Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, after Mozel had completely undone his beard and left it to hang down over his chest.

She smiled despite the pins clenched in her teeth and said, ‘Your hair is too soft. I was wrong to think it could brush my skirt clean. Triloch, give your hair to me. I’ll make myself an exquisite woven handbag.’

Trilochan was furious. ‘Have I ever made fun of your religion?’ he asked in dead seriousness. ‘Why then do you mock mine? It’s not nice to ridicule a person’s religious feelings. I would never have tolerated it, but I’ve looked the other way because I love you. I love you very much. Don’t you know that?’

She stopped playing with his beard. ‘I know,’ she muttered.

‘So?’ he asked, deftly folding his hair and pulling the pins out of her mouth. ‘You know perfectly well that my love isn’t some kind of claptrap. I want to marry you.’

She got up, shaking her hair softly. ‘I know,’ she said, and looked intently at the picture hanging on the wall. ‘In fact, I’ve nearly made up my mind to marry you.’

‘Do you mean it?’ He jumped up with elation.

Her reddish-brown lips parted in a broad smile and her strong white teeth glimmered for an instant. ‘I do — I really do!’

His beard only half folded, he embraced her passionately and asked, ‘When. . when?’

Mozel pulled away and announced, ‘When you get rid of this mop of hair.’

‘I will, tomorrow,’ he said without thinking. He was so overcome that he would have agreed to anything.

Mozel began to tap-dance. ‘Rubbish, Triloch! You don’t have the spunk!’

This had driven every single thought of religion flying out of his mind. ‘You’ll see.’

‘So I will,’ she said, darting towards him and kissing him on his moustache. Then with another ‘Phew!’ she breezed out.

It would be useless to recount here what all went through his mind that night and the torment Trilochan suffered. The next day he went to a barber in the Fort area and had him cut off his hair and shave off his beard. Trilochan kept his eyes tightly closed and let it happen. After it was over he opened his eyes and contemplated his face in the mirror for the longest time — even the most beautiful woman in Bombay would have found this face irresistible.

Trilochan was now feeling the same eerie chill he had felt when he stepped out of the barbershop. He quickened his steps across the terrace that was crowded with a network of water tanks and pipes. He wanted to avoid the rest of the story but it proved impossible.

He remained in his flat the whole day. The next day he sent his servant with a note for Mozel saying that he wasn’t feeling well. She came to see him. The sight of his head without its shag of hair threw her off for a moment. Then she exclaimed, ‘My darling Triloch!’ and began hugging him and painting his whole face a deep red with her kisses.

She ran her hand over his smooth cheeks, combed her fingers through his hair, now trimmed short in the English style, and kept exclaiming loudly in Arabic. She shouted so much that her nose began to run. When she realized it, she just lifted the hem of her skirt and wiped her nose. Trilochan blushed. He quickly lowered her skirt and admonished her, ‘You should at least wear something underneath.’

Mozel only smiled and said, ‘It bothers me. Makes me feel cooped up, strangely. It’s fine this way.’

Trilochan remembered their first encounter, when the two had collided in the hallway and their bodies had become entangled in a strange way. He smiled and took her in his arms. ‘We’ll marry tomorrow!’

‘Yes, tomorrow,’ she agreed, caressing his smooth chin with the back of her hand.

They chose Puna for the wedding. Since it would be a civil marriage conducted before the court, a fortnight’s notice was required. So Puna seemed quite feasible. Not only was it close, Trilochan also had some friends there. According to the plan, they would leave the next day.

Mozel worked as a salesgirl in one of the Fort area stores. She had asked him to meet her at a taxi stand not far from her workplace. Trilochan arrived at the appointed time and waited a whole hour and a half, but she never came. The next day he heard that she had left for an indefinite stay in Devlali with an old friend who had just bought a new car.

How Trilochan bore his agony is a fairly long story. Briefly, he inured himself to this calamity and eventually got over it. Not long afterwards he met Kirpal Kaur and fell for her. It didn’t take him long to realize that Mozel was a heartless coquette who kept hopping from tree to tree like a bird. The thought that he had been saved from making the terrible mistake of marrying her eased his heart a little. But there were times when the memory of her returned like an old pain. He liked her even though she didn’t much care about people’s feelings. He couldn’t resist wondering now and then about what she might be up to in Devlali with this other man who had bought himself a new car. Was she still with him or had she ditched him for yet another man? Given his knowledge of her true character, Trilochan couldn’t bear the thought of her being with any man other than himself.

He’d spent a fortune on her, quite willingly though. Most of the time Mozel wasn’t hard to please. She frequently went for the cheap stuff. Once, he wanted to buy her a fairly expensive pair of gold earrings, but she was so taken by the sight of some cheap, gaudy ones in the same store that she begged him to buy those instead.

He still hadn’t quite figured her out. What substance was she made of — really? She let him kiss her for hours, spread himself all over her like a blanket, but never anything beyond that. ‘You’re a Sikh — I hate you!’ she would say playfully.

He knew she didn’t mean it. Had she really hated him, she wouldn’t have spent so much time with him. Her impatience wouldn’t have allowed her to put up with him for two full years and would have settled the matter in two minutes flat instead. She didn’t like to wear undergarments because they bothered her. He often tried to knock some sense into her about the necessity for them, to instil some regard for propriety, even tried to appeal to her sense of modesty, but she refused to budge.

Whenever he brought up ‘modesty’ and ‘propriety’ it always raised her hackles. ‘Modesty — what’s that? Just close your eyes if you care so much for it. Name one piece of clothing that can hide a person’s nakedness or that your eyes can’t see through. Spare me such nonsense. You’re Sikh — I know you guys wear some silly shorts under your pants. They are also part of your religious trappings, like your beard and long hair. You should be ashamed of yourself — a grown man who still believes his religion resides in his underpants.’

At first, this sort of talk greatly infuriated him, but later, after he thought about it, he didn’t feel quite so sure about it himself. Perhaps what she said wasn’t completely preposterous after all. In the end, after getting rid of his hair and beard, he was convinced that he’d been carrying this excess baggage all along for no sane reason at all.

Trilochan stopped near a water tank. He uttered the coarsest swear word he could think of for Mozel and put her out of his mind. The life of the virginal Kirpal Kaur whom he loved very much was in danger at that moment. Her mohalla had become the haunt of militant Muslims and had seen a few incidents already. The problem was that it had been placed under a forty-eight-hour curfew, but if these chawl Muslims got it into their heads, they wouldn’t be deterred by a curfew. They could easily dispatch Kirpal Kaur and her parents without anyone so much as catching a whiff of it.

Plagued by such thoughts, Trilochan sat down on a section of the huge pipeline. His kes had grown back some already and, he hoped, would reach its former length within a year. His beard was also growing fast, though he didn’t want it to get too bushy. This barber in the Fort area, he trimmed it so deftly that it didn’t appear as though it had been touched.