‘Hell, you’re charging us. Give it back.’ Mammad Bhai’s tone was as sharp as his dagger’s blade.
Dr Pinto gave me back the note, packed his bag, apologized to Mammad Bhai and left.
Mammad Bhai twisted his thorny moustache with one finger and then smiled. ‘Vamato Bhai, I can’t believe that he was trying to charge you. I swear I would have shaved off my moustache if that bastard had taken your money. Everyone here is at your service.’
There was a moment of silence. Then I asked, ‘Mammad Bhai, how do you know me?’
Mammad Bhai’s moustache twitched. ‘Who doesn’t Mammad Bhai know? My boy, I’m the kingpin here. I keep track of my people. I have my own CID. They keep me informed—who’s come, who’s left, who’s doing well, who’s doing bad. I know everything about you.’
‘Like what?’ I asked, just for fun.
‘Hell, what don’t I know? You’re from Amritsar. You’re Kashmiri. You work in the newspapers here. You owe the Bismillah Hotel ten rupees and so never go by there. A paan seller in Bhindi Bazaar is after you because you still haven’t paid him the twenty rupees and ten annas you owe him for some cigarettes.’
I could have died from shame.
Mammad Bhai stroked his bristly moustache again. ‘Vamato Bhai, don’t worry. Your debts have been cleared, and you can get a fresh start. I told those bastards to make sure never to mess with Vamato Bhai, so, God willing, no one will bother you again.’
I didn’t know what to say. The quinine injection had given rise to a buzzing sensation in my ears. Moreover, I was so overwhelmed by his kindness that it was hard to express my gratitude. I could only say, ‘Mammad Bhai, may God look after you! Take care!’
Mammad Bhai pushed his moustache up a little and left.
Dr Pinto came by every morning and evening, and each time I mentioned the money, he put his hands over his ears and said, ‘No, Mr Manto! It’s Mammad Bhai’s business. I can’t take a single coin.’
I thought Mammad Bhai was incredible. I mean he was so intimidating that stingy Dr Pinto paid for the injections himself.
Mammad Bhai came to see me every day, either in the morning or the evening, and he would bring with him six or seven apprentices. He reassured me that it was an ordinary case of malaria, ‘God willing, Dr Pinto’s treatment will get you feeling right in no time.’
I was completely cured within fifteen days, and during my convalescence I learned everything about Mammad Bhai.
He must have been in his late twenties. He was very skinny and had surprisingly nimble hands. I heard from the people in Arab Alley that he could throw a pocketknife straight through a man’s heart. And as I said earlier, he was an expert wielder of knives, clubs, and swords. Countless famous stories circulated about how he had committed hundreds of murders, and yet I am still not ready to believe this.
Nonetheless, I shivered in fright at the thought of his dagger. Why did he always keep this deadly weapon tucked unsheathed inside his waistband?
After my health recovered, we ran into each other in one of Arab Alley’s run-down Chinese restaurants. He was trimming his fingernails with his dagger.
I asked him, ‘Mammad Bhai, these days it’s all about guns and pistols. Why do you still use a dagger?’
He adjusted his moustache. ‘Vamato Bhai, I don’t get any pleasure from guns. Even a child can use one. You squeeze the trigger and “bang!” What fun is there in that? This thing—this dagger—this knife—this pocketknife—there’s pleasure in it, you know? Sure as hell there is! And it’s that—what do you call it?—yeah—art. There’s an art in it, okay? If you don’t know how to use a dagger or a knife, you’re nothing. A pistol’s just a toy—a toy that can kill. But there’s no enjoyment in it. Look at this dagger, look at its sharp blade.’ He wet his thumb and ran it along the blade. ‘With this, there’s no bang at all. You can thrust it into someone’s stomach just like this. It’s so smooth that the bastard won’t even know what’s going on. Guns and pistols are nonsense.’
I fell into the habit of seeing Mammad Bhai every day. I felt obliged to him for what he had done for me, and yet whenever I tried to express my gratitude he would get angry and say, ‘I didn’t do you any favour. It was my duty.’
The neighbourhood was his. He looked after the people who lived there, and if someone was sick or having problems, Mammad Bhai would pay them a visit. His agents kept him constantly informed.
He was a gangster and such a dangerous criminal, and yet with God as my witness I still can’t figure out what made him intimidating. That is, other than his moustache. Its every hair stood upright like the quills on a porcupine’s back. Someone told me he greased it every day. When eating, he would dip his fingers into the food’s gravy and then massage it, as ancient wisdom says that oil strengthens hair. His moustache gave him his name—that or maybe his dagger, secured in his shalwar’s waistband.
We became good friends. Although he was illiterate, he treated me with so much respect that the rest of Arab Alley got jealous. One early morning on my way to the office, I overheard a man in a Chinese restaurant saying that Mammad Bhai had been arrested. This surprised me because he was friendly with all the area’s police.
I asked the man why. He told me that a woman named Shirin Bai lived in Arab Alley and her young daughter had been raped the previous day. Shirin Bai had gone to Mammad Bhai and said, ‘You’re our protector. Some man did this horrible thing to my daughter. Damn you that you’re still at home doing nothing!’ Mammad Bhai unleashed a fierce insult at the old woman and then said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ Shirin Bai answered, ‘I want you to slice the bastard’s stomach open.’
Mammad Bhai had been at a restaurant eating dinner. When Shirin Bai stopped talking, he took out his dagger. He checked its sharpness against his thumb and said, ‘Go, I’ll finish your business.’
And he did. Within a half hour the man who had raped Shirin Bai’s daughter was dead.
Mammad Bhai was arrested, but there were no witnesses. Even if there had been any, they would never have testified in court. He stayed for two days in police custody, but he was completely at home there as everyone from the street officers to the inspectors knew him. Nonetheless, when he got out on bail he knew he was in for it, and his spirits were low.
I saw him at a Chinese restaurant, and his usually clean clothes were dirty. I didn’t mention anything about the murder, but he said, ‘Vamato Sahib, I’m sorry it took the bastard so long to die. I made a mistake while stabbing him. My hand got twisted. But it was the bastard’s fault too. He turned suddenly, and so everything turned ugly. He died, but I’m sorry for his pain.’
You can imagine how I reacted—he wasn’t worried about having killed a man so much as having caused him a little pain!
The trial got underway. Mammad Bhai was worried because he had never faced a judge before. Like I’ve said, I really don’t know how many people he’d killed, but he really didn’t know anything about judges, lawyers, witnesses, and the rest.
The police presented the case and fixed a date for the trial. Mammad Bhai was distraught. Over and over he stroked his moustache and said, ‘Vamato Sahib, I’d rather die than go into a courtroom. Hell, you don’t know what it’s like!’
His friends in Arab Alley assured him it wasn’t serious since there were no witnesses. Only his moustache might cause the judge to turn against him.
He considered this. His court date had just about arrived when I found him in an Iranian restaurant. I could tell he was beside himself with worry. He couldn’t figure out what to do about his moustache. He thought that if he showed up in court with it, there was a good chance he would get convicted. You will think that this is just a story, and yet I’m telling you he was truly distraught. His apprentices were worried too because usually nothing bothered him. But many of his close friends had advised him, ‘Mammad Bhai, if you have to go to court, shave off your moustache. Otherwise the judge will lock you up for sure.’ He thought about it so much that he be
gan to wonder whether he had killed the man or if his moustache had! He couldn’t reach any decision. He took his dagger from his waistband and threw it into the alley outside. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
‘Mammad Bhai, what’re you doing?’
‘Nothing, Vamato Bhai. I’ve got a big problem. I have to go to court, and my friends are saying that if the judge sees my moustache, he’s sure to convict me. What should I do?’
What could I say? I looked at his moustache and said, ‘Mammad Bhai, they’re right. Your moustache will influence the judge’s decision. If you really want to know, a conviction won’t be a judgment against you but against your moustache.’
‘Should I shave it off, then?’ Mammad Bhai asked, stroking his beloved moustache.
‘What do you think?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think—it’s not for you to know. But everyone around here thinks I should shave it off. Should I, Vamato Bhai?’
‘Yes. If you think it’s right, shave it off. It’s a question of the courtroom, and really your moustache is very intimidating.’
The next day, Mammad Bhai shaved off his moustache, and yet he did so only on the advice of others.
His case came before the bench of Mr F.H. Teague. I was there. There were no witnesses against him, but the judge declared him a dangerous criminal and ordered him to leave the state. He had just one day to put all his affairs in order before leaving Bombay.
After leaving the courtroom, he didn’t say anything to me. Over and over he raised his fingers to his cleanly shaven face, but there wasn’t anything there to stroke.
Just before he had to leave Bombay that evening, we met in an Iranian restaurant. Twenty or so apprentices surrounded him, and they were all drinking tea. When he saw me, he didn’t say anything. Without his moustache, he looked entirely respectable. But I could tell he was sad.
I sat down next to him and asked, ‘What’s wrong, Mammad Bhai?’
He unleashed a directionless curse and then said, ‘Hell, Mammad Bhai’s dead.’
‘Don’t worry. If you can’t live here, another place will do.’
He launched into an expletive-filled tirade against every other possible place to live. Then he said, ‘It’s not about where I’m going to live. Here or somewhere else, it’s all the same. But why the hell did I have to shave off my moustache?’
He recited a litany of curses against those who had told him to shave it off. Then he asked, ‘Hell, if I have to leave the city, then why not go with my moustache?’
I couldn’t help but laugh. He flew into a rage. ‘What kind of man are you, Vamato Sahib? Fuck, I swear they should’ve hanged me! But I’m to blame for this foolishness. I never feared anyone but, hell, then I got scared of my moustache.’
He slapped his face twice. ‘Mammad Bhai, a curse on you! Asshole, you got scared of your moustache! Now get out of here, you mother …’
Tears welled in his eyes. How strange they looked against his clean-shaven face!
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
SAADAT HASAN MANTO—HIS LIFE
Saadat Hasan Manto was born on May 11, 1912 in the small town of Samrala near Ludhiana, a major industrial city in the current-day Indian state of the Punjab.1 He claimed allegiance not only to his native Punjab but also to his ancestors’ home in Kashmir.2 While raised speaking Punjabi,3 he was also proud of the remnants of Kashmiri culture that his family maintained—food customs, as well as intermarriage with families of Kashmiri origin—and throughout his life he assigned special importance to others who had Kashmiri roots.4 In a tongue-in-cheek letter addressed to Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, he went so far as to suggest that being beautiful was the second meaning of being Kashmiri.5
Manto’s father, Maulvi Ghulam Hasan, was a lawyer from a family of lawyers.6 He married twice, and Manto was the last of twelve siblings and the only son from his father’s second marriage.7 Hasan transferred to Amritsar some time after Manto’s birth, and Manto grew up there in Lawyers’ Lane, the area of town where lawyers resided.8 He was a strict disciplinarian with whom the teenage Manto had a somewhat contentious relationship. Manto liked to portray his parents as opposites, with his father’s coldness offset by his mother’s warmth,9 and while Manto never wrote much about his father, he did recount in the sketch ‘Two Encounters with Agha Hashr’ an incident in which his father swooped down upon the informal drama club that several high school friends and he had put together, broke the harmonium and tabla the boys had been using for musical accompaniment, and made it absolutely clear that he considered such activities an utter waste of time.10
While Manto’s three elder half-brothers followed in the family tradition and became lawyers,11 Manto didn’t have the temperament to become a lawyer, and his school career as such was marked more by failure than success. In the Indian educational system, students must pass a final high school examination to be eligible for college, which Manto failed in his first two attempts because of poor scores in, of all subjects, Urdu.12 After barely passing in his third effort, he entered the Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar in 1931.13 At the end of his first year, he failed the annual year-end tests, and after failing again the subsequent year, he dropped out.14 To complicate matters further, his father died on February 25, 1932.15
During these years, Manto did have the good fortune to meet Abdul Bari Alig, an editor of the Amritsar newspaper Equality.16 Bari Sahib served as a writing mentor for the young Manto. Under Bari Sahib’s tutelage, Manto translated Victor Hugo’s novella The Last Day of a Condemned Man,17 and the resulting book was published in Lahore in 1933.18 This first translation was followed by three more projects. With the help of Bari Sahib,19 he and his friend Hasan Abbas translated Oscar Wilde’s play Vera, or the Nihilists,20 a melodrama about the despotism of the Russian monarchy and the efforts of a group of revolutionaries to overthrow the old order. After that he would go on to publish two collections of translated Russian short stories—Russian Short Stories and Gorky’s Stories, a collection of Maxim Gorky’s short fiction.21 These earliest literary efforts showed Manto’s ideological fervour and passion for social justice. They also revealed his tendency toward iconoclasm. Bari Sahib also introduced Manto to Communism. Manto later admitted that when Bari Sahib wrote an essay ‘From Hegel to Karl Marx’ for his short-lived journal Creation,22 he hadn’t even heard the name Hegel and knew Marx only as someone Bari Sahib talked about as a friend of the working classes.23 Yet Manto took it upon himself to learn more about the Communist cause, and later he put his learning to use when he wrote a thumbnail historical essay on the Bolshevik Revolution,24 as well as his short story ‘Rude’, included in this volume. Manto’s debt to Bari Sahib was immense. He gave him what every young writer needs, both good writing advice and publication,25 and Manto noted sardonically that if he had not met Bari Sahib, he might have become not a writer but perhaps a criminal.26
Manto’s second attempt at university began in July 1934.27 This time he travelled far from home to enter the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University. His career there did not last long, although this time it was not due to poor study habits. After nine months, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.28 This diagnosis, which later turned out to be incorrect, was a heavy blow to his scholastic ambitions since tuberculosis was then a deadly disease.29 He left the university, borrowed money from his elder sister, and retreated into the mountains, spending three months in a sanitarium in the small northern town of Batot.30 Whatever the original cause of the chest pains he had been suffering in Aligarh had been, his health improved somewhat in the high altitude of the mountains. He returned to Amritsar in late 1935 and faced yet another set of challenges; his mother was without money and he realized he would have to start earning his own living. The next year his life would change considerably when he accepted the offer of Nazir Ludhianvi to go to Bombay to edit his weekly film newspaper The Painter.31
Thus began the second era of Manto’s young life. When he arrived in Bombay, he was twenty-four years old. Manto wo
uld live in Bombay twice: from 1936 to 1941; and then after a hiatus of one and a half years, from 1942 until his final move to Lahore in 1948. In hindsight, he would recognize that these Bombay years were the best and most enjoyable of his life; and yet while Manto lived there his frequent bouts of ill health32 coupled with his temperamental personality meant that his time in Bombay was not at all free of disappointments, sadness, or angst.
Shortly after Manto went to Bombay, his mother moved there as well. She went to live with his only full sibling, his elder sister Iqbal, in the suburb of Mahim.33 His mother was eager to see him married, and in 1938 Manto became engaged to his future wife, Safiya, the daughter of a Lahore family of Kashmiri descent.34 Their wedding did not take place until April 26, 1939 since Manto continually procrastinated because of his inability to support her financially and the uncertainty he had about his ability to be a good husband.35 But to his own surprise, Manto took to being a husband. In May 1940 Safiya gave birth to a son, Arif, and Manto’s life as a father began, though this would be bitterly truncated when the toddler died the following April.36
Manto worked at the Clare Road offices of The Painter. Upon his arrival he slept in the office of the newspaper and continued to do so until he had enough money to rent a room in a squalid building nearby—a two-storey building with holes in its roof, forty narrow rooms, and only two bathrooms, neither of which had a door.37 He lived in these conditions—which caused his mother to cry when she first came to his room—until ten days before Safiya was to move in with him, at which point he hurriedly rented a room nearby.38 In August 1940 Nazir Ludhianvi suddenly fired Manto from the newspaper,39 and Manto then took up the editorship of Babu Rao Patel’s film magazine Caravan. Not even seven months had passed, though, when he grew dissatisfied with that job and accepted a position at All India Radio in Delhi.
During these years, Manto not only worked at editing jobs but also wrote stories and radio plays.40 He published his first full collection of short stories, Sparks, as well as Short Stories.41 Just as importantly, Nazir Ludhianvi introduced him to the film world where Manto soon began to work as a scriptwriter.
Bombay Stories Page 21
