Naked Voices

by Sadat Hasan Manto

  ‘Put him in the car.’

  ‘And leave him beyond the boundaries.’

  ‘Catch the brave, famous and emotional Indian leader – very, very carefully – as though you are picking up a baby. And imagine that you are putting him not in a motor car but placing him on a swing. And take the swing all the way back to the point where he first decided to become a nuisance for us. We are Dogras.’

  ‘We are do gure.’

  ‘I am Hari Singh.’

  ‘We are drunk on rum.’

  ‘And that is why we are standing at alert and respectful attention!’

  ‘Return the President’s carriage.’

  ‘So there, the division/partition has happened.’

  ‘What has been divided/partitioned?’

  ‘The subcontinent.’

  ‘The subcontinent?’

  ‘Who partitioned it?’

  ‘I am sorry, but I am a Hindu, and now my country is this Hindustan.’

  ‘Which Hindustan?’

  ‘The one that was given to us by Radcliffe4.’

  ‘Why do you need to be sorry, then?’

  ‘I need to. Don’t say anything – you are a Hindu now – your language should be Hindi.’

  ‘But the loincloth clad leader in our country had said ....’

  ‘He shall be killed.’

  ‘But who will kill him?’

  ‘We shall kill him.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Any man will be ready to rise from among us to kill such a communal man.’

  ‘Yes, this must be done.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It shall happen in its own time.’

  ‘When will that time come?’

  ‘A great deal of speculation has happened at the right time. But it has been heard that the matter is not in the hands of the government servants and bureaucrats. It has been said that there is a God who is the highest officer of His department.’

  ‘And He brooks no interference, and does exactly as He pleases.’

  ‘He ought to be punished.’

  ‘For that, our Indian Penal Code will be of no use.’

  ‘What’s going on, brother?’

  ‘Assalam-wa-alaekum.’

  ‘Wa-alaekum as-salam.’

  ‘The greatest Islamic government in the world is about to become a reality.’

  ‘It has been heard that many bugles were sounded and many crackers were burst.’

  ‘Why? Was it shab-e-baraat5?’

  ‘Every revolution is a shab-e-baraat.’

  ‘But every shab-e-baraat is not the harbinger of a revolution.’

  ‘You talk rubbish. It looks like you are still entangled in the bonds of imperialism.’

  ‘And you are a bourgeois; you have empathy for the proletariat.’

  ‘Empathy be damned.’

  ‘This isn’t Saadat Hasan Manto speaking.’

  ‘Oh no, he died a long time ago. It is his stone-cold corpse speaking.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From the grave?’

  ‘How can that be? A fatwa has been issued against him declaring him to be a kafir, a non-believer. How can there be a grave for a kafir?’

  ‘It came up on its on.’

  ‘This is wrong. It can’t be. Make a general announcement. Let it be known: that this isn’t the grave of that scoundrel; it is the grave of some unknown dervish who was obscene only from inside and had been secretly getting treatment for his sickness.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right.’

  “It is more than all right; it is perfect.’

  ‘God is benevolent and merciful.’

  ‘May Manto also benefit from God’s mercy!’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘This isn’t hell; it is heaven.’

  ‘Gar Firdaus bar-rooh-e zameen-ast

  Hameen asto hameen asto hameen ast’

  (If there is paradise anywhere on earth

  It is here, it is here, it is here.6)

  ‘The traitor is scared.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means exactly what the rest of us mean.’

  ‘That means we shall certainly take Kashmir.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The UNO shall decide.’

  ‘Decide what?’

  ‘Our fate.’

  ‘God used to take such decisions earlier.’

  ‘Now earthly “gods” decide the fates of earthly paradises.’

  ‘Who is this earthly “god”?’

  ‘He has several names. His name can be Rahim7. It can be Graham too. Let’s say it is Graham – that is if both the countries and its people accept that, or else…’

  ‘Or else?’

  ‘All else is nonsense.’

  ‘Bravo!’

  ‘Well said!’

  ‘Long live!’

  ‘We are the rightful claimants of paradise.’

  ‘Undoubtedly. What is the right Hindi equivalent for “undoubtedly”? The leader will find out from All India Radio and tell us. Will he understand what it means or not – we don’t know that as yet. He hasn’t said anything about it so far.’

  ‘Respected leader, we use the Hindi word for paradise; we call it “swarg”.’

  ‘I have heard this name for the first time today.’

  ‘How strange!’

  ‘The word you use for strange – “achrach” – I have heard that too for the first time today.’

  ‘It’s the lingo of the radio – it is the language that is breeding here, despite your presence amongst us.’

  ‘I am known for my foul tongue; I have no sarokar with this language.’

  ‘What’s that word you use? “Sarokar” 8? What does it mean?’

  ‘This “sarokar” has nothing to do with anything; it has to do with me, with my entire family. But forget about all this now. I want to tell you in no uncertain words – I want Kashmir, I want it because I was born there.’

  ‘Manto wasn’t born there?’

  ‘No one on earth was born there.’

  ‘If any human being has ever been born, he has been born outside Kashmir.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ask Kashmir.’

  ‘Ask the one who has been born.’

  ‘This is very strange. Very strange, indeed.’

  ‘This strange thing is known by its other name – UNO.’

  ‘That too is a very strange name.’

  ‘Politics is a strange business.’

  ‘And the other word for “strange” is Saadat.’

  ‘E Saadat bajor-e baazu neest

  Tanah bakhshad Khuda-e-Kashmiri.’

  ‘But unfortunately, he is no Hato9.’

  ‘Long live Dr Graham!’

  ‘Down with Dr Graham!’

  ‘The fellow is a good for nothing.’

  ‘No, my dear, he writes reports. Which is a very difficult thing to do.’

  ‘Long live difficult things!’

  ‘Long live Kashmir!’

  ‘Paradise has been broken into parts.’

  ‘We have half; they get half.’

  ‘No, we want all of it.’

  ‘We want a whole and complete paradise.’

  ‘Who’s that?

  ‘Manto.’

  ‘No, that’s Sheikh Saadi, who was the Manto of his time.’

  1 In the Bible, Nimrod, the son of Cush, grandson of Ham, great-grandson of Noah, was a Mesopotamian monarch and ‘a mighty hunter before Yahweh’. According to popular legend, however, he has been made out to be an impious tyrant who built the infamous Tower of Babel.

  2 In the original, there is a great deal of word play between Nimrod (pronounced Nimrood in Urdu) and amrood (guava). Just as in the original Urdu, there is a clever pun on Dogre (plural of Dogra, the community from the foothills of the Himalayas who produced the last Maharaja of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh), ‘Do-gure’ (a coinage to imply one
who has two gurs or two qualities), and Gore (the often pejorative word for the white-skinned Englishmen).

  3 The play upon words continues – ‘jyoti’ meaning light or radiance and ‘jooti’ meaning shoe sound the same but mean vastly different things.

  4 Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe GBE, PC (1899-1977) was a British lawyer and law lord most famous for his partitioning of the British Imperial territory of India. With the passing of the Indian Independence Act, he was appointed Chairman of the Boundary Commission on 3 June 1947 and given the task of carving up three separate territories in the Indian subcontinent; India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. While it is doubtful that anything Radcliffe could have done, or not done, would have made any significant difference to the fate of millions who were displaced by the greatest migration in history and even the most carefully crafted border would have provoked the massive exchange of population that resulted, Radcliffe has been demonized by many as the evil architect of the Partition. Whatever the merits of the Radcliffe Awards, he was clearly a man in a hurry, or a man being hurried by the powers-that-be, especially Lord Mountbatten, since he took just over two months to carve up these new territories.

  5 Some Sunni Muslims observe Shab-e-baraat, which falls on the 15th day of the month of Shabaan according to the Islamic lunar calendar as a night of worship and salvation, commemorating when Allah saved Noah and his followers from the deluge. It is believed that during this night Allah prepares the destiny for all people on Earth for the coming year. For this reason it is sometimes called the Night of Emancipation (Lailat ul Bara'at). In India it is celebrated with distributing sweets and halwa, lighting candles and bursting crackers. People fast during the day and pray during the night, visit graveyards and light candles on the graves.

  6 A Persian couplet by Amir Khusrau, the 13th century Hindustani poet, written in praise of the land of Hindustan.

  7 Again a play on words: Rahim, a popular Muslim name, is also a name for God, One who is Merciful.

  8 ‘Sarokar’ means ‘to do with’.

  9 A community among Kashmiris.

  SAADAT HASAN

  Much has been written and said about Manto – a great deal against him than in favour of him. An intelligent person would be hard pressed to reach any sensible conclusion on the basis of these reports. As I sit down to write this piece, I feel it is very difficult to truly express one’s feelings about Manto. Although, viewed in another way, maybe it is actually quite easy – because I have had the great good fortune to be close to Manto. In fact, if truth be told, I am Manto’s twin.

  I have no real objection to what has been written about him; my only contention is that most of what has been written about Manto is quite far removed from the truth. There are some who call him a devil. Others a bald angel. But, wait, let me check whether that swine is hovering close by and eavesdropping. No, no, it is all right. Now I remember – this is the time when he drinks. He has the habit of guzzling his bitter sharbat at six in the evening.

  We were born at the same time, and I seem to think we will die together. It is possible, however, that Saadat Hasan may die and Manto may not; the thought torments me. That is why I have made every effort possible to remain friends with him. If he stays alive and I die, it would be a little like the piquant case of the eggshell remaining intact while the yolk and white disappears from inside it.

  I don’t wish to go into any more background details. I want to make it amply clear to you that Manto is one of those ‘one-two’ people, a real clever devil, the like of which I have never seen before in my entire life. If you add 1+2, it becomes 3. And he knows a great deal about triangles, but let us not get into that. A hint is enough for a clever man to follow.

  I have known Manto since his birth. We were born together, at the same time, on 11 May 1912 but Manto has always tried to make himself into something else. If he tucks his head and neck in, you can try all you want but will never be able to find him. But I am a part of him; I belong to him. No matter what he does, I can always monitor every move he makes.

  Let me tell you how he became such a great storyteller. Writers and novelists tend to write tomes about their own quirks and personality traits. They quote from Schopenhauer, Freud, Hegel, Nietzche, Marx whereas they are miles away from reality. Manto’s oeuvre is the outcome of two opposing principles. His father, may God bless him, was an extremely harsh man and his mother was the kindest of women. You may well imagine how that poor kernel must have been pulverised between these two implacable forces.

  I shall now come to his schooldays. He was an intelligent though mischievous child. His height then would have been no more than three feet six inches. He was the youngest of his father’s offspring. He had his parents’ love but never had the opportunity to meet his three elder brothers who were his half-brothers and were studying abroad. He wanted to meet them and wanted them to behave like elder brothers but he got to meet them only much later – when he was an established and famous writer.

  Now, let us come to his storytelling. Let me tell you quite bluntly that he is an absolute fraud. His very first story was called Tamasha; it was about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He did not get it published in his own name. That is why he was able to escape the clutches of the police.

  Shortly after this, a new thought arose in his fertile mind – this time a scheme to study further. Here it would be pertinent to mention that he had failed the ‘inter exam’ twice before finally clearing it with a third division. And you will be surprised to know that he had failed his Urdu paper!

  Today when he is hailed as one of the greatest Urdu writers, I can’t help smiling to myself because, you see, he still doesn’t know much Urdu. He runs after words like a hunter who chases butterflies with a net. Yet they elude his grasping fingers. And that is why there is a dearth of pretty words. He is a rough and ready hammersmith; but the blows that life has dealt him, he has taken them all squarely on the neck.

  His hammering is not a crude or violent sort of clobbering. He is a fine marksman and an ace sharpshooter. He is the sort of man who will never walk on the straight and narrow path; he must always walk on a tightrope. People predict that he will fall any moment, but the bugger has never ever tripped. Sometimes I wish that he falls flat on his face and never rises again. But I know that even with his dying breath he will say that he fell simply in order to put an end to the despair of not falling!

  I have said before that Manto is an absolute fraud. A proof of this is that he has always maintained that he never thinks of his story; his story thinks of him. I think this is complete rubbish! Though I can tell you that at the moment of writing a story his state is a bit like a hen that is about to lay an egg. He doesn’t lay his eggs in hiding but in full view of anyone who cares to see. His friends loll about him, his three daughters run around making a din while he squats in his special chair laying his eggs, which soon become chirping-cheeping stories. His wife is almost always angry with him. She often tells him to stop writing his stories and open a shop instead. But the shop that is open inside Manto’s brain is stuffed with more stock than the glittering bangles and baubles crammed in a trinket-seller’s cart. And that is why he sometimes worries what if one day he were to become a cold storage house or a deep freezer where all his thoughts and feelings get frozen.

  As I write this essay, I am afraid that Manto will become angry with me. I can take everything that Manto dishes out, but I cannot bear his anger. He turns into a devil when he is angry. Though his anger lasts only a few minutes, but God grant you mercy in those few minutes ....

  He throws a lot of tantrums about writing stories but I know because I am his twin – that he is a fraud. He had once written somewhere that he carries countless stories in his pocket. The truth, however, is just the opposite.

  When he has to write a story, he thinks about it all night. No clear idea emerges, at first. He gets up at five in the morning and tries to suck the juice out of some story published in a newspaper; still with no
success. Then he goes to the bathroom and attempts to cool his clamour- filled head, so that he is able to think clearly, still there is no success. Then, out of frustration, he picks up some needless quarrel with his wife. If that doesn’t work, he goes out to buy a paan. The paan lies untouched on his table; still the story’s plot eludes him. Finally, as though warding off an attack, he picks up the pen or pencil. Writing 786 on Babu Gopinath, Toba Tek Singh, Hatak, Mummy, Mozelle – all these stories were written in exactly this ‘fraudulent’ fashion.

  It is strange that people consider him an irreligious, vulgar sort of a person and even I think that to some extent he does fall in this category. That is why he raises his pen to write on subjects that can only be called dirty and uses words in his writings that have plenty of leeway for objections. But I know that whenever he has written anything, the first thing he writes on the first page is 786 which means ‘In the name of Allah’ and this man who appears to be an atheist, becomes a believer on paper. At the same time, it is the ‘paper-Manto’ who can be crushed between your fingers like paper-thin almond shells, whereas the real Manto is not one to be broken by hammers!

  And now I shall come to Manto’s personality that I can describe in just a few words – he is a thief, a liar, a traitor and a crowd-puller.

  Time and again, he has taken advantage of his wife’s carelessness and stolen several hundred rupees. He would come and hand her 800 rupees, keep looking from the corner of his eye to see where she hides them and the next day one green note would disappear! And when the poor woman discovers her loss, she would begin to scold the servants!

  While everyone knows that Manto is famous for his plain speaking, I, for one, am not willing to concede that. He is a first-class liar. In the early days, he managed to get away with his lies because it had a special Manto ‘touch’. But after some time, his wife discovered that all this while she had been fed lies. Manto can lie so freely and with such ease that now, unfortunately, his family thinks that everything he says is a lie. A bit like the artificial mole that a woman makes with kohl on her cheek!

  He is illiterate – since he has never studied Marx. Nor has anything written by Freud ever passed his eyes. He barely knows Hegel by name. Hebel and Amis are no more than names for him. But the funny thing is that his critics say that he has been much influenced by these great thinkers. As far as I know, Manto is not one to be influenced by the thoughts of others. He thinks that those who teach him are no better than idiots. One shouldn’t attempt to teach the ways of the world to others but understand things for one’s own self. In trying to teach and explain things to himself, he has become something that is beyond both understanding and wisdom. Sometimes, he says the oddest of things and that makes me laugh.