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
