Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

As soon as Narain released her arm, she began to cry. He paid no attention, cleaned the injection site with the cotton ball, and went into the other room.

The first shot was administered at nine in the evening. The second was due in three hours. Narain warned me that if it was delayed by even half an hour, the penicillin’s effect would wear off entirely. So he stayed awake. At eleven he got the stove going, sterilized the needle in boiling water, and filled the syringe with the next dose.

Janki’s eyes were shut, her breathing raspy. Narain rubbed an alcohol-soaked wad of cotton on her other arm and jabbed the needle. A shrill cry escaped from her lips. Narain pulled the needle out, rubbed the cotton over the spot on her arm, and said, ‘We’ll give her the third dose at three o’clock.’

I have no idea when he gave her the third or even the fourth injection. When I awoke I heard the hissing sound of the burning stove and Narain asking the attendant for some ice. He had to keep the penicillin chilled.

At nine in the morning, we entered her room to give her the fifth shot and found her lying in bed with her eyes open. She scowled at Narain with hatred in her eyes, but said nothing. Narain smiled. ‘How are you feeling, my dear?’

Janki remained quiet.

Narain stood close to her and said, ‘These shots I’m jabbing into your arm are not love shots. They’re meant to cure your pneumonia. I swiped them from the military hospital. . Come on, lie on your stomach and slide your shalwar down your bottom a bit. Have you ever taken an injection there?’

He poked a spot on her derrière with his finger. Naked hate, tinged with awe, surfaced in Janki’s eyes.

When she turned over, Narain said, ‘Shabash!’ and before she could resist, he pulled down her shalwar and ordered me, ‘Come on, rub some alcohol here!’

She started to thrash her legs every which way. ‘Don’t,’ Narain shouted, ‘I’m giving you a shot, one way or another.’

The fifth injection was given successfully. Fifteen more remained, to be administered every three hours. The whole course required forty-five hours.

Five injections later, Janki’s condition still hadn’t shown any signs of improvement. But Narain believed in the miraculous potency of penicillin. He was absolutely sure that she would walk out of here fully cured. We talked a long time about this drug.

Around eleven Narain’s servant walked in with a telegram for me. It was from a film company in Puna. They had asked me to rush over. I had to leave.

I returned to Bombay on the company’s business about ten or fifteen days later. After finishing my work I went to Andheri. Saeed told me that Narain was still holed up in the hotel. Since the hotel was quite far away in the city, I spent the night in Andheri.

I reached the hotel the next morning around eight and found Narain’s door ajar. I entered but found the room empty. I pushed on the door to the other room. Something flashed before my eyes. The moment she saw me, Janki slipped under the quilt. Narain was sprawled out next to her. Seeing me leave, he shouted, ‘Come, Manto, come in. I always forget to latch the door. Come, yaar, sit down in this chair, but first hand Janki’s shalwar to her, will you?’

For the first time in four years, Trilochan was looking up at the night sky, and only because anxiety was gnawing at his heart. He had gone up to the terrace at Advani Chambers to clear his mind in the fresh air.

The cloudless sky stretched out like a sprawling canopy over the whole of Bombay. The city lights, dotting the landscape as far as Trilochan could see, appeared like so many fallen stars caught in a maze of tall buildings, glimmering like fireflies in the darkness.

It was an entirely novel experience for him to be out under the open sky at night. He had an overwhelming feeling that he’d been cooped up inside his flat for the last four years, and deprived of one of nature’s great bounties. It must have been around three in the morning. A light, cool breeze was blowing around him, unlike the usual mechanical breeze of the electric fan, which always felt uncomfortably thick and heavy. When he woke up in the morning it was never without the feeling that his body had been thrashed all night long. Now, as every fibre of his being joyously soaked in the fresh morning air, he felt delightfully revived. He had climbed up to the terrace in a feverishly agitated state, but within half an hour it had subsided enough for him to think clearly.

Kirpal Kaur and her entire family lived in a mohalla teeming with Muslim fanatics. Several houses had been torched and many lives lost already. He might have brought them out to safety, but a curfew was on and there was no telling how long it would last — forty-eight hours perhaps. There were Muslims of the awfully dangerous kind everywhere. And to make matters worse, news of Sikhs making short work of Muslims and subjecting them to all manner of atrocities were filtering in from the Punjab. Trilochan felt totally helpless. Any Muslim hand could easily grab Kirpal Kaur’s arm and send her to her death.

Kirpal’s mother was blind and her father disabled. She did have a brother, but Niranjan had been living in the Devlali area for some time now, supervising a construction contract he had recently taken on.

Trilochan found Niranjan’s attitude thoroughly annoying. He read the newspaper regularly and had warned Niranjan a week or so ago about the speed and ferocity with which riots were erupting everywhere. He’d told him quite plainly, ‘Forget about the contract for now. These are treacherous times. And even if you stay with your family, it would still be better if you brought them over to my house. I know it isn’t large enough, but in these days of such uncertainty. . well, we’ll manage somehow.’

But would Niranjan listen! He just stroked his bushy moustache and smiled. ‘Yaar, you’re worrying your head over nothing. Riots. . I’ve seen many such riots here. This is Bombay, not any old place like Amritsar or Lahore. How long since you moved here? Four years, right? Well, I’ve been living here for twelve.’

God knows what Niranjan took Bombay for. Probably a city where, even if riots did break out, they would die down on their own, as if it possessed some magical power to quell them, or was perhaps a fairy-tale castle impervious to calamity. But in the fresh morning air Trilochan could see clearly that the mohalla wasn’t quite as safe as all that. In fact, he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he read in the newspaper one of these days that Kirpal and her family had been murdered.

He didn’t much care about her blind mother or her disabled father. As far as he was concerned, it would be fine if she was saved and they were killed, and even better still if her brother was also killed for then there would be nothing standing in his way. Niranjan, especially, was proving to be the biggest hurdle, a khingar , a veritable brick wall in his path. When he and Kirpal Kaur talked, he referred to her brother as ‘Khingar Singh’ instead of his real name ‘Niranjan Singh.’

The morning breeze was stirring gently around him. His head, now bereft of his kes, felt the refreshing coolness. But his mind, that was something else entirely — countless misgivings were colliding there.

Kirpal Kaur had come into his life only recently. Unlike her brother Khingar Singh, who was a burly young man, she was extremely delicate and nimble. Despite growing up in a village and experiencing its pastoral way of life, she displayed none of the coarse masculinity usually found in Sikh girls from rural areas who are accustomed to hard, physical labour. Her features were still evolving and her tiny breasts still needed many more layers of fat to fill out. Her complexion was fair and her body was as smooth as mercerized cotton. She was also very shy.