Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Babaji expounded on his belief with such clarity and profound sincerity that an entirely new world opened up before his listeners. I too was deeply touched. Ghulam Ali, who sat opposite me, was so engrossed in Babaji’s speech that he seemed to be drinking in every word. When Babaji stopped, Ghulam Ali briefly consulted with Nigar, got up, and declared in a trembling voice:

‘Ours will be just such a marriage. Until India wins her freedom, our relationship will be entirely like that of friends.’

More shouts of applause followed, brightening the dreary atmosphere in Jallianwala Bagh with cheery tumult for quite a while. Shahzada Ghulam Ali grew emotional, and streaks of red blotched his Kashmiri face. ‘Nigar!’ he addressed his bride in a loud voice. ‘Could you bear to bring a slave child into this world?’

Dazed in equal parts by the wedding and by Babaji’s lecture, Nigar lost what little presence of mind she had when she heard this question. ‘No! Of course not!’ was all she could get out.

The crowd clapped again, transporting Ghulam Ali to an even higher pitch of emotion. The joy at saving Nigar from the ignominy of birthing a slave baby went to his head, and he wandered off the main subject into the tortuous byways of how to free the country. For the next hour he spoke non-stop in a voice weighed down by emotion. Then, suddenly, his glance fell on Nigar, and he was struck dumb. He couldn’t get a word out. He was like a drunkard who keeps pulling out note after note without any idea of how much he is spending and then suddenly finds his wallet empty. The abrupt paralysis of speech irritated him greatly, but he immediately looked towards Babaji, bowed and again found his voice: ‘Babaji, bless us to remain steadfast in our vow.’

Next morning at six Shahzada Ghulam Ali was arrested. In the same speech in which he had vowed not to father a child until the country gained her freedom, he had also threatened to overthrow the English.

A few days after his arrest Ghulam Ali was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment and sent to the Multan jail. He was the forty-first ‘dictator’ of Amritsar and, if I remember correctly the figures quoted in the newspapers, the forty-thousandth political activist apprehended and imprisoned for taking part in the movement for independence.

Everybody thought that freedom was just around the corner. The astute British politicians, however, let the movement run its course. The failure of the major national leaders of India to reach an agreement pretty much took the teeth out of it.

Following their release, the freedom lovers tried to put the memory of their recent hardships behind them and get their interrupted business back on track. Shahzada Ghulam Ali was let go after only seven months. Even though the revolutionary fervour had subsided considerably by then, people did show up at the Amritsar railway station to greet him, and a few parties and rallies were held in his honour. I attended all of them. But they were largely lacklustre affairs. A strange fatigue seemed to have come over people, like runners returning listlessly to the starting line after being suddenly told, ‘Stop! We’ll have to do it over,’ in the middle of a dash.

Several years passed. The listlessness, the exhaustion still hung over India. My own life went through a series of upheavals, some major, some minor. A beard and moustache sprouted on my face. I entered college and twice failed in my FA. My father died. I knocked about looking for a job and found work as a translator for a third-rate newspaper. Fed up, I decided to go back to school and enrolled in Aligarh University, but I contracted tuberculosis and found myself wandering around rural Kashmir three months later, recuperating. Then I headed for Bombay. Witnessing three Hindu — Muslim riots in two years was enough to send me packing to Delhi. But that city, by comparison, turned out to be terribly drab, with everything moving at a snail’s pace. Even where there was some sign of activity, it had a distinctly feminine feel to it. Maybe Bombay isn’t so bad after all, I thought, even if your next-door neighbour has no time to ask your name. What of it? Where there is time, you see a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of disease. So after spending two uneventful years in Delhi I returned to fast-paced Bombay.

It had been eight years since I left home. I had no idea what my friends were doing; I barely remembered the streets and by-lanes of Amritsar. How could I? I hadn’t kept in touch with anybody from home. As a matter of fact, I’d become somewhat indifferent to my past in the intervening eight years. Why think about the past? What good would it do now to total up what was spent eight years ago? In life’s cash, the penny you want to spend today, or the one another may set his eyes on tomorrow is the one that counts.

Some six years ago, when I wasn’t quite as hard up, I’d gone to the Fort area to shop for a pair of expensive dress shoes. The display cases in a shop beyond the Army & Navy Store on Hornby Road had been tempting me for some time. But since I have a particularly weak memory, I wasn’t able to locate the shop in question. Out of habit I started to browse in other stores, even though I’d come specifically to buy shoes. I looked at a cigarette case in one store, pipes in another, and then I strolled on until I came to a small shop that sold footwear. I stopped and decided to look for a pair there. The attendant greeted me and asked, ‘Well, Sahib, what may we show you?’

For a moment or two I tried to remember what I had come to buy. ‘Oh, yes. Show me a pair of dress shoes with rubber soles.’

‘We don’t stock them.’

The monsoons will start any day now, I thought. Why not buy a pair of gumboots? ‘Well then, how about gumboots?’

‘We don’t sell those either,’ the man said. ‘Try the shop next door. We don’t stock any rubber footwear at all.’

‘Why?’ I asked out of curiosity.

‘Orders from the boss.’

There was nothing I could do but leave after that brusque but definitive reply. As I turned to go, my eyes fell on a well-dressed man with a child in his arms standing outside on the footpath buying a tangelo from a street vendor. I stepped out just as he turned towards the store. ‘You! Ghulam Ali!’

‘Saadat!’ he shouted and hugged me, the child in his arm sandwiched between us. Unhappy with the situation, the infant started to cry. Ghulam Ali called the man who had attended me, handed the child over to him and said, ‘Go! Take him home!’ Then he said to me, ‘It’s been ages, hasn’t it?’

I probed his face. The swagger, the ever-so-slight trace of rakishness that had been such a prominent feature of his appearance had entirely disappeared. It was a common family man who stood before me, not the fiery young khadi-clad speech-maker. I remembered his last speech, when he had energized the otherwise bleak atmosphere of Jallianwala Bagh with his sizzling hot words, ‘Nigar! Could you bear to bring a slave child into this world?’ Instantly I thought of the child Ghulam Ali was holding in his arms until a few moments ago.

I asked him, ‘Whose child is that?’

‘Mine, of course,’ he answered, without the least hesitation. ‘I have an older one too. And you, how many do you have?’

For a second I felt it was somebody else talking. Hundreds of questions rattled in my mind: Had Ghulam Ali completely forgotten his vow? Had he dissociated himself entirely from political life? The ardour, the passion to win freedom for India — where had they gone? Whatever happened to that naked challenge? Where was Nigar? Had she been able to bear giving birth to two slave children after all? Maybe she’d died and Ghulam Ali had remarried.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ghulam Ali smacked me on the shoulder and said. ‘Come on, let’s talk. We’ve met after such a long time.’