Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

He ran his fingers through his long soft hair and sighed. Just as he was thinking of getting up, the jarring clip-clop of wooden clogs struck his eardrums. Who could that be — he wondered? Quite a few Jewish women lived in the building and they all wore clogs indoors. The sound kept getting closer. Suddenly he saw Mozel. She was clad in the familiar long, loose Jewish tunic and yawning loudly near another water tank, so loudly indeed that for a moment he thought the air around her might shatter.

He stood up, wondering where she had materialized from so suddenly and what she was doing here at this hour.

She yawned again. Trilochan felt as if his bones were about to crack from the sound.

Her large breasts heaved inside her baggy tunic. Several flat, round bluish-black veins swirled before Trilochan’s eyes. He coughed loudly. Mozel turned around and saw him. Her reaction was pretty mild. Dragging her clogs, she walked up to him and gawked at his diminutive beard.

‘Oh, you’ve become a Sikh again, Triloch?’

His beard began to irk him.

She took a step forward, rubbed the back of her hand against his chin and smiled. ‘Perfect, I can clean my navy blue skirt now,’ she said. ‘Too bad, I seem to have left it in Devlali.’

Trilochan remained silent.

She pinched his arm and said, ‘Why don’t you say something, Sardar Sahib?’

He didn’t wish to repeat his earlier mistakes. Still, he looked closely at Mozel’s face in the faint light of the morning. It didn’t show any noticeable change, except that she looked a bit thin. ‘Have you been ill?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She shook her head slightly.

‘But you look a little frail.’

‘I’m dieting.’ She plopped down on the pipe and started to tap the terrace floor with her clogs. ‘So you’re. . you’re becoming a Sikh again?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Trilochan said, rather audaciously.

‘Congratulations!’ She removed one of her clogs and started tapping it on the pipe. ‘Are you in love with some other girl?’

‘Yes,’ he replied softly.

‘Good for you. Someone from this building?’

‘No.’

‘That’s too bad,’ she said, slipping the clogs over her toes and standing. ‘One should always think of one’s neighbours first.’

He remained silent. Mozel touched his beard with all five fingers and asked, ‘Growing this at the girl’s behest?’

He was feeling quite unnerved, as if the hair in his beard had become tangled while being combed. ‘No,’ he said sharply.

Her lipstick looked like a piece of shrivelled meat on her mouth. When she smiled an image of the village butcher in his shop — where jhatka meat was sold — slashing a massive chunk of meat in two with a quick movement of his knife floated in his mind.

She laughed. ‘I swear I’ll marry you if you shave off this beard.’

Trilochan felt like telling Mozel to go to hell. He was in love with a chaste, pure-hearted girl from his village and would marry only her. What was Mozel compared to her? Just a lewd, promiscuous woman, ugly, rude and insensitive. But he wasn’t mean, so he only said, ‘Mozel, I’ve made up my mind to marry this girl from my village. She’s a very simple, religious girl. I’m growing back my hair for her sake.’

Although Mozel wasn’t someone who thought long and hard about anything, she did think for a moment. After a while, swivelling around in a half circle on the heels of her clogs, she said, ‘How on earth do you expect her to marry you if she’s so observant of her religion? Wouldn’t she know you once had your hair cut?’

‘She doesn’t know about that yet. I started growing my beard soon after you took off for Devlali. . to get back at you. I met Kirpal Kaur shortly afterward. But I wrap my turban so cleverly that maybe only one in a hundred people would guess that underneath it my kes is clipped. And in any case, it won’t be long now before it grows back to its former length.’ He started combing his fingers through his soft hair.

She pulled up her tunic and started scratching her fleshy white thigh. ‘That’s wonderful. . Damn these mosquitoes, they’ve even invaded here. Look, how badly it bit me.’

Trilochan looked away. Mozel bent down, moistened her fingertip with a dab of saliva, pressed it over the tiny red spot and then, letting her tunic drop back down, stood up again and asked, ‘So when is the wedding?’

‘Can’t say. . nothing is definite,’ he replied and became pensive.

After a brief silence, sensing his anxiety, she asked in a serious tone, ‘Triloch, is something wrong?’

He desperately needed someone, even Mozel, to empathize with him, to appreciate his predicament. He told her everything.

‘You’re a complete moron.’ She let out a laugh. ‘Go and get her. It’s not that difficult.’

‘Difficult! You don’t seem to understand the precariousness of this situation. . of any situation for that matter. You’re a devil-may-care sort of person — precisely why we couldn’t hit it off together, something that I’ll regret for the rest of my days.’

She banged the pipe forcefully with her clog in dismay. ‘To hell with your regret. Idiot, you should be thinking about how to get your — what’s her name? — out to safety. Instead, here you are, moaning about our affair. We would never have made it. You’re a silly fool. . a coward. . I want a man, a fearless man. But there’s no time for idle talk. Come on, let’s go and get her.’

She grabbed his arm.

A befuddled Trilochan asked, ‘Where to?’

‘Where she is — where else? I know every last brick of that mohalla. Come on, let’s get going.’

‘But listen. . there’s a curfew.’

‘Not for Mozel. . Now come on.’

She dragged him towards the door that led to the stairs. She opened it and was about to go down when she stopped and looked at his beard.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘This. . your beard,’ she said. ‘Well, okay. It isn’t too long. If you walk bareheaded, no one will take you for a Sikh.’

‘Bareheaded?’ He was a bit fazed. ‘I’m not going there bareheaded.’

‘Why?’ she asked, naively.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, pushing a lock of hair to the back of his head. ‘It isn’t right for me to go there without my turban.’

‘Why not?’

‘Try to understand. She’s never seen me bareheaded. She thinks I have kes; I don’t want her to know my secret.’

‘You really are a nut, a first-rate nut. You stupid ass.’ She stomped her clog on the threshold of the door. ‘It’s a question of her life — what’s her name, this Kaur you love?’

‘Mozel, she’s a religious kind of person.’ Trilochan tried to impress it upon her. ‘If she saw me without my turban, she would start hating me.’

Mozel was pissed off. ‘To hell with your love. Tell me, are all Sikhs as stupid as you? Her life is in danger, and what do we have here: you, dead set on wearing your turban and maybe even those underpants that look like shorts.’

‘I wear those all the time,’ he said.

‘Good for you. But now, do some thinking. She lives in a neighbourhood which is crawling with miyan bhai s, *each more ferocious than the other. If you walked in with your turban on, they would make mincemeat out of you in no time.’

He gave a quick answer, ‘I don’t care. If I go there with you, it will be in my turban. I can’t risk my love.’

Mozel became irritated; her body quivered with anger, so much so that her breasts shook inside the bodice of her tunic. ‘You ass, where will your love be when you’re not here, your — what’s that dumdum’s name — when she’s not there, her family isn’t there? By God, you are a Sikh. A first-rate idiot Sikh. No doubt about it.’