Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Nobody gawks at a female typist with consternation, or at midwives with hatred, or at sweeper women carrying baskets of refuse on their heads with belittlement. But, strangely, women who sell their bodies, whether in a delicate or crude manner, are looked upon with all three: consternation, hatred, and belittlement.

Gentlemen, prostitution is indispensable. You see gorgeous, ritzy cars in the street — don’t you? Such classy vehicles aren’t meant to transport garbage. There are vehicles for that purpose, but you see them less often. And when you do see them, you quickly cover your nose. Well, just as we can’t do without garbage trucks, neither can we do without prostitutes. They are absolutely necessary; they carry away our dirt, our filth. Had they not existed, our streets and pathways would have been filled with the most unseemly, the most vulgar acts of men.

These women are like dreary, desolate gardens; open sewers running by garbage piles. They live in the middle of this filth. How can everyone live a lush and exuberant life?

Just think about it: tucked away in a corner of the city is the room of a woman who sells her flesh; in the darkness of the evening, a man with a heart even darker than the night, barges in to assuage the leaping flames of his passion. She knows how evil this man is, that his very existence is a danger to humanity’s peace, over which it blazes like an ugly stain. She knows he is a frightening specimen of a creature from the age of barbarity, but she cannot slam the door shut in his face — can she? The door that one is compelled to open out of sheer economic necessity and want can’t simply be shut, not without the greatest difficulty.

This woman — a bawd first, a woman second — gives her body over to a man in exchange for a few coins, but it is a body bereft of her soul in those moments. Listen to what one such bawd has to say:

Men take me out into the fields. I just lie there, immobile, without a sound — dead, inert. Only my eyes are open, gazing far, far into the distance, where some she-goats are going at one another under the shade of the trees. Oh, what an idyllic scene! I start counting the she-goats, or the ravens on the branches — nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. . Meanwhile the man has finished, withdrawn, and is panting heavily some distance from me. But I’m not aware of any of this.

Observation tells us that vaishiya s tend to be God-fearing. At every Hindu vaishiya’s place you will invariably find small idols or, at the very least, a picture of Lord Krishna or Lord Ganesha in one room or another. She worships it with the same reverence and purity of heart as any virtuous woman would. Likewise, if she happens to be Muslim, she will fast unfailingly during the month of Ramzan, close her business and wear black for the duration of Muharram, help the needy, and, on special occasions, bow to God in utmost humility and submission.

On the face of it, such attachment by prostitutes to religion might seem fake. When, in fact, it portrays that there is a part of their soul which they have kept well protected from the corrosive effects of society.

This holds equally true for prostitutes of other faiths. You will find them as devoted to their religion as any. A Christian vaishiya will not fail to attend mass in church or light an earthen lamp before the picture of the Virgin Mary. In this commerce of the flesh, a vaishiya trades her body, not her soul. It is not necessary for a seller of charas and bhang to be addicted to these substances himself. By the same token, not every pandit or maulvi is pious as a rule.

The body can be stained, not the soul.

What with her gloomy business, a prostitute can have a radiant soul. She can be merciless in collecting her earnings, but she can also help numberless poor. Her richest clients may not succeed in winning her love, but she wouldn’t think twice about giving it to a drifter who only has the sidewalks to sleep on at night.

Yes, she craves money. But does that mean she cannot crave love?

The answer to this question calls for a detailed discussion. There is a big difference between a hereditary prostitute and one who is new to the profession. Then there are also those women or girls who are driven to sell their flesh to support their poor parents or to take care of their fatherless children, but their case is entirely different from the two main types mentioned above.

A hereditary prostitute is one who is born to a prostitute and grows up in her household, in other words, a woman who is instructed in the ways of prostitution according to the principles of her occupation. Women who grow up in such an environment generally consider love a coin that has no purchase in their trade. This makes sense; for if they were to give their hearts away to every client who visits them for a few hours, they wouldn’t be able to run their business successfully.

Such women, as commonly observed, rarely feel the stirrings of love in their hearts. Said differently, in comparison to other women, they are very circumspect. Indeed, they can be quite stingy about falling in love. Their interaction with men generates indescribable feelings of bitterness in their hearts for them, whom they begin to consider worse than animals. That’s why they become, to a degree, ‘disbelievers’ in love. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that their hearts are entirely bereft of the delicate, tender feelings of love.

Just as a sweeper’s daughter would probably not feel any revulsion towards carrying her first basket of filth on her head, similarly prostitutes would likely feel no hesitation or shame upon their debut in the profession. Bashfulness, hesitation and their complementary sentiments gradually wear off to the point of non-existence. How can tender feelings of love find their way into the hearts of prostitutes whose doors are open for lustful men?

Just as decent, virtuous women gaze at vaishiyas with bafflement and shocked disbelief, so do the latter gaze at the former. While the eyes of virtuous women are filled with the question, ‘Could a woman sink so low?’ the virtue-less woman wonders, ‘What are these chaste women? Who are they?’

A vaishiya whose mother, whose grandmother, and so on were all vaishiyas, who has suckled at a vaishiya’s breasts after being born in the midst of the oldest profession in the world, who grew up in its milieu and started selling her flesh there — how can she ever understand virtue or virtuous women?

Out of every one hundred girls born into prostitutes’ families, perhaps only one or two ever feel revulsion at their environment and firmly commit to surrendering themselves to only one man. The rest follow the path of their mothers.

A shopkeeper’s son desires to open his own shop and expresses this desire in a variety of ways. It is no different with the teenage daughters of prostitutes. They also long to set up their own business, which is what leads them to display the attributes of their bodies, their charms, their beauty in ever-newer, eye-catching ways. And when they launch into the business, their debut follows the enactment of specific initiation ceremonies. This is no different from the protocol for beginning any new business.

This being the case, obviously, it is hard for love to sprout in the hearts of these hereditary prostitutes. By love, I mean the kind that our society has been witness to over the ages — the proverbial love of Heer and Ranjha, Sassi and Punnu.

But these seasoned, hardened prostitutes also love, though in a radically different way. They can’t replicate the love of Laila and Majnun or Heer and Ranjha for the all-too-obvious adverse effect it would have on their business. If a vaishiya were to set apart a few moments during her work hours for a man from whom she doesn’t care to receive money, well, we would say that she has feelings for this fellow. But as a rule, she is greedy only for a man’s wealth. She would be breaking a rule if she cared for him and not his money, and would also be making it obvious that her heart is at work behind this care, not any desire to cash in on his riches. And where the heart is involved, feelings of love must inevitably find their way.