My auto came to a halt atone of the dusty, grimy, grey traffic signals that dots the Mumbai suburban landscape. It was just another Mumbai road moment, the air vibrating with the restless thrum of the million engines carrying a million impatient people to their various destinations. A dusty, grimy, grey street child was making the rounds of the waiting vehicles, begging. He was so small that any smaller, he would have been mistaken for the million bandicoots that live under the pavements and sewers.
He was begging the way street children are perhaps taught in their Fagin’s academy—touching the passengers, knocking on the raised car windows, his tone whining and pitiful. He approached an auto containing two teenage girls. As he tried to touch them, one of the girls shrieked in a tone colored by disgust and fear, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”
The little child, as like some of us around, was taken aback by the violence of her words. Just then the signal turned green and a million of us left a dusty, grimy, grey child to deal with not only his poverty, abuse, hunger, and lack of opportunities, but also the weight of this rejection that denied his right to exist as a human being, alone.
I can write about my guilt about what happened to this child and to all those million nameless, faceless people who live on the edges of our existence, identified only by the disembodied dirty hands and feet and sometimes eyes that we look away from. I would probably end up sounding pretentious and insincere for my trouble.
But it takes the genius of Sadat Hasan Manto to write a stunning, shocking short story of the inner world of one such person and make it more profound than an epic tragedy.
“The Insult” tells the story of Saugandhi, a prostitute whose dreamy, happy, simplistic inner world keeps her ugly, gristly real world at bay. She’s been a prostitute for five years—but has a naïve approach to it. “It seemed like every night some john would proclaim his love to her. Saugandhi knew they were lying, and yet her emotions would overwhelm her and she would imagine they really did.”
Saugandhi is in a relationship with a police constable from Pune who pretends to be her husband, promises to send money so that she can stop being a prostitute, but in reality, takes money from her instead. “Both were lying, and both were pretending. But Saugandhi was happy just as those who can’t wear real gold become content with imitation trinkets.”
But such a happy bubble is about to be pricked. One night, Saugandhi is woken up from her drunken stupor by her pimp who wants to take her to a new rich customer who’s come in a car. She agrees to go, not for herself, but because she needs to give money to a widowed neighbor. “Saugandhi had reassured her just the day before, ‘Don’t worry. My boyfriend’s about to come from Pune. I’ll get some money from him and buy your tickets.’ Madho was indeed about to come, but Saugandhi would have to come up with the money on her own.”
But poor Saugandhi. The rich customer takes one look at her and takes off with a “Yuhkk!”
Saugandhi’s lovely inner world crashes into her real world, and it turns her into a bitter, disillusioned, angry woman. She sees the ugliness of the world around her for the first time. She throws her boyfriend out and is left with just a mangy dog. “For quite a while she stayed in the cane chair, but even after thinking things over, she couldn’t find any way to soothe herself, so she picked up her mangy dog, put him on one side of her wide teak bed, lay down next to him and immediately fell asleep.”
“Bombay Stories” (published by Random House India) is an anthology of Manto’s 14 short stories written between 1936 and 1948, during his stay in the city. Exquisitely translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, this book captures moments in the lives of its working class, specifically prostitutes. We understand from the foreword that prostitution in the city had developed on an unprecedented scale, driven by unaccompanied male workers and destitute women.
The translation manages to capture the essence of Manto’s style, which is a curious mix of frankness, lyricism and black humour. There is a range of emotions that the author explores, with the sure-footedness of an expert in psychiatry and the sensitivity of a poet. There are no existential debates—yet, in the small moments and spontaneous emotions of the “low life” characters, lie universal truths.
“Smell” is the story of a man haunted by the smell of a ghatin woman he has casual sex with, one monsoon day. I understand that Manto was tried for obscenity for this story. It is a story of striking sensuousness. “All night her body emitted a strange smell at once alluring and repellent. With every breath Randhir took in this ambivalent odor that came from everywhere—her hair, her armpits, her breasts, and her stomach. All night he told himself that he wouldn’t have felt that close to her if her naked body hadn’t smelled that way, if that smell hadn’t entered into his every fibre and invaded his every thought.”
In “Siraj,” here’s how the author describes her—“I had seen Siraj once or twice. She was really skinny but beautiful, and her prominent eyes overshadowed every other feature of her oval face. When I saw her for the first time on Clare Road, I was puzzled. I wanted to tell her eyes, ‘Excuse me, please move aside a little so I can see Siraj.’ Needless to say, it didn’t happen.”
Siraj, in one short story, evolves from being a troublesome and troubled prostitute to a fine Joan of Arc, extracting her unique revenge. It is also a surprisingly sweet love story.
“Mummy” talks about a film workers’ collective, a squalid living quarters inhabited by wannabe directors, actors, music directors and a woman of uncertain social standing, all bonded to a studio. It is a story of debauchery, drinking, escapism, and Anglo Indian prostitutes and also laced with real love and menace. But at heart, it is a buddy story.
The main protagonist goes into raptures about the silver hair of a girl he met—“’Man, I have really become emotional! Yes—that color—I swear to God it’s unprecedented. Have you seen it? You’ll find it on a fish’s stomach—no, no, not just their stomachs—on pomfret fish—what are those things on fish called? No, no—on snakes—on their delicate scales—yes, scales—just that color—scales—I learned that word from a fisherman. It’s such a beautiful thing and yet such an absurd word! In Punjabi we call it ‘chane’—shining—yes, that—it’s exactly how her hair is. Her hair is so beautiful, it could kill you!’ Then he suddenly got up. ‘Fuck all this! Man, I’ve got all emotional!’
Then Venkatre asked very innocently, ‘What do you mean by emotional?’”
“Ten Rupees” is a drop of sunshine, a breath of fresh air, a brightly colored pebble on a beach, a moment of happiness in a bottle. It talks about a child prostitute, Sarita, all of 15 years old, pimped by her mother. When she does not go out with customers, she spends her time playing with younger girls in the chawl. She has no crisis or problems—her life is one of small, innocent pleasures, such as taking a ride in a car.
The story describes one outing she has with three young men from Hyderabad. They drive around and reach the beach. “Sarita got out and set off running down the beach, and Kifayat and Shahab joined her. She ran upon the wet sand by the tall palm trees that rose along the ocean’s open vista, and she wondered what it was she wanted—she wanted to fade into the horizon, dissolve into the water, and soar so high into the sky that the palm trees stood beneath her; she wanted to absorb the sand’s moisture through her feet, and…and… the car, the speed, the lash of the rushing air… she felt transported.”
Manto’s writing is not just a sum of craft, style, imagination and content. It is much beyond and much greater than its components, a rare talent that only a chosen few are blessed with, a genius that others can only aspire for.
The book’s back cover quotes this from Nadeem Aslam, the prize-winning British Pakistani novelist, who puts it much better than I can ever do: “I would travel anywhere with Manto. In every lane, he points out the errors of God. In every bazaar, he kicks away the gold coins of men. He can hear the colour in betrayal and street argument, and can smell disease in the bloodstream. As long as there is a Lahore, a Bombay, a Toba Tek Singh, a Wagah—Manto will be alive. He is magnificently immortal.”
About the title: "Low life fictions" is how Salman Rushdie describes Manto's writings.
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