Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Keeping your lips pressed to mine

But not letting your head rest on my arm

Teasing me by lying on my chest

And becoming cross when I speak of my desire

The pleasures of your tongue in my mouth

The manifest hint of your desire in your acts

And when I wish for something more

When I desire a greater intimacy

You place your hand and furiously refuse

My unfastening your trousers

Your shaking off my hand with each advance

Your pushing me back against the pillow

Your kicking me languidly

And refusing me each time with a new excuse

Your pulling your hand away forcibly

And biting me in frustration

Your moving under me furiously

And breaking free from my hold

Your tearing up in such helplessness

And calling out with suppressed anger,

‘Night and day you amuse yourself thus,

In a play not to my liking,

Never are you satisfied,

Never do you call it quits.’

(From Kullīyāt-e Mōmin, ‘Masnavī 2’)

If one writes about the sexual relationship between man and woman in the above manner, I would consider it opprobrious because every grown person knows that when a man and a woman get into bed for sex, they engage in some such animal exercises, although they are never so pretty as the poetry above makes them out to be. They have been just overlaid with poetry, screened behind it. This, of course, is the poet’s mischief, which is censurable.

If these ghastly acrobatics were made into a film and shown on screen, I’m sure all sensible people would turn their faces away in revulsion. The poetry above, however, presents a very misleading picture of those animal exercises.

I call such poetry ‘mental masturbation’—reproachable as much for the writer as for the reader. My ‘Kālī Shalwār’ is blissfully free of any such reproach. Nowhere in it have I depicted the sexual act in titillating language. What kind of sexual pleasure could one expect from my Sultāna who used to hurl obscenities at her gora customers in her own tongue and considered them ‘silly fools’? She was a businesswoman to the hilt, pure and simple. After all, when we go to a wine shop, we don’t expect the man behind the counter to be Umar Khayyam or have Hafiz’s entire poetic corpus at the tip of his tongue. Wine merchants sell wine, not the quatrains of Umar Khayyam and the poetry of Hafiz Shirazi.

My Sultāna is a prostitute first, a woman second. Prostitute first because the most important thing for man during his life is his stomach. Shankar says to her, ‘Surely, you must do something?’

‘I waste my time,’ she replies. She doesn’t say, ‘I sell wheat, or deal in gold and silver.’ She knows what she does for a living. If you asked a typist, ‘What do you do?’ the answer would be, ‘I type.’ Naturally. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between my Sultāna and a typist.

I feel like talking to you, my readers, informally today, not in the stiff language of forewords or legalese. Actually, even things which reside in some deeper recess of a person’s mind and are meant for his exclusive use often find their way into my short stories, plays and semi-fictional articles, but since they’re framed as fiction you take them for fiction.

I feel blue today, strangely weary. I felt the same gloom and weariness of the spirit some four or four and a half years ago when I said goodbye to Bombay, my second home. I was sorry to leave the place where I had spent the most arduous days of my life, the place that had found room for even a tramp like me, a person spurned by his family. That place had whispered to me: Look, you can be happy here whether you make two paisas a day or ten thousand rupees, but if you want to, you can also live here as the unhappiest man on earth. Whatever you do, rest assured, no one here will run you down. There won’t be anyone to counsel you either. You’ll have to do all the hard work yourself. As far as I’m concerned, it makes no difference whether you sleep on the sidewalk or in some gorgeous mansion, whether you stay or leave. I am where I am, and I plan to stay there.

Thanks to my twelve years in Bombay and all that I learned there, I’m now able to survive in Pakistan, and wherever else I might end up next. I’m Bombay on wheels, alive and kicking. I will create a world of my own no matter where I go.

A feeling of dejection swept over me after leaving Bombay. I had friends there whose friendship I’m proud of. I was married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. I earned from as little as a few rupees to tens of thousands there, and spent them. I loved Bombay. I still do. For years I wasn’t able to react to the cataclysmic upheavals following the partition of the country in any way other than the most rebellious. Later, I accepted this horrific reality, but I didn’t allow hopelessness to come anywhere near me.

I plunged into the bloody sea that one human had created by spilling the blood of another and emerged with a few priceless pearls — pearls of the toil and shame man exerted in spilling the last drop of his brother’s blood, of the tears some eyes had shed in their irritation at not being able to extinguish humanity entirely. I have presented these pearls in my book Siyāh Hāshiye [Black Margins].

I’m a human, but one who violated humanity, who made extinction the inevitable fate of everyone, who sold human flesh like any other commodity in their shops with ever more garish displays. I’m the same human who rose to the station of prophets and the same human who stained his hands with their blood. I have all the vices and virtues that others have. But believe me, I was pained, greatly pained, when some of my contemporaries laughed at my effort. They called me a joker, a liar, eccentric, unreasonable and reactionary. A dear friend went so far as to accuse me of rummaging through the pockets of corpses and robbing them of their cigarettes, their rings and other such items. This dear fellow even published an open letter to me, which he could just as easily have given to me in person. In it he openly spilled his guts against my Siyāh Hāshiye .

I’m a human. I lost my cool. I accumulated filth far greater than his, filth that might have stuck to the faces of my so-called critics for a long time. But reason prevailed; I realized this would be a mistake. Yes, it is human nature to respond with a heavier stone when you’ve been hit by a rock. No doubt about it. But the better part of wisdom is to conceal your feelings. It is a sign of man’s forbearance, his fortitude.

I was angry, not because X had misunderstood me, but because he had doubted my intentions — motivated by nothing more than a desire to appear chic and using a standard that only recognized everything red as pure gold. He had done this at the bidding of a bankrupt and hollow movement that was receiving its marching orders from outside the country.

I was angry at what had happened to these people. What kind of Progressives were these people who were heading straight down the reactionary path? Why did the ‘red’ they so loved always hasten towards the dark and the macabre? What kind of love of the peasantry was this that impelled them to incite the farmer to demand his wages before he’d even shed one drop of sweat? Why were they so eager to arm themselves with capital while pretending to be fighting against capitalism, to hand over their cherished weapons of sickle and hammer to their opponents? What kind of literary revolution were they planning by devising schemes to transform machines into ghazals and vice versa?