The Dog of Tithwal

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  I cut him off sharply. ‘Dhobi, have you started drinking again?’

  He laughed, ‘Drink? Where can one get drink?’

  I didn’t think it appropriate to say more. He wrapped the dirty clothes in a bundle and went off.

  In a few days, the situation became even worse. Wire after wire began to arrive from Lahore, ‘Leave everything and come at once.’ I decided at the beginning of the week that I would leave on Sunday, but as it turned out, I had to prepare to leave early the following day.

  The clothes were with the dhobi. I thought I might retrieve them from his place before the curfew started, so that evening I took a Victoria and went to Mahalakshmi.

  There was an hour left before the curfew and there was still traffic on the streets, trams were still running. My Victoria had just reached the bridge when, all of a sudden, a great commotion broke out. People ran blindly in all directions. It was as if a bullfight had begun. When the crowd thinned, I saw many dhobis in the distance with lathis in hand, dancing. Strange, indistinct sounds rose from their throats. It was where I was headed, but when I told the Victoria driver, he refused to take me. I paid him his fare and continued on foot. When I came near the dhobis, they saw me and fell silent.

  I approached one dhobi and said, ‘Where does Ram Khilavan live?’ Another dhobi with a lathi in his hand reeled towards us. ‘What’s he asking?’ he said to the dhobi I’d questioned.

  ‘He wants to know where Ram Khilavan lives.’

  The blind-drunk dhobi came close and pushed up against me. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Me? Ram Khilavan is my dhobi.’

  ‘Ram Khilavan is your dhobi. But which dhobi’s runt are you?’

  One yelled, ‘A Hindu dhobi’s or a Muslim dhobi’s?’ The crowd of dhobis, blind drunk, closed in around me with their fists up, swinging their lathis. I had to answer their question: was I Muslim or Hindu? I was terrified. They had surrounded me, so running away was not an option. There were no policemen nearby to whom I could cry out for help. Dazed with fear, I started speaking in broken sentences. ‘Ram Khilavan is a Hindu…I’m asking where he lives…Where is his room…He’s been my dhobi for ten years…He was very sick…I had him treated…My begum…My memsaab came with a motor car…’ I got as far as that and began feeling terrible pity for myself. I was filled with shame at the depths to which men were willing to sink in order to save their lives. My wretchedness made me reckless. ‘I’m Muslim,’ I said.

  Loud cries of ‘Kill him, kill him,’ rose from the crowd. The dhobi, who was soused to the eyeballs drifted to one side, and said, ‘Wait. Ram Khilavan will kill him.’

  I turned and looked up. Ram Khilavan stood over me, wielding a heavy cudgel in his hand. He looked in my direction and began to hurl insults at Muslims in his language. Raising the cudgel over his head, he advanced on me, swearing the whole time.

  ‘Ram Khilavan!’ I yelled authoritatively.

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ he barked, ‘Ram Khilavan…’

  My last hope had vanished. When he was close to me, I said softly, in a parched voice, ‘You don’t recognize me, Ram Khilavan?’

  Ram Khilavan raised his cudgel in attack. Then his eyes narrowed, widened and narrowed again. The cudgel fell from his hand. He came closer, concentrating his gaze on me and cried, ‘Saab!’

  He turned quickly to his companions and said, ‘This is not a Muslim. This is my saab. Begum saab’s saab. She came with a motor car and took me to the doctor who cured my diarrhoea.’

  Ram Khilavan tried to make them understand, but they wouldn’t listen. They were all drunk. Fingers were pointed this way and that. Some dhobis came over to Ram Khilavan’s side and fighting broke out amongst them. I saw my chance and slipped away.

  At nine the next morning my things were ready. I waited only for my ticket, which a friend had gone to buy on the black market. I was deeply unsettled. I wanted the ticket to arrive quickly so that I could go to the port to board the ship to Lahore. I felt that if there were any delay, my very flat would make me a prisoner.

  There was a knock on the door. I thought the ticket had arrived. I opened the door and found the dhobi standing outside.

  ‘Salaam, saab!’

  ‘Salaam!’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Come in.’

  He came in, in silence. He opened his bundle and put the clothes on the bed. He wiped his eyes with his dhoti, and in a choking voice, said, ‘You’re leaving, saab?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He began to cry. ‘Saab, please forgive me. It’s all the drink’s fault…and…and these days it’s available for free. The businessmen distribute it and say, “Drink and kill Muslims.” Who’s going to refuse free liquor? Please forgive me. I was drunk. Saeed Salim, barrister was grateful to me. He gave me one turban, one dhoti, one kurta. Begum saab saved my life. I would have died of dysentery. She came with a motor car. She took me to the doctor. She spent so much money. You’re going to the new country. Please don’t tell Begum saab that Ram Khilavan…’

  His voice was lost in his throat. He swung his bundle over his shoulder and headed out. I stopped him. ‘Ram Khilavan, wait…’

  But he straightened the folds of his dhoti and hurried out.

  Translated by Aatish Taseer

  Mozail

  TARLOCHAN LOOKED up at the night sky for the first time in four years, only because he felt tired and listless. That was what had brought him out on the terrace of Advani Chambers to take the open air and think.

  The sky was absolutely clear, cloudless, stretched over the entire city of Bombay like a huge dust-coloured tent. As far as the eye could see, there were lights. Tarlochan felt as if a lot of stars had fallen from the sky and lodged themselves in tall buildings that looked like huge trees in the dark of the night. The lights shimmered like glow-worms.

  This was a new experience for Tarlochan, a new feeling, being under the open night sky. He felt that he had been imprisoned in his flat for four years and thus deprived of one of nature’s great blessings. It was close to three and the breeze was light and pleasant after the heavy, mechanically stirred air of the fan under which he always slept. In the morning when he got up, he always felt as if he had been beaten up all night. But in the natural morning breeze, he felt every pore in his body happily sucking in the air’s freshness. When he had come up he was restless and agitated, but now, half an hour later, he felt relaxed. He could think clearly.

  He began to think of Kirpal Kaur. She and her entire family lived in a mohalla, which was predominantly and ferociously Muslim. Many houses had been set on fire there and several lives had been lost. Tarlochan would have evacuated the entire family except that a curfew had been clamped down – probably a forty-eight-hour one – and Tarlochan was helpless. There were Muslims all around, and pretty bloodthirsty Muslims they were. News was pouring in from the Punjab about atrocities being committed on Muslims by Sikhs. Any hand – easily a Muslim hand – could grab hold of the soft and delicate wrist of Kirpal Kaur and push her into the well of death.

  Kirpal Kaur’s mother was blind and her father was a cripple. There was a brother, who lived in Deolali, where he took care of the construction contract he had recently won.

  Tarlochan was really annoyed with Kirpal’s brother, Naranjan, who read about the riots every day in the newspaper. In fact, a week ago, he had been told of the rapidity and intensity with which the riots were spreading. He was warned quite plainly: ‘Forget about your business for the time being. We are passing through difficult times. You should stay with your family or, better still, move to my flat. I know there isn’t enough space, but these are not normal times. We’ll manage somehow.’

  Naranjan had merely smiled through his thick moustache. ‘Yaar, you are unduly worried. I have seen many such riots here. This is not Amritsar or Lahore: it is Bombay. You have only been here four years; I have lived here for twe
lve, a full twelve years.’ God knows what Naranjan thought Bombay was. To him it was a city which would recover from the effects of riots by itself, in case they ever were to take place. He behaved as if he had some magic formula, or a fairy-tale castle that could come to no harm. As for Tarlochan, he could see quite clearly in the cool morning air that this mohalla was not safe. He was even mentally prepared to read in the morning papers that Kirpal Kaur and her parents had been killed. He did not care much for Kirpal Kaur’s crippled father or her blind mother. If they were killed and Kirpal survived, it would be good for Tarlochan. If her brother, Naranjan, was killed in Deolali, it would be even better, as the coast would be clear for Tarlochan. Naranjan was not only a hindrance in his way, but a huge, big boulder blocking his path. Whenever his name came up in a conversation with Kirpal Kaur, he would call him Khingar Singh-Punjabi for ‘boulder’ – instead of Naranjan Singh.

  The morning breeze was stirring gently around Tarlochan’s head, shorn of its long hair, religiously ordained. But his heart was full of apprehensions. Kirpal Kaur had newly entered his life. Although she was the sister of the rough and ruddy Khingar Singh, she was soft, delicate and willowy. She had grown up in the village, lived through its summers and winters, but she did not have that hard, tough, masculine quality that is common to average Sikh village girls, who have to do hard, physical work. She had delicate features as if they were still in the making and her breasts were small, still needing to fill out. She was fairer than most Sikh village girls are, fair as unblemished white cotton cloth. Her body was smooth like printed linen. She was very shy.

  Tarlochan belonged to the same village but he had not lived there very long. After primary school, he had gone to the city to attend high school and never went back. High school done, he began his life at college and, although during those years he went to his village numerous times, he had never even heard of this girl called Kirpal Kaur. But that may have been because he was always in a hurry to get back to the city.

  The building he lived in was called Advani Chambers and, as he stood on the balcony looking at the pre-morning sky, he thought of Mozail, the Jewish girl who had a flat here. There was a time when he was in love with her ‘up to his knees’, as he liked to say. Never in his thirty-five years had he felt that way about any woman.

  But those college days were long in the past. Between the college campus and the terrace of the Advani Chambers lay ten years, a period full of strange incidents in Tarlochan’s life: Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bombay, where he had now lived for four years. And it was the first time in those four years that he had seen the sky at night, which was not a bad sight. In its dust-coloured canopy twinkled thousands of clay lamps while a cool breeze blew his way gently.

  While thinking of Kirpal Kaur, his thoughts drifted back to Mozail. He had run into Mozail the very day he had moved into a second-floor flat at Advani Chambers, which a Christian friend of his had helped him rent. His first impression of her was that she was really quite mad. Her brown hair was cut short and looked dishevelled. She wore thick, unevenly laid lipstick that sat on her lips like congealed blood. She wore a loose white dress, cut so low at the neck that you could see three-quarters of her big breasts with their faint blue veins. Her bare arms were covered with a layer of fine fuzz that gave the impression that she’d just emerged from the beauty parlour with wispy clippings of hair still sticking to her. Her lips were not as thick as they looked, but it was the plastered on crimson-red lipstick that gave them the appearance of thick beefsteaks.

  Tarlochan’s flat faced hers, divided by a narrow passage. When he stepped forward to go into his flat, she stepped out of hers in wooden sandals. He heard their clatter and stopped. She looked at him with her big eyes through her dishevelled hair and laughed. This made Tarlochan nervous and he pulled out his key from the pocket and moved towards his door. One of Mozail’s wooden sandals slipped from her foot and came skidding across the floor towards him. Before he could recover, he was on the floor and Mozail was over him, pinning him down. Her trussed-up dress revealed two bare, strong legs which had him in a scissors-like grip. He tried to get up and, in so doing, brushed against her entire body as if soaping it. Breathless now, he apologized profusely. Mozail straightened her dress and smiled. ‘These wooden sandals ek-dum kandam, just no good.’ Then she carefully re-threaded her big toe in her sandal and walked out of the corridor.

  Tarlochan was afraid it might not be easy to get to befriend her, but she became quite close to him before long. She was headstrong and she did not take Tarlochan too seriously. She would make him take her out to dinner, the cinema or Juhu beach, where she would spend the entire day with him, but whenever he tried to go beyond hugging and kissing she would tell him to lay off. She would say it in such a way that all his resolve would get entangled in his beard and moustache.

  Tarlochan had never been in love before. In Lahore, Burma, Singapore, he would pick up young women and pay for the service. It would never have occurred to him that one day he would find himself plunged ‘up to the knees’ in love with a wild Jewish girl in Bombay. She treated him with strange indifference, although she would dress up and get ready whenever he asked her to go to the movies with him. Often they would hardly have taken their seats when she would start looking around and, if she found someone she knew, she would wave to him and go sit next to him without asking Tarlochan if he minded.

  The same thing would happen in restaurants. He would order an elaborate meal and she would abruptly rise in the middle of it to join an old friend who had caught her eye. Tarlochan would get terribly jealous. And when he protested, she would stop meeting him for days on end and, when he insisted, she would pretend that she had a headache or her stomach was upset. Or she would say, ‘You are a Sikh. You are incapable of understanding any subtleties.’

  ‘Such as your lovers?’ he would taunt her.

  She would put her hands on her hips, spread out her legs and say, ‘Yes, my lovers, but why does it burn you up?’

  ‘We cannot carry on like this,’ Tarlochan would say.

  And Mozail would laugh. ‘You’re not only a real Sikh, you’re also an idiot. In any case, who asked you to carry on with me? I have a suggestion. Go back to your Punjab and marry a Sikhni.’ In the end Tarlochan would always give in because Mozail had become his weakness and he wanted to be around her all the time. Often she would humiliate him in front of some young ‘Kristan’ lout she had picked up that day from somewhere. He would get angry, but not for long.

  This cat-and-mouse thing with Mozail continued for two years, but he was steadfast. One day when she was in one of her high and happy moods, he took her in his arms and asked,’ Mozail, don’t you love me?’

  Mozail freed herself, sat down in a chair, gazed intently at her dress, then raised her big Jewish eyes, batted her thick eyelashes and said, ‘I cannot love a Sikh.’

  ‘You always make fun of me. You make fun of my love,’ he said in an angry voice.

  She got up, swung her brown head of hair from side to side and said coquettishly, ‘If you shave off your beard and let down your long hair which you keep under your turban, I promise you many men will wink at you suggestively, because you’re really quite handsome.’

  Tarlochan felt as if his hair was on fire. He dragged Mozail towards him, squeezed her in his arms and put his bearded lips on hers.

  She pushed him away. ‘Phew!’ she said, ‘Don’t bother! I already brushed my teeth this morning.’

  ‘Mozail!’ Tarlochan screamed.

  She paid no attention, but took out her lipstick from the bag she always carried and began to touch up her lips which looked havoc-stricken after contact with Tarlochan’s beard and moustache.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ she said without looking up. ‘You have no idea how to use your bristles properly. They would be perfect for brushing dust off my navy-blue skirt.’

  She came and sat next to him an
d began to unpin his beard. It was true he was very good-looking, but being a practising Sikh he had never shaved a single hair off his body and, consequently, he had come to assume a look which was not natural. He respected his religion and its customs and he did not wish to change any of its ritual formalities.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked Mozail. By now his beard, freed of its shackles, was hanging over his chest in waves.

  ‘You have such soft hair, so I don’t think I would use it to brush my navy-blue skirt. Perhaps a nice, soft woven handbag,’ she said, smiling flirtatiously.

  ‘I have never made fun of your religion. Why do you always mock mine? It’s not fair. But I have suffered these insults silently because I love you. Did you know I love you?’

  ‘I know,’ she said, letting go of his beard.

  ‘I want to marry you,’ he declared, while trying to repin his beard.

  ‘I know,’ she said with a slight shake of her head. ‘In fact, I have nearly decided to marry you.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ Tarlochan nearly jumped. ‘I do,’ she said.

  He forgot his half-folded beard and embraced her passionately. ‘When when?’

  She pushed him aside. ‘When you get rid of your hair.’

  ‘It will be gone tomorrow,’ he said without thinking.

  She began to do a tap dance around the room. ‘You’re talking rubbish, Tarloch. I don’t think you have the courage.’

  ‘You will see,’ he said defiantly.

  ‘So I will,’ she said, kissing him on the lips, followed by her usual ‘Phew!’