Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

But no matter how much he raged inside, he never could utter those words. Come evening, impervious to his miserable condition, Tirpathi would unload a fresh story without fail and then slip under the same quilt with him. After a whole month had passed, Joginder Singh had about had it. Finding an opportunity, he met his wife in the bathroom. His heart throbbing violently, afraid Tirpathi’s wife might interrupt, he planted a hasty kiss on her lips like he was franking an envelope at the post office and said, ‘Stay awake tonight. I’ll tell Tirpathi that I have to go out and won’t be back before two-thirty, but I’ll come back early, say, around midnight. Open the door when you hear a soft rap. And then. . The deorhi is somewhat secluded, but do lock the door that opens towards the bathroom.’

After firmly instructing his wife he went to Tirpathi and took his leave.

Twelve o’clock was four dark, chilly hours away. He spent two of them pedalling around aimlessly on his bike and didn’t feel cold at all. The thought of the coming intimacy kept him warm. Then he decided to spend the rest of the time sitting in the open area across from his house. There, he felt himself becoming romantic. The hushed silence of the cold evening seemed familiar. Stars shone overhead in the frosty sky, like heavy droplets of water congealed into pearls. The occasional scream of a locomotive tore through the quiet, prompting his writer’s mind to think of the silence as a massive chunk of ice and the sound of the whistle as a nail being driven through its heart.

For quite a while he let this unprecedented feeling of romance spread through his mind and heart and meditated on the darkened beauties of the night. Suddenly he was jolted out of his reverie. He quickly looked at his watch; only two minutes before midnight. He promptly got up, went to the door and knocked softly. Five seconds went by. The door didn’t open. He knocked a second time.

The door opened and he whispered, ‘Amrit. .’ But when he raised his eyes, whom did he see but Tirpathi. Joginder Singh was overwhelmed by the feeling that the man’s beard had grown so long it seemed to touch the ground. Then he heard Tirpathi say, ‘Wonderful! Couldn’t have asked for more. I’ve just finished writing a new story. Come, let me read it to you.’

People take pleasure in winning. But he, well, it was losing that gave him the greater thrill, especially when it came in the wake of winning. Winning was easy enough; it was losing that made him sweat. Earlier, when he used to work in a bank, he too had thought about making piles of money. His relatives and friends had pooh-poohed the idea though. Soon afterwards he left for Bombay and, before long, he was sending wads of money to relatives and friends to help them financially.

Bombay was teeming with possibilities. He chose to go into films as they promised both money and fame. He could make a bundle in this world, and lose it just as easily. He’s still marching on in that world. He made thousands, crores even, and squandered all of it. Making it took no time at all, losing it did. He wrote the lyrics for a film and earned one lakh rupees, but it took a long time to lose this stupendous sum — in prostitutes’ balconies, their pimps’ assemblies, in races and gambling dens.

One of his films yielded a tidy profit of ten lakh. The big question then was how to squander this windfall. So he wittingly bumbled every step along the way. He bought not one but three cars, one brand new and two shabby old ones that he was absolutely sure were worthless. He left them outside the house to rot away, locking the new one in his garage on the pretext that petrol was hard to come by. So a taxi was the answer. You hailed one in the morning and had the driver stop a mile or so down the way near one gambling place or another, emerging the next day after burning two or two-and-a-half thousand rupees. You took another taxi and went home, purposely forgetting to pay the fare so that when you stepped out in the evening the taxi would still be standing at the door. You yelled at the driver, ‘Wretched man, you’re still here. All right, let’s go to my office. . I’ll have them pay the fare.’ But arriving at the office, you once again forget to pay, and. .

Two or three of his films back to back turned out to be terrific hits and broke all records. He was swimming in money and his popularity soared sky-high, which greatly annoyed him. So he deliberately made a couple of films that failed miserably, indeed, so miserably that the failures became proverbial. In ruining himself, he had taken a few others along. But he wasn’t one to give up. He put some zing into the sagging spirits of those he’d wrecked and made another film that proved to be a gold mine.

His relations with women followed the same pattern of loss and gain. He would pick up a prostitute from some song-and-dance soiree or some kotha, spend lavishly on doing her up, and catapult her to the height of fame. Then, after he’d sucked every ounce of womanhood out of her, he would deftly set up opportunities for her to leave him for the embrace of some other man.

He would take on the awfully rich and many handsome, amorous young men in a deathly struggle to win some beauty’s favour, and always come out ahead. He would plunge his hand into the thorniest bramble and pluck the blossom of his choice. He would stick that blossom on his lapel, only to gladly let his rival snatch it away.

Back when he was visiting a Faras Road gambling den every day for ten days in a row, he was obsessed with losing, despite the fact that he had just recently lost a very beautiful actress and kissed goodbye to a sum of ten lakh on a film. But his thirst for losing still wasn’t quenched as both losses had come much too suddenly. This time around his calculations had obviously misfired. Perhaps this was the reason he was now cautiously losing a fixed amount every day in the Faras Road gambling establishment.

He would set out for Pawan Pul in the evening with two hundred rupees in his pocket. The taxi would course past the line of prostitutes’ display windows, which had iron bars running horizontally across them, and halt some distance away by a utility pole. He would get out of the taxi, adjust his heavy eyeglasses and arrange the front fold of his dhoti, and then, glancing to his right at the terribly ugly woman behind the iron bars busily applying her make-up in front of a broken mirror, he would climb up to the baithak .

He had been visiting this gambling den at Faras Road regularly for the last ten days, determined to lose two hundred rupees on every visit. Sometimes it took only a few hands, sometimes it took until the wee hours of the morning.

After the taxi pulled up beside the utility pole on the eleventh day, he got out, fixed the heavy glasses on his nose and the front fold of his dhoti, and looked to his right. Suddenly he had this strange feeling about the fact that he had been looking at this ugly woman for the past ten days. As usual, she was seated on a wooden takht, busily applying her make-up in front of the broken mirror.

Coming abreast of the iron bars, he peered at the middle-aged woman: swarthy complexion, oily skin, cheeks and chin tattooed with blue circles more or less blending in with her terribly dark skin. Her teeth were awful and her gums were practically melting away from chewing paan and tobacco regularly. What kind of man would go to her, he wondered.

When he took another step towards the bars, the ugly woman smiled at him, put her mirror off to one side and said to him awkwardly, ‘Well, Seth, want to come in?’

He inspected the woman, who regardless of her attributes and age still hoped for customers, even more closely. Greatly surprised, he asked her, ‘Bai, how old might you be?’