Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

For a moment I thought it was someone else. . the deep red lipstick smeared across her lips somehow gave the impression of a mouth that had been left unwiped after spitting blood. . her hair terribly mussed up, her white sari practically in tatters, several buttons on the front of her blouse torn open, revealing scratches on her light-almond-coloured breasts.

I was so dazed looking at her in this condition that I couldn’t even ask what had happened or how she had found the address to my kholi. The first thing I did was shut the door. After I pulled up a chair and sat down across from her, she opened her lipstick-coated lips to say, ‘I came straight here.’

‘From where?’ I asked, softly.

‘From my place. . and I’ve come to tell you that that silliness has now ended.’

‘How?’

‘I knew he would return when I was quite alone. So he came. . to reclaim his bag.’ The same mysterious smile curved her thin lips, now utterly disfigured by lipstick. ‘He came to pick up his bag. . I said to him, “Come, it’s in the other room.” Perhaps my tone sounded different, because he tensed a little. . “Don’t be nervous,” I said. In the other room, I didn’t return his bag. I sat down at the dressing table and started putting on make-up.’

She stopped, picked up the glass sitting on my broken table, quickly emptied it, wiped her mouth with the corner of her sari, and resumed. ‘I kept applying make-up for a whole hour. I smeared my lips with as much lipstick as I could and rubbed on as much rouge on my cheeks as I could, while he stood in a corner, watching my face in the mirror. When I had turned myself into a veritable witch, I walked over to the door on firm feet and bolted it.’

‘And then?’

When I looked at her for the answer, she seemed totally changed. Her lips seemed different now that they’d been wiped; her tone sounded about as muted as a piece of red-hot iron being pounded with a hammer.

At the moment she didn’t look at all like the witch she had no doubt resembled after painting herself with all that make-up.

She didn’t answer right away. She got up from my charpoy, installed herself on top of the table, and said, ‘I gnawed at him. . stuck to him like a wild cat. He scratched my face, I clawed at his. We wrestled for quite a while. . oh, he was so strong. . but. . as I once told you, I’m a formidable woman. The weakness brought on by the malaria just vanished. My body was on fire. . my eyes were shooting sparks. . my bones were becoming rigid. I grabbed him and sprang on him like a furious cat. . I don’t know why. . I have no idea why I tangled with him so thoughtlessly. Neither of us said anything that anyone might understand. . I kept screaming, and he kept saying, “Yes, yes”. . I tore off pieces of his white khadi kurta with my fingers. . He yanked out clumps of my hair right from their roots. . He used his utmost force, but I was determined to win at all costs. This left us totally exhausted. He was lying on the rug like a corpse and I was gasping so hard, I felt my heart would give out any moment. In spite of my breathless state I still managed to tear his kurta to shreds. As soon as I saw his broad chest I realized the essence of that silliness. . the silliness that both of us had wondered about but neither of us could make any sense of. .’

She got up quickly, jerked her dishevelled hair over one shoulder and continued, ‘Sadiq. . the bastard, he really has an exquisite body. . I don’t know what came over me. I suddenly lowered myself over him and started biting him. He cringed with pain. But when I stuck my bleeding lips to his and kissed him passionately, he suddenly cooled off like a sated woman. . I got up. . And in a flash I felt hatred for the man surge up in me. I peered down at him intently. . the red of my blood and lipstick had traced hideous patterns on his broad chest. . I glanced around my room and suddenly everything seemed like a sham. Afraid that I might suffocate, I quickly opened the door and came straight to you.’

She fell silent, as silent as a corpse. I was frightened. I touched her arm dangling from the edge of the bed. . it was as hot as fire.

I called her name loudly several times, but she didn’t answer. Finally, when I screamed, ‘Neelam!’ in sheer terror, she started.

As she was leaving she only said, ‘My name is Radha!’

Drained from the day’s gruelling work, Saugandhi had fallen asleep almost as soon as she hit the bed. Minutes ago, the city’s sanitary inspector — she called him ‘Seth’—had gone home to his wife, dead drunk, after a prolonged session of stormy sex which had left even her bones aching. He would have stayed for the night but for the regard he had for his wife who loved him dearly.

The money that she had received from the inspector for her services was still stuffed in her tight-fitting bra, now stained with the man’s drool. Every so often the silver coins clinked a bit with the rise and fall of her breathing, the sound blending with the irregular rhythm of her heart. It was as if the molten silver of the coins was dripping into her bloodstream. Her chest was on fire, partly from the half-bottle of brandy the inspector had brought along and partly from the raw country liquor they had downed with plain water when the soda ran out.

She was lying face down on the large teakwood bed, her bare arms splayed out like the bow-shaped rib of a kite that has come loose from its dew-drenched paper. The grainy flesh visible in her right armpit had acquired a bluish tint from frequent shaving and looked like a graft from the skin of a freshly plucked chicken.

It was a small room. Miscellaneous objects were strewn about. A mangy dog was stretched out under the bed on a heap of shrivelled, weather-beaten chappals, snarling at some invisible object in his sleep. The mange had left the severely affected areas of his body so totally hairless that a person might think a folded rag being used as a doormat had been left on the floor.

A small shelf on the wall held an assortment of make-up: rouge, lipstick, face powder, combs and metallic hairpins that she probably used to keep her chignon in place. In a birdcage hanging from a hook near the rack slept her parrot, its head tucked inside its feathers. Bits of unripe guava and rotting orange peel lay inside the cage, their putrid smell attracting a hovering swarm of mosquitoes and minuscule fruit flies. A wickerwork chair, its backrest grimy from overuse, stood near the bed. To its right was an elegant three-legged tea table supporting a portable His Master’s Voice gramophone draped with a decaying black cloth. Rusted gramophone needles were scattered not just on the table but all over the dingy room. Four framed photographs of some individuals hung on the wall directly above the table.

Slightly to one side of the photographs, near the entrance, hung a brightly coloured portrait of Ganeshji, adorned with strings of faded flowers. The picture was likely some fabric brand label that had been removed from the bolt and stuck into a frame. A lamp and a cup filled with oil sat on a small, greasy rack near Ganeshji’s picture, along with a smattering of curled-up ash that had fallen from incense sticks. In the stagnant atmosphere of the room, the flame in the lamp burned as perfectly straight as the tilak mark on someone’s forehead. Saugandhi habitually touched her day’s first earnings against this image of Ganeshji and then against her own forehead before tucking them inside her bra; regardless of how many banknotes she stuffed there, they remained safe in the hospitable space between her ample, protruding breasts — safe, that is, until Madho showed up from Puna, taking a day or two off from his job. Then she would be forced to stash some of the money inside the hole she had dug under one of her bedposts just for such a situation. It was Ramlal who had let Saugandhi in on this trick for keeping her money safe. Hearing how Madho came over from Puna now and then and played around with her infuriated Ramlal so much that he let her have it one day: ‘Since when have you made that son-of-a-bitch your lover? Some affair you’ve got there! That bum! Doesn’t have to spend even a paisa of his own money, but ends up having a good time with you all the same. And to top it all off, he even swindles you out of some of your own money. . Why, don’t I know every last weakness of you girls? After all, I’ve been in this business for seven years.’