Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Ordinarily, love springs from the unalloyed desire for sexual gratification. So, here too, we will consider sex the operative agent of what is called love. But many other considerations can also set love in motion. For instance, a woman who sells sex for money and is used to lording it over men might also tire of being endlessly wheedled and indulged in her whims by her clients. Yes, she likes to be the boss, but there may be times when she would like nothing better than being subservient herself. Surely, fulfilment of every request is hugely profitable, but rejection, too, has a flavour all its own. Raking in piles of money as a routine inevitably makes her want, sometimes, to spend it on someone else. If everyone plays up to her, she too might want to flatter someone. If she is adamant with someone, someone must also be adamant with her. She always spurns and snubs others; someone should snub her, tease her, treat her badly. All these latent desires compel her to choose a particular man for herself. And so she chooses.

Selection is an exceedingly delicate, indeed, unpredictable matter. It is entirely conceivable that she might open the doors of her heart to the scion of some rich man, or end up throwing herself at the feet of the filthy, charas-addicted miraasi who fills the hookah-bowls at her kotha — she, for a kiss of whose curls distinguished kings and princes would shower thousands of gold pieces without thinking twice. Nor should we feel surprise when that filthy man kicks her away with contempt. One often observes and hears about such incidents.

A famous tawaif , whom a nawab sahib was madly in love with, had given her heart to a very ordinary man. She would ridicule the nawab’s love, while people derided her for hers. The nawab earned disgrace for loving a tawaif, and she lost esteem in the eyes of the people for loving a nobody.

A vaishiya’s love, compared to that of ordinary women, is more intense. Her association with men introduces her to unfamiliar emotions of loving, and when she herself falls in love, those emotions affect her with greater force.

Stories abound in bazaars where prostitutes conduct their business, especially stories about the pleasure-loving rich whose bags of money open up at prostitutes’ kothas. And there are those who love to tell those stories with great gusto. Sarangi-players, drummers and others who regularly come and go at kothas will tell you many such spicy tales.

Among those stories, we can cite by way of example the one about a particular prostitute who literally bathed in money, but had lost her heart to a labourer in tatters and who trampled it mercilessly under his calloused feet every day. She collected piles of money from her admirers every night, but remained miles away from the grimy embrace of the labourer. She hopelessly tried to find her way into his heart, and failed. Far too often she, with a body as delicate as a flower, slept on the bare cobblestone sidewalk to win the affection of her labourer!

Such paradox, the colour of true love, does appear quite outlandish and mysteriously romantic in the milieu of brothels. But it is the backdrop that accentuates and highlights the objects that occupy the foreground. Since we normally think that all a prostitute ever cares about is money, that she is altogether bereft of feelings of love, a story such as the one just told always seems incredible and bizarre; hence, our heightened interest in listening to it — rather than the love affairs of ordinary men and women — as if it was an account of something highly improbable, although, in point of fact, the heart and its stirrings have nothing to do with the selling of one’s virtue or keeping it unstained. A virtuous woman can have a heart that does not throb for love; conversely, the meanest bawd of a brothel can possess a heart fully responsive to such promptings.

One should never forget that not every woman is a vaishiya, but that every vaishiya is a woman.

There’s something special about a vaishiya’s love that is worth mentioning. It is that her love never gets in the way of her business. One rarely finds a vaishiya who permanently folded up her business for the sake of her love (any more than a respectable shopkeeper closes down his business because of his love for an honourable girl). Normally, a vaishiya will continue her business even though she loves someone. One could say that a businessman’s appetite for money becomes part of her psyche. Making new customers and selling her flesh turns into something like a habit, which eventually becomes her nature, with absolutely no effect on other areas of her life. Just as a servant, after speedily making his master’s bed, turns to his own comfort, in like manner, these women return to their own happiness and comfort just as soon as they have entertained the last customer of the evening.

The heart is not something one can portion off, and women tend to be comparatively less promiscuous than men. Inasmuch as a vaishiya is a woman, she can’t give her heart to all of her clients. A woman loves only one man in her life, or so the saying goes. I tend to think that this is largely true. She will open her heart only to the man for whom she feels love; she can’t give it to everyone who crosses her threshold.

How often is the complaint not heard that prostitutes are generally very cruel and tyrannical. Perhaps the thinnest sliver in a population of hundreds can be characterized this way, but not all; they cannot be. One must never compare a prostitute to a woman who preserves her modesty. Indeed such a comparison is grossly misleading. A vaishiya works for her living; the modest woman has many to provide for her needs.

The words of a vaishiya, which reflect the depths of her feelings, are still echoing in my ears. Listen:

A vaishiya is a helpless woman with no one to watch over her. A whole host of men visit her every evening — for only one purpose. She feels alone even in the company of her lovers — all alone. She is a train that travels in the darkness of night, drops off her passengers at their destinations, and then stands empty under the metal roof of a shed — all alone, abandoned, forlorn, covered with dust and smoke. People call us bad. Heaven only knows why. The very clients who buy us for their comfort in the darkness of night, disparage, belittle and hate us in the light of day. We sell our bodies openly; we don’t hide it as a secret. Men come to us to buy sex, and then keep this transaction a secret. . one wonders why.

Think of the prostitute who has no one in the world to call her own — no brother, no sister, no parents, not even a friend. When the last customer of the evening has gone away, she is left all alone in her room. Try to imagine the state of her mind and heart then — a void made a hundredfold more frightening than the darkness of her night.

Imagine the condition of a porter who has no means to relax after a day’s gruelling work, neither a wife to talk with to amuse himself, nor a mother who will put an affectionate hand gently on his shoulder and take away all his misery, soak up all his fatigue. Have you any idea what such a man must feel like? Materially, a vaishiya’s situation is not much different from his. But why, then, does she look so full of vivacity and exuberance?

For the answer we must dig deep into our hearts. The fault lies in the way we look at a prostitute; hence, we must commune with our inner self in order to discover the reasons for our short-sightedness. What I have been able to work out, after much hard thinking, is this:

The minute the word vaishiya is uttered, the image of a woman sails before our eyes — a woman who can gratify a man’s desire for sex in whatever manner and whenever he feels the need for it. But we forget that a prostitute and a woman are two different entities, so when we think about the former, what we inevitably see is a woman and her profession rolled into one. Now it’s true that one’s profession and milieu do considerably affect a person, but there are times when this person is simply a human being, apart from whatever else she may be. Likewise, there can be times when a vaishiya sheds the accoutrements of her calling and becomes just a woman. But alas, we are used to only looking at her and her profession as one and the same thing. Thus we see her as a woman and as one who gives pleasure, the pleasure being ordinarily pure sexual gratification.