Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

There was a knock at the door. My ticket has arrived, I thought. I quickly opened the door and who do I see — the dhobi.

‘Sab salaam!’

‘Salaam!’

‘May I come in?’

‘Sure.’

He walked in very quietly, took out my clothes from the bundle and laid them on the bed. Then he wiped his moist eyes and said in a voice hoarse with emotion. ‘You leaving, Sab?’

‘Yes.’

He started to cry. ‘Sab, forgive. It’s liquor doing. Liquor. . these days. . free. Seth log give. . free. . say drink and kill Muslimeen. Nobody not take free liquor, Sab. Forgive. I drunk. Saaeed Shaleem Balishtar kind man. . gave pagri, dhoti, kurta. . Begum Sab save my life. Dying from diarrhoea. Come to me. . in car. . took to doctor. . spent money. . big money. You go your country, Sab. . don’t tell Begum Sab. . Ram Khilawan. .’

His voice choked. He slung the bundle over his shoulder and made to leave. I stopped him, ‘Wait, Ram Khilawan.’

But he walked out quickly, arranging the front fold of his dhoti.

‘Don’t say that one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims died; say that two lakh human beings died. That two lakh human beings died is not such a great tragedy after all; the tragedy, in truth, is that those who killed and those who were killed, both have nothing to show for it. After killing one lakh Hindus, the Muslims may have thought that they had finished off Hinduism. But it lives, and will live on. Likewise, after killing one lakh Muslims the Hindus may have exulted over the death of Islam. But the truth is before you: This hasn’t managed to put even a scratch on Islam. Those who think that religions can be killed by guns are foolish. Mazhab, deen, iman, dharm , faith, belief — these are found in our souls, not in our bodies. How can butchers’ cleavers, rioters’ knives and bullets annihilate them?’

Mumtaz was unusually excited that day. Just the three of us had come to see him off at the ship. He was leaving us for an undetermined period of time and was headed for Pakistan — a Pakistan we hadn’t imagined even in our dreams would come into being.

We were Hindus, all three of us. Our relatives in West Punjab had incurred heavy losses in both property and lives — presumably, this was why Mumtaz had decided to leave. Juggal had received a letter from Lahore telling him that his uncle had died in communal riots; the news affected him in a bad way. Still reeling from its impact, he casually said to Mumtaz one day, ‘I’m wondering what I would do if riots broke out in my neighbourhood.’

‘Yes, what would you do?’ Mumtaz asked.

‘I might kill you,’ Juggal said in all seriousness.

Mumtaz fell silent, dead silent. His silence continued for nearly eight days, breaking only when he suddenly announced that he was leaving for Karachi by ship at 3.45 p.m. that very afternoon.

None of us talked to him about his decision. Juggal was feeling contrite that the reason behind Mumtaz’s departure was his comment: ‘I might kill you.’ Perhaps he was still wondering whether in the heat of passion he could really kill Mumtaz or not — Mumtaz who was one of his best friends. That’s why he was now the silent one among the three.

Strangely enough, though, Mumtaz had become unusually talkative, especially in the few hours before his departure. He had begun drinking the moment he got up in the morning. His bags were packed as though he were going on a vacation. He would talk to himself and laugh for no apparent reason. If a stranger had seen him he would have thought that Mumtaz was feeling overwhelming joy at the prospect of leaving Bombay. But the three of us knew well that he was trying hard to deceive both us and himself in order to hide his true feelings.

I very much wanted to ask him about his sudden decision to leave. I even gestured to Juggal to bring up the subject, but Mumtaz never gave us a chance.

After downing three or four drinks Juggal became even quieter and went to lie down in the other room. Braj Mohan and I stayed with Mumtaz. He had quite a few bills to settle, give the doctors their fees, fetch his clothes from the cleaners — all these chores he did light-heartedly and easily enough. But as he was taking a paan from the stall next to the restaurant at the end of the street, his eyes began to well up with tears. When we moved away from the stall he put his hand on Braj Mohan’s shoulder and said softly, ‘You remember, don’t you, how Gobind lent us a rupee ten years ago, when we were down on our luck?’

After this Mumtaz remained silent, but once we returned home he launched another endless stream of small talk — all totally unconnected, but nonetheless so full of feeling that Braj Mohan and I found ourselves fully participating in it. When the time for Mumtaz’s departure drew near, Juggal joined us too. But the moment the taxi started for the docks, a hush fell over everyone.

Mumtaz’s eyes continued to say goodbye to the wide, sprawling bazaars of Bombay, until the taxi pulled into the harbour. The place was terribly crowded. Thousands of refugees, a few of them affluent, most others poor, were leaving — it was a veritable crush of people. And yet Mumtaz alone seemed to me to be leaving, leaving us behind for a place he had never even seen before, a place which, no matter how hard he tried to get used to it, would still remain unfamiliar. That’s what I thought at any rate. I couldn’t tell what was going through Mumtaz’s mind.

After his bags had all been taken to the cabin, Mumtaz took us out on to the deck. For a long time he gazed at the place where sky and sea came together. Then he took Juggal’s hand in his and said, ‘How perfectly deceptive. . this meeting of the sky and the sea, and yet so incredibly delightful too!’

Juggal remained silent. Perhaps his earlier remark—‘I might kill you’—was still tormenting him.

Mumtaz ordered a brandy from the ship’s bar; that was what he had been drinking since morning. Drinks in hand, we stood against the guardrail. Refugees were piling on to the ship with a lot of noise and commotion, and seagulls were hovering over the water, which looked almost still.

Abruptly Juggal downed his glass in one huge gulp and said rather crudely, ‘Do forgive me, Mumtaz — I think I hurt you the other day.’

Mumtaz paused briefly and asked him, ‘When you uttered those words—“I might kill you”—was that exactly what you were thinking? You arrived at this decision with a cool head?’

Juggal nodded his head, and then said, ‘But I feel sorry.’

‘You’d have felt sorrier had you actually killed me,’ Mumtaz said pensively. ‘But only if you had paused to reflect that you hadn’t killed Mumtaz, a Muslim, a friend, you had killed a human being. If he was a bad man, what you would have killed was not his badness, but the man himself. If he was a Muslim, you wouldn’t have killed his Muslim-ness, but his being. If Muslims had got hold of his dead body, it would have added a grave to the cemetery, but the world would have come up one human being short.’

Stopping to think a bit, he resumed, ‘Perhaps my co-religionists would have anointed me as a martyr, but I swear I would’ve torn through my grave and cried that I didn’t accept the title, that I didn’t want this diploma for which I had taken no exam. Some Muslim murdered your uncle in Lahore, you heard the news in Bombay and murdered me — just tell me: What medals do we deserve for this? What robes of honour do your uncle and his killer back in Lahore deserve?

‘If you ask me, the victims died the miserable death of a pie-dog, and their killers killed in vain, utterly in vain.’

Mumtaz became agitated as he spoke, but the emotional excess was matched by an equal measure of sincerity. His observation that mazhab, deen, iman, dharm, faith, belief — these were found in our souls, not in our bodies, and that they couldn’t be annihilated by cleavers, knives and bullets had made an especially deep impression on me.