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Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and the most controversial short-story writer in Urdu, was born on 11 May 1912 at Samrala in Punjab’s Ludhiana district. In a literary, journalistic, radio scripting and film-writing career spread over more than two decades, he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches and many scripts for films. He was tried for obscenity half a dozen times, thrice before and thrice after Independence. Some of Manto’s greatest work was produced in the last seven years of his life, a time of great financial and emotional hardship for him. He died several months short of his forty-third birthday, in January 1955, in Lahore.
Muhammad Umar Memon is professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a critic, short-story writer, translator and editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies. He has translated the best of Urdu writers. His most recent translation is Collected Stories, a selection of stories by Naiyer Masud.
Saadat Hasan Manto
Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
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Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
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Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
Why singles are so taken with empty bottles and cans continues to amaze me even now. By singles I mean men generally not interested in getting married—ever.
Granted, this breed tends to be eccentric and fosters idiosyncrasies; however, what throws me off is their exaggerated fondness for empty bottles and cans. Often they also keep birds and animals. I can understand their need for companionship, but empty bottles and cans? In heaven’s name, what possible companionship can these inanimate objects offer?
Call it the result of transgressing nature if you wish to find a reason for such strange habits and eccentricities, but you can’t explain it as easily in psychological terms. Indeed it’s hugely difficult.
I have a relative, about fifty now, who is fond of keeping pigeons and dogs as pets. There’s nothing odd about that. His affliction is this: Every day he goes to the bazaar to buy cream which he boils down to clarified butter. This is what he uses to cook his food. He believes this is how pure ghee is distilled.
He also keeps a reserve pot of water especially for his personal use. It’s always covered with a piece of a thin, gauzy fabric to prevent insects from getting in while still allowing the continuous passage of fresh air. Before going to the toilet, he takes off all of his clothes, wraps a small towel around himself and slips on his wooden clogs. Now, if you want to understand the psychology behind the clarified butter, the thin, gauzy fabric over the mouth of the water pot, the towel and the wooden clogs—be my guest.
I have a friend—a single. He appears to be quite normal. He works as a reader at the high court. His affliction: He smells foul odours everywhere all the time. So, as a consequence, his kerchief is never far from his nose. He’s fond of keeping rabbits.
There’s another single. He drops down to offer namaz whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself. But he’s perfectly sane. He has a profound understanding of world politics. He’s an expert in training parrots to speak.
And this wealthy old major in the military—he’s fond of collecting hookahs. Gurguris, pechwans, you name it; he’s got quite a collection. Although he owns several houses, a rented room in a hotel is where he lives. Pheasants are his passion.
And this retired Colonel Sahib, he lives in a spacious bungalow with his dozen or so dogs, big and small. He keeps a collection of whiskies, of all types and brands. He drinks four glasses every evening with one or another of his favourite canines and treats the dog to some as well.
All the singles I’ve mentioned so far are, without exception, fond of empty bottles and cans to one degree or another. Whenever my kinsman, the one who distils pure ghee from cream, spots an empty bottle anywhere in the house, he washes it thoroughly and puts it in his cupboard, thinking that it might come in handy some day. The high court reader, who only smells foul odours everywhere, all the time, collects only bottles and cans that he has made absolutely sure will never smell bad. The fellow who is ready to pray anywhere and any time keeps dozens of bottles to wash himself after going to the toilet and tin cans to use for ablutions. He thinks that these items are both inexpensive and clean. The major, who is given to stockpiling hookahs, collects empty bottles and cans for the sole purpose of selling them to scrap merchants. The retired colonel is only fond of collecting empty bottles of whisky. If you happen to visit him, you will see these whisky bottles neatly arranged inside several glass cabinets in a small, tidy room. No matter how antiquated the brand, you can be sure to find it in his rare collection. Just as some people are fond of collecting stamps and coins, he has a passion—or rather obsession— for collecting empty whisky bottles and displaying them.
The Colonel Sahib has no relatives. If he does have anyone, I’m certainly not aware of it. Even though he’s all alone in the world, he doesn’t suffer from loneliness at all. He’s happy with his dozen or so dogs and he cares as much for them as an affectionate father for his children. He spends his entire day with his pets, and whatever free time he has is spent rearranging his darling bottles in their cabinets.
Now, you might say, well, all right, empty bottles make sense, but why have you tacked on empty cans along with them? Why in the world should it be necessary for a bachelor to be interested not just in empty bottles but also in empty cans? And whether bottles or cans—why should they be empty? Why not full?
Haven’t I already told you that I wonder about that too? This and similar questions often assail my mind. Yet I’m unable to come up with an answer, no matter how hard I try.
Empty bottles and cans represent a void. The only logical connection between them and celibate men is perhaps that the latter’s life is characterized by a gaping emptiness. This doesn’t help, for it begs the question: Do such men try to fill one void with another? A person can at least say that dogs, cats, rabbits and monkeys fill the emptiness of a man’s life to some degree. They can amuse with their funny antics and airs, and even respond to love. But what possible enjoyment can empty bottles and cans afford?
It’s possible that the following might offer you an answer to these questions.
Ten years ago, when I went to Bombay, a film produced by a famous studio had been running for twenty weeks. The heroine was an experienced actress, but the hero was a complete novice and looked very young in the advertisements. After reading great things about his acting skills in the newspapers, I decided to go see the film. It was quite all right. The story was interesting enough and, considering that the hero was appearing before the camera for the first time in his life, his acting was okay.
It is generally difficult to guess the true age of an actor or actress on the screen. Thanks to the wonders of make-up, a young man can look years older, an old man like a strapping youth. But this newcomer was in fact quite young, vibrant and very agile, like a college student. Although not exactly handsome, every limb on his firm body was well proportioned and finely shaped.
In the years that followed I saw many more films with the same actor. He had become more mature in his work. The raw, boyish softness of his features had gelled into the firmness that comes with age and experience. He was now among the finest film stars in Bombay.
Scandals are nothing new in the film world. Every day brings the news that some actor has become amorously involved with some actress or other, or that actress X has ditched her lover for director
; Y. No actor or actress is immune from a romantic affair at some time or other. However, the life of this new actor was entirely free of any such entanglements. This fact, though, was not talked about much in the newspapers. No one ever mentioned, even in passing, that Ram Saroop’s life was absolutely free of any kind of gossip in spite of his close involvement with the film world.
To tell you the truth, I’d never given much thought to these matters because I had absolutely no interest in the personal lives of film people. Watch a film, form a good or bad opinion of it, that was the extent of my involvement. However, when I met Ram Saroop, I learned many interesting things about him. This meeting took place nearly eight years after I saw his first film.
During his early days in the film industry he lived in a village quite far from Bombay. With his increasing involvement in motion pictures, he was obliged to move into a modest flat in the Shivaji Park neighbourhood near the sea. This flat was where I met him. It had four rooms, including the kitchen.
The family that lived here comprised eight members: Ram Saroop himself, his servant who doubled as the cook, three dogs, two monkeys and one cat. Ram Saroop and the servant were both bachelors; the dogs and the cat were also without mates of the opposite sex; the monkeys were the exception, but they stayed in their separate wire mesh cages most of the time.
Ram Saroop loved his six animals dearly. He also treated his servant kindly, which had little, if anything, to do with emotion. He had a set routine, and performed tasks at fixed times with the cold regularity of a machine, as if automatically. It almost seemed as though Ram Saroop had jotted down the set of rules and regulations governing his life and handed them over to his servant, who had then memorized them.
If Ram Saroop took off his clothes and slipped into a pair of shorts, the servant immediately placed a few bottles of soda and some flasks of ice on the glass-topped teapoy. This meant that the sahib would now drink rum and play with his dogs. If the phone rang in the meantime, he was supposed to say that the sahib was not home.
An empty bottle of rum or can of cigarettes was never to be trashed or sold. It was put away carefully in the sahib’s room, which was already crowded with piles of empty bottles and cans.
If a woman came to the door, she would be turned away with the excuse that the sahib had spent the night shooting for a film and was asleep. If she showed up in the evening she was told that the sahib was out on a shoot.
The ambience of Ram Saroop’s place wasn’t very different from that of any bachelor who lives alone. It lacked the decor and tidiness beholden to a woman’s delicate touch. Yes, it was neat and clean, but in a coarse sort of way. The first time I entered, the feeling that I’d stepped into the part of a zoo where tigers and cheetahs and such are kept overwhelmed me; it exuded the same animal odour.
One of the rooms was a bedroom, another a sitting room, and the third was where the empty bottles and cans were kept—all the rum bottles and cigarette cans that Ram Saroop had emptied himself. They were just sitting around haphazardly without any particular order, bottles and cans, one on top of the other, face up or face down. Some stood in a line in one corner, while others were just heaped up in another, coated with dust, giving off the pungent odours of stale tobacco and equally stale rum blended together.
I must say I was bowled over when I first saw this room, crowded as it was with numberless bottles and cans—all empty.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Ram Saroop.
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘I mean this junk?’
‘It just kind of piled up,’ was all he could say.
‘It would take seven or eight years to collect so much junk’—I thought out loud.
I was mistaken. As I later found out, it had taken ten. When he moved over to Shivaji Park he had hauled along all the bottles and cans that had accumulated in his old house. Once, I asked him, ‘Saroop, why don’t you sell these. In the first place, they shouldn’t have been allowed to get out of hand, but now that they have, and you can get a good price on account of the war, you’d better get rid of this junk.’
His only answer: ‘Drop it, yaar! It’s just too much bother.’
This sort of gave the impression that he really had no interest in empty bottles and cans, but his servant let me in on the fact that Ram Saroop raised hell if even a single bottle or can was moved from its place.
Ram Saroop had no interest in women. We had become close friends. Several times I asked him casually, ‘So my friend, when are you getting married?’ and each time I was given the same type of answer: ‘Whatever for?’
‘Yes, indeed, whatever for—really?’ I thought. ‘Will he shut her up in his junk room? Or play with her in his shorts as he sipped his rum?’ While I did bring up the subject of marriage with him now and then, try as hard as I could, in my imagination I couldn’t picture him with a woman.
Our association was now several years old. During this time the rumour went round several times that he had fallen in love with some actress named Sheela. I absolutely didn’t believe in the veracity of the story. For one thing, it wasn’t something one could expect from Ram Saroop; for another, Sheela wasn’t quite the woman any sane young man would lose his heart to. She always looked lifeless, as though she was suffering from tuberculosis. She did look tolerable in her first few movies, but eventually lost whatever panache she might have had, morphing into a totally insipid, bland character, now consigned to appear only in third-class movies.
I asked him just once about this Sheela woman. He replied with a smile, ‘Do you think she’s the only woman left for me?’ About this time his dearest dog Stalin caught pneumonia. Ram Saroop had it treated in the best way he knew, but the poor animal’s days were numbered. Its death pained him deeply. His eyes remained teary for quite some time. Then one day he gave away his other dogs to a friend. I thought it was due to the terrible shock of Stalin’s death, otherwise he would never have parted with them. However, it surprised me a bit when, not long afterwards, he also got rid of the monkeys. Must be because he didn’t want to go through another harrowing experience in the future, I concluded. Now he only played with his cat Nargis, as usual, in his shorts while sipping rum. The cat loved him equally in return because she had no competition; she alone was the recipient of his affections.
Soon, his living quarters no longer smelled of tigers and cheetahs and reflected a noticeable order and taste in their decor. His face, too, now assumed a slightly fresher look. However, all this happened so slowly that it was difficult to determine the exact time of the onset of
the change.
Time rolled on. His new film was released. I observed a marked freshness in his acting. When I congratulated him, he smiled and said, ‘Come, have some whisky?’
‘Whisky?’ I asked, surprised. Didn’t he always drink rum . . . only rum?
His earlier smile shrank somewhat on his lips as he answered, ‘I’m tired of drinking rum.’
No further questioning was necessary.
A week later when I went to see him, he was drinking as usual, not rum but whisky, not in his shorts but in a kurta–pyjama. We played cards and drank for a long time. After a while I noticed his tongue and palate were having difficulty accepting the taste of the new drink, for with every sip he made a face as if he was drinking something foreign. I said to him, ‘Looks as if you haven’t got used to whisky yet, have you?’
‘Oh, I will. Give it some time,’ he said smiling.
Ram Saroop’s flat was on the second floor. As I was passing by one day I saw great big piles of empty bottles and cans near the garage being loaded on to a couple of rickety carts by a few junk dealers. I was aghast; this treasure could only have belonged to Ram Saroop. I felt a tinge of indescribable pain to see it being hauled away. I ran up to his flat and rang the bell. The door opened, but when I tried to step inside his servant uncharacteristically stopped me, saying, ‘Sahib was out on a shoot last night; he’s sleeping now.’
I left in surprise a
nd anger, muttering something under my breath. That very evening Ram Saroop came to my house with Sheela in tow, draped in a new crisp Banarasi sari. ‘Meet my wife,’ Ram Saroop said, pointing at Sheela.
Had I not already downed four pegs of whisky I would certainly have been knocked out.
Both of them sat for a short while and then left. For a long time afterwards I kept ruminating: What did Sheela remind me of? A papery, beige sari over a sparse, thin body, puffed out here, shrunk there? Suddenly the image of an empty bottle floated before my eyes, an empty bottle wrapped in paper.
Sheela was a woman—totally empty, but it was possible that one void had filled another.
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Copyright © Muhammad Umar Memon, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-387-62573-0
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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