WHY I WRITE: ESSAYS BY SAADAT HASAN MANTO (6 page)

‘I shut the door to my room and put on a blouse. In it I slipped two halves of a rubber ball as “breasts” . I wore a petticoat and then wrapped a sari around myself. I used to wear my hair very long those days, and now I parted it at the centre, sending a few stray curls down the sides.

‘I looked into the mirror and an effeminate face stared back. The wonders a few clothes can do! I slipped on my sister’s burqa and left. On the street I stumbled a few times as I walked, the burqa catching the soles of my unpracticed feet. I found it difficult to get the feminine gait and stride right. The thought of being discovered also quickened my heartbeat. But I was resolute and crossed three bazaars to reach that house. Its stairs were right next to a halwai’s shop. I lifted the veil from my face and climbed up, my heart racing. As I walked up, the thought of my act aced all other sentiments. I knocked, having decided that if a man answered I would not say anything but turn and leave. If needed I would explain in a thin voice: “Sorry, I came here by mistake.”

‘Then I knocked again. I heard footsteps. I thought of fleeing but it was too late at this point, and the latch was being unfastened. I lowered my veil. The door opened. The girl was before me. She looked distraught. Her hair was in disarray. She was wearing a different kurta, but she had on the same pyjamas I had spotted her in. On seeing that it was a burqa-clad “woman”, her fear left her. I calmed down too.

‘She said: “Please come in.”

‘We crossed a large room and went into a small one. It had two chairs and a small bed, on which was the kurta I had seen her earlier in, with one of its sleeves turned out. Next to it was that white turban.

‘She asked me to sit, lifting some books off one chair and setting them on the bed. I was troubled by the main door, which she had left ajar. As I sat, she said politely: “You can take off the burqa.” When I looked around, she assured me there was nobody else in the house. “I’m alone,” she said. I had decided I wouldn’t speak but couldn’t stop the words, “Please shut that door outside,” from coming out of my mouth. I had used my
own
voice, but she didn’t react.

‘She got up to shut the door. I lifted my veil and waited. My face was still framed by the burqa’s cowl. My ears were hidden and my hair covered much of my face. So I thought this sight wouldn’t shock her too much.

‘She returned. I turned my face towards her. She was about to sit on the bed but sprang up like she was bitten. She gave off a soft shriek. As the saying in English goes, the cat was out of the bag.

‘I took the burqa off. I could see her legs were trembling. I became bolder. I smiled and said: “
Aadaab arz karti hoon
.” She recognized me and was paralyzed with fear. I looked into her eyes and said: “You look pretty in men’s clothing. What do you think of me in this outfit?”

‘She couldn’t figure out how to respond. Even if the skies had fallen and the roof caved in, she wouldn’t have been more shocked than she was now.

‘I felt for her. So I picked up the burqa and said: “Don’t be afraid. I’m leaving. The prank’s over.”

‘As I began to walk past her, she said with a trembling voice, “Wait.”

‘I stopped: “Well?”

‘She was looking at my blouse, from which the half-globes had slipped out. “Will you be able to go home like this?”

‘I said: “Why not? It’s how I came here.”

‘But even as I was saying this I knew that now, with the excitement behind me, I couldn’t take a step further in this outfit.

‘She said: “Think it over.”

‘I did. I was sure I couldn’t. I went through my options. I could take the sari off. But in just the blouse and petticoat, I would look like some sort of actor in costume. I could take it all off and wrap the sari around my waist but that was equally stupid. I reconsidered putting the burqa on again but the thought of stumbling around in it soon put paid to the idea.

‘I said: “Is it all right if I sit for a while?”

‘She said, “Sure,” but then all of a sudden she seemed to have remembered something.

“No, you must leave! My father-in-law is on his way. I’d forgotten about him. Please leave now.”

‘I now felt as if I was naked. I stubbornly settled further into the chair. She was in panic. “He’s going to be here any moment. Please, you must go now.’

‘I was furious with myself. I said sharply to her: “What do I care if he’s coming? I can’t walk another step dressed like this.”

‘Despite the tension, she laughed. I remained sullen. She thought for a moment and then pointed to the kurta on the bed which she’d worn earlier and said: “Take this. I’ll find you pyjamas. But for god’s sake, leave now. Don’t think of anything else.”

‘She didn’t wait for me to respond. She bent over and pulled out a trunk from under the bed to look for pyjamas. While she looked, I took the blouse off and put on the kurta.

‘When she couldn’t find a pair, she said: “Wait here. I’ll take mine off and give them to you,” and went out. I spent a strange couple of minutes waiting. Then she came and handed them over to me . “Please hurry,” she said and went out again.

‘I put them on with a bit of effort. She called out: “Are you done?”

‘“Yes,” I said. She came in and told me to go again: “I am scared he’ll be here!”

‘I took the burqa in my hand and was sallying forth when she said: “What about all this other stuff?” I looked at the sari, blouse, petticoat and two halves of the rubber ball. I said: “Let these remain.”

‘She didn’t respond to that. I walked towards the door. She came with me. When I opened it and was on the other side, she smiled and said:
“Aadaab arz karta hoon.”

‘I never saw her after that. She went away somewhere the next day. I tried to look for her and asked around but nobody could tell me much.

‘Her kurta and pyjamas are still with me. Perhaps my sari, blouse and petticoat are still with her. And those two halves of the rubber ball. I cannot say if they are. But I know that this wasn’t the sort of thing that either of us will ever be able to forget.’

The boy who liked asking girls for the time said this: ‘When I moved to Bombay, I was ecstatic because I saw girls walking around everywhere, often wearing watches.

‘One day, in Nagpada’s Jewish neighbourhood, I saw a Parsi girl on the footpath. She was walking with quick strides towards Batliwala Hospital. On her slender white wrist, I could see the black strap of a watch. I was about 200 metres behind her, a distance I covered in no time.

‘I walked a couple of steps ahead of her and turned around to ask in Gujarati:
“Tamari
ghadiyal ma ketla vagya
?” (What time is it in your watch?)

‘She lifted her wrist, but the watch was gone!

‘“Mari ghadiyal kyan chhe
?” (Where’s my watch?) she exclaimed.

‘My Gujarati gambit was over.

‘I said in Hindustani: “
Aap ki ghadi mujhe kya maaloom kahan hai?”
(How should I know where your watch is?)

‘Man, she began shrieking. In Gujarati. And in her Parsi-
manic manner. I was terrified. I had seen it on her wrist only moments before — god knows where it had vanished.

‘She kept shouting:
“Tamej lidhi hase”
(I’m sure you took it).

‘I kept trying to reassure her that I hadn’t: “If I had, why would I have asked you for the time? And forget that, how is it even possible for me to have taken it off your wrist?”

‘By now, many Jews and Christians gathered around us on the footpath. I was surrounded. Loud voices in every possible language began to raise themselves.

‘I tried to prove my innocence — sometimes in English, other times in Hindustani. But they were all on her side, of course.

‘I was tired of protesting and was about to tell them: “Go to hell if you don’t believe me.” Just then I spotted a little child through the crowd. It was playing with a black strap. At the end of the strap was the watch.

‘I pointed with a shout: “Look! What’s that child holding?”

‘The girl turned first: “My watch!”

‘An old Jewish woman took it from the child and gave it to her. I didn’t say anything, and didn’t have to because I thought I was quite the hero of the moment.’

The boy, who said girls like being teased, told the following story: ‘As I said, girls like it and often they invite us to do it to them. I can prove it with my story.

‘This happened a couple of years ago, when my thinking on the subject was different from what it is today. I was quite unsuccessful at love then. I’d be morose all the time, out of frustration of not having had a girl.

‘One day when a friend of mine told me in vivid detail that he’d made out with a girl in this particular lane, I was even more regretful about my failure. I was so saddened about being a loser that tears came to my eyes.

‘But then I thought of going to that same lane regularly and spending time till I met the girl. There was no other girl I could think of who would allow me to do the things my friend said he had with her.

‘So for a couple of weeks, I walked through the lane at the same time every day. I often saw the girl there. And she noticed me. But I couldn’t move forward.

‘One afternoon, the lane was deserted when I entered. Near its masjid I saw a lone woman in a burqa. As I went past her, she put her hand out and held on to my arm. She shouted: “
Kyon ve gushtian, tu har roz idhar de pheray
kyon karnaiyen
?” This meant — you moron, why are you here every day?

‘I began to tremble. I said: “I... I... I... never come here.”

‘She laughed. I could now see her glittering eyes through the burqa’s mesh. It was her. My fear evaporated. I shrugged my arm off her grip and pinched her ass so viciously that she screamed “
‘Allah kar key marjaein!
Tera kakh na rahe
” meaning that she wished I died and that nothing remained of me.

‘But everything remained, of course. She remained. My fear had left me. And her anger now left her.’

– (Originally published as
Chhed Khubaan
Se Chali Jaye
‘Asa
d
’)

Our Progressive Graveyards

This essay explains the working of graveyards and readers, especially non-Muslims, will find it informative.
The one thing that is striking about the piece is the moral tone that Manto adopts as a preamble to the essay. He wrote this in his early years in Bombay (at the end he indicates that the incident happened in 1942). This was the time when Manto took all that he “objected” to — the clubs, the half-naked women, the drinking, the dancing and the gambling — for granted. He imagined all of this existing without the British, which was, as he was to learn later, a naive way of looking at the issue. Indeed, he was to pine for the passing of most
of it in Pakistan only a few years later, as his other
pieces show.

Many excellent things have come to us from the culture of the west. What has it not brought to us uncivilized Indians? It gave our women the sleeveless blouse. Also lipstick, rouge, powder. Hair dyes and depilation. It’s a gift of civilization that a girl may now take a license to
prostitute herself. She can marry under a civil act and divorce under it.

Then we have the dance halls, where one can clasp women and swing away, breast touching breast. There are the clubs where one can gamble away all of one’s money. And there are places to get a drink once you’ve done that.

English culture has made us very progressive. Our women now wear trousers and walk about. There are also those women who seem to be wearing nothing at all, but may still walk around undisturbed.

India’s become so advanced that we now talk of opening a club for nudists. How silly are those who say the British, who gave us all this, should go back to Europe. If they did, who would open a nudist club in India? Who would look after all of these other places where enjoyment may be found? Where will we dance, breast touching breast, with women? Won’t our brothels become empty of life?

And who will teach us to fight one another? Who will also produce in Manchester and send us clothes made of our own cotton?

The progress we’ve achieved under the British, we haven’t in any other era. They have brought modernity not just to our hotels, clubs and cinema halls, but also to our burial grounds.

In old-fashioned graveyards, corpses are brought and buried, as if they have no value or price. But this is not so in the new, progressive graveyards.

I came to learn this when my mother died in Bombay. Till that time I was used to living in small towns. What did I know that the government had laws even for the dead?

My mother’s corpse was in one room. I was sitting distraught on a sofa in the one next to it. A friend, who had been in Bombay for a while now, said to me: ‘Look, now you people have to get working on arranging for her coffin and burial.’

I said: ‘Could you please take care of it? I’m new here.’

He replied: ‘I will, but first you have to send word that your mother is dead.’

‘To whom?’ I asked.

‘The municipal office in the neighbourhood,’ he said, ‘till they issue a death certificate, we won’t be permitted to bury her.’

The office was sent word. Soon a man arrived from there, and began asking questions. ‘Was she unwell? For how long? Who was treating her?’

The truth is that she had died of a heart attack in my presence. Obviously she wasn’t being treated by anyone because she hadn’t been unwell before. I gave the facts to the man from the municipal office. He wasn’t satisfied and said: ‘You’ll have to get a doctor’s certificate that shows us she died of a heart attack.’

I had no idea from where or how to get one and said a few words in anger to him in my frustration. My friend, the one who had been in Bombay for some time, now rose and took the man aside. He exchanged a few words with him, and then turned to me, saying to him: ‘He’s a moron. He doesn’t understand how things work here.’ He came over and took two rupees from my pocket and gave it to the man from the municipal office, who suddenly became friendly. He said: ‘Give me a few empty medicine bottles so that there’s proof of her illness. Also hand me any old prescriptions that you may have.’

I felt as if I were my mother’s killer and this fellow, who knew of my guilt, was helping out of pity for me, showing me the ways in which to hide the murder. I thought of shoving him out and throwing the empty bottles one by one on his retreating head. But, and thanks here to civilization and culture, I was silent and asked for some empty bottles to be brought and gave them to him.

For a two-rupee bribe, I had secured the municipality’s permission. Now the graveyard awaited. The first sight of it was a large metal door with a tiny room on one side, like the booking office of a cinema hall. A man peeked out from its window as my mother’s corpse was being led inside. He was about to say something when my friend handed him the certificate.

The manager was satisfied, the body hadn’t entered without a ticket. It was a pretty graveyard. There was a grove of trees at one end, in the shade of which many gravestones could be seen. There were rose bushes and
chameli
growing all around the area. On asking, we learnt that this was the highest class in the graveyard, where the rich buried their dead. To spend an eternity here, it costs 300 rupees. This sum bought you or your loved ones a good location and a well constructed grave. For it to be cared for, an additional six rupees had to be paid every year.

The graves other than the 300-rupee ones would be dug up every three or four years. Others would then be buried in that space. These graves neither had the shade of tree nor any fragrance of rose and
chameli
. Along with dirt, a special masala was added to these graves so that the flesh would decompose and the bones dissolved rapidly.

Because there were rows upon rows of them, these ordinary, unmarked graves had numbers identifying some of them. The number could be bought for four annas. This is also like it is in a cinema hall, where you pay for a numbered seat. Once the money was paid, a metal plate stamped with the number was assigned to the grave. This plate remained till the grave was emptied for its next occupant.

Numbering makes it all so easy. In your diary, you can set down all your details with numbers:

Shoe size: 5

Stocking size: 91/2

Insurance policy number: 225689

Mother’s grave number: 4817

Telephone number: 44457

And if the world really progresses, you’ll be allotted the number of your grave the moment you’re born.

Anyway, in the graveyard there was a beautiful little mosque. On the board outside was written: ‘Important Message’ and under it the following instructions.

‘If someone wants to bury their relative in a kutcha grave, they must dig it themselves. Nobody is available to do this.

Digging a large one will cost two rupees and four annas. Of this one rupee and four annas is for the gravedigger and one rupee for the rights of the graveyard. A small grave (for children) will cost one rupee and four annas of which twelve annas are for the gravedigger and eight annas for the graveyard. If this is not paid, the grave will be vacated. Nobody is permitted to stay on in the graveyard, whether man or woman. You may come with the bier and leave when it is done. If a body is brought in without ritual cleaning, the graveyard will take four annas for the washing (even if this is done by your person).

For bodies that are brought in the night, another two annas for lights will be charged. Please do not shout or scream or fight here. Those who do will be handed over to the police. If gravediggers are used for watering graves or the plants around them, they are to be paid another four annas. Those who do not pay this will not have their graves or plants watered.

Management Trustee.

This has a point of similarity with the notices in cinema halls. Even there it’s written: ‘Those who come drunk or make trouble will be handed over to the police.’

It’s quite possible that as we progress, there will be additions to the notice in the graveyard. Such as: ‘In case of a natural disaster or aerial bombing, management will not refund the money for those graves that may be destroyed. For building an air-raid shelter over your grave, the price is two hundred and fifty rupees. But even here, note that the responsibility for the grave’s safety does not lie with the management. To keep graves air-conditioned, small cooling plants are available. The bill must be settled for this month etc.’

Another board was put up in the graveyard where the rates for ritual cleaning were advertised:

For funeral prayer and Quran reading: six annas

Cleaning an adult: One rupee and two annas

Cleaning a child: fourteen annas

Wood for heating water: four annas

Labour for heating and filling water: two annas

Barga
*
for adults: two-and-a-half annas

Barga
for children: one-and-three-fourth annas

I found this board to be like those in good saloons. Perhaps there could be one in the graveyard for the grooming of corpses as well. Something like:

Haircut (Boys): four annas

Haircut (Women): one rupee

Haircut (Girls): eight annas

Shave: two annas

Haircut and shave: nine annas

Shampoo: two annas

Haircut, shave and shampoo: ten annas.

If one gets a haircut, shampoo and shave, a couple of annas may be saved. Perhaps the graveyards will also give such discounts to their customers. In a notice such as: ‘Those who pay for two large graves in a year, a child’s grave will be free.’ Or: ‘Those who have two graves dug at the same time will get two rose bushes free.’

Or: ‘Those who buy the gravestones etc from our store will get one beautiful metal number free.’

I wonder when we progress even further, if an advance booking of graves will be possible? We can select a spot in some fashionable place a few years before our loved ones are likely to go so that we don’t have to face last-minute disappointments.

And the manner of burial will also be the latest, I suppose. It will in fact even be advertised.‘Isaji Moosaji & Sons — Experts in laying you to rest. We are specialists in ritual cleaning and clothing without any contact with human hands.’

Graveyards will also advertise their services: ‘City’s most modern graveyard! Where your loved ones will rest in as much peace as you have in your bedroom!’

There are many anjuman-type bodies in Bombay that do this sort of thing anyway, and arrange for burial. You need not do a thing. Just send word to one of them. From cleaning the corpse to clothing it and taking it to the graveyard, it’s all door-to-door service.They’ll hand you a bill at the end of it, of course.

And you’re a busy man, so why not? Let’s say your servant dies. You regret the death very much and are in fact deeply saddened by his passing. But it is also a fact that some acquaintances of yours are off to a picnic on the beach. And these are people with whom you may have some business dealings. So you summon someone from one of the anjumans. You settle their fees and it’s done.

Their young men will shoulder the bier and piously shout out verses from the Quran as they lead the body out. The funeral prayer will be held in a proper fashion (it is listed in your bill).

And in the adult grave, which costs two rupees and four annas, your faithful servant will be interred. Meanwhile you’re enjoying your picnic, and things are also being done quite smoothly here. If you’ve promised them a bonus, the anjuman’s boys will even offer a sheet of flowers over the grave.

A few days after my mother was buried, I had occasion to visit that graveyard again. The board had this new notice on it: ‘From June 1942, the labour charge of gravediggers has been increased. For digging an adult grave, one rupee and four annas. For digging a small grave, 14 annas.’

War has brought inflation even to the graveyard.

– (Originally published as
Taraqqi Yafta Qabrastan
)