Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

He then dug a pit by the well and interred his father’s dead body. Standing by the grave, he uttered a few words by way of the Fatiha: ‘Only God knows best about sins and recompense. But let me just wish you Paradise!’

The rioters had dispatched Rahim Dad — who had been not just a father but also a great friend to Karim Dad — with such fiendish cruelty, that any time people recalled his savage murder, they never failed to hurl obscenities at the murderers. At such times Karim Dad never spoke a word. Several of his flourishing grain fields had been completely laid to waste and two houses reduced to ashes, yet Karim Dad didn’t spare his losses a second thought. Now and then, though, one did hear him utter this much: ‘Whatever happened was due to our own failings.’ When asked what those failings were, he chose to remain silent.

While the village folks were still lamenting over their dead, Karim Dad got himself married to the same blossoming Jaina he’d had his eyes on for some time. Jaina was grieving. Her brother, a strapping youth, had been killed in the riots. He had been the only person left whom she could count on for support since the death of their parents. That she also loved Karim Dad dearly was beyond doubt, but the pain of losing her brother had cast a pall over that love somewhat. Her eyes, lively and smiling before, now never seemed free of tears.

Karim Dad couldn’t stand wailing and crying at all. The sight of a doleful Jaina annoyed him, but he chose not to mention it to her, thinking that, tender-hearted woman that she was, his words might hurt her feelings even more. However, one day he couldn’t hold back any more. He caught up with her in the field and gave her a piece of his mind. ‘Look, it’s been a whole year since the dead were shrouded and buried. Even they are probably tired of all this keening and wailing over them. Let go of it, my dear. Who knows how many more deaths we’re fated to see in this life. Save some tears for the future.’

Jaina took umbrage at his words, but what could she do? She was deeply in love with the man. During long bouts of solitude, she tried her best to conjure up some meaning in his words and, eventually, convinced herself that what he had said wasn’t all that unreasonable after all.

The elders opposed their marriage when the proposal was run past them; however, their opposition turned out to be quite weak. Excessive mourning had sapped their energies so completely that they couldn’t even hold on to oppositions that had every chance of success. And so Karim Dad got married. With the customary wedding fanfare and music, and after every ceremony was duly performed, Karim Dad brought his beloved Jaina home as his bride.

Since the rioting a year ago, the whole village had assumed something of the depressing air of a cemetery. Thus, when Karim Dad’s marriage arrangements got under way with a lot of hullabaloo and excitement, a vague feeling of trepidation swept over some people. They cringed and felt as though it wasn’t Karim Dad’s but some bhoot — pret ’s *wedding procession that was unfolding before them. Some friends informed Karim Dad about this reaction and he laughed his head off. One day, jokingly, he mentioned it to his new bride, who instantly began quaking with alarm.

‘Well,’ he said to Jaina, taking hold of her wrist with its beautiful, bright bracelet, ‘you can’t escape. You’re stuck with this bhoot for the rest of your life. Even Rahman Sain’s hocus-pocus can’t rid you of him.’

Jaina stuck her hennaed finger between her teeth, blushed a little, and got out only this much, ‘Kaimay, nothing seems to frighten you!’

Karim Dad ran the tip of his tongue over his reddish-brown moustache and smiled broadly. ‘What is there to frighten anyone? Fear doesn’t exist.’

By now, Jaina’s grief had subsided quite a bit. She was soon to be a mother. To see her in the fullness of her blossoming youth made Karim Dad enormously happy. He would say to her, ‘You were never so stunningly beautiful before, Jaina, I swear. If all this beauty is only for the sake of the baby who’s coming, I’ll have to fight with that little rascal, I’m telling you.’

Jaina would blush and quickly cover her big, bulging belly with her chador, which made him laugh and tease her even more. ‘Why are you hiding that thief? Don’t I know that all this dolling up is just for that little swine?’

At that Jaina would become serious. ‘Why are you swearing at the baby? After all it’s your own.’

‘And Karim Dad is the biggest swine of them all,’ he would say, his reddish-brown moustache quivering from the rumble of his laughter.

The ‘Little’ Eid came along, followed a couple of months later by the ‘Big’ Eid. Karim Dad celebrated both with equal fanfare and great fuss. The rioters had attacked his village twelve days before the Big Eid and his father Rahim Dad and Jaina’s brother Fazl Ilahi had both been murdered in that attack. Jaina cried a lot as she remembered their killings but, realizing how Karim Dad was predisposed to put any tragedy behind him, she couldn’t grieve as much as her own temperament called for.

Sometimes when she thought about it, she wondered how she could have begun to forget the most tragic incident of her life so imperceptibly. She had absolutely no memory of how her parents had died. Fazl Ilahi was six years older than her. He wasn’t just a brother; he had been both father and mother to her. She was absolutely sure that it was for her sake alone that he hadn’t married. And it was to save her honour that he had lost his life fighting the enemy — a fact known to the whole village. His death was truly the greatest catastrophe of her life, a veritable hell suddenly let loose upon her just twelve days before the Big Eid. Whenever she thought about that calamity now, the realization that she was drifting further away from its effects never failed to surprise her.

As the month of Muharram approached, for the first time Jaina expressed her desire to Karim Dad. She was very interested in seeing the decorated horse and the taziya s of Muharram. She had heard a lot about them from her girlfriends. She asked Karim Dad, ‘If I’m feeling up to it, will you take me to see the Muharram horse?’

‘I will, even if you aren’t feeling well, and the swine too,’ he replied with a smile.

She hated the word ‘swine’, took immediate offence to it and often lost her cool. But it was uttered with such endearing honesty that her bitterness was instantly transformed into an indescribable sweetness and she would begin to see how the word ‘swine’ could be filled with genuine affection and love.

The rumour of an imminent war between India and Pakistan had been circulating for quite some time. Actually, almost as soon as Pakistan was established it had been taken for granted that there would definitely be a war, but when was something the inhabitants of the village couldn’t say with any certainty. If anyone asked Karim Dad about it, his short answer invariably was, ‘It will be when it will be. What’s the point of losing sleep over it?’

But whenever Jaina heard about that dreaded event, it knocked the living daylights out of her. She was a peace-loving woman by nature. Even ordinary squabbles made her terribly nervous. Besides, during the previous mayhem she’d been witness to a great deal of carnage and bloodshed. Her own brother, Fazl Ilahi, had been mowed down in one such riot. She would cringe with an unknown fear and ask, ‘Kaimay, what will it be?’

Karim Dad would smile. ‘How would I know? Maybe a boy, maybe a girl.’

Such a cheerful reply made her feel even more helpless. Soon she would forget all about the dreaded war, focusing all her attention on whatever else Karim Dad was saying. He was a strong, fearless man who loved Jaina very much. After buying himself a rifle, he had quickly become an expert marksman. These things kept her spirits up. But now and then, when she was by the waterfront and heard from a terrified girlfriend of the rumours about war being spread by the village folk, she would instantly go into a daze.