money in any case. If not two hundred, I still have a hundred and ninety to lose.’

Several days passed. Everyday, without fail, his taxi would stop beside the electric pole. He would open the door and step out. Through his thick-rimmed glasses he would look towards the right and find Gangubai sitting on the wooden settee in her iron cage. He would adjust his dhoti, approach the grilled cage, take out a ten-rupee note and hand it to Gangubai. Gangubai would touch her forehead with the note in a gesture of salaam, he would climb the stairs to the casino to lose a hundred and ninety rupees. During these days, whenever he would come down after losing all his money — whether it was eleven or twelve in the night or three or four in the morning — he would always find Gangubai’s shop closed.

One day when he gave the ten rupees and came up, he ended up losing all his money by ten o’clock. He landed up with a hand of cards that relieved him of his hundred and ninety rupees in a matter of a few hours. As he came down and was about to get into his waiting taxi he saw that Gangubai’s shop was open and sitting on the settee in her cage was Gangubai — waiting for her clients.

He got out of the taxi and approached her cage. Gangubai saw him and looked nervously about, but there was nothing she could do.

‘What is this, Gangubai?’

Gangubai did not answer.

‘I am sad to see that you have not lived up to your promise. I told you, didn’t I, that I should not see your light on in the night? But look at you, you are sitting here like this…’

There was pain in his voice; it touched Gangubai.

‘You are bad,’ he said and started to move away.

Gangubai called out, ‘Wait.’

He stopped. Gangubai spoke slowly, biting every word with care: ‘I am bad. But who is good here? Seth, you can give ten rupees and cause one light to be switched off, but look around you … See … there are lights everywhere.’

He turned to look down the length of the narrow street lined with cages. There was a never-ending row of grill-fronted shops and countless bulbs were flickering in the muddy night air.

‘Can you cause all these lights to be switched off?’

Through his thick-rimmed glasses, he first looked at the naked bulb hanging above Gangubai’s head, then at Gangubai’s dusky earth-coloured face and bent his head. ‘No, Gangubai, I can’t.’

When he got into the taxi, his heart was as empty as his pocket.

A DAY IN 1919

It is about those days in 1919, brother, when agitations against the Rowlatt Act had sprung up all across the Punjab. I am talking about Amritsar. Sir Michael O’Dwyer had forbidden Mahatma Gandhi from entering the Punjab under the Defence of India Rules. Gandhiji was on his way when he was stopped near Palwal, arrested and sent back to Bombay. As far as I can understand, brother, had the English not committed this grave mistake, the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, which is the bloodiest chapter in the history of British rule in India, would never have occurred.

Whether Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs, all held Gandhiji in veneration. Everyone considered him to be a ‘mahatma’, a great man, a truly evolved spirit. When the news of his arrest reached Lahore, all business came to a standstill. When people in Amritsar heard of this, complete and total strikes paralyzed the city within the snap of a finger.

It is said that by the evening of 9 April, orders banishing Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew from the district had already reached the Deputy Commissioner. However, he wasn’t ready to carry out the orders because he was convinced there was no danger of riots or disturbances in Amritsar. People had been staging peaceful demonstrations to express their discontent, but there was no question of any sort of violence. I am telling you what I saw with my own eyes. It was the festival of Ramnavmi on 9 April. As always, a procession was carried out but nowhere did anyone take one objectionable step against the wishes of the administration. But, brother, Sir Michael was a mad man. He refused to listen to the deputy commissioner. He was convinced that the political leaders of the day were hell bent upon overturning the imperial rule at the Mahatma’s behest. And these same leaders were part of a grand conspiracy behind all the strikes and processions.

The news of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew’s banishment spread like wildfire. People were sore and heartsick. They were gripped by the fear that something terrible could happen anytime. But, brother, there was no stopping their commitment to the cause. Shops were shut down and the city looked like a graveyard. But in the stillness of this graveyard lay a clamour. When news of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew’s arrest reached them, thousands of people gathered so that together they could go to meet the deputy commissioner and petition him to revoke the orders banishing their beloved leaders. But the time, brother, was not right for receiving petitions. A tyrant like Sir Michael was the ruler. Forget accepting the petition, he decreed that the crowd that had assembled was unconstitutional and illegal!

Amritsar — the Amritsar that had once been the greatest hub of the Independence struggle, the city that had proudly borne the wound of Jallianwala Bagh on its chest like a medal — look at the state of that city today! Anyhow, let that pass. It pains my heart. People say that the English are responsible for what happened here in this sacred city five years ago. Maybe so, brother, but if you ask me the truth, I will say that it is our own hands that are sullied in the blood that was spilt here. Anyhow, let that pass.

The deputy commissioner’s bungalow was in the Civil Lines. All the big officers and their self-important toadies lived in this exclusive part of the city. If you have been to Amritsar, then you would know that a bridge joins the city and the Civil Lines, and you need to cross this bridge to come to that secluded haven where the city’s elite have built their piece of heaven on earth.

As the crowd surged towards the gate of the City Hall, they found white soldiers mounted on horses patrolling the bridge. Still, the crowd did not stop. Brother, I was part of that procession. I can’t describe the passion that raged in every breast. Yet every single man was unarmed; they did not even have a stick among them. They had left their homes and spilled out on to the streets with the simple desire to take their single request to the commissioner to free Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew without imposing conditions of any sort. The crowd moved towards the bridge without stopping. The white soldiers opened fire. It caused a stampede. The soldiers were no more than twenty or so; the crowd ran into thousands. Brother, you cannot imagine the panic that even a stray bullet can cause. The chaos that followed had to be seen to be believed! Some fell to the bullets; some were wounded in the stampede.

A dirty water drain ran on the left. A push from the crowd and I fell into it. When the hail of bullets dried up, I climbed out of the drain and saw that the crowd had dispersed. The wounded lay strewn on the road and the white soldiers stood about laughing and cracking jokes. Brother, I cannot describe the state of my mind at that moment. I suspect I was not entirely in control of my senses. I certainly was not fully conscious of anything around me when I had fallen into the drain. By the time I came out, gradually, very gradually, the events that had occurred began to take shape, form and coherence.

In the distance, I could hear shouts — as though a lot of people were speaking very loudly and angrily together. I crossed the drain, skirted the grave of the Blessed Zahira, and reached the gate of the Town Hall. There, I found a group of 30–40 excited youth hurling stones at the gate. When the glass panes in the gate fell in slivers on the road, one youth said to another, ‘Let’s go and break the statue of the Queen.’

Another said, ‘No, no, let’s burn the kotwali instead.’

A third said, ‘And all the banks, too!’

A fourth said, ‘Wait! What good will that do? Instead, let’s go and kill the white soldiers on the bridge.’

I recognized the fourth man. It was Thaila Kanjar. His real name was Mohammad Tufail, but everyone knew him as Thaila Kanjar. He had been born from the womb of a prostitute. And a good-for-nothing he was, too! He had begun drinking and gambling while still very young. He had two sisters — Shamshad and Almas — two of the prettiest prostitutes of their time. Shamshad could sing very well. Rich aristocrats would flock from miles around to hear her. The sisters despaired of their brother and his feckless ways. Everyone in the city knew that they had given him the boot. Yet, somehow or the other, he managed to extract enough money from them to get by. And not just get by, he ate well and drank well. In fact, he was known to be quite a dandy. He was a raconteur and an aesthete. He knew how to spin a tale and crack a joke. There was none of the bawdiness of someone from his ‘trade’. A tall man with a strong well-built body, he had a finely-etched face.

The excited youth paid no heed to his words and headed towards the Queen’s statue. Once again, Thaila Kanjar said, ‘Don’t fritter away your enthusiasm. Come with me. Come, let us go and kill those whites. They have taken the lives of our innocent people and injured them. By God, if we want we can wring their necks. Come! Come with me!’

Some of the young men had already begun to walk away; others stopped. When Thaila began to move towards the bridge, they followed him. I said to myself, why are these poor hapless young men walking towards certain death? I called out to Thaila from my hiding place beside a fountain, ‘Don’t go. Why are you bent upon killing yourself and these poor innocents?’

Thaila heard me and laughed a strange laugh. He said, ‘Thaila only wants to prove that he is not afraid of bullets.’ Then he turned towards the crowd and said, ‘You may turn back if you are scared.’

How could advancing steps retreat at a time like this? That, too, when the man leading them was walking bravely in the face of extreme danger? When Thaila increased his pace, his companions had to perforce do the same.

It wasn’t a great distance from the gate of the Town Hall to the bridge — it must have been no more than 60 or 70 yards. Thaila was leading the pack. Two mounted white soldiers stood 15 or 20 steps from the railings on either side of the bridge. They opened fire by the time Thaila, shouting slogans, reached the mouth of the bridge. I had thought he would collapse in a heap there and then but I looked up and saw he was alive and still walking. His companions had fled by now. He turned around and shouted, ‘Don’t run away! Come with me!’

He had turned around, facing me, when there was another fire. He turned towards the white soldiers, his hand moved along his back. Brother, I shouldn’t have seen anything but I can tell you I saw bloodstains on his white shirt. He moved swiftly, like a wounded lion. The sound of another bullet rang out. He tottered a bit, then controlled himself and moved surefootedly towards one of the mounted soldiers. In the blink of an eye, the horse’s back was empty. The white soldier lay on the ground and Thaila was grappling on top of him. The other white soldier, who was mounted on the other horse close by, got over his initial stupefaction, reined in his panic-stricken horse and opened a volley of shots. I don’t know what happened thereafter. I fainted and fell down beside the fountain.

Brother, when I regained consciousness, I was home. Some passers- by who recognized me, had brought me home. They later told me that the firing on the bridge had enraged the crowd. As a result, the statue of the Queen had been destroyed. The Town Hall and three banks had been set on fire. Five or six Europeans had been murdered. And there had been much looting and chaos.

The English officers were not particularly bothered by the loot and arson. The blood bath at Jallianwala Bagh took place to avenge the killing of these five or six Europeans. The deputy commissioner had handed over the reins of maintaining law and order to General Dwyer. On 12 April, the General had marched through the markets and street of the city and ordered the arrest of scores of innocent people. About 25,000 people had assembled in Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April. General Dwyer had arrived with armed Gurkhas and Sikhs and rained bullets upon those poor unarmed people.

No one could tell right away how many lives had been lost that day in Jallianwala Bagh but later, when inquiries and probes were conducted, it was found that a 1000 people had died and 3000–4000 had been injured. Anyhow, I was telling you about Thaila. Brother, I have told you what I saw with my own eyes. Only God Almighty is faultless and pure. The deceased was guilty of all four sins that are banned by the Sharia. He may have been born from the womb of a professional courtesan, but he was a brave man. I can tell you with complete certainty that he was hit by the first bullet fired by the white soldier. When he had turned around and urged his companions to follow him, perhaps in the heat of the moment he had not realized that the hot lead had already pierced his chest. The second bullet had hit his back, the third his chest. I didn’t see it, but I have heard that when Thaila’s corpse was removed from the white soldier’s body, Thaila’s hands were clasped so tightly around the dead man’s neck that it had been difficult to prise them free.

The next day when Thaila’s corpse was handed over to his family for the last rites, his body was found to be riddled with shots. The other white soldier had emptied his entire cartridge in Thaila’s body. But by then Thaila’s soul had departed from his body and the white soldier was merely target practising on a dead body.

I have heard that when Thaila’s corpse was brought home, loud cries of lamentation had rent the neighbourhood. Thaila was not especially popular among his people but the sight of his body, looking like mince meat, had made grown men cry like babies. His sisters, Shamshad and Almas, had fainted. When the body was being taken away for burial, their wailing and weeping had made the assembled mourners shed tears of blood.

Brother, I had once read somewhere that the first shot fired during the French Revolution had hit a prostitute. The late Mohammad Tufail was the son of a prostitute. In this struggle to bring about a revolution, whether it was the first bullet or the tenth or the fiftieth, no one has made any attempt to find out. Perhaps because he had no real social standing. I think Thaila Kanjar does not even feature among the list of those who died in that blood bath. For that matter, no one knows if such a list has ever been compiled.

Those were days of tumult. The army held sway. The ogre called Martial Law went about snorting and bellowing through the streets and alleys of the city. In that free-for-all state of chaos, poor Thaila was buried with indecent haste as though his death was the cause of such a great shame on the part of his relatives that they had to instantly remove every trace of it.

‘And, brother, Thaila died. He was buried … and … and ….’ For the first time since he had launched into his story, my companion checked himself and fell silent. The train kept rushing on. The tracks began to sing, ‘Thaila died … Thaila was buried.’ There was no gap, no space, no distance, between his death and his burial. As though he had died one minute, and been buried the next. The rattling tracks and the rhythmic beat of those words were so entirely bereft of feeling that I had to drag my mind away from their staccato beat. And so I said to my fellow-traveller, ‘You were about to say something when you stopped?’

Startled, he turned around to face me and said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, a poignant part of that tale is still left.’

I asked, ‘What?’

He began to speak: ‘As I had told you, Thaila had two sisters — Shamshad and Almas — who were extremely beautiful. Shamshad was tall with slender features and big eyes. She sang the thumri very well. People say she had trained under Khan Saheb Fateh Ali Khan. The other, Almas, could not carry a note, but there was none who could match her steps. When she danced, it seemed every pore, every part of her body came alive. Every gesture spoke volumes. Her eyes had a magic that entranced you and caught you unawares.’

My companion was busy heaping praises upon the duo, yet I thought it best not to interrupt. Finally, he emerged from his long- winded eulogies and came to the sad part of the tale. ‘It so happened, brother, that some toady had gone to the English officers and told them about the beauteous sisters. An Englishwoman had been killed during the riots … What was the name of that witch?…. Miss … Miss Sherwood! And, so it was decided that the sisters would be sent for and revenge would be taken in ample measure. You do understand how, don’t you, brother?’

I said, ‘I do.’

My companion took a long, deep sigh. ‘In some delicate matters, even prostitutes and courtesans are, after all, mothers and sisters. But, Brother, sometimes I think our country has lost all sense of shame. When the order was conveyed from the top, the thanedar himself immediately agreed to go. He went to the sisters’ house and told them that the English sahab had sent for them to sing and dance. The soil on their brother’s grave was still fresh. He had been dead for just two days when the orders came: Come! Come and dance before us! Can there be a more terrifying way of causing hurt. I doubt if there can be another greater example of cruelty. Did those who issued these instructions not stop to consider that even prostitutes can have some self-respect? After all, they can, can’t they?’ Evidently, he was asking himself that question even though he was talking to me.

I asked, ‘Did they go?’

My companion answered, somewhat sadly, after a while. ‘Yes, yes, they did — and they went dressed to kill.’ Suddenly, his sadness acquired an edge of sarcasm. ‘They went made up to their eyebrows. People say, it was quite an occasion. The sisters were in peak form. Dressed in all their finery, they looked like fairy princesses. Wine flowed like water. People say, at two past midnight, when a senior officer finally gave a signal, the merriment eventually wound up.’ The man got up and began to watch the trees racing past the window.

His last two words began to dance to the tune of the wheels and the tracks: ‘Wound up, wound up, wound up.’

I tried to wrench them free from the rumbling inside my head and asked, ‘What happened then?’

Removing his gaze from the trees and poles running past, he spoke clearly and firmly, ‘They tore off their fine garments. Standing stark naked before the English officers, they said, “We are Thaila’s sisters — sisters of that martyr whom you riddled with bullets simply because he possessed a soul that loved his country. We are his beautiful sisters. Come and besmirch our fragrant bodies with the molten lead of your lust. But before you do that let us spit on your faces — once!”’

And with that, the man fell silent, as though he would not speak again. I asked immediately, ‘What happened then?’

Tears came to his eyes. He said, ‘They were shot dead.’

I said nothing. The train slowed to a halt at the station. He called a coolie to carry his luggage. As he prepared to leave, I said, ‘I suspect you coined the ending of that particular story.’

Startled, he turned around and asked, ‘How do you know?’

I said, ‘There was a deep anguish in your voice.’

Swallowing the bitterness in his throat with his spit, my fellow-traveller said, ‘Yes, those bitches…’ He checked the invectives that rose to his lips. ‘They defiled the name of their martyred brother,’ he said and got off the train.

COWARD

The field was clear, but Javed was convinced that the lantern fixed by the Municipal Committee to the wall was staring at him. The wide courtyard, paved in a criss-cross fashion with thin, hand-fired Nanakshahi bricks, lay in front and on its own — as if away from the other buildings. Time and time again he tried crossing the courtyard to reach the corner house but that lantern, which was staring at him with its unblinking needle-sharp gaze, made his resolve totter and he would move away a few paces, closer to the big sewer. If he had wanted, he could have jumped across the sewer and crossed the courtyard in a few paces — just a few paces!

Javed lived far away from here but had reached here virtually in no time at all. His thoughts had raced faster than his steps. His mind had dwelt on many things on the way. He was no fool. He knew well enough that he was on his way to a prostitute and knew even better why he wanted to go to her.

He needed a woman — a woman, no matter what kind of woman. The need for a woman had not come up all of a sudden; it had been growing slowly inside him for a long time till it had attained its present form and now, suddenly, he felt as though he could not live another moment without a woman. He must get a woman — a woman whose thigh he could slap lightly, whose voice he could hear, a woman with whom he could talk in the most obscene manner possible.

Javed was an educated, sober sort of a chap. He knew the rights and wrongs, but in this matter was not willing to think any further. A desire had arisen deep inside him; it wasn’t a new desire by any means. It had sprung up several times before and, each time had been met with frustration despite innumerable attempts on his part. Defeated, he had reached the conclusion that he would never find a complete woman and if he were to continue searching for such a woman, he might one day just fall upon some woman walking by the road — like a mad dog that can bite any passerby.

Having failed to even pounce upon a passing woman like a mad dog, a new thought had crossed his mind. Now he no longer dreamt of passing his fingers through a woman’s hair. He still had a picture of the woman in his mind — the woman even had hair — but now he dreamt of pulling her hair out by the clumps, like a savage beast.

By now that image had quite left his mind — the image of a woman on whose lips, he thought, he would rest his own like a butterfly on a flower. Now he wanted to brand those lips with his hot lips. The thought of murmuring sweet nothings in a woman’s ear too had left him by now. He wanted to speak in a loud grating voice — speak of things that were as naked as his intentions.

Now there was no single, complete woman in his mind. He wanted a woman who had been chaffed and worn out so much that she looked like a low, fallen-down man — a woman who was half woman and half nothing in particular.

There was a time when Javed would feel a special sort of moistness in his eyes when ever he mouthed the word ‘woman’, when the mere thought of a woman would transport him to a strange moon-like place. He would utter the word — ‘woman’ — with the utmost care, scared as though this lifeless word might break with careless handling. For a long time, he had traversed this sublime, moon-like world relishing its pleasures. Till, finally, he discovered that a woman, the sort of woman he longed for, was only the sort that can be dreamt up by a man with a weak stomach!

Javed had now stepped out of the world of dreams. For a long time, he had tried to keep his unruly thoughts under control but now his body had woken up in a terrifying sort of way. The swiftness of his imagination had honed his bodily sensations into such fine zones of feelings that life had turned into a bed of needles for him. Every thought had turned into a spear and the woman had acquired a shape and form that, even if he wanted to, he would have found it difficult to describe her.

Javed had been human once; but now he hated human beings, so much so that he even hated himself. And that is why he wanted to debase himself in such a manner that all those beautiful thoughts that he had once strewn about his mind like flowers in a garden would be besmirched and soiled. ‘I have been unsuccessful in finding refinement, because all around me there is filth. I now want to destroy every atom and pore of my body and soul with this filth. My nose, that once used to quiver in search of fragrances, now twitches in anticipation at the thought of sniffing out the foulest of smells. And that is why, today, I have discarded the cloak of old thoughts and come to this neighbourhood where everything appears to be clothed in a mysterious stink. How frighteningly beautiful this world is!’

The courtyard, paved in a criss-cross fashion with thin, hand-fired Nanakshahi bricks, was in front of him. In the wan light of the lantern, Javed looked at the courtyard with new eyes. It appeared to him as though several naked women were lying there — some on their backs, others face down; all had bones jutting out at odd angles. He resolved to cross the brick-paved floor and reach the staircase of the corner house and climb up to the brothel. But the Municipal Committee’s lantern kept staring unblinkingly at him. His advancing steps retreated and he stopped. Thwarted, he wondered: ‘Why is the lantern staring at me? Why is it putting obstacles in my path?’

He knew it was a figment of his imagination and had nothing to do with reality. Yet, his advancing steps retreated and he stood beside the sewer holding in check all the ugly thoughts rearing in his head. He began to believe that this hesitation of twenty-seven years that had been bequeathed to him as a legacy had seeped into that lantern. That shrinking hesitation, that he thought he had left behind at home like a discarded second skin, had reached here long before him — here where he was about to play the dirtiest game of his life. A game that would cover him with slime and blacken his soul with darkness.

A grubby, filthy woman lived in that house. She kept four or five young women who plied their trade with ceaseless crassness — be it in the full light of day or the darkness of night. These women worked all day and all night like the pump that sucks out filth from choked sewers. A friend had told Javed about them, someone who had buried the corpse of love and beauty innumerable times in this gross graveyard. He used to tell Javed, ‘You go on and on about women, tell me, where is a woman? I have seen a woman only once in my life… my mother. I have seen women in purdah but I have heard a great deal about them too. Whenever I feel the need for a woman I find the choicest companion at Mai Jeeva’s brothel. By God, Mai Jeeva is not a woman; she is an angel. May God make her live till the Day of Judgement!’

Javed had heard a great deal about Mai Jeeva and the four or five women who worked the trade under her. He knew that one of them wore dark glasses all the time because she had lost her eyes due to some disease. Another was a coal-black girl who laughed all the time. Whenever Javed thought of her, a strange picture rose in front of his eyes. ‘I want precisely such a woman… one who laughs all the time. When she laughs, her dark lips must be opening up like the murky bubbles that form in stinking, rotting water and burst when they reach the surface.’

There was another girl at Mai Jeeva’s place, one who, before she joined the profession full time, used to roam the streets and markets begging for a living. She had been in Mai Jeeva’s establishment for a year now, in a house where this business was being transacted for the past eighteen years. The girl used to cover her face with powder and rouge. Javed would think about her, too, sometimes: ‘Her rouged cheeks must be like bruised, slightly rotten apples … that everyone can afford.’

Of the four or five women, Javed didn’t have any particular one in mind. ‘I don’t mind which one I get. I want to hand over the cash, and voila! … A woman should be handed over to me. There shouldn’t be a second’s delay. There shouldn’t be any idle chitter-chatter. Not the slightest polite conversation should escape anyone’s mouth, only the sound of approaching footsteps, the creak of the door as it opens, and the clink of money exchanging hands. A few sounds can be heard but mouths should stay firmly shut. And if any voice is heard, it should not be a human voice. The meeting should be one of beasts. And for a short while, when such a world comes into being, the delicate senses of smell, sight and sound should become as dull as rusty razors.’

Javed became restless. A tumult rose within him. He had made up his mind to such an implacable extent now that, even if there had been mountains blocking his path, he could have removed those too. But the nearly dim lantern put up by the Municipal Committee, which could be snuffed out by the smallest puff of wind, presented an insurmountable hurdle before him.

A paan shop was still open nearby. It was lit by a strong light; in its blinding glare, the variety of things stacked inside could not be made out individually. Flies buzzed around the naked bulb as though their wings had become leaden. Javed looked at the flies and his irritation grew; he did not wish to see any slow-paced creatures. The resolve, to ‘do it’, with which he had set out from his home clashed, again and again, with those flies. The impact of that collision troubled him to such an extent that a storm began to swirl inside his head. ‘I am scared … I am terrified … I am scared of the lantern … It has destroyed all my plans … I am a coward … I am a coward …I ought to be ashamed of myself.’

He cursed and admonished himself in many ways but the desired impact failed to take effect. His feet did not move forward. The courtyard paved in a criss-cross fashion with hand-fired Nanakshahi bricks lay spread-eagled in front of him.

It was summer. Half the night had passed but the wind had still not cooled. The crowds in the bazaar had thinned. Only a handful of shops were open. Everything was wrapped in a sheet of silence. Though, occasionally, a gust of warm wind would carry a snatch of tired music from some brothel that would soon dissolve into the dense silence.

Some signs of life were still visible in front of Javed, that is, on the other side of Mai Jeeva’s hovel, in the rows of brothels lined above the shops in the big bazaar. Directly in front of him, a black-as-coal woman sat by a window, fanning herself in the sharp glare of an electric light. A naked bulb hung directly above the whore and looked like a white-hot ball of fire that was slowly melting and dripping over her head.

Javed was about to seriously begin thinking about that coal-back woman when he heard some coarse voices shouting the most obscene slogans from the far end of the market, the end that was not visible to him from where he stood. A short while later, three men appeared — dead drunk and swaying on their feet. The three planted themselves under the coal-black woman’s window and Javed’s ears heard such obnoxious things that all his plans shrank into a tiny ball inside him.

One of the three drunks, who seemed more drunk than the rest and could barely walk, snatched a kiss from his moustache-coated lips and flung it towards the coal-black whore with such a graphic obscenity that it shattered whatever little remained of Javed’s determination. In the brothel, the coal-black woman sitting in the light of the naked bulb, laughed, her lips opening in a horrific cackle. She returned the lewd remark tossed at her by the drunken man as though she was flinging down a basketful of filth. On the street below, a fountain of coarse laughter erupted and Javed saw the three drunks climb up the brothel. In a matter of minutes that space where the coal-black woman sat, became empty.

Javed began to despise himself more than ever. ‘You … you … you … what are you? I ask you … after all, what are you? You are neither this nor that … you are neither human nor beast … your education, your intellect, your ability to tell good from bad — it has all come to naught. Three drunken men arrive. Unlike you, they have come with no clear plans. But without any fear or hesitation, they talk to the whore, they laugh, they cackle and they climb up to her den, as simple as that … as though they are going up to fly a kite. And you … you … you who know well enough what you should do, stand like a fool in the middle of the bazaar scared of a lantern! Your intention is so clear and transparent, yet your feet refuse to take you forward … Shame on you!’

For a minute the thought of taking revenge upon himself rose within Javed. His legs shook and he moved, crossed the sewer in one leap and began to move towards Mai Jeeva’s brothel. He was about to reach the stairs when a man came down. Javed stepped back quickly. He tried his best to hide himself but the man coming down the stairs paid him no heed.

The man had taken off his mulmul kurta and placed it on his shoulder. On his right wrist he had wound a string of fragrant motiya flowers. His body was drenched in sweat. Unaware of Javed’s existence, the man hitched his tehmad up to his knees with both hands, crossed the brick-paved courtyard, leapt across the sewer and went away. Javed began to wonder why the man had not even glanced in his direction.

Meanwhile, he looked at the lantern that seemed to be saying to him: ‘You will never succeed in your plans because you are a coward. Do you remember last year, during the rains, when you had tried to declare your love to that Hindu girl, Indira, how your body had lost every ounce of strength? How scared you had been and how you kept imagining the most terrifying things? Remember, you had even thought of Hindu- Muslim riots and how that thought had scared you? You forgot all about that girl because you were scared. And Hamida … you could not love her because she was related to you and you were scared that your family would view your love with distrust. The things you would imagine and the illusions you laboured under! And then, you had tried to love Bilquis but one look at her and all your hopes were dashed and your heart remained a wasteland, as always … Do you not realize that you have always viewed your own innocent love with distrustful eyes. You could never fully comprehend that your love was pure and good … You have always been scared. You are scared now, too. There is no question of girls or women from good families here. Nor is there any fear of Hindu-Muslim riots in a place like this. Yet you will never be able to climb the stairs to that brothel … I shall see how you drum up the courage to do so.’

Whatever remained of Javed’s resolve dissipated. He began to feel that he was truly a first-class coward. Past incidents began to flutter through his mind, like the pages of a book in a sharp gust of wind and for the first time he realized with utter certainty that a certain irresolution lurked in the bedrock of his very being and that had turned him into a pitiful coward.

The sound of someone coming down the stairs shook Javed out of his reverie. The same girl, the one who wore dark glasses and the one about whom he had heard a great deal from his friend, stood on a platform at the foot of the stairs. Javed became flustered. He tried to sidle away when she called out in a coarse voice, ‘You, there, won’t you stay for a bit … Don’t be scared, my love … come … come.’ And then she called out, louder this time, ‘Come on … come on.’

Hearing these words, Javed became convinced that if he were to stay here any longer he would sprout a tail, a tail that would wag at the woman’s bidding. He looked fearfully towards the platform where the woman stood. The whore wearing dark glasses from Mai Jeeva’s brothel moved her body in such a way that all of Javed’s plans fell, like a ripe fruit from a tree. Again, she cooed, ‘Come, my love, come on now.’

Javed ran. By the time he leapt across the sewer and reached the bazaar he heard loud laughter, terrifying in its horrendousness. He shivered.

When he reached home, a voice writhed out from the chaotic jumble of his thoughts and reassured him thus: ‘Javed, you have been saved from a very great sin. You should be thankful to God.’

THE RAT OF SHAHDOLE

Salima was twenty-one years old when she got married. Five years later, she still had no baby. Her mother and mother-in-law were extremely worried, particularly her mother who fretted that Najeeb, Salima’s husband, might bring home a second wife. Several doctors were consulted, but nothing happened.

Salima herself was quite concerned, too. After all, there are few girls who, soon after marriage, don’t expect a baby. Salima sought her mother’s advice and did her best to follow her instructions but, still, nothing happened.

One day a friend, who had been declared barren, came to meet her. Salima was amazed; her friend had a bonny baby in her lap. Salima asked her, ‘Fatima, how did you get this baby?’

Fatima, who was five years older, smiled and said, ‘It is with the blessings of Shahdole sahab¹. A woman told me, if you truly want a baby, go to the shrine of Shahdole sahab and make a vow. Make a pledge that if a child is born to me, I shall bring him here and offer him to you.’

Fatima then went on to say that if such a vow is made at the shrine of Shahdole sahab, then the first-born has a head that is very small. Salima didn’t quite fancy the idea of a baby with a tiny head. Moreover, the very thought of abandoning her first-born was unbearable.

She wondered at mothers who could do such a thing. A mother doesn’t abandon her baby at the garbage heap if the child is born with a tiny head or a flat nose or bleary eyes. Yet she desperately wanted a baby and, so, she eventually agreed to her friend’s coaxing.

Salima was a native of Gujarat, where the hospice of Shahdole sahab was located. She went to her husband and said, ‘Fatima is urging me to go to the shrine of Shahdole sahab. I want to go there, with your permission.’ Salima’s husband had no objection. He said, ‘Go, by all means, but come back quickly.’

And so Salima set off with Fatima.

The shrine of Shahdole was not a typical, ornate, marble encrusted mausoleum. In fact, it was quite a nice place and Salima liked it very much. Yet when she looked around, and in the milling crowd spotted the rats of Shahdole — with snot dribbling from their noses — a shiver ran down her spine.

She came face to face with a young girl, nubile and brimful with youth, yet behaving in the oddest possible way. Her behaviour could make the soberest of men smile. Salima looked at her and, for a minute, laughed — but her laughter was followed almost immediately by tears. She began to wonder about the girl and what the future held for her. She knew the owners of the shrine would sooner or later sell her off. Her buyer would travel all over the country, making her dance like a monkey to earn money.

The girl had an inordinately small head. But Salima thought — a small head need not spell a small fate. The rat-girl, however, had a beautiful body. Every limb, every part of her body was near perfect. Looking at her, it seemed as though her mental faculties had been deliberately snuffed out. She moved and talked like a wound-up doll. Salima felt as though she had been turned into one.

Yet Salima still went ahead, and at the urging of her friend Fatima, prayed to the saint to grant her a baby that she would offer the saint in lieu.

Salima returned home. She continued seeing doctors and taking their counsel. Within two months, she was delighted to discover that she was pregnant. A beautiful baby boy was born to her in due course. There had been a lunar eclipse during her pregnancy and so the child was born with a small black mole on its right cheek, but the mole didn’t make the baby look ugly at all.

Fatima came to see the baby and announced that the infant should be given away to Shahdole sahab right away. Salima had agreed to this, yet now she looked for ways to buy some time. The mother in her could not come to terms with the decision to dump her darling baby at the saint’s doorstep.

She had been told that whosoever asks Shahdole sahab for a baby has one with a tiny head; yet her child had a normal-sized head. Fatima admonished her, ‘Don’t look for excuses! Your child belongs to the saint; you have no right over it. If you go back on your solemn word, mark my words, some terrible calamity shall befall you and you shall regret it for the rest of your life.’

Poor, heart-broken Salima travelled all the way to the hospice and handed over her bonny baby with the black mole on its cheek to the caretakers of the shrine.

She came home and cried so much that she fell ill. For one whole year, she swung between life and death. She just could not forget her baby boy. The black mole on his right cheek, which she had kissed so often, haunted her memories. She had loved it so; it looked so endearing there on his cheek.

All through her illness, her boy did not leave her thoughts even for a minute. Strange dreams tormented her. The saint of Shahdole would appear before her, looking distraught. With his sharp teeth, he would tear off pieces of her flesh. Agonised beyond endurance, she would scream out loud and tell her husband, ‘Help! Save me! See — see that rat, he is eating away my flesh!’

Sometimes, her over-wrought brain would imagine that her boy was about to enter a rat’s hole. She is pulling, pulling at his tail with all her might. But the big rats inside the hole have caught her baby’s snout in a vice-like grip. And she can never pull him out!

And, sometimes, that girl — the one she had seen at the shrine of Shahdole sahab, the one who had been in the full bloom of youth — would appear before her. Looking at the girl, Salima would begin to laugh; but just as quickly, she would start crying. And she would cry so much that her husband, Najeeb, would be at his wit’s end worrying how to stem her tears.

Salima saw rats everywhere — on the bed, in the kitchen, inside the bathroom, running on top of the sofa, even deep within her heart and inside her ears. So much so, that sometimes she felt she too had turned into a rat. That snot was dribbling down her nose. And that, in the milling crowd that surged around the shrine of Shahdole sahab, she too is going about holding her tiny head on her frail shoulders and behaving in such an odd manner that all those who see her are holding their sides and doubling up with laughter at her odd antics. Truly, Salima was in a pathetic state.

Wherever she looked, she saw black moles. The universe, for her, had turned into a giant cheek and the sun had broken into fragments and got pasted on its surface like black moles. Eventually, her fever broke and she became somewhat better. Najeeb sighed with relief. He knew well enough what ailed his wife. He was a man with a grave disposition. He wasn’t the slightest bit put out by his son being given away as a pledge. In fact, he considered the child to be not his but the saint’s.

When Salima recovered and the storms raging in her mind and heart abated somewhat, Najeeb said to her, ‘My dearest, forget the baby. He wasn’t yours; he was an offering to the saint.’

Salima answered in a voice laden with sadness, ‘I don’t believe that. As long as I live, I shall not be able to forgive myself. How could I, as a mother, commit such an unpardonable sin? How could I abandon my baby, the apple of my eye, leaving him at the mercy of the shrine’s caretakers? They can never be his mother; they can never look after him as I would.’

One fine day, she disappeared. She went straight to the saint’s hospice. She stayed there for over a week, made enquiries about her son but could find nothing about his whereabouts. Disappointed, she returned home and told her husband, ‘I shall not remember him anymore.’

Of course, she continued to remember him, but she did so secretly now, in her heart. With time, the mole on the baby’s right cheek became a scab on her heart.

A year passed and a daughter was born to her. The girl resembled her first born, but there was no mole on her right cheek. She named the baby Mujeeba because she had thought of naming her son Mujeeb. When the baby became two months old, Salima took her in her lap and, made a big black mole on her cheek by dabbing a spot of kohl. And she remembered her Mujeeb and began to cry. But as the tears began to fall down her cheeks, she wiped them with her dupatta, controlled herself and began to smile instead. She wanted to forget her sorrow.

Later, two sons were born to her. Her husband was very happy now.

Once, Salima went for a friend’s wedding, close to the mausoleum of Shahdole Sahab. Once again she made enquiries about her Mujeeb and was disappointed. She thought he must have died and so, upon her return, decided to hold a lavish funeral prayer for him on a Thursday. The women from the neighbourhood were curious: who had died? What was all this fuss for? But Salima gave no answer.

In the evening she took her ten-year-old daughter Mujeeba’s hand and took her to her room. With a spot of kohl, she made a large black mole on the girl’s cheek and kept planting kisses on it for a long, long time.

She considered Mujeeba her long-lost son. She had stopped thinking about him. After performing his last rites, she felt the burden on her heart had lessened. She built a grave for him inside her heart which she strewed with the choicest flowers from the garden of her imagination.

Her three children went to school. Salima would get them ready early every morning. She would have breakfast prepared for them. She would herself bathe and dress each one of them. When they went away to school, for a second she would be reminded of Mujeeb. Even though she had performed the last rites and the burden on her heart had lessened, sometime she felt as though the black mole on Mujeeb’s cheek had actually gone inside her brain.

One day, her three children ran up to her and said, ‘Ammi, we want to see the tamasha².’

She asked lovingly, ‘What sort of a tamasha?’

Her daughter, who was the eldest, said, ‘Ammi, there is a man who is showing the tamasha.’

Salima said, ‘All right, go and ask him to come. But he must show his tamasha outside; I can’t let him inside the house.’

The children ran to get the tamashawalla who performed his show much to the children’s amusement. When the show got over, Mujeeba went to her mother to get some money. Salima took a four-anna coin from her purse and came out. She reached her door and found a rat from Shahdole standing and shaking his head in the oddest possible manner. Salima laughed involuntarily.

Ten or twelve children surrounded the odd creature. They were creating such a din that you couldn’t hear a thing. Salima stretched her hand to give the four-anna coin to the creature when, suddenly, she stepped back — as though she had touched a live wire. The rat had a black mole on its right cheek. Salima looked carefully at it. Snot was dribbling down its nose. Mujeeba, who was standing close by, asked her mother, ‘Ammi, this rat … he looks like me … why? Am I a rat, too?’

Salima took the rat-boy’s hand and took him inside her house. She locked the door and kissed him. It was her Mujeeb. But he was behaving in such an odd way that the laughter that had welled up naturally inside poor, heart-broken Salima was giving way to sorrow.

She said to Mujeeb, ‘Son, I am your mother.’

The rat of Shahdole laughed loudly. He wiped a glob of snot on his sleeve, stretched his palm and said, ‘One paisa?’ The mother opened her purse but her eyes had already opened a stream of tears. She took out a 100-rupee note and gave it to the man who had turned her son into an itinerant roadshow. The man refused, saying he could not sell the only source of his livelihood so cheaply. Finally, Salima struck a deal with him for Rs 500. She paid the money and came inside the house to discover that Mujeeb had fled. Mujeeba told her that he had gone out from the back door. Salima’s womb kept calling out to Mujeeb, beseeching him to come back. But he was gone, never to return.

1 Gujarat, in the Sindh province of Pakistan, is home to many Sufi saints. The people here, though Muslims, attribute great importance to their local saints who they claim can work in mysterious ways, answering the prayers of the devout and fulfilling their wishes. People visit these shrines, tie threads, make mannat, or vow, to offer anything the saint should ask of them should their prayers be answered. Usually, the mannat takes the form of an offering of money or food. Occasionally, it can be marrying off a virgin daughter to the caretaker of the shrine. In this case, the mannat takes the form of offering the first-born to the saint, Shahdole sahab.

2 Itinerant tamashawallahs went around neighbourhoods showing spectacles ranging from dancing bears, prancing monkeys, families of acrobats, deformed babies, persons with congenital deformities or oddities. The tamasha, literally meaning spectacle, provided a crude form of amusement to the onlookers who usually threw a handful of coins, or sometimes food, sweets or fruit, for the benefit of the oddity on display and its owner. The practice continues in some parts of the subcontinent.

THE HUNDRED CANDLE

POWER BULB

He stood leaning against an electric pole in the square outside Kaisar Park where a few tongas stood awaiting customers and pondered over the desolation that had taken over everything around him.

Till two years ago this park had been a bustling, lively place; today it was a desolate wilderness. Where once men and women dressed in the most attractive fashionable clothes strutted about, today people clothed in abysmally dirty rags loiter about meaninglessly. There is a crowd in the market but it lacks both colour and energy. The cement buildings that ring the market have lost their sheen; they gape at each other, open mouthed and vacant eyed, like widowed women.

He is amazed by this loss of colour. Where has the bride’s vermilion disappeared? What happened to those lovely notes, those melodies that he had once heard here? It wasn’t very long ago that he had last come here — after all two years is not a very long time — when he had been enticed to come from Calcutta by a firm offering a better salary. How hard had he tried to rent a house in Kaisar Park and, despite a thousand entreaties, how unsuccessful he had been!

But now any cobbler, barber or weaver who wished to move into these flats and rooms could simply move in and take possession.

Where once a film company had had a swish office, stoves were lit. Where the city’s smartest people once gathered, a washerman now washed his filthy laundry.

What a great revolution in a mere two years!

He was surprised, yes, but he was also aware of the context and background of this revolution. Newspapers and friends who had stayed behind had told him about the storm that had hit this city. Yet he wondered what a strange storm it must have been for it had sucked the colour and shine from buildings. Men had killed men and debased women, but how had they managed to do the same to timber and mortar buildings?

He had heard that women had been stripped naked in that storm. Their breasts had been sliced off. Everything around him seemed similarly naked and sexless.

He stood leaning against the electric pole waiting for a friend who was supposed to help him find a house. The friend had told him to wait outside Kaisar Park, near the tonga stand.

When he had come here two years ago, this had been a huge tonga stand, the busiest and biggest in the city. The smartest and most gaily decorated tongas were to be found here because it was here that the city offered every manner of delectation. The best hotels and restaurants were close by — the best tea, the finest food, and everything else besides. The city’s well-known pimps and agents were also to be found here. Money and drink flowed like water because some of the biggest companies had their offices in Kaisar Park.

He remembered having a good time here with his friend two years ago. Every night he had had the prettiest girl beside him. The war had made Scotch unavailable elsewhere, but here a dozen bottles would materialize within a minute.

The tongas were still around, but now the pom-poms, the frills and ribbons, the gleaming brass fittings were all gone. Perhaps those too had taken wing and disappeared along with everything else.

He looked at his watch. Five o’clock. It was the month of February, and the evening shadows had begun to lengthen. He cursed his friend and was about to set off towards the desolate hotel on his left to drink a cup of tea brewed, no doubt, from drain water, when he heard someone call out softly. For a moment he thought his friend had finally shown up, but when he turned around he found a stranger standing in front of him. An ordinary looking man dressed in a white cotton shalwar which had no space left for any more creases and a blue poplin shirt that was desperately in need of a wash.

He asked, ‘Well, brother, did you call me?’

The man answered softly, ‘Yes.’

He took the man to be a refugee, probably asking for some money. He said, ‘What do you want?’

The man answered in the same soft tone, ‘Nothing.’ Then, coming a step closer, he whispered, ‘Do you want something?’

‘What?’

‘A girl, maybe?’ he said, and stepped back a little.

It was as though an arrow had pierced his chest. Look at him, he thought, even at a time like this, he is going about groping and fondling people’s bodily hungers, and a mad rage against all humanity overtook him. Overwhelmed by his own feelings, he asked, ‘Where is she?’

His tone did not seem very encouraging to the pimp. He stepped back a few paces and said, ‘Never mind, you don’t seem to need it very much.’ He stopped the pimp and asked, ‘How can you tell? A man is always in need of that thing that you can provide — even when he is atop the scaffold waiting for the hangman’s noose or on the smoldering funeral pyre…’

He was about to philosophize a bit more when he stopped, ‘Look here, if it is somewhere close by, I am ready to come with you. I have asked a friend to meet me here.’

The pimp sidled up and said, ‘It is right here, very close by.’

‘Where?’

‘There — in that building right across there.’

‘There? In that big building?’

‘Yes, sir.’

A shudder coursed through him, ‘All right, then…’ He pulled himself up and asked, ‘Shall I come with you?’

‘Please do, but I shall go first,’ and the pimp starting walking towards the building in front of them.

Thinking countless self-loathing thoughts, he followed the pimp.

The building was barely a few feet away. The distance was covered in a matter of minutes. By now both he and the pimp had entered the building that bore a weather-beaten battered board. This building was more dilapidated than its neighbours — peeling plaster, gaping brickwork, broken pipes and heaps of rubbish all around.

Evening had fallen. As they crossed the threshold, it was dark inside. They crossed a wide courtyard and turned a corner. Here, construction had come to a standstill. Naked brickwork, heaps of hardened cement and mortar and small piles of gravel were scattered all about.

The pimp began to climb the half-finished stairs and turned to say, ‘Please wait here. I won’t be a minute.’

He stood, waiting. The pimp had disappeared. He raised his face to look at the top of the stairs where a bright light was visible.

Two minutes passed and he began to climb the stairs on tiptoe. At the top of the staircase he heard the pimp’s voice, loud and harsh.

‘Will you get up or not?’

A woman’s voice answered, ‘I said, didn’t I, let me sleep.’ Her voice sounded muffled, subdued.

The pimp’s voice crackled, ‘I said — get up! If you don’t listen to me, I will….’

The woman’s voice said, ‘Kill me if you want, but I won’t get up. For God’s sake, have pity on me.’

The pimp wheedled, ‘Get up, my love. Don’t be so stubborn. Just think … what will we live on?’

The woman answered, ‘Let the living go to hell! I’ll die of hunger, if I must. Don’t trouble me. I want to sleep.’

The pimp’s voice hardened, ‘So you won’t get up? You bitch! You daughter of a sow!’

The woman began to shout, ‘I won’t get up … I won’t get up … I won’t get up…’

The pimp lowered his voice. ‘Speak softly. Someone might hear … Come now, get up. You will get thirty or forty rupees.’

There was entreaty in the woman’s voice now. ‘Look! I am folding my hands before you … I have been awake for so long … I beg you, have pity on me. For God’s sake, have pity on me.’

‘It’s only for an hour or two … You can sleep later … Or else, I will have to be very stern with you.’

Silence reigned for a while. He took a few stealthy steps and peeped into the room from which bright light spilled out.

He saw a small room; a woman lay on the floor. Except for a few utensils scattered about, there was nothing else in the room. The pimp sat beside the woman, pressing her legs. After a while he said, ‘Come on now, get up. I swear upon God you will be back in an hour or two — you can sleep then.’

The woman jumped up like a rat that has been shown fire and screamed, ‘All right, I am getting up!’

He stepped aside. Actually, he was a bit scared. On tiptoe, he climbed down the stairs. He thought of running away — running away from this city, from this world. But where could he run?

Then he thought: who is this woman? Why is she being subjected to this cruelty? Who is the pimp? How is he related to the woman? And why do they live in that room lit with a bulb that is certainly not less than a hundred candle power? How long have they been iving here?

The light from that strong bulb still pierced his eyes. He couldn’t see anything around him. But he was thinking: how can anyone possibly sleep in that dazzling light? Why such a big bulb? Couldn’t they have put a smaller bulb — maybe fifteen or twenty candle power?

As he stood lost in thought, he heard a footfall. He turned around to see two shadows standing close beside him. One shadow, which belonged to the pimp, spoke up, ‘See for your self.’

He said, ‘I have seen.’

‘All right?’

‘All right.’

‘It’ll cost you forty rupees.’

‘Okay.’

‘Give it to me now.’

By now he was no longer capable of rational thought. He thrust his hand in his pocket, pulled out a few notes and handed them to the pimp.

‘Count them, how many are they?’

The rustling of currency notes could be heard.

The pimp said, ‘There are fifty here.’

He said, ‘Keep fifty, then.’

‘Salaam, sahab.’

He thought of picking a huge stone and hitting him on the head with it.

The pimp said, ‘Take her. But please don’t trouble her too much and please do bring her back after an hour or two.’

‘All right.’

He stepped out of that big building on whose front had once hung a board that he had read countless times.

A tonga stood outside. He began to move towards it, with the woman following.

Once again the pimp raised his hand to salaam. Once again he was overcome with the urge to pick a huge stone and hit him on the head with it.

The tonga started. It took him to a seedy little hotel nearby. Somehow, he pulled himself out of the anxiety that had engulfed his brain and looked at the woman. She was wasted — from head to toe. Her eyelids were swollen. Her eyes were downcast. In fact, the entire upper part of her body was bent forward like a building that was about to topple over any second.

He said to her, ‘Raise your head a bit.’

With a terrible start she said, ‘What?’

‘Nothing. All I had said was, say something.’

Her eyes were bloodshot. They were red, as though someone had flung red-hot chillies in them. She remained quiet.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Nothing at all.’ Her tone burnt like acid.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Wherever you want me to be from.’

‘Why are you so curt?’

By now the woman had woken up fully. She looked at him with her chilly-bright eyes and said, ‘You get on with your job; I have to go.’

He said, ‘Where?’

The woman answered in a dry couldn’t-care-less tone, ‘Where you got me from.’

‘You can go now.’

‘You do what you have to do; why are you troubling me?’

Filling his voice with all the pain in his heart, he said. ‘I am not troubling you. I sympathize with you.’

This infuriated her. ‘I don’t need any sympathizer.’ And then, nearly shouting, she repeated, ‘You get on with your job and let me go.’

He came closer and attempted to pat her head, but she flung his hand away with a jerk.

‘I tell you — don’t trouble me. I have been awake for so many days. I have been awake ever since I have come here.’

He began to sympathize with her again.

‘Go to sleep … right here.’

The woman’s eyes became redder. In a sharp tone, she said, ‘I haven’t come here to sleep; this isn’t my home.’

‘Is that your home — where you have come from?’

The woman grew more agitated.

‘Uff! Stop this nonsense. I have no home. Why don’t you get on with your job! Or else take me back and take your money from that … that ….’ And she bit back a terrible obscenity.

He thought it was futile talking to the woman while she was in that state, or even showing her any sympathy. So, he said, ‘Come, I will take you back.’

And he took her back to the big building.

The next day, sitting in a seedy hotel in Kaisar Park, he narrated the entire incident to his friend. The friend was suitably sympathetic. He expressed the deepest shock and disgust and asked, ‘Was she young?’

He said, ‘I don’t know; I didn’t really see her properly. All I could think of was why didn’t I pick up a stone and crush the pimp’s head with it.’

The friend said, ‘Truly, that would have been a great mercy.’

He couldn’t sit in the hotel for very long with his friend. The previous day’s incident weighed on his mind. So he finished his tea and took leave of his friend.

The friend walked towards the tonga stand. His eyes searched for the pimp but couldn’t find him. It was past six. The big building loomed ahead, barely a few yards away. He walked towards it and soon was inside it.

People milled past him, but he reached the stairs quite easily. He saw the light spilling down the staircase. He looked up and began to climb the stairs on tiptoe. For a few minutes he stood silently at the topmost stair. Dazzling bright light spilled out of the room, but there wasn’t a sound to be heard. He crossed the landing. The door of the room was ajar. He looked around and peered inside the room. Before he could spot the bulb, its piercing light jabbed his eyes. He turned around to face the darkness outside and allow his eyes to get used to that dazzling light.

Once again he approached the door, but in such a way that he remained outside the piercing pool of light cast by the bulb. He peered inside. He could see a woman lying on a mat. He craned forward for a closer look; she appeared to be asleep. A dupatta covered her face. Her chest rose and fell with her breaths. He stepped closer and nearly screamed. He controlled himself and saw — a short distance away from the woman, a man lay on the uncovered floor. His head was smashed into pieces. A blood-smeared brick lay close by. He saw everything in the blink of an eye and rushed towards the stairs. He slipped and fell several times but heedless of his injuries tried his best to hold on to his senses. With great difficulty, he managed to reach home and spent the night having the most terrifying nightmares.

BY GOD

Muslims from there and Hindus from here were still crossing to and from. The camps were bursting at the seams. There wasn’t even space for putting the proverbial seed of sesame anywhere; yet, people were being stuffed into them. Food supplies were running short. Hygiene was abysmal. Diseases were spreading. But who had the time to care. Panic and chaos reigned.

It was the beginning of the year 1948. Probably it was the month of March. From this side and that, work had begun on rescuing ‘run-away’ women and children with the help of volunteers. Thousands of men, women, boys and girls were participating in this act of goodness. When I saw them thus engaged, I was seized by a strange happiness — so God was busy trying to remove the traces of Man’s misdeeds. He was trying to save those honours that had already been lost from further loot and pillage … But why?

So that Man might be saved from further stains and wounds on his virtue? So that he might quickly lick his bloodstained fingers and once again sit at the table with his fellow men, and partake of the good things? So that he might pick up the needle and thread of humanity and, while others still had their eyes closed, repair the torn fabric of chastity?

I could not be certain of anything … the efforts of these volunteers, however, seemed commendable.

Everyday they faced countless obstacles. There were unimaginable difficulties in their way because those who had kidnapped these women and girls were like mercury; up one minute, down another, here now, gone tomorrow. In one neighbourhood now, then in another. And no one was willing to part with any information.

These volunteers had the strangest stories to tell. One liaison officer told me of two girls in Saharanpur who refused to return to their parents. Another narrated how, once in Jalandhar, when they went to rescue an abducted girl, the captor’s entire family showed up to bid adieu as though their captive was a much-loved daughter-in-law setting off on a long journey. Several girls, fearful of meeting their parents again, committed suicide on the way. There were some who had succumbed to their tragedies and become weak. Some had become addicted to drink — when thirsty they would ask for alcohol instead of water and utter the filthiest of obscenities.

Whenever I thought of these abducted women and girls, all I could see were swollen, distended bellies. What would happen to these bellies? Who is the owner of that which lies stuffed in these bellies — India or Pakistan? And what of the nine months of labour? Who would pay the wages — India or Pakistan? Or would it all simply be put in the account of cruel Nature? Isn’t there a blank column somewhere in this ledger?

Rescued women were coming home. Retrieved women were going home.

I always wondered why these women were called ‘runaways’? They weren’t asked to run away. The word ‘runaway’ has a romantic connotation; the man and the woman have an equal role. Running away or eloping, to give it its more romantic name, is like a chasm that causes every nerve and sinew to tingle with excitement before the big leap across. But this is plain and simple abduction where a poor defenseless woman is picked up and locked away in a dark dingy hovel.

But the times were such that arguments and counter-arguments, sage counsels and philosophic musings held little value. During these days when, despite the heat of summer, people slept indoors with all the doors and windows shut, I too had shut and bolted the doors and windows of my mind — even though it was imperative that at a time like this, I keep them wide open. But what could I do? I could think of nothing better.

Rescued women were coming home. Retrieved women were going home.

This rescue and retrieval was in full swing to the accompaniment of other mundane business-like transactions. And, pen in hand, journalists, writers and poets were busy hunting their quarry. And a flood of poems, stories and articles kept eddying about endlessly. Pens would stumble and lose their way occasionally. Dismayed by the sheer numbers, the hunters were at a loss as to what to do.

I met a liaison officer who asked me, ‘Why do you look so lost?’

I gave no answer.

He told me a story:‘We have to travel all over looking for abducted women — from one city to another, from one village to the next, then the third, then fourth, from street to alley to by-lane, from one neighbourhood to another. It is with the greatest difficulty that these rare jewels come to our hands.’

I said to myself, ‘Pierced gems or unpierced ones?’

‘You have no idea of the difficulties we have to face. I’ll tell you a story … we have made countless trips across the border. The strangest thing is that on every trip I saw an old woman — a Muslim old woman. The first time I saw her she must have been middle aged. It was in the by-lanes of Jalandhar. She was dressed in torn filthy rags, her eyes were vacant, her hair matted and coated with dirt, and she looked lost and crazy with grief. She was in no state to look after herself, yet it was amply clear that her eyes were searching for someone.

‘A woman volunteer told me that grief had made her lose her mind. She was from Patiala. She had an only daughter whom she couldn’t find. Every effort was made to locate her, but with no luck. She was perhaps killed in the riots, but the old woman refused to accept that.

‘I saw her for the second time in Saharanpur, where the lorry drivers parked their vehicles. She looked frailer and dirtier than before. A film of muck coated her lips. Her hair was matted in dreadlocks like a sadhu’s. I tried to talk to her and persuade her to give up her blind hopeless search. I hardened my heart and spoke harshly to her, “Old woman, your daughter was killed.”

‘The mad woman looked at me and said, ‘Killed? … No.’ There was a steely resolve in her tone, ‘No one can kill her. No one can kill my daughter.’

‘And she went off on her blind, futile search.

‘I wondered — a search like this and that too blind? Why was the mad woman convinced that no one would raise a dagger against her daughter? That no sharp-edged blade or knife could come near her throat? Was she immortal? Or was it the old woman’s love for her daughter that was immortal? A mother’s love is, after all, immortal, so was she then simply searching for a mother’s love? Had she lost it somewhere…?

‘I saw her again on my third trip. The rags barely covered her body now and she was almost naked. I gave her some clothes but she refused to accept them.

‘I said to her, “Old woman, I am telling you the truth. Your daughter was killed in Patiala itself.”’

‘She answered with the same steely resolve, “You lie.”’

‘I tried to make her believe me, “No, no, I am telling you the truth. You have shed enough tears over her. Come with me now, I will take you to Pakistan.”’

‘She didn’t hear me and began to mumble to herself. In the middle of her muffled monologue, she was suddenly startled. This time the resolve in her voice was stronger than steel. “No! No one can kill my daughter.”’

‘I asked, “Why?”

‘The old woman answered softly, “She is beautiful. She is so beautiful that no one can kill her — no man can even raise his hand to slap her.”’

‘I wondered — could she really be so beautiful? In the eyes of every mother, her child is fairer than the sun and the moon. While it is possible that her daughter was indeed very beautiful, could these tempestuous times have left any beauty untarnished by Man’s callused hands? Perhaps the old woman is only fooling herself by holding on to that one slender thread? There are a thousand means of escape, but sorrow is the only cross-section that weaves a web of a hundred thousand converging roads.

‘I made several other trips across the border and saw the mad woman each time. She was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. She could barely see but her search continued — undaunted and stronger than ever. She believed as strongly as ever that her daughter was alive for the simple reason that no one could kill her.

‘The lady volunteer told me it was pointless trying to make her see reason. She was completely insane; it would be best to take her to Pakistan and admit her to a mental asylum.

‘But I didn’t agree. I could not take away the only thing that kept her going — her blind search for her daughter. I could not take her away from this huge madhouse where she could walk freely around for miles and slake the thirst of her blistered feet and lock her away in some cramped cell across the border.

‘I saw her for the last time in Amritsar. Her state was such that it brought tears to my eyes. This time I resolved to take her to Pakistan and put her in a mental asylum.

‘She was standing in Farid Chowk, looking about her with her near- blind eyes. There was a hustle and bustle in the marketplace. I was sitting with the lady volunteer and talking about an abducted girl who was reported to be living with a Hindu merchant in Sabuniya Bazaar. I finished my conversation and got up with the intention of telling the mad woman a bunch of lies and somehow get her to agree to come with me to Pakistan when a couple walked past. The girl had veiled her face but not fully. The man with her was a Sikh youth — a prime specimen of young manhood with chiseled features and robust good looks.

‘As the two walked past the mad woman, the young man stepped back a pace or two. He held the girl’s hand and pulled her against him. She pushed back her veil almost involuntarily. Framed against the white cotton of her veil, I saw a glowing pink face whose incredible beauty I cannot describe.

‘I was standing close beside them. The Sikh youth pointed the mad woman to the young Goddess of Beauty and whispered, “Your mother.”’

‘The girl looked at the mad woman and, in that one instant, forgot to hold on to her veil. Then she clutched the young man’s arm and spoke in a clenched tone, “Let’s go.”’

‘And the two walked away swiftly. The mad woman shouted, “Bhaagbhari! Bhaagbhari!”’

‘She was beside herself with excitement. I went to her and asked, “What’s the matter, old woman?”’

‘She was shaking. “I saw her!”’

‘Who? I asked.

‘The sightless balls sunk into two pits beneath her creased forehead came to life. “I saw my daughter — Bhaagbhari!”’

‘Once again I said to her, “But she died a long time ago.”’

‘She shouted, “You lie!”’

‘To convince her once and for all, this time I said, “I swear upon God — your daughter is dead.”’

‘She heard these words and fell down dead in the middle of the Chowk.’

YAZID

The riots of 1947 came and went. In much the same way as spells of bad weather come and go every season. It wasn’t as though Karimdad accepted everything that came his way as God’s will. No, he faced every vicissitude with manly fortitude. He had met hostile forces in a head-on collision — not necessarily to defeat them, but simply to meet them face to face. He knew that the enemy outnumbered him but he believed that it was an insult, not just to him but to all mankind, to give in when faced with trouble. To tell you the truth, this was the opinion others had of him — those who had seen him take on the most savage of men with the most amazing courage. But, if you were to ask Karimdad if he considered it an outrage for himself or all mankind to admit defeat in the face of opposition, he would no doubt fall into deep thought — as though you had asked him a complicated mathematical question.

Karimdad knew nothing of addition-subtraction or multiplication- division. The riots of ’47 came and went. People began to sit down and calculate the loss of lives and property. But Karimdad remained untouched by all this. All he knew was this: his father, Rahimdad, had been ‘spent’ in this war. He had picked his father’s corpse, carried it on his own shoulders and buried it beside a well.

The village had known several casualties. Thousands of young and old had been killed. Many girls had disappeared. Several had been raped in the most inhuman way possible. Those who had been afflicted sat and cried — they cried over their own misfortune and the heartless perpetrators of these crimes. But Karimdad did not shed a single tear. He was proud of his father’s valiant fight to the finish. His father had single-handedly fought 25–30 rioters who were armed to the teeth with swords and axes. When Karimdad had heard that his father had fallen down dead, after bravely fighting off the attackers, he had only these words to say to his dead father’s spirit: ‘Yaar, this isn’t done. I had told you to always keep at least one weapon handy with you.’

And he had picked up Rahimdad’s corpse, dug a hole beside the well and buried it. Then, he had stood beside the grave and by way of prayer said only this: ‘God keeps count of vices and virtues. May you be granted Paradise!’

The rioters had killed Rahimdad barbarically. Rahimdad, who was not just Karimdad’s father but also his dear friend. Whoever heard of his brutal murder cursed the savages who had butchered him, but Karimdad never uttered a word. Karimdad had also lost several ready-to-harvest crops. Two houses belonging to him had been burnt earlier. Yet, he never added these losses to the loss of his father. He would simply content himself by saying: ‘Whatever has happened has happened due to our own fault.’ And when someone would ask him what that fault was, he would remain quiet.

While the rest of the village was still grieving after the recent riots, Karimdad decided to get married — to the dusky belle, Jeena, on whom he had been keeping an eye for a long time. Jeena was grief stricken. Her brother, a strapping youth, had been killed in the riots. He had been her only support after the death of her parents. There was no doubt that Jeena loved Karimdad dearly but the tragic loss of her brother had turned even her love into heartache; her once ever-smiling eyes were now always brimming with sorrow.

Karimdad hated crying and sobbing. He felt frustrated whenever he saw Jeena looking unhappy. But he always refrained from admonishing her because she was a woman and he thought his rebukes might hurt her aching heart even more. One day, he caught hold of her when they were both out on their fields and said, ‘It has been a whole year since we buried our dead. By now even they must be weary of this mourning. Let go of your sorrow, my dear. Who knows how many deaths we have to see in the years ahead. Save your tears for what lies ahead.’

Jeena did not like his words. But because she loved him, she thought long and hard over what he had said. In solitude, she searched for the meaning behind his words and, at long last, came around to convincing herself that Karimdad was right.

When the subject of Karimdad’s marriage to Jeena was first broached, the village elders were against it. But their opposition was weak. They had grown so weary of the constant state of mourning that they no longer had the conviction for carrying on with any sort of sustained opposition. Therefore, Karimdad was duly married. Musicians and singers were called. Every ritual was performed. And Karimdad brought his beloved home as his legally wedded wife.

The village had turned into a vast graveyard a year after the riots. When Karimdad’s wedding procession wound through the village amidst shouts and cries, some villagers were initially scared. They thought it was a ghostly parade. When Karimdad’s friends told him about it, he laughed loudly. But when Karimdad laughingly narrated the incident to his new bride, she shivered with fright.

Karimdad took Jeena’s red-bangled wrist in his hand and said, ‘This ghost will haunt you for the rest of your life … even the village sorcerer will not be able to rid you of me with his witchcraft.’

Jeena put the tip of her hennaed finger between her teeth and mumbled shyly, ‘Keeme, you are scared of nothing!’

Karimdad licked his brownish-black moustaches with the tip of his tongue and smiled, ‘Why should one be scared of anything?’

The sharp edge of Jeena’s grief was becoming dull. She was about to become a mother. Karimdad saw her blossoming womanhood and was pleased. ‘By God, Jeena, you have never looked so ravishing! If you have become so beautiful only for the sake of my about-to-be-born baby, then he and I will never be friends.’

Jeena shyly hid the bump in her middle under her shawl. Karimdad laughed and teased her even more, ‘Why do you hide it? Do you think I don’t know that you have taken all this trouble with your appearance because of that son of a sow?’

Jeena grew suddenly serious and said, ‘How can you call your own child by a bad name?’

Karimdad’s blackish-brown moustaches began to quiver with a smile. ‘Karimdad is the biggest pig of ’em all.’

The first Eid²came. Then the second one³. Karimdad celebrated both festivals with fervour. The rioters had attacked his village twelve days before the last Eid when both Rahimdad and Jeena’s brother, Fazal Ilahi, had been killed. Jeena had shed copious tears in memory of both. But in the company of one who resolutely refused to harbour any trace of sorrowful memories, she could not mourn them as much as she would have wanted to.

Whenever Jeena paused to take stock of her life, she was amazed at how quickly she was forgetting the greatest tragedy of her life. She had no memory of her parents’ death. Fazal Ilahi had been six years older than her. He had been her mother, father, brother all rolled into one. Jeena knew well enough that her brother had not married for her sake. And the entire village knew that Fazal Ilahi had lost his life trying to save his sister’s honour. Clearly, his death was the single-most tragic accident of her life. A calamity had befallen her, quite without warning, exactly twelve days before the second Eid. Whenever she thought about it, she was struck with amazement at how far she had drifted away from the shock and sorrow of that fateful incident.

By the time Muharrum⁴came around, Jeena made her first request to Karimdad. She was dying to see the famous horse and taaziya during the procession. She had heard a great deal about the procession from her friends. And so she said to Karimdad, ‘Will you take me to see the procession if I am well enough?’

Karimdad smiled and said, ‘I will take you even if you are not well … and this son of a sow as well.’

Jeena hated the way he referred to her unborn baby. She would go into a huff whenever she heard it but Karimdad’s tone was, as always, so loving that it transformed Jeena’s anger into an indescribable sweetness and she would wonder how so much love could be stuffed into that awful expression — ‘son of a sow’.

The rumours of a war between India and Pakistan had been floating for some time now. In fact, it had become a near-certainty shortly after the creation of Pakistan that there would be a war between the two countries. Although no one in the village knew exactly when the war might break out, whenever someone asked Karimdad about the imminent breakout of hostilities, he would answer briefly and succinctly: ‘It’ll happen when it’ll happen. What’s the point of thinking about it?’

Jeena was terrified at the very thought of war. She was, by nature, a peace-loving girl. The smallest tiff between friends made her unhappy. In any case she had seen enough looting and killing during the last riots that had also claimed the life of her dear brother. Terrified, she asked Karimdad one day, ‘Keeme, what’ll happen?’

Karimdad smiled and said, ‘How would I know whether it’s going to be a girl or a boy?’

This sort of rejoinder always made her mad but she would soon get caught up in Karimdad’s banter and forget all about the war clouds gathering over her head. Karimdad was strong, fearless and completely in love with Jeena. He had bought a rifle and learnt to take perfect aim. All this combined to lend courage to Jeena but every time she heard idle gossip from an equally scared friend or loose talk among the villagers, her fears would return.

One day, Bakhto, the midwife, who came to check on Jeena everyday, brought the news that the Indians were going to ‘close’ the river. Jeena didn’t know what that meant so she asked Bakhto, ‘What do you mean by closing the river?’

Bakhto answered, ‘The river that waters our crops.’

Jeena thought for a minute, then laughed and said, ‘You talk like a mad woman … Who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.’

Bakhto gently massaged Jeena’s distended belly and said, ‘I don’t know … I have told you what I’ve heard. They say the newspapers are full of it, too.’

‘Full of what?’ Jeena found it hard to believe.

Bakhto felt Jeena’s belly with her wrinkled hand and answered, ‘That they are going to close the river.’ Then she pulled down Jeena’s shirt and got to her feet speaking in the tone of one who knows, ‘If all stays well, the child will be born ten days from now.’

Jeena asked Karimdad about the river the moment he stepped foot inside the house. At first, Karimdad tried to fob off her insistent queries, but when Jeena kept repeating her question, he said, ‘Yes, I have heard something of the sort too.’

Jeena demanded, ‘What have you heard?’

‘The Indians are going to close our river.’

‘But why?’

‘So that our crops are ruined.’

By now Jeena was convinced that rivers could actually be closed. So all she could say, a bit helplessly, was this: ‘How cruel those people are!’

Upon hearing this, Karimdad smiled after a moment’s pause. He said, ‘Forget all this … Tell me, did Bakhto come?’

Jeena answered listlessly, ‘She did.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said the baby will be born ten days from now.’

Karimdad hurray-ed loudly, ‘And may he live long!’

Jeena showed her displeasure and muttered, ‘Look at you, rejoicing at a time like this … when God knows what sort of Karbala⁵will be visited upon us.’

Karimdad went to the chaupal where almost all the men from the village had gathered. Everyone was clustered around the village headman, Chaudhry Nathu, and was asking him questions about the closing of the river. Someone was busy showering abuse upon Pandit Nehru, another wishing every manner of mishaps for him, and yet another was resolutely refusing to admit that the course of a river could be changed at will. And there were some who believed that whatever was about to happen was a punishment for our own misdeeds and the only way to avert the calamity that hovered overhead was to go to the mosque and pray.

Karimdad sat in a corner and listened quietly to the talk that swirled about him. Chaudhry Nathu was the most vocal among those who were abusing the Indians. Karimdad turned restlessly from this side to the other as though acutely frustrated. Everyone agreed on one thing: closing the river was a dirty, low-down trick, that it was a petty, unscrupulous, and an extremely cruel thing to do, that it was a sin that matched the one perpetrated by Yazid¹.

Karimdad coughed a couple of times as though preparing to say something. But when yet another shower of the choicest profanities erupted from Chaudhry Nathu’s mouth, Karimdad could no longer contain himself. He cried out, ‘Don’t abuse others, Chaudhry!’

A terrible mother-related profanity got stuck midway in the Chaudhry’s throat. He turned and looked strangely at Karimdad who was, at that moment, busy adjusting the turban on his head.

‘What did you say?’

Karimdad answered in a low but firm voice, ‘I said: don’t abuse others.’

Chaudhry Nathu spat out the profanity stuck in his throat and turned aggressively towards Karimdad, ‘Abuse who? How are they related to you?’ And then he looked around and addressed all those who had gathered at the chaupal. ‘Did you hear, people? He says don’t abuse others … Ask him: how are they related to him?’

Karimdad answered patiently, ‘Why would they be related to me? They are my enemies, what else?’

A loud, strained sort of laughter tore out of the Chaudhry’s throat with such force that it shook the hairs of his moustache. ‘Did you hear that? They are his enemies. And should one love one’s enemies, son?’

Karimdad answered in the tone of a dutiful son answering an elder, ‘No, Chaudhry, I didn’t say that. All I said was: don’t abuse others.’

Karimdad’s childhood friend, Miranbakhsh, who sat next to him, asked, ‘But why?’

Karimdad spoke directly to Miranbaksh, ‘What’s the point, yaar? They are trying to close the river and ruin your crops and you think you can abuse them and even the score? Does it make sense? One abuses when there is no other answer.’

Miranbakhsh asked, ‘Do you have an answer?’

Karimdad paused for a minute, then said, ‘The question is not mine alone; it involves thousands upon thousands of people. My answer can not be everyone’s answer. In such situations, one can come up with a satisfactory answer only after careful consideration. They can’t turn the course of the river in one day. It’ll take them years. Whereas here, you are taking just one second to vent your pent up venom against them in the form of expletives.’ He put one hand on Miranbakhsh’s shoulder and spoke with affection. ‘All I know is this, yaar: that it is wrong to call India unscrupulous, petty and cruel.’

Instead of Miranbakhsh, Chaudhry Nathu shouted, ‘Now hear this!’

Karimdad continued to address Miranbakhsh, ‘It is stupid, my dear friend, to expect mercy or favour from the enemy. When war breaks out and we begin to cry that they are using a bigger bore rifle, or that we are dropping smaller bombs while they are dropping bigger bombs, I ask you in all honesty, are such complaints right? A small knife can kill just as effectively as a big knife. Am I not telling the truth?’

Instead of Miranbakhsh, Chaudhry Nathu began to think, but soon showed his irritation. ‘But the issue here is that they are going to close our water… they want to kill us of hunger and thirst.’

Karimdad removed his hand from Miranbakhsh’s shoulder and addressed the Chaudhry, ‘When you have already declared someone as your enemy, why complain that he wants to kill you of hunger and thirst? If he doesn’t drive you to your death from hunger and thirst, if he doesn’t turn your green fields into arid wastelands, do you think he will instead send you pans full of pilau and pots full of sweet sharbat and plant gardens and groves for your leisure?’

This only aggravated the Chaudhry further. ‘What is this nonsense?’ he asked furiously.

Even Miranbakhsh asked his friend softly, ‘Yes, yaar, what is this nonsense?’

‘It isn’t nonsense, Miranbakhsh!’ Karimdad spoke as though trying to explain things to his friend. ‘Just think, in a war the two parties try their hardest to defeat the other side. Just as the wrestler who grids his loins, as it were, and enters the ring, and tries every trick in the book to bring his opponent to the ground.’

Miranbakhsh nodded his tonsured head and said, ‘Yes, that’s true.’

Karimdad smiled, ‘Then it is all right to even close the river. It may seem like cruelty to us; but for them it is perfectly acceptable.’

‘When your tongue begins to loll and hang to the ground with thirst, then I will ask you if it is acceptable. When your children cry for every morsel of food, will you still say it is okay to close the river?’

Karimdad licked his dry lips with his tongue and answered, ‘I will still say the same thing, Chaudhry. Why do you forget that it isn’t as if they are our enemies only; we too are their enemies. If we could, we too would have shut off their food and water. But now when they can and are going to close our river, we will have to think of a way out. But what’s the point of useless abuses? The enemy will not produce rivers of milk for you, Chaudhry Nathu. If he can, he will mix poison in every drop of your water. You might call it cruelty, even barbarianism, because you don’t like this form of taking life. Isn’t that strange? Before the commencement of war, should the two warring parties lay down a set of conditions and clauses, a bit like a nikah? Should we tell them not to kill us of hunger or thirst but that they are welcome to do so with a gun and that too a gun of a certain bore? This is the real nonsense … Think about it, carefully and coolly.’

By now Chaudhry Nathu had reached the far limit of his frustration. He shouted, ‘Someone get a slab of ice and place it on my breast.’

‘You expect me to get that too?’ Karimdad said and laughed. Then he patted Miranbakhsh on the shoulder, got to his feet and left the chaupal.

As he was about to cross his threshold, he saw Bakhto coming out of the house. She saw Karimdad and a toothless smile appeared on her face.

‘Congratulations, Keeme! You have been blessed with a healthy baby boy. Think of a suitable name for him now.’

‘Name?’ Karimdad thought for no more than a second and said, ‘Yazid — Yazid.’

Bakhto’s mouth fell open with surprise.

Whooping with joy, Karimdad entered his house. Jeena was lying on a string bed. She looked paler than she had ever before. A bonny baby lay besides her, busy sucking his thumb. Karimdad looked at him with a glance full of love and pride. Touching his cheek lightly with a forefinger, he said softly, ‘My little Yazid!’

A faint shriek escaped Jeena as she squealed with surprise, ‘Yazid?’

Karimdad looked closely at his son’s face, inspecting each feature carefully, ‘Yes, Yazid. That’s his name.’

Jeena’s voice sounded faint, ‘What are you saying, Keeme? Yazid…’

Karimdad smiled, ‘What’s in it? It’s only a name!’

All Jeena could manage was a whisper ‘… But whose name?’ Karimdad answered with all seriousness, ‘It needn’t be the same Yazid. He had closed the river; our son will open it.’

1 Within fifty years of the Prophet’s death, the small community of Muslims was torn by conflicting claims to leadership. The governor of Syria, Mu’aviya, opposed Ali and wrested the Caliphate from him. His son, Yazid, carried the enmity forward by demanding allegiance (bay’ ah) from Ali’s son and successor Husain. When Husain — son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad — declined, Yazid issued an unequivocal call: Surrender or Die! Surrender meant recognition of Yazid and the power he had wrongfully wrested. For Husain both were unacceptable; instead, he chose willing sacrifice of himself, his family and supporters.

It was the year AD 679 — seventy men held out against 4000 in a desert named Karbala, approximately 70 km from Kufa. Rations dwindled, men died in battle, children were slaughtered and the enemy closed in on the small, besieged group. On the eighth day of battle, water supply was cut off. The river Euphrates glimmered in the distance but the way was barred. Ill, hungry, dying of thirst, the bedraggled but valiant group faced battle on the fateful tenth day, the day called Ashura, when all perished save for three male members and some women and children who were paraded till Damascus to be presented before Yazid. Quite naturally, then, Yazid is one of the most hated figures in Islamic history.

2 Called Chhoti Eid in the Urdu original, meaning ‘small Eid’ referring to Eid-ul- Fitr that comes after the month of Ramazan.

3 Called Badi Eid in the Urdu original, meaning ‘big Eid’ referring to Eid-uz-Zuha or the Feast of the Sacrifice which is celebrated in memory of Abraham’s sacri- fice of that which was dearest to him, his son Isaac.

4 Muharrum is the first month of the Muslim lunar calendar. The incidents of Karbala happened during this month. Shaam-e-Gharibaan (Eve of Sorrows) on the night of the ninth day of Muharrum is a poignant cathartic occasion for remembrance. By Ashura, the tenth day, the matam or mourning reaches a fren- zied climax: processions are taken out, the faithful walk on live coals, flay them- selves with chains and whips. Alam, a replica of the standard or pennant carried by Husain in battle, is carried at the head of the procession. The Panja, an emblem in the shape of the open palm signifying the panj tan paak, the Five Holy Ones, namely, the Prophet, Fatima (his daughter), Ali (her husband), Hasan and Husain (their sons) — and the taaziya — an elaborate construction of paper, tinsel and other finery replicating Husain’s tomb — are included in the procession for ‘burial’ at Karbala. Any city with a sizeable population of Shia Muslims has its own ‘Karbala’ to bury both the annual taaziya and serve as bur- ial ground for Shias. All over north India, both Shia and Sunni Muslims partic- ipate in these Muharrum processions. Crowds gather to watch them, and in rural India occasionally the ‘spectacle’ overtakes the solemnity of the occasion.

5 Karbala, here is a metaphor for vicissitudes, troubled times, when there might be shortages of food and water.

SLIVERS AND SILVEREENS

‘The brave and famous Indian leader has been barred from entering Kashmir.’

‘And it is noteworthy that the brave and famous leader is a Kashmiri!’

‘Saadat Hasan Manto is also a Kashmiri.’

‘And he has three cases of obscenity filed against him.’

‘Politics, too, is obscene.’

‘A case under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code ought to be filed against the brave and famous Indian leader.’

‘And the Sessions Court ought to acquit him.’

‘Because so far no decision has been reached on the issue of obscenity.’

‘Neither has a correct and satisfactory definition of obscenity been spelt out.’

‘The brave and famous Indian leader who is a Kashmiri…’

‘May he live long!’

‘Saadat Hasan Manto.’

‘The brave and famous — and emotional — Indian leader arrived in Kashmir despite a ban on his entry.’

‘The Dogra rulers better beware!’

‘All those present stand at attention!’

‘The President is on his way.’

‘We are not Dogras; we have do gur, two virtues, that is.’

‘You may be “do gur” — people with two virtues — but you are not Goras who have a thousand virtues. You cannot stop me.’

‘We can’t stop you, but these bayonets and slivers can certainly stop you; they have been made with the express purpose of doing so.’

‘Why have they been made?’

‘I don’t know; ask those who have made them.’

‘You are a Kashmiri.’

‘We don’t know. We are only Dogras. We are only slivers. We are only that which we are not. But we have been born from your existence. Go back — go back to Allahabad, the city famous for its guavas. We have been slicing guavas with our razor-sharp slivers and eating them. Go, go back lest we take you for an Allahabadi guava and eat you.’

‘I am a very emotional man. I can turn into a guava. But I cannot stand here and watch Nimrod¹ play God. Your king is like Nimrod. He will never have the honour of turning into a guava². I am a Kashmiri. I am a pear, a cherry, an apple. I can be whatever I want to be. Get out of here and ask the rest of the country who I am. My father was a pearl, a very rare pearl. Have you forgotten its lustre and its glory?’

‘What is done is done. Whatever has been strung is a pearl. Has he been strung?’

‘He wasn’t strung; he was tied up! In fact, he was even beaten up.’

‘Then he was no pearl. We never saw his “jyoti”.’

‘You didn’t see his “jooti”³ either; nor do you deserve to.’

‘Catch him.’

‘Catch him.’

‘Stop him, stop him at the point of your spears.’

‘I don’t care for your spears.’

‘Pick up this hothead, put him in a motor car and drop him beyond the boundaries of Kashmir.’

‘Well, he isn’t a bad sort, actually — though he does talk an awful lot of nonsense.’

‘Things that we weren’t taught.’

‘Catch him.’

‘Put him in the car.’

‘And leave him beyond the boundaries.’

‘Catch the brave, famous and emotional Indian leader — very, very carefully — as though you are picking up a baby. And imagine that you are putting him not in a motor car but placing him on a swing. And take the swing all the way back to the point where he first decided to become a nuisance for us. We are Dogras.’

‘We are do gure.’

‘I am Hari Singh.’

‘We are drunk on rum.’

‘And that is why we are standing at alert and respectful attention!’

‘Return the President’s carriage.’

‘So there, the division/partition has happened.’

‘What has been divided/partitioned?’

‘The subcontinent.’

‘The subcontinent?’

‘Who partitioned it?’

‘I am sorry, but I am a Hindu, and now my country is this Hindustan.’

‘Which Hindustan?’

‘The one that was given to us by Radcliffe⁴.’

‘Why do you need to be sorry, then?’

‘I need to. Don’t say anything — you are a Hindu now — your language should be Hindi.’

‘But the loincloth clad leader in our country had said….’

‘He shall be killed.’

‘But who will kill him?’

‘We shall kill him.’

‘You?’

‘Any man will be ready to rise from among us to kill such a communal man.’

‘Yes, this must be done.’

‘When?’

‘It shall happen in its own time.’

‘When will that time come?’

‘A great deal of speculation has happened at the right time. But it has been heard that the matter is not in the hands of the government servants and bureaucrats. It has been said that there is a God who is the highest officer of His department.’

‘And He brooks no interference, and does exactly as He pleases.’

‘He ought to be punished.’

‘For that, our Indian Penal Code will be of no use.’

‘What’s going on, brother?’

‘Assalam-wa-alaekum.’

‘Wa-alaekum as-salam.’

‘The greatest Islamic government in the world is about to become a reality.’

‘It has been heard that many bugles were sounded and many crackers were burst.’

‘Why? Was it shab-e-baraat⁵?’

‘Every revolution is a shab-e-baraat.’

‘But every shab-e-baraat is not the harbinger of a revolution.’

‘You talk rubbish. It looks like you are still entangled in the bonds of imperialism.’

‘And you are a bourgeois; you have empathy for the proletariat.’

‘Empathy be damned.’

‘This isn’t Saadat Hasan Manto speaking.’

‘Oh no, he died a long time ago. It is his stone-cold corpse speaking.’

‘From where?’

‘From the grave?’

‘How can that be? A fatwa has been issued against him declaring him to be a kafir, a non-believer. How can there be a grave for a kafir?’

‘It came up on its on.’

‘This is wrong. It can’t be. Make a general announcement. Let it be known: that this isn’t the grave of that scoundrel; it is the grave of some unknown dervish who was obscene only from inside and had been secretly getting treatment for his sickness.’

‘All right.’

‘All right.’

“It is more than all right; it is perfect.’

‘God is benevolent and merciful.’

‘May Manto also benefit from God’s mercy!’

‘Amen.’

‘Amen.’

‘This isn’t hell; it is heaven.’

‘Gar Firdaus bar-rooh-e zameen-ast

Hameen asto hameen asto hameen ast’

(If there is paradise anywhere on earth

It is here, it is here, it is here.⁶)

‘The traitor is scared.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means exactly what the rest of us mean.’

‘That means we shall certainly take Kashmir.’

‘Sure.’

‘The UNO shall decide.’

‘Decide what?’

‘Our fate.’

‘God used to take such decisions earlier.’

‘Now earthly “gods” decide the fates of earthly paradises.’

‘Who is this earthly “god”?’

‘He has several names. His name can be Rahim⁷. It can be Graham too. Let’s say it is Graham — that is if both the countries and its people accept that, or else…’

‘Or else?’

‘All else is nonsense.’

‘Bravo!’

‘Well said!’

‘Long live!’

‘We are the rightful claimants of paradise.’

‘Undoubtedly. What is the right Hindi equivalent for “undoubtedly”? The leader will find out from All India Radio and tell us. Will he understand what it means or not — we don’t know that as yet. He hasn’t said anything about it so far.’

‘Respected leader, we use the Hindi word for paradise; we call it “swarg”.’

‘I have heard this name for the first time today.’

‘How strange!’

‘The word you use for strange — “achrach” — I have heard that too for the first time today.’

‘It’s the lingo of the radio — it is the language that is breeding here, despite your presence amongst us.’

‘I am known for my foul tongue; I have no sarokar with this language.’

‘What’s that word you use? “Sarokar” ⁸? What does it mean?’

‘This “sarokar” has nothing to do with anything; it has to do with me, with my entire family. But forget about all this now. I want to tell you in no uncertain words — I want Kashmir, I want it because I was born there.’

‘Manto wasn’t born there?’

‘No one on earth was born there.’

‘If any human being has ever been born, he has been born outside Kashmir.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Why?’

‘Ask Kashmir.’

‘Ask the one who has been born.’

‘This is very strange. Very strange, indeed.’

‘This strange thing is known by its other name — UNO.’

‘That too is a very strange name.’

‘Politics is a strange business.’

‘And the other word for “strange” is Saadat.’

‘E Saadat bajor-e baazu neest

Tanah bakhshad Khuda-e-Kashmiri.’

‘But unfortunately, he is no Hato⁹.’

‘Long live Dr Graham!’

‘Down with Dr Graham!’

‘The fellow is a good for nothing.’

‘No, my dear, he writes reports. Which is a very difficult thing to do.’

‘Long live difficult things!’

‘Long live Kashmir!’

‘Paradise has been broken into parts.’

‘We have half; they get half.’

‘No, we want all of it.’

‘We want a whole and complete paradise.’

‘Who’s that?

‘Manto.’

‘No, that’s Sheikh Saadi, who was the Manto of his time.’

1 In the Bible, Nimrod, the son of Cush, grandson of Ham, great-grandson of Noah, was a Mesopotamian monarch and ‘a mighty hunter before Yahweh’. According to popular legend, however, he has been made out to be an impious tyrant who built the infamous Tower of Babel.

2 In the original, there is a great deal of word play between Nimrod (pronounced Nimrood in Urdu) and amrood (guava). Just as in the original Urdu, there is a clever pun on Dogre (plural of Dogra, the community from the foothills of the Himalayas who produced the last Maharaja of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh), ‘Do-gure’ (a coinage to imply one who has two gurs or two qualities), and Gore (the often pejorative word for the white-skinned Englishmen).

3 The play upon words continues — ‘jyoti’ meaning light or radiance and ‘jooti’ meaning shoe sound the same but mean vastly different things.

4 Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe GBE, PC (1899–1977) was a British lawyer and law lord most famous for his partitioning of the British Imperial territory of India. With the passing of the Indian Independence Act, he was appointed Chairman of the Boundary Commission on 3 June 1947 and given the task of carving up three separate territories in the Indian subcontinent; India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. While it is doubtful that anything Radcliffe could have done, or not done, would have made any significant difference to the fate of millions who were displaced by the greatest migration in history and even the most carefully crafted border would have provoked the massive exchange of population that resulted, Radcliffe has been demonized by many as the evil architect of the Partition. Whatever the merits of the Radcliffe Awards, he was clearly a man in a hurry, or a man being hurried by the powers-that-be, especially Lord Mountbatten, since he took just over two months to carve up these new territories.

5 Some Sunni Muslims observe Shab-e-baraat, which falls on the 15th day of the month of Shabaan according to the Islamic lunar calendar as a night of worship and salvation, commemorating when Allah saved Noah and his followers from the deluge. It is believed that during this night Allah prepares the destiny for all people on Earth for the coming year. For this reason it is sometimes called the Night of Emancipation (Lailat ul Bara'at). In India it is celebrated with distributing sweets and halwa, lighting candles and bursting crackers. People fast during the day and pray during the night, visit graveyards and light candles on the graves.

6 A Persian couplet by Amir Khusrau, the 13th century Hindustani poet, written in praise of the land of Hindustan.

7 Again a play on words: Rahim, a popular Muslim name, is also a name for God, One who is Merciful.

8 ‘Sarokar’ means ‘to do with’.

9 A community among Kashmiris.

SKETCHES

SAADAT HASAN

Much has been written and said about Manto — a great deal against him than in favour of him. An intelligent person would be hard pressed to reach any sensible conclusion on the basis of these reports. As I sit down to write this piece, I feel it is very difficult to truly express one’s feelings about Manto. Although, viewed in another way, maybe it is actually quite easy — because I have had the great good fortune to be close to Manto. In fact, if truth be told, I am Manto’s twin.

I have no real objection to what has been written about him; my only contention is that most of what has been written about Manto is quite far removed from the truth. There are some who call him a devil. Others a bald angel. But, wait, let me check whether that swine is hovering close by and eavesdropping. No, no, it is all right. Now I remember — this is the time when he drinks. He has the habit of guzzling his bitter sharbat at six in the evening.

We were born at the same time, and I seem to think we will die together. It is possible, however, that Saadat Hasan may die and Manto may not; the thought torments me. That is why I have made every effort possible to remain friends with him. If he stays alive and I die, it would be a little like the piquant case of the eggshell remaining intact while the yolk and white disappears from inside it.

I don’t wish to go into any more background details. I want to make it amply clear to you that Manto is one of those ‘one-two’ people, a real clever devil, the like of which I have never seen before in my entire life. If you add 1+2, it becomes 3. And he knows a great deal about triangles, but let us not get into that. A hint is enough for a clever man to follow.

I have known Manto since his birth. We were born together, at the same time, on 11 May 1912 but Manto has always tried to make himself into something else. If he tucks his head and neck in, you can try all you want but will never be able to find him. But I am a part of him; I belong to him. No matter what he does, I can always monitor every move he makes.

Let me tell you how he became such a great storyteller. Writers and novelists tend to write tomes about their own quirks and personality traits. They quote from Schopenhauer, Freud, Hegel, Nietzche, Marx whereas they are miles away from reality. Manto’s oeuvre is the outcome of two opposing principles. His father, may God bless him, was an extremely harsh man and his mother was the kindest of women. You may well imagine how that poor kernel must have been pulverised between these two implacable forces.

I shall now come to his schooldays. He was an intelligent though mischievous child. His height then would have been no more than three feet six inches. He was the youngest of his father’s offspring. He had his parents’ love but never had the opportunity to meet his three elder brothers who were his half-brothers and were studying abroad. He wanted to meet them and wanted them to behave like elder brothers but he got to meet them only much later — when he was an established and famous writer.

Now, let us come to his storytelling. Let me tell you quite bluntly that he is an absolute fraud. His very first story was called Tamasha; it was about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He did not get it published in his own name. That is why he was able to escape the clutches of the police.

Shortly after this, a new thought arose in his fertile mind — this time a scheme to study further. Here it would be pertinent to mention that he had failed the ‘inter exam’ twice before finally clearing it with a third division. And you will be surprised to know that he had failed his Urdu paper!

Today when he is hailed as one of the greatest Urdu writers, I can’t help smiling to myself because, you see, he still doesn’t know much Urdu. He runs after words like a hunter who chases butterflies with a net. Yet they elude his grasping fingers. And that is why there is a dearth of pretty words. He is a rough and ready hammersmith; but the blows that life has dealt him, he has taken them all squarely on the neck.

His hammering is not a crude or violent sort of clobbering. He is a fine marksman and an ace sharpshooter. He is the sort of man who will never walk on the straight and narrow path; he must always walk on a tightrope. People predict that he will fall any moment, but the bugger has never ever tripped. Sometimes I wish that he falls flat on his face and never rises again. But I know that even with his dying breath he will say that he fell simply in order to put an end to the despair of not falling!

I have said before that Manto is an absolute fraud. A proof of this is that he has always maintained that he never thinks of his story; his story thinks of him. I think this is complete rubbish! Though I can tell you that at the moment of writing a story his state is a bit like a hen that is about to lay an egg. He doesn’t lay his eggs in hiding but in full view of anyone who cares to see. His friends loll about him, his three daughters run around making a din while he squats in his special chair laying his eggs, which soon become chirping-cheeping stories. His wife is almost always angry with him. She often tells him to stop writing his stories and open a shop instead. But the shop that is open inside Manto’s brain is stuffed with more stock than the glittering bangles and baubles crammed in a trinket-seller’s cart. And that is why he sometimes worries what if one day he were to become a cold storage house or a deep freezer where all his thoughts and feelings get frozen.

As I write this essay, I am afraid that Manto will become angry with me. I can take everything that Manto dishes out, but I cannot bear his anger. He turns into a devil when he is angry. Though his anger lasts only a few minutes, but God grant you mercy in those few minutes….

He throws a lot of tantrums about writing stories but I know because I am his twin — that he is a fraud. He had once written somewhere that he carries countless stories in his pocket. The truth, however, is just the opposite.

When he has to write a story, he thinks about it all night. No clear idea emerges, at first. He gets up at five in the morning and tries to suck the juice out of some story published in a newspaper; still with no success. Then he goes to the bathroom and attempts to cool his clamour- filled head, so that he is able to think clearly, still there is no success. Then, out of frustration, he picks up some needless quarrel with his wife. If that doesn’t work, he goes out to buy a paan. The paan lies untouched on his table; still the story’s plot eludes him. Finally, as though warding off an attack, he picks up the pen or pencil. Writing 786 on Babu Gopinath, Toba Tek Singh, Hatak, Mummy, Mozelle — all these stories were written in exactly this ‘fraudulent’ fashion.

It is strange that people consider him an irreligious, vulgar sort of a person and even I think that to some extent he does fall in this category. That is why he raises his pen to write on subjects that can only be called dirty and uses words in his writings that have plenty of leeway for objections. But I know that whenever he has written anything, the first thing he writes on the first page is 786 which means ‘In the name of Allah’ and this man who appears to be an atheist, becomes a believer on paper. At the same time, it is the ‘paper-Manto’ who can be crushed between your fingers like paper-thin almond shells, whereas the real Manto is not one to be broken by hammers!

And now I shall come to Manto’s personality that I can describe in just a few words — he is a thief, a liar, a traitor and a crowd-puller.

Time and again, he has taken advantage of his wife’s carelessness and stolen several hundred rupees. He would come and hand her 800 rupees, keep looking from the corner of his eye to see where she hides them and the next day one green note would disappear! And when the poor woman discovers her loss, she would begin to scold the servants!

While everyone knows that Manto is famous for his plain speaking, I, for one, am not willing to concede that. He is a first-class liar. In the early days, he managed to get away with his lies because it had a special Manto ‘touch’. But after some time, his wife discovered that all this while she had been fed lies. Manto can lie so freely and with such ease that now, unfortunately, his family thinks that everything he says is a lie. A bit like the artificial mole that a woman makes with kohl on her cheek!

He is illiterate — since he has never studied Marx. Nor has anything written by Freud ever passed his eyes. He barely knows Hegel by name. Hebel and Amis are no more than names for him. But the funny thing is that his critics say that he has been much influenced by these great thinkers. As far as I know, Manto is not one to be influenced by the thoughts of others. He thinks that those who teach him are no better than idiots. One shouldn’t attempt to teach the ways of the world to others but understand things for one’s own self. In trying to teach and explain things to himself, he has become something that is beyond both understanding and wisdom. Sometimes, he says the oddest of things and that makes me laugh.

I can tell you with complete conviction that Manto, against whom several cases of vulgarity have been initiated, is actually a very decent man. But I cannot but say that he is like a doormat that is forever dusting and beating itself.

A LETTER TO UNCLE SAM

31 Lakshmi Mansion

16 December 1951

Mall Road

Lahore

Dear Uncle Sam,

Assalam-wa-alaekum!

This letter is from your nephew in Pakistan, whom you do not know, whom probably no one does from your land that has waged seven wars of liberation.

You know well enough how my country was created, how it was cut out from Hindustan, and how it became independent. And that is why I am taking the liberty of writing this letter to you. For just as my country was cut away and freed so I too have been cut off and freed. And surely an all-knowing scholar such as you, Uncle Sam, would know the sort of freedom a bird whose wings have been clipped would know. Anyhow, let’s not get into that.

My name is Saadat Hasan Manto and I was born in a place which is now in Hindustan. My mother is buried there, my father is buried there and my first-born too is sleeping in that land, but today it is no longer my home. My home is Pakistan which I had visited five or six times before, when it was under British rule.

I used to be a great short story writer in Hindustan; today I am a great short story writer in Pakistan. Several collections of my short stories have been published. People respect me. In undivided Hindustan, I was the subject of three lawsuits; in Pakistan there has been only one so far. But, remember, Pakistan is a very new country.

The British government considered me a writer of pornography. My own government thinks the same. The British government had let me go, but it doesn’t look like my own government will do the same. The trial court here sentenced me to three months’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 300. I appealed in the sessions court and was acquitted. But my government thinks an injustice has been done and so it has filed an appeal in the high court to review the session court’s judgment and give me an exemplary punishment. Let us see what the high court has to say.

I deeply regret that my country is not like yours. If the high court verdict goes against me, there is not a single newspaper in this country that will publish my photograph or the story of my many encounters with the law.

My country is extremely poor. It has no art paper, nor any good printing presses. In fact, I am the biggest proof of its poverty. You will, no doubt, find this hard to believe. Uncle Sam, I have written twenty-two books yet I do not have my own house to live in! And you will be astounded to know that I do not own either a Packard or a Dodge to move around in — not even a second-hand one!

I take a cycle on rent when I need to go out. And, sometimes — when I get twenty or twenty-five rupees for a newspaper article at the rate of Rs seven per column — I take a tonga and drink some locally-brewed liquor. If this liquor was brewed in your country, you would no doubt drop an atom bomb on the distillery where it is made because it can destroy a man in a year.

Look how far I have digressed. Actually, I meant to send my regards to Erskine Caldwell through you. No doubt you would know him. You have prosecuted him for his novel, God’s Little Acre for the same charge that is levelled against me here: obscenity.

Believe me, dear Uncle, I was amazed when I heard that the country that waged seven wars of independence had filed a lawsuit against him on a charge of obscenity. After all, in your country everything is naked. In your country, everything is peeled off its outer covering and showcased in display cabinets. Whether it is fruit or women, machines or animals, books or calendars — you are the King of Nudity. I used to think that in your country sanctity would be called obscenity. But what is this incredible thing you have done, dear Uncle? You have filed a case of obscenity against Caldwell!

Shocked by this news, I would have died of an overdose of my locally brewed liquor had I not, almost immediately thereafter, read about the outcome of this lawsuit. It is indeed a great misfortune for my country that it couldn’t get rid of me. But then, how would I have written this letter to you, if I had indeed been dead! Usually I am very obedient. I love my country. I shall, God willing, die in a short while. If I don’t die of natural causes, I shall do so automatically. Because where wheat flour is sold for two and three-quarters of a seer for a rupee, it would take a very shameless man to last out the usual lifespan.

So, as I was saying, I read about the outcome of the lawsuit and decided to abandon the idea of committing suicide by drinking too much bad liquor. After all, dear Uncle, you can say what you want, while everything in your country is silver coated, the judge who acquitted Brother Caldwell of the charge of obscenity is free from the influence of silver plating. If this judge (unfortunately, I don’t know his name) is alive, please do convey my warmest regards to him.

His judgment is an indication of the breadth of his vision: ‘I am personally of the view that confiscating or burying such books causes an unnecessary curiosity and amazement in people which pushes them towards seeking cheap thrills. While this book may not have been written with the intention of garnering cheap publicity and its author seems to have been actually inspired by certain sections of American life and society, I am of the opinion that truth must always be a part of literature.’

I too had said the same thing before the trial court, yet it sentenced me to three months’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 300. It was of the opinion that truth must always be kept separate from literature. Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion, I suppose.

I am willing to undergo three months of rigorous imprisonment but I cannot pay the Rs 300 fine. Dear Uncle, you have no idea how poor I am!

I am used to the rigours of hard labour but I am not used to having money. I am thirty-nine years old and I have spent most of these years doing hard physical labour. After all, do consider that despite being such a great writer I do not have a Packard!

I am poor because my country is poor. I somehow manage to find two square meals a day but some of my countrymen have to even go without that!

Why is my county poor? Why is it illiterate? You know the answer well enough. It is, as you know, the direct outcome of a conspiracy hatched between you and your brother, John Bull, but I don’t want to get into that now. For I know its very mention will besmirch your greatness. I write this letter as your humble servant and I want to remain a servant from beginning to end.

No doubt you will ask and ask with a great deal of surprise: how is your country poor when so many Packards and Buicks and such vast quantities of Max Factor cosmetics are exported from my country? This is all very well, dear Uncle, but I shall not answer your question because I know you can get the answers from your own heart (that is, if you haven’t asked your able surgeons to take it out of your breast!)

The number of people in my country who ride in Packards and Buicks do not constitute the population of my country. My country is populated by people like me and others even poorer than me.

These are bitter facts. My country does not have enough sugar, or I would have coated them before presenting them before you. Anyhow, forget that. The real issue is that I recently read a book by a writer from your friendly nation, The Loved Ones by Evelyn Waugh. I was so impressed by this book that I immediately sat down to write this letter to you.

I have long been an admirer of the individuality practiced in your country but after reading this book, I cried out uncontrollably, ‘By God, how marvellous! Bravo!’

Truly, dear Uncle, I am amazed and delighted! I must say what wonderfully alive people live in your country! Evelyn Waugh tells us that in your state of California the dead or ‘dear lost ones’ can be embalmed, and there are centres of excellence devoted to this art. If the dear departed had an ugly face, you can send him to one of these centres, fill out a form, mention your specifications and the job will be done. You can have the dead person as ‘beautified’ as you want — at a cost, of course! The best experts are available who can operate upon the corpse’s jaws and paste the sweetest smile upon its face. A twinkle can be brought in the eye, and an effulgent glow created upon the face, strictly according to requirement. And all this is done with such expertise that even the angels who come to the grave to take stock of your earthly account might think they have come to the wrong place!

Well, really Uncle Sam, by God, no one can equal your country!

We have heard of surgical operations performed upon the living. We have even heard of living people resorting to plastic surgery to improve their looks. But we had never heard that in your country even the dead can have their looks improved!

A traveller from your country had come here. Some friends of mine introduced him to me. By then I had read Brother Evelyn Waugh’s book. So I praised his country by reciting the following couplet:

Ek hum hain ke liya apni hi soorat ko bigadh

Ek woh hain ke jinhe tasveer banana aata hai

(On the one hand, there is me who has ruined my own face

On the other hand, there is he who knows how to make a painting.)

The traveller did not understand my meaning but the fact is, dear Uncle, that we have ruined our own faces. We have made ourselves so ugly that our faces can barely be recognized, not even by ourselves. And look at you — you can even transform your ugly-faced corpses into better- looking ones. The fact is that only your people have earned the right to live in this world. By god, all the others are merely swatting flies and wasting their time!

There was once a poet called Ghalib who wrote in our language — Urdu. Nearly a century ago, he had written:

Huwe mar ke hum jo ruswa huwe kyon na gharq-e-darya

Na kahin janaza uthta na kahin mazaar hota

The poor man had no fear of disrepute while he was alive because, from beginning to end, his life remained the subject of scandals. His fear was of the disrepute that would hound him after death; he was an honourable man, you see! It wasn’t really a fear; it was his belief that here would be dishonour in death and that is why he wished to be put into a flowing river so that there would neither be a funeral nor a grave! If only he had been born in your country! You would have ensured that he got a grand funeral and had his tomb built in the form of a skyscraper. Or, if you had respected his last wishes, you would have had a glass tank constructed in which his dead body would have floated and people would have flocked to see it as they do in a zoo.

Brother Evelyn Waugh tells us that in your country there are parlours where not just dead people can have their looks improved, even dead animals can have their beaks and lashes fixed. If a dog loses his tail in an accident, he can have another one fitted in. If a man had some flaws and imperfections in his face when alive, after his death they can be miraculously removed by trained hands and he is buried with great pomp and ceremony, so much so that even ‘hands’ can be hired to shower his coffin with flowers. And when someone loses a pet, a card is sent by the parlour which carries a message along the following lines: ‘Your Tammy — or Jeffy — is shaking his tail — or ear — in Heaven remembering you.’

In your country, even the dogs are better off than us. Here, we die one day and it is business as usual the next. If someone loses a dear one here, that poor man curses his luck. He says, ‘Why did the wretch have to die! I wish I had died instead!” The truth is, dear Uncle, we know neither the art of living, nor dying!

I saw the latest issue of Life (5 November, 1951, International Edition). I must say that yet another revealing vision of life in your country unfolded before my eyes. The entire story — with pictures — of the funeral of your country’s famous gangster was splashed across two whole pages. I saw the pictures of Willie Moretti — may God grant him a place in paradise! I saw the grand home that he had recently bought for 55,000 dollars as well his five-acre estate where he wanted to go away to escape from the worries of the world and live in peace. And I also saw the dead man’s photo where he is lying in bed with his eyes closed for ever and his coffin worth 5000 dollars as well as his funeral procession that comprised 11 large vans weighed down with flowers and 55 cars. As God is the only witness, tears welled up in my eyes.

God forbid, if you die, may you get a bigger and grander funeral than Willie Moretti’s. This is the heart-felt wish of a poor writer from Pakistan who, at the same time, requests you to organize your own funeral procession in your own lifetime — since you belong to a land of far-seeing people. To err is human, after all, and someone might make some mistake later and forget to remove some flaw from your face. Think of the torment it would cause your soul! But, at the same time, it is entirely possible that you might have the flawed feature corrected according to our instructions and arrange for your funeral according to the pomp and circumstance you deem fit. After all, you are far more intelligent than me! And you are also my uncle!

Give my regards to Erskine Cadwell and to the judge who acquitted him of the charge of obscenity. Forgive me for any indiscretion that I might have committed.

Your poor nephew,

Saadat Hasan Manto

Resident of Pakistan

(This letter could not be posted since there was no money to buy the postage stamp.)

ZAHMAT-E-MEHR-E-DARAKHSHAN¹

Leaving Bombay I reached Lahore via Karachi on the 7 or 8 of January, 1948. My mind was in turmoil for almost three months. I couldn’t figure out where I was — in Bombay or in Karachi in my friend Hassan Abbas’ house, or was I in Lahore where song and dance soirees are routinely organized in restaurants to collect donations for the Quaid-e-Azam Fund.

I could reach no conclusion for nearly three months. It seemed as though several reels were running on the same screen at the same time — all jumbled up and unclear. Sometimes the screen would show the bazaars and streets of Bombay, sometimes the slow-moving small trams and donkey-carts of Karachi, and sometimes the rowdy, noisy restaurants of Lahore. Where was I? I would sit in a chair all day, lost in thought.

Till one day, I came to with a start because whatever little money I had brought with me from Bombay was nearly all gone — some had been spent in the house and the rest in the Clifton Bar. By now I was sure that I was in Lahore where I used to occasionally come for various court appearances in the past and buy beautifully crafted slippers from the Karnal shop to take back.

I began to think of the sort of work I could do. The film industry was in doldrums after the Partition. The few film companies that were still around had little to show other than the boards hanging outside their offices. It made me sad. Then I found that there was a brisk trade in ‘allotments’. Muhajirs and non-Muhajirs alike were pulling every string they could to get shops and factories allotted in their names. I was advised to do the same but I declined to be a party to that loot.

Soon I discovered that Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Chiragh Hasan Hasrat were planning to bring out a new radical newspaper. I went to meet these two great men. The newspaper was called Imroze — which is today a widely read paper. The paper’s dummy was being prepared when I went for my first meeting. By my second meeting nearly four issues were out. I was delighted with the way it looked. I felt the urge to write, but when I sat down to write I found I had nothing inside my head. No matter how hard I tried I could not separate India from Pakistan or Pakistan from India. Again and again, vexing questions echoed inside my head.

Would Pakistan’s literature be different? If so, what would it be like? Who is the rightful owner of all that had been written in undivided India? Will that, too, be divided? Are the fundamental problems in India and Pakistan not alike? Will Urdu be completely destroyed out ‘there’? And what form will Urdu take here in Pakistan? Will ours be an Islamic state? We will remain faithful to our state, but will we be allowed to be critical of our government? Will the state of affairs under our own people be any better than what it was under firangi administrators?

I saw dissatisfaction and discontent in every direction. Some people were very happy because they had become rich overnight but, at the same time, they were dissatisfied with their happiness and worried that it might scatter and disappear into thin air. Some were unhappy because they had lost everything on the way across the border. I visited some refugee camps where I saw discontent with its hair on end. Someone said, things are a lot better now; you should have seen the pitiable state of these camps a few years ago. I wondered if things were better now, what was it like when they were worse?

There was chaos all around. One man’s laughter could turn into another person’s sigh. One man’s life spelt another’s death. Two streams were flowing side by side: one had life, the other death. In between there was happiness which was perpetually under the onslaught of hunger and thirst and alcoholism. A death-like atmosphere prevailed. Just as the screeching of kites, aimlessly circling the skies at the onset of summer have a sadness, so did the shouts of ‘Long Live Pakistan’ and ‘Long Live Quaid-e-Azam’. Carrying the burden, night and day, of one of the late poet Iqbal’s legendry poems, the radio waves too sounded weary. The feature programmes on radio were mostly on: How to raise poultry? How to make shoes? What is gardening? Or, how many people have come to the refugee camps? And, how many have left?

Almost all the trees were naked. The poorer refugees had stripped their bark and lit fires to escape the bitter cold and to keep their bodies warm. They had cut off the twigs and branches to quench the fire in their bellies. These denuded trees made the city look even more intolerably, heart-breakingly desolate. The buildings looked as though they were in mourning. Their inhabitants, too, looked as though they were grieving. They might laugh or play or if they found some work, they would do that too but everything seemed as though it was taking place in a vacuum — a vacuum that was filled to the brim and yet empty.

I met my dear friend Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Sahir Ludhianvi and several others. Like me, they too suffered from a mental paralysis. I had begun to feel as though some of the tremors of the terrible earthquake that had so devastated us were still lodged somewhere, perhaps inside a volcano. If they were to burst forth, they might set the world right, fix its ‘temperament’ as it were and then, finally, we might get a real sense of the situation we were in.

Thinking about all this made me feel sad and fed up. And so I began to loaf around. I would loiter in the streets all day like a vagabond. I would stay quiet myself, but listen to others. I would listen to all sorts of talk — perfect nonsense, illogical arguments and half-baked political discourses. The one good thing that emerged from this aimless loitering was that the cloud of dust and smoke that fogged my brain gradually settled down and I decided to write a few light-weight, frothy little pieces. Therefore, I wrote short essays for the Imroze on ‘The Types of Noses’ and ‘Writing on the Wall’. These were liked. Little by little, humour began to take the form of satire. I never quite felt this change. I kept writing and my pen kept producing sharp and irascible pieces such as, ‘The Question Arises’ and ‘Last Morning When I Woke Up’. I was pleased when I discovered that my pen had groped its way out of the fog that had once held it in its grip and found its own path. I felt lighter, too. And I began to write prolifically. This collection of essays was later published under the title ‘Bitter, Salty and Sweet’.

(This is an extract from a much longer essay which also served as an Introduction for Thanda Gosht, Delhi, Maktaba-e-Nau, 1950.)

1 From the verse by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib: Larazta hai mera dil zahmat-e-mehr-e-darakhshan par Main hoon woh qatra-e-shabnam ke ho khaar-e-bayabaan par. (My heart trembles at the trouble taken by the shining sun;I am the drop of dew that rests on a desert thorn.)