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Manto and Chughtai

Page 7

by Muhammed Umar Memon


  He thought and thought but the answer eluded him. His mind was in a shambles. He had even started to reflect on morality. Guilt over betraying his wife haunted him night and day, and as the days rolled past it became more pronounced. He began to hate himself. ‘I’m scum. Why has this woman become my second wife? When did I ever need her? Why has she stuck to me so? Why did I allow her to come here? Because she’d written to him—that’s why. But it was sent when I could no longer stop her. She was already on her way.’

  Then his mind would strike out on a different line of thinking: Whatever Sharda does . . . it’s all make-believe, a sham. She wants this charade to drive a wedge between my wife and me. Reasoning like this alienated him further from Sharda, and his attitude worsened. But this only made Sharda gentler and even more submissive. She went to great lengths to ensure his comfort and ease, and that behaviour irritated him even more. Now he began to hate her.

  By chance one day he had no money on him. It had slipped his mind to go and withdraw some from the bank. He arrived at the office quite late because he wasn’t feeling well. When he was leaving, Sharda had said something to him and he had yelled back: ‘Shut your trap! I’m all right. I forgot to get cash from the bank and I haven’t got any money for cigarettes.’ He got a tin of Gold Flakes from the cigarette stall near his office.

  Although he hated this brand, it was the only one he was able to get on credit. He smoked two or three willy-nilly. That evening at home he saw a tin of his favourite brand on the tea table. At first he thought it was just an empty tin, or that maybe it had just a couple of cigarettes. When he opened it, it was full. He asked Sharda, ‘Where did this come from?’

  She smiled. ‘It was sitting in the cupboard.’

  He must have opened it at some point, left it there and then forgot about it, he decided. The next day another full tin was sitting on the tea table. When he asked Sharda, she repeated, again with a smile, the same answer as the day before.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he snapped angrily. ‘I don’t appreciate such antics. I can buy my own, thank you. I’m not a beggar who needs you to buy his cigarettes every day.’

  ‘I took the liberty because I know you sometimes forget,’ she said tenderly, lovingly.

  For no reason at all Nazir blurted out furiously, ‘Well, of course, I’m absent-minded! But I don’t like such boldness.’

  ‘I apologize.’ Sharda’s tone grew infinitely softer.

  Sharda was hardly to blame, Nazir thought for a moment; perhaps he should step forward and kiss her for caring. But the next instant the thought that he was betraying his wife overpowered him, so he said to her with all the hate he could pack into his voice, ‘Hold your tongue. I think I’ll send you back first thing tomorrow. In the morning I’ll give you whatever money you need.’

  Sharda remained quiet. She slept with him that night, caressing and hugging him with all the tenderness of her being the whole time. It irritated him, but he didn’t let her know.

  In the morning he found a variety of tasty dishes for breakfast. Still he didn’t say a word to Sharda. Immediately after breakfast he left for the bank, saying only, ‘I’m going to the bank. I’ll be right back.’

  The branch where Nazir had his account was close by. He withdrew two hundred rupees and hurried home. He planned to give it all to Sharda, buy her train ticket and pack her off. When he arrived the servant informed him that she had already left.

  ‘Where did she go?’ Nazir inquired.

  ‘She didn’t say. She left with her trunk and bedding.’

  Nazir entered his room and found a tin of his favourite cigarettes on the tea table. It was full.

  MY FRIEND, MY ENEMY!

  by Ismat Chughtai

  I was filled with trepidation as we climbed the wooden stairs of Adelfi Chambers. The kind of trepidation that one feels while entering the examination hall. I usually had apprehensions while meeting strangers. But here the ‘stranger’ was Manto, whom I was going to meet for the first time. My apprehensions soon turned into worry, and I said to Shahid, ‘Let’s go back. It seems Manto is not home.’ But Shahid would have none of it.

  ‘He is usually at home in the evening. This is his boozing time.’ This was too much to handle. A sober Manto was trouble enough, but a drunk Manto was more than one could deal with. I gathered the courage to face him—well, he couldn’t devour me! It might be that he had a barbed tongue that would leave its sting. I was not a bubble that would burst if he blew on it. We climbed the dusty stairs and reached the second floor. The door of the flat was ajar. There was a sofa set lying in the space that was the drawing room. A white bed lay on the other side. There was a thin, spiderlike man sitting on his haunches before a table near the window.

  ‘Come on in, please,’ Manto got up cheerfully. Manto used to sit curled up in his chair, which gave him the look of a midget. But when he stood up and straightened himself, he looked fairly tall. He was wearing a khaddar kurta-pyjama and a Jawahar waistcoat.

  ‘You know, I had imagined you to be a dark, shrivelled-up creature.’

  ‘And I had thought that you would be a hefty Punjabi, singing heer in a full-throated voice.’ I was determined to give him tit for tat so that he didn’t get an upper hand right from the start.

  And in a few moments we began to argue vociferously. It was as though we had suffered a great loss from not having met each other for a long time and were now impatient to make good the loss. Our jaws moved rapidly through a host of subjects like machines. It soon became apparent that Manto, like me, was accustomed to cut others in mid-sentence. He would start his retort without listening to his interlocutor in full. The discussion soon turned into a debate, and the debate gave way to nit-picking. And on the strength of a few hours’ acquaintance we called each other silly, ignorant, hair-splitter and so on, though all in very elegant language.

  During the stormy discussions I sidled up to him and looked at him closely—big eyes with dark pupils leaping behind large eyeglasses that reminded me of a peacock feather. What could be the similarity between peacock feathers and human eyes? This always eluded me. But whenever I saw his eyes I was reminded of peacock feathers. Perhaps the combination of pride, irreverence and freshness in him reminded me of peacocks. Seeing those eyes, my heart missed a beat. I had already seen them before, from very close quarters . . . The same delicate hands and legs, a luxuriant crop of hair on the head, two shrivelled up, yellowish cheeks and some uneven teeth. While drinking, Manto choked, and he began to cough. My senses became alert. This cough was familiar. I had heard it right from childhood. I began to feel uneasy and said in reference to something, ‘This is absolutely wrong!’ And we began to fight.

  ‘You’re indulging in hair-splitting.’

  ‘This is silly!’

  ‘This is fraud, Sister Ismat.’

  ‘Why are you calling me “sister”?’ I was peeved.

  ‘Just like that. Normally, I don’t call women “sisters”. My own sister is not an exception.’

  ‘So you’re calling me “sister” just to tease me?’

  ‘Not at all. Why do you think so?’

  ‘Because my own brothers always teased me and bashed me up. Or they saw to it that I was beaten.’

  Manto burst out laughing. ‘Then I’ll certainly call you “sister”, and nothing else.’

  ‘In that case, please keep in mind that my brothers did not have very pleasant experiences of me. You’re afflicted with a cough. Why don’t you get it treated?’

  ‘Treated? Doctors are donkeys. Three years ago they had predicted that I would die of tuberculosis within a year. You can see that I didn’t oblige them. Now I consider all doctors stupid. The magicians and mesmerists are better than they!’

  ‘I’ve heard the same statement from a gentleman before you.’

  ‘Who’s the gentleman?’

  ‘My brother, Azim Beg. He’s resting in his grave now.’

  This led to a discussion on Azim Beg’s art.

  We had com
e to meet Manto just for a few minutes. But it was now eleven, and our discussion was not yet over. Shahid, who was sitting a little away and watching our verbal duel, was dying of hunger. It would be one o’clock by the time we reached Malad. So we decided to have dinner right there. Manto asked me to take out plates and spoons from the cupboard and went out to bring roti from the hotel.

  The heated discussion even went on during the meal. Manto singled out ‘Lihaaf’, the story that had become a source of torment for me, and dissected it. I wanted to change the subject, but he stuck to it stubbornly and pulled apart each one of its strands. I was not prepared to accept that ‘Lihaaf’ was my masterpiece. Manto insisted on it. In a little while, we went far beyond ‘Lihaaf’ and began to discuss things quite openly. I was surprised at the way he could so innocently say the most vulgar or obscene things without the slightest self-consciousness. One did not feel ill at ease. Rather, he did not let one feel so. He made one laugh. One didn’t feel angry or outraged.

  Manto mentioned his wife quite a few times during the evening: ‘Safiya is a nice girl’, ‘Safiya cooks good curry.’

  ‘You think of her a lot. Why don’t you ask her to come?’ I said.

  ‘Arré . . . do you think I can’t sleep without her?’ He assumed his usual tone.

  ‘One can sleep even on the gallows.’ I changed the topic and we laughed.

  ‘Do you love Safiya deeply?’ I asked him conspiratorially.

  ‘Love!’ He screamed out as though I had called him names. ‘I don’t love her at all. I don’t believe in love.’ He frowned, his large eyeballs rolled around.

  ‘Do you mean that you’ve never fallen in love with anyone?’ I asked in fake surprise.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you never had pustules on your neck or measles, but you certainly had whooping cough, I think.’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘What do you mean by love? Love is something profound and all-embracing. We love our mothers, brothers and sisters . . . Wives, too. We also love our sandals and shoes. I’ve a friend who loves his bitch. Of course, I loved my son.’ At the thought of his son, he leapt up in his chair. ‘He used to toddle nimbly on his tiny feet. Full of mischief. When he crawled on the floor, he would pick up mud and put it in his mouth. He was deeply attached to me.’ Like any other father, Manto began to convince us of his son’s uniqueness.

  ‘Believe me—he was just six or seven days old when I began to lay him down beside me to sleep. I would give him an oil massage before bathing him. He was barely three months old when his tinkling laughter reverberated in the house. Safiya didn’t have to do a thing for him except feed him milk. At night, she would sleep soundly when I fed him quietly. Before feeding the child, it is necessary that he should be cleaned with eau de cologne or spirit; otherwise he may have pimples all over,’ he said in a serious vein and I stared at him in surprise. What kind of a man was he who specialized in childcare!

  ‘But he died,’ he said with mock cheerfulness, ‘Good that he died. He had reduced me to an ayah. Had he been alive, I would have spent my time washing his dirty nappies. I would have been useless for the world, of no worth at all! Really, Sister Ismat, I loved him deeply.’

  Before we left, he mentioned that Safiya was to join him shortly and that I would enjoy meeting her.

  This prediction turned out to be true. I was delighted to meet Safiya. In a few minutes we grew so intimate that we began to discuss even forbidden things—things which only women discuss, not meant for men’s ears.

  When Manto saw that putting our heads together, we were talking in a hushed tone, he lost his temper and began to mock us. He had pressed his ears to the wooden partition and eavesdropped on our whispering. He chirruped like a mischievous boy, ‘Tauba! Tauba! I couldn’t have imagined that women can talk about such filthy things.’

  Safiya’s ears turned red with shame.

  ‘And you, Sister Ismat, I certainly didn’t expect you to indulge in small talk like the illiterate, stupid women of the mohalla—“When did you marry?”, “How did you spend the wedding night?”, “When and how was the baby born?” Shame on you!’

  I immediately reined him in. ‘Manto Sahib, this is the limit! I didn’t think that you were so narrow-minded. You also think that these things are filthy? What’s filthy about it? The birth of a baby is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the world. And these whispering sessions are our training school. Do you think that in college I was taught how to give birth to a baby? . . . I’ve learnt the most important secrets of life from the women of the mohalla.’

  ‘Safiya is absolutely stupid! She doesn’t understand art and literature. She has a very didactic outlook. She’s angered by your writings. Don’t you feel bored talking to her for hours about how much turmeric is to be put in korma, about dahi vadas made of urhad ki daal and so on?’

  ‘Arré Manto Sahib! Who puts turmeric in korma?’ Safiya asked, horrified.

  If Manto and I made an appointment for five minutes, it would stretch to five hours. Debating with Manto was like sharpening one’s cerebral tools. The cobwebs were cleared, and the brain was swept clean . . . But often the discussion would get acrimonious. I knew how to accept defeat, but Manto would get maudlin, and his eyes would dilate like peacock wings. His nostrils would flare up, his face would wear a scowl and, getting provoked, he would call Shahid to his support. And then the battle would shift from the realms of literature and philosophy to the domestic realm. Manto would leave our house in a huff. Shahid would chide me. ‘Why are you so rude to my friends? Manto left in such anger today that he won’t come here again. And I do not have enough courage to go to his place. He’s brutally outspoken. If he says something hurtful, our friendship will be spoilt.’

  And I would also feel that I had really been harsh on him. If he got himself into a rage, my friendship with Safiya, which was now more intense than my friendship with Manto, would be at peril . . .

  But often it so happened that we quarrelled with each other in the morning, and if we met the same evening, Manto would greet me with such enthusiasm and talk so cordially it was as though we had not quarrelled at all! For a little while our talk would be ‘refined’ and ‘genteel’, without any disagreement. But soon we’d get tired of this pretence. And then firecrackers would begin to spark from both sides. Sometimes people would provoke us, on purpose, to have some fun. We’d fight, but remain friends. We engaged ourselves in debates because we loved it, not to entertain others. Manto also felt that however much we fought between ourselves, at public gatherings we should present a united front. And our team would be so strong that no one would be able to beat it. But usually I’d forget about my loyalty to our team, and the team would itself turn into a hornet’s nest.

  I could never make out whether Manto drank to lose his senses or lost his senses after drinking. I never saw him unsteady on his feet, neither did his tongue lose its sharpness. I never saw any difference. I knew only this that when he drank too much, he would try hard to convince me that he was not drunk, and get on my nerves.

  ‘Truly, Sister Ismat, I’m not drunk at all. And I can give up drinking right today. I can give up drinking any moment—you can bet on it.’

  ‘I won’t put a wager because you’re sure to lose . . . And you’re drunk.’

  How he would try to convince me that he was not drunk, that he could give up drinking any moment only if someone put a wager on it!

  Manto loved self-praise. But if I was part of the company, he would also include me with him and would not be ready to concede that any other writer could be as great as us. He would especially turn against Krishan Chander and Devender Satyarti. If anyone praised them, he would flare up. If I told him that he was no critic and so his judgement could not be accepted as valid, he would begin to rail against critics.

  ‘They write nonsense,’ he would scream. ‘Do exactly the opposite of what they say. These fellows object to my stories but read them secretly. Instead of learning anything f
rom them, they seek sensual pleasure and then develop a guilty conscience. They write gibberish in order to clear their guilty conscience.’ He would continue to fume. To pacify him I’d say, ‘If you know that they’re writing gibberish, why respond to them? If you don’t like their criticism, so be it. But why decry common people’s judgement?’ But he would not be pacified.

  Away from self-praise, Manto would talk proudly about his friends with me. He had a strange attachment with Rafiq Ghaznavi that I failed to understand. Whenever he referred to him, he’d say, ‘He’s a perfect lout, a loafer. He has got married to four sisters one after the other. There’s not a single courtesan in Lahore whom he has not exploited.’ He’d refer to Rafiq in the same way as a child refers to his elder brother. He would describe to me his amorous exploits in great detail. One day he said that he’d like me to meet him. I said, ‘What’s the point of meeting him? You say that he’s a loafer.’ Pat came his reply: ‘That’s why I want you to meet him. Who told you that a loafer or a lout must be a bad human being? Rafiq is a thorough gentleman.’

  I said, ‘Manto Sahib! I just don’t understand what you mean. Maybe I’m not as intelligent as you take me to be.’

  ‘This is your pretension,’ said Manto with displeasure. ‘That’s why I’m arranging this meeting. He’s a very interesting person. No woman can help falling in love with him.’

  ‘I’m also a woman,’ I said anxiously, and he felt awkward.

  ‘I regard you as my own sister.’

  ‘But your sister, too, can be a woman!’

  ‘Can be a woman! Well said.’ Manto liked my reply, but he was insistent all the same. ‘You’ll have to meet him. Just you wait.’

  ‘I’ve already seen him—at the station. You had prejudiced me so much against him that I just ran away from there so that I didn’t have to fall in love with him!’ After meeting Rafiq I realized how deep was Manto’s study of his character. Despite his blemishes, Rafiq was endowed with all the qualities that make one a gentleman. He could be a loafer, but at the same time, he was an absolutely honest fellow. How was it and why? I didn’t try to understand. It was to Manto’s credit. He could track down pearls among the socially discarded, and in dirt. He liked scratching filth.

 

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