Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

‘Is this a toilet or what?’ she replied, her heart pounding with fright. ‘What’s this chain hanging down like the ones in a train carriage? My back was aching, so I took hold of it for support. The instant I grabbed it there was this horrible explosion. .’

Khuda Bakhsh laughed uproariously. He explained, ‘It’s a new-style toilet. When you pull the chain, it sends the filth to an underground sewer.’

How Khuda Bakhsh and Sultana got hitched together is a long story. He hailed from Rawalpindi. After passing his Intermediate he learned to drive lorries. For four years he ran a lorry between Rawalpindi and Kashmir. In Kashmir he had an affair with a woman, whom he persuaded to abscond with him. They went to Lahore where, since he couldn’t find work, he set her up as a prostitute. This went on for two or three years until the woman ran away with another man. When Khuda Bakhsh found out that she was in Ambala, he went looking for her. There he met Sultana, who liked him, and so they decided to band together.

Her business picked up after Khuda Bakhsh got together with her. A superstitious woman, she attributed her success to Khuda Bakhsh’s presence. She took him to be someone blessed by God. This faith jacked up his stature in her eyes.

Khuda Bakhsh was a hard-working man who didn’t like to lie around and while away his time. He struck up a friendship with a photographer who took photos with a Mint camera outside the railway station. He learned photography from him and, later, took sixty rupees from Sultana and bought his own camera. Gradually he acquired a background screen, bought two chairs and equipment for developing film and set up his own business. The business boomed. Shortly thereafter he established himself in Ambala Cantonment where he photographed goras and, within a month, came to know several of them rather well. So he moved Sultana to the cantonment area too and many goras became her regular clients through him.

Sultana bought herself a pair of earrings, had eight gold bangles made, each weighing five and a half tola s, and also collected an assortment of some fifteen fine saris. The house also got some furniture.

In short, she was quite well off in Ambala Cantonment. Then, suddenly, God knows how, Khuda Bakhsh got it into his head to move to Delhi. How could she refuse? After all he was a godsend, her lucky break. She gladly agreed to go with him. In fact, she even thought her business would prosper further in such a large city where the Big Lord Sahib lived and which a friend of hers had praised to high heaven. Besides, the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, for which she felt a special reverence, was also in Delhi. She quickly sold her heavier household goods and came to the city with Khuda Bakhsh, who rented this place for twenty rupees a month and both settled in.

It was a row of newly built lookalike units running along the road. The municipal committee had assigned this area of the city to prostitutes to stop them from setting up businesses all over the city. The ground floor had two shops and the upper, a pair of flats. Because all units looked alike, at first Sultana had a lot of difficulty finding her flat. This became easier when the laundry shop on the lower level put up a sign ‘Clothes Washed Here’ which she used as a landmark. And this was only one of the signs that worked as a marker for her. There were others. For instance, her friend Hira Bai, who sometimes sang on the radio, lived above the place where ‘Coal-Shop’ was inscribed in large letters. The shop announcing ‘Excellent Food for Gentlemen’ was right below Mukhtar’s flat and Anwari, another friend, lived above the small factory that made broad tapes for bed meshing. She was in the employ of its owner who needed to keep an eye on the work at night and stayed with her.

During the first month, in which she remained idle, Sultana consoled herself with the thought that a newly launched business usually didn’t pull in customers right away. But anxiety swept over her when not a single customer turned up in two months. She asked Khuda Bakhsh, ‘What do you think, Khuda Bakhsh? We’ve been here for two whole months and no one has come along. I know business is slow these days, but it can’t be so slow that no one will come our way at all.’

The matter had been weighing no less heavily on Khuda Bakhsh, but he’d kept quiet. But now that Sultana had brought it up he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it myself for some time now. The only thing that comes to mind is that people are so preoccupied with other things because of the war that they can hardly think of anything else. Or perhaps—’

His sentence was interrupted by the sound of someone coming up the stairs and their attention became fixed entirely on the sound of approaching feet. Shortly, there was a knock on the door. Khuda Bakhsh darted to open it. A man entered. This was her first customer and they settled for three rupees. Later, she had five more, that is, six in all in a month and a total of eighteen and a half rupees.

Every month, twenty alone went for the flat’s rent. Utilities were extra. Add to it all the other household expenses: food, drink, clothes, medicines. And no income. Eighteen and a half rupees in three months could hardly be called any kind of income. Sultana really became distraught with worry. The eight bangles she’d had made in Ambala were all eaten up one by one. When it was time to sell the last one she said to Khuda Bakhsh, ‘Listen to me, let’s go back to Ambala. This place is a bummer. Maybe it has something, but not for us. It hasn’t been kind to us. You were doing quite well there. Come on, let’s go back. We’ll consider our losses a sacrifice. Go, sell this bangle; meanwhile, I’ll start packing and getting everything ready. We’ll leave by the evening train.’

He took the bangle and said, ‘No, my darling, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll stay right here and make it work. You’ll see, all these bangles will come flying back to you. Have faith in God. He knows how to help. He will find a way for us!’

Sultana said nothing. The last bangle too was sold. The sight of her bare wrists saddened her. But what could she do? They had to fill their stomachs somehow.

When five months went by and her earnings remained less than even a quarter of their expenses, her anxiety mounted. Meanwhile, Khuda Bakhsh had also started to stay away from home the whole day, which was yet another source of her grief. It was true that a few of her friends lived in the neighbourhood and she could while away the time with them, but she didn’t feel comfortable hanging out with them for hours every day. Gradually she stopped visiting with them altogether. She stayed in her empty house all day long, crushing betel nut or mending her old clothes. Sometimes she went out on to the balcony, stood against the railing, and watched the moving and stationary engines in the railway yard across the street for hours.

A warehouse stretched from one corner to the other on that side of the street. To the right, huge bales and piles of different goods lay under a metal roof. To the left was an open space with innumerable intersecting railway tracks. Whenever the iron tracks flashed in the sun, Sultana’s eyes fell on her hands where the protruding blue veins looked very much like those tracks. Engines and carriages were moving all the time in the open space, this way and that, creating a veritable din with their chug-chug and clatter. On the days when Sultana woke up early in the morning and went out to the balcony, a strange sight greeted her: engines in the misty dawn spewing out thick smoke that climbed slowly towards the murky sky like plump, beefy men. Clouds of steam rose noisily from the tracks and quickly dissolved in the air. Now and then the sight of a shunted carriage left to run on its own along a track reminded her of herself: She too had been pushed out to run on her own along the track of her life. Others simply changed the switches and she kept moving forward — to God knew where; one day, when the momentum had slowly spent itself, she would come to a halt, at some place unknown to her.