Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Sharda, never much of a talker, wrote very long letters. While she had never admitted her love to his face, her letters overflowed with her feelings — the same reproaches and complaints, the same pain of separation that is the staple of love letters. Nazir, though, didn’t feel love for her, the kind of love found in romantic stories and novels, and didn’t know what to write to her. He commissioned a friend to do this job. His friend would write out a letter in Hindi and read it to him, and he would invariably say, ‘Yes.’

Sharda was dying to come to Bombay but didn’t want to stay at Karim’s. Nazir couldn’t put her up in a house since houses were scarce and hard to find. He thought about sending her to a hotel but hesitated lest this should let out their secret. He had his friend write to her to wait a while longer.

Just then communal rioting erupted throughout the country. A strange panic and confusion seized people in the days just prior to Partition. Nazir’s wife wanted to move to Lahore. ‘I’ll stay there for a while,’ she told him. ‘If conditions get better, I’ll come back, otherwise you come over there too.’

He kept her from going for a few days, but when her brother got ready to leave for Lahore both she and her younger sister went along with him. Nazir was left alone. He mentioned casually to Sharda in his next missive that he was all by himself. She telegrammed to say that she was coming. It seemed from the message that she had already left Jaipur. Nazir found himself in a terrible fix, although his body was feeling a blossoming sense of anticipation. He was thirsting for her body and her genuine devotion. He yearned for the days when he had clung to her for hours, from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening to be precise. There was no question of spending money now, or of Karim’s involvement, or even of the rent for the room. He thought, ‘I’ll take my servant into my confidence and everything will be fine. A few rupees will be enough to shut his mouth. He won’t breathe a word if my wife does decide to come back.’

He went to the station the next day. The Frontier Mail arrived but, despite a long search, he couldn’t find Sharda. Maybe something held her up, he concluded, and she’ll probably send another telegram.

The next day he left for the office as usual by the morning train. When the train pulled into the Mahalakshmi station, where he usually got off, he spotted Sharda on the platform and cried out loudly, ‘Sharda! Sharda!’

A startled Sharda looked at him. ‘Nazir Sahib.’

‘What — you here?’

She complained, ‘You didn’t come to meet me so I decided to go to your office. There they told me that you weren’t in yet so I was waiting for you here on the platform.’

He thought for a bit and then said to her, ‘Stay here. I’ll go to office, arrange a few days off and come right back.’

He sat her down on a bench and hurried off to his office. He wrote out an application to be absent for a few days, handed it to the office boy, and took Sharda home. Neither spoke a word on the way, but their bodies were communicating perfectly, drawing ever closer to each other.

‘You’d better bathe,’ he said to Sharda after reaching home. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll have some breakfast prepared for you.’

While she was bathing, he told the servant that a friend’s wife was visiting him; he should quickly prepare breakfast. He then took a bottle from the cabinet, poured a double shot, added some water and gulped it down.

He wanted to make love to her in the same spirit as in the hotel.

Sharda emerged from her bath and started on the breakfast. As she ate, she talked to him about a hundred different things. Nazir noticed a change in her. She had been quite taciturn and had preferred silence most of the time, but now she couldn’t resist using every opportunity to impress upon him how madly she was in love with him.

‘What is this “love”?’ Nazir wondered. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if she never mentioned it? Frankly, I liked her silence better. It communicated a hell of a lot more. God knows what’s gotten into her now. When she talks, it seems as if she’s reading out loud from her letters.’

After she was done eating, Nazir mixed a drink and offered it to her. She refused. When he pressed her, she pinched her nose and drank it just to please him. She grimaced and rinsed her mouth. Nazir felt a twinge of regret. ‘Why did she drink it? It would have been infinitely nicer if she had turned it down in spite of his insistence.’ He didn’t exercise his mind about it further. He sent the servant away on an errand, bolted the door, and lay down with her on the bed.

‘You wrote, when will those days come again,’ she started. ‘Well, they’ve come — and not just the days, but the nights as well. Back then there weren’t any nights, only days — those dirty, filthy days at the hotel. Here, everything is so bright, so immaculate. No more paying rent for the hotel room, or tolerating the presence of pesky Karim. Here, it’s just the two of us, our own masters.’

She told him how badly she’d suffered during their separation, how she survived that agonizing period — the same garbage found in romantic books. Complaints and reproaches, sighs, sleepless nights spent counting stars.

Nazir downed another peg and thought: ‘Who would ever count stars. There are so many, how can anyone possibly count them? Absolute nonsense. Rubbish.’

He gathered her in his arms and held her close. The bed was clean, Sharda was clean, he himself was clean, even the atmosphere in the room was clean. Why then were his senses failing to evoke the same sensations he’d felt with her on that steel bed in the dingy hotel room?

Maybe he hadn’t really had enough to drink — he thought. He got up, poured another peg, swallowed it in one mouthful and lay down beside Sharda again. Immediately, she resumed her litany of separation, the same complaints and reproaches. Feeling fed up, Nazir’s body worked itself into a state of suspended numbness. A nagging thought crossed his mind: Sharda’s body had lost its consuming passion, so much so that it blunted his own desire and became useless, no longer able to ignite his passion. Even so, he lay next to her a long time.

When he finally got out of bed he felt a violent desire to grab a taxi and go home to his wife. But he quickly realized that he was, in fact, home and his wife was in Lahore, which rankled him. Insanely, he wished his home were the hotel.

Sharda’s body was still as physically hospitable as before, but the vibes were no longer the same. There was no haggling over price, no giving with one hand and taking with the other, and there was no hotel filth either. The ambience created by all these things was conspicuously absent. Nazir was in his own home, in the bed where his simple-minded wife slept with him. Ever since this nagging thought took hold of his subconscious he had felt quite conflicted. Sometimes he thought the whisky wasn’t potent enough, sometimes that Sharda hadn’t shown him proper regard, and sometimes that it would have worked out if she had just chosen to keep her mouth shut. Then he thought about the fact that she was seeing him after a long and painful separation; the poor thing needed some time to vent her feelings after all. She would become normal in a day or two, like her old self.

A fortnight passed but Sharda still didn’t give him the feeling that she was the same girl he’d carried on with in the hotel. Her baby daughter was in Jaipur. Back then she was with Sharda at the hotel, and Nazir would have medicine sent for to treat her head cold, her boils or her throat. None of this was there any more. She was alone now. Nazir had always thought of Sharda and Munni as one.

Once he had embraced Sharda rather tightly and the pressure had caused a few drops of milk to ooze out of her swollen breasts on to his hairy chest. It had given him a pleasurable sensation. How wonderful to be a mother! And this milk! — he’d thought. Men are the poorer for their inadequacy: They eat and drink and produce nothing, whereas women take nourishment and sustain others through it. What a sublime experience to be able to nourish someone, especially your own child!