Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

After a while he wiped the perspiration off his forehead, put out his cigarette and said, ‘We were both struck by a strange curse. You know how much I love Nigar. I’d think: “What kind of love is this? When I touch her, why don’t I allow the sensation to peak? Why do I feel so guilty? As if I’m committing a sin?” I love Nigar’s eyes so much. One day when I was feeling normal. . I mean just how one should feel, I kissed them. She was in my arms — or rather I should say, I had the sensation of My holding a tremor in my arms. I was about to let myself go, but managed to regain control in time. For a long while afterwards, several days in fact, I tried to convince myself that my restraint had given my soul a pleasure few had experienced. The truth was that I’d failed. And that failure, which I wanted to believe was a great success, made me the most miserable man on earth. But as you know, people eventually find ways to get around things. Let’s just say I found a way around it. We were both drying up. Somewhere deep inside a crust had started to form on our pleasures. “We are fast turning into strangers,” I thought. After much thinking we felt that we could. . without compromising our vow. . I mean that Nigar wouldn’t give birth to a slave child. .’ The wounded smile appeared a third time, dissolved immediately into a loud laugh, with a distinct trace of pain in it; then he continued in an extremely serious tone of voice: ‘Thus started this strange phase of our married life. It was like a blind man suddenly had sight restored in one eye. I was seeing again. But soon the vision blurred. At first we thought. .’ He seemed to be fishing for the right word. ‘At first we felt satisfied. I mean we hadn’t the foggiest idea that we’d start feeling terribly dissatisfied before long. As though having one eye wasn’t enough. Early on we felt we were recovering, our health was improving. A glow appeared on Nigar’s face, and her eyes shone. For my part, my nerves no longer felt so hellishly strung out all the time. Slowly, however, we turned into rubber dummies. I experienced this more than she did. You wouldn’t believe it, but, by God, every time I pinched the flesh of my arms, it felt like rubber. Absolutely. As though I didn’t have any blood vessels. Nigar’s condition, I believe, was different. Her perspective was different too. She wanted to become a mother. Every time a woman in our lane had a baby, Nigar would sigh quietly. I didn’t much care about having children. So what if we didn’t have any? Countless people in the world don’t either. At least I had remained steadfast in my vow. And that was no mean achievement. Well, this line of thinking did comfort me quite a bit, but as the thin rubbery web began to close around my mind, I became more and more anxious. I grew overly pensive, the feel of rubber clung to my mind. At meals the food felt chewy and spongy under my teeth.’ A shudder went through his body as he said this. ‘It was disgusting! All the time it felt as though soap lather had stuck to my fingers and wouldn’t wash off. I started to hate myself. I felt all the sap had drained out of me and something like the thinnest of skins was left behind — a used sheath.’ He started to laugh. ‘Thank God I’m rid of that abomination now, but at what cost, Saadat! My life had turned into a dried-up, shrivelled-up piece of sinew, all my desires smothered. But, oddly, my sense of touch had become unusually keen, almost unnaturally keen. Maybe not keen, but focused, in one direction only. No matter what I touched, wood, glass, metal, paper or stone — they all had the same clammy tenderness of rubber that made me sick! My torment would grow even worse when I thought about the object itself. All I needed to do was grab my affliction in my two fingers and toss it away, but I lacked the courage. I longed for something to latch on to for support, for the merest straw in this ocean of torment, so that I might reach the shore. I kept looking for it desperately. One day as I sat on the rooftop in the sun reading, rather browsing, through a religious book, my eyes caught a Hadith, *and I jumped for joy. The “support” was staring at me. I read the lines over and over again. I felt as if water had gushed through the desiccated arid landscape of my life. It was written: “It is incumbent on man and wife to procreate after they are married. Contraception is permissible only in the event of danger to the lives of parents.” Then and there I peeled off my affliction and threw it aside.’

He chuckled like a child. I did too, because he had picked up the cigarette with his two fingers and tossed it aside like some infinitely revolting object.

All of a sudden he became serious. ‘I know what you’ll do, Saadat,’ he said. ‘You’ll turn all I’ve told you into a story. But, please, don’t make fun of me in it. I swear to God, I’ve told you only what I’ve felt. I won’t get into a debate over this with you. But the substance of what I’ve learned is this: It’s no bravery to fight nature, no achievement to die or live starving, or to dig a pit and bury oneself in it for days on end, or sleep for months on a bed of sharp nails, or hold one arm up for years until it atrophies and turns into a piece of wood. This is show business. You can’t find God or win freedom with show business. I even think the reason India hasn’t gained freedom is precisely because she has more showmen than true leaders. And the few leaders she does have are going against the laws of nature. They have invented a politics that stops faith and candidness from being born. It is this politics which has blocked the womb of freedom.’

Ghulam Ali wanted to say more when the attendant walked in. He had a child, perhaps Ghulam Ali’s second boy, in his arms. The boy was holding a colourful balloon. Ghulam Ali pounced on it like a madman and it burst with a loud boom. A piece of rubber dangling from a little bit of string remained in the boy’s hand. Ghulam Ali snatched it with two fingers and threw it away like some infinitely revolting object.

This battle for Kashmir was nothing like any other battle. It had confused Subedar Rub Nawaz so much that he couldn’t think clearly. He felt as though he had turned into a rifle, but one whose trigger was jammed.

He had fought on many fronts in the last Great War and knew how to kill and be killed. All the high- and low-ranking officers regarded him with admiration and respected his wits, daring and pluck. The platoon commanders always assigned him the most hazardous duty and he never failed to live up to their expectations. But this battle. . it was so strange. He had joined it with great fervour and passion, obsessed with the single thought — annihilate the enemy at any cost. But when he confronted the enemy, he saw familiar faces. Some had once been his friends, his bosom buddies in fact. They had fought alongside him against the enemies of the Allied forces, but now they seemed to have become sworn enemies hell-bent on killing him.

Sometimes it all seemed like images in a dream: the declaration of the last Great War, enlistment, the usual physical tests, target practice, being packed off to the front and moved from one theatre of war to another, and, finally, the war’s end. And close upon its heels the creation of Pakistan, followed immediately by the Kashmir war — so many events occurring in dizzying succession. Could it be that all this was done to confound people, to prevent them from taking the time to grasp it all? Why else would all these momentous events occur so rapidly that it made your head spin?

Subedar Rub Nawaz understood one thing: They were fighting to win Kashmir. Why did they need to win Kashmir? Its annexation was vital for the survival of Pakistan. But as he took aim to shoot and a familiar face appeared on the opposite side, he forgot for a moment why they were fighting, why he had lifted his gun and aimed. At such times he had to remind himself repeatedly that he was no longer fighting for the wages, a parcel of land or medals, but for his country. But this was his country before too, wasn’t it? He belonged to this same region that had now been included in Pakistan. Now he had to fight the very person who, not long ago, had been his countryman — why even his next-door neighbour, and their two families had bonded for generations. All of a sudden that man’s country had become an alien piece of land where he had never set foot before, whose water he had never tasted. He had been given a gun and ordered, ‘Go fight for this land where you still haven’t set up your home, acquired a taste for its water or gotten used to the feel of its air. Go fight Pakistan — where you’ve lived so many years of your life.’