Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

So there he was, talking to the sub-inspectors and the constables, who had threatened my wife that if she didn’t let them in to search the house they would attempt to force their way in.

I’m sure my arrival must have caused them sufficient embarrassment. I invited them politely to step inside the house, which they graciously accepted. They were a pair of pretty rude and headstrong police officers. I asked them the purpose of their visit. They said they had come from Karachi and had a warrant to search my house. I was hugely surprised. I am not someone who deals secretly in contraband, or sells opium or illegal wines and liquors, not even a pinch of cocaine. Why did they want to search my house? In any case, the first question they asked me was: Where is your library?

What could I have told them? Here in Pakistan my entire ‘library’ consisted of only a few books, of which three were dictionaries. So I said, ‘Whatever books I owned were left behind in Bombay. If you’re looking for a particular magazine or piece of paper, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Bombay. Here is the address.’

They failed to appreciate my witty response, so bereft were they of any sense of humour, and started rummaging through my house. My house is not some bar or tavern, though I did have half a dozen empty bottles of beer which they didn’t bother to glance at. There were a few porcelain bowls in a cupboard and some papers in a small box on the tea table. They went through the box methodically and looked at every single scrap of paper. They found some newspaper clippings, which they promptly confiscated.

I politely asked them to show me the search warrant they had brought from Karachi but they refused. The one who had it in his hand simply waved it at me from a distance saying, ‘This, here.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘The thing that has brought us here.’

When I made it plain that I was not about to let them continue without seeing the warrant, one of them, holding on to it firmly, opened it and said, ‘Here, you can read it.’

On reading it I discovered that the warrant wasn’t only for a house search but also for my arrest.

So now there was the question of bail. The officers were so headstrong that they wouldn’t accept it from anyone, not even my nephew or my brother-in-law who are both gazetted officers. The police officers told them: ‘But you’re government employees, what if you were let go from your jobs tomorrow?’

Thereafter, I twice wrote to the Karachi court to be excused from being present at the hearing on account of illness and attached the relevant medical certificates with my request. But, of course, that was only a temporary solution. I couldn’t hope to be lucky all the time. Eventually, I had to go to Karachi.

An interesting joke: There was no one in the house to arrange for bail when the warrant for my arrest finally arrived. I went looking for friends but, as luck would have it, found none. Finally, I went to see Muhammad Tufail Sahib. He is a very decent man. He went with me willy-nilly, or maybe willy-willy, and posted the bail. How? Well, he runs a literary establishment (he is both the editor and the owner of the journal Nuqūsh ) and the balance of the books in his shop is guarantee enough that he can put up a bail for five thousand rupees.

And, here is another joke. Listen. Tufail Sahib did post the bail, but now he feared that I might not show up on the date of the hearing.

As God is my witness, I was absolutely penniless. I didn’t even have money to buy a drop of poison, as the saying goes. Tufail Sahib materialized at my door at five in the morning, with two second-class train tickets in his pocket. He also gave me the fare for the tonga, accompanied me to the station and hung around with me until the train started moving. He had asked one of my friends, Naseer Anwar, to go with me, perhaps to forestall any possibility of my not reaching Karachi and jumping bail.

What I went through in Karachi I’ll tell you some other time. Right now, I’m too terribly ill to continue. Two

I had started writing an article entitled ‘The Fifth Trial’ in one of the issues of Nuqūsh (nos. 29–30; Feb. — Mar., 1953) but was unable to finish it on account of my severe illness. I’m still unwell, and it seems I will remain so forever. ‘Your illness,’ some friends quip, ‘is all you’ve got.’ By ‘all’ they perhaps mean my short story and non-fiction writing.

Tufail Sahib, the editor and owner of the literary magazine Nuqūsh , has also written an article about me, entitled ‘Manto Sahib’. Brother Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, who has, unfortunately, been appointed the stand-in editor of Imroz , has penned the following review of this article under the name of ‘Critic’:

Muhammad Tufail’s article ‘Manto Sahib’ is personal and, to a large extent, overly intimate. In our opinion he should have kept those secret matters bearing on his and Manto’s mutual relationship a secret. Were the relations of publisher/editor and writer to be revealed in the open so unabashedly, there would be no place left for either of them to hide. Who doesn’t have flaws and weaknesses, but to expose them in print like this! At least in our opinion, it is overstepping the bounds of moderation. It is true that unveiling the little flaws of writers and artists does help to bring out their personalities more fully, but such unveiling that it disgraces! However, the article does leave the impression that Tufail Sahib means well. He seems to have been carried away by emotion and has said certain things that would have been better left unsaid, or at least not in the way he has said them.

I had already sent the following letter to Tufail Sahib before Qasimi Sahib’s review appeared in print:

My brother, as-salāmu alaikum!

Last night Safia *told me that you have written an article about me in Nuqūsh . I couldn’t read it properly at the time as I’d had too much to drink. Since Safia liked it, I asked her to read it to me. She read some random parts, which I absolutely didn’t like; I even cursed you up and down. Then I fell asleep.

Reading it myself the next morning, I liked it a lot. I don’t disagree at all with whatever you have chosen to say about me. Regardless of my flaws, I’m very happy that your account of them is blissfully free of any trace of hesitation. Whatever I am, it is there in your article, and in abundance. It mentions certain things about me that I had in me all along; it’s just that I was not aware of them.

Humbly, Saadat Hasan Manto

I don’t wish to say anything more about that article. I’d be the last person to stand in the way of truth. If I drink, why should I deny it? Equally, if I have borrowed money from someone, I shouldn’t deny that either. If the world wants to put me down for this reason, let it. If I worried about what the world has to say, I wouldn’t have written in excess of one hundred short stories. Mr Critic *comments: ‘It is true that unveiling the little flaws of writers and artists does help to bring out their personalities more fully, but such an unveiling that it disgraces!’ I don’t know whether I’ve been disgraced since Tufail Sahib’s article. Time will tell.

I do want to say one thing, though, about that article. If what really moved Tufail Sahib to put off his brother’s medical treatment and come to my aid was his sudden recollection of his elders’ saying, ‘One should never provide a guarantee on behalf of someone,’ then I truly regret it. Had I only known of his weakness, I’d never have appeared in the court. He would have been arrested and would have looked for someone to bail him out. I would then have said to him: Mister, time to remember the advice of your elders which you threw overboard out of politeness. Forget about the bail, and come with me to the slammer. .