Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

He re-emerged after quite some time with the bowl in hand. Phataan was sitting on the cot. He blew into the bowl three times and offered it to her. ‘Come on, drink it up!’

Phataan gulped down the liquid and instantly felt queasy. The maulvi tapped on her back a few times and said, ‘There, okay!’

Phataan tried to feel better, and to a degree she did. The maulvi stretched out on the bed.

In the morning, when Maujo and Jaina returned, they found Phataan sleeping alone in the courtyard with no sign of the maulvi anywhere. Maybe he’s gone out for a bit. . to the fields, Maujo thought. He tried to wake Phataan. Mumbling some inarticulate sounds, she slowly opened her eyes. Then, in a clear distinct voice, she mumbled, ‘Paradise! Oh, sheer paradise!’ But as soon as she saw Maujo, she sat up in the bed, eyes wide open.

‘Where is Maulvi Sahib?’ Maujo asked.

Phataan, who still hadn’t fully recovered her senses, replied, ‘Maulvi Sahib? What Maulvi Sahib? Oh he, God knows where he’s gone. . Isn’t he here?’

‘No,’ Maujo said. ‘Okay, I’ll go out and look for him.’

Just as he was leaving he heard Phataan’s muffled scream. He turned around to look at her. She was pulling out something black from under the pillow. ‘What the hell is this?’ she asked, looking at the object in her hand.

‘Hair,’ Maujo replied.

Phataan quickly threw that tangled clump of hair down on the floor. Maujo picked it up and gave it a close look. ‘It’s a beard and sideburns.’

Jaina, who was standing near them, said, ‘Maulvi Sahib’s beard and sideburns.’

‘Yes, his beard and sideburns,’ affirmed her mother from the bed.

Maujo was nonplussed. ‘But where is the Maulvi Sahib himself?’ Suddenly a thought came into his simple, trusting peasant mind, ‘Jaina, Phataan, you don’t understand. He was a godly person, full of saintly graces. He fulfilled what we most yearned for and left us this memento to remember him by.’

He reverently kissed that clump of hair, touched it to his eyes, and, handing it to Jaina, told her, ‘Go, wrap it in a clean piece of cloth and put it in the big chest. God willing, it will bring blessings to our household forever.’

Once Jaina left, he sat down next to his Phataan and told her lovingly, ‘I will learn to say my namaz and always pray for the saintly elder who again brought us together.’

Phataan just sat there in hushed silence.

A heated discussion about Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas’s latest speech was in full swing in the Tea House. The atmosphere inside was cosy and as warm as the tea. We were in agreement about one thing: We should grab Kashmir no matter what and Dogra rule must end immediately.

They were all mujahid s, God’s valiant soldiers, who didn’t know the first thing about fighting but were ready to jump into the battlefield at any moment. The consensus was that if we launched a surprise attack, Kashmir would be in our hands in a blink.

Well, I was among those mujahids. My problem, though, is that I’m a Kashmiri right down to the hilt, and no less a Kashmiri than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, which makes it my greatest weakness. I just chimed along with the other mujahids. It was decided that the minute war broke out we would join and fight at the very front.

Although Haneef showed great enthusiasm, I sensed that he was feeling rather melancholy, but I couldn’t figure out the reason for his downcast mood.

Everyone left after the tea, only Haneef and I stayed on. By now the Tea House had become nearly empty with only two boys chatting over their breakfast in a far corner.

I had met Haneef a while back. He was about ten years younger than me. He had finished his BA and was undecided whether to opt for an MA in English or in Urdu. Sometimes he got it into his head to stop his studies altogether and set out to travel.

I looked at him closely. He was picking up the used matchsticks from the ashtray and nervously breaking them into small bits. As I’ve already mentioned, he was feeling rather blue. It appeared to be a good opportunity to ask him about it. ‘Why are you feeling so glum?’

He lifted his head, tossed the broken pieces to one side, and replied, ‘Oh, no particular reason.’

I lit up. ‘What do you mean “no particular reason”? That’s no answer. There’s always a reason for everything. Perhaps you’re reminiscing about some old event.’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And that event has something to do with Kashmir?’

He started. ‘How did you know that?’

I smiled. ‘I’m a Sherlock Holmes too. My good man, weren’t we just now talking about Kashmir? When you agreed that you were thinking, and thinking about some past event, I immediately guessed that this event must have to do with Kashmir. It’s got to be. So, did you fall in love there?’

‘Love. . I don’t know. . God knows what it was. Anyway, something did happen and the memory of it still haunts me.’

I was eager to hear his story. ‘If you don’t mind, tell me about that “something”.’

He asked me for a cigarette and lit it. ‘Manto Sahib,’ he said, ‘it isn’t an especially interesting incident. But if you promise to listen quietly without interrupting, I’ll tell you everything, down to the last detail, about what transpired three years ago. I’m not a storyteller, all the same I’ll try.’

I promised not to interrupt. Actually he wanted to narrate his story by going into the depths of his heart and mind.

After a pause he began, ‘Manto Sahib, it happened two years ago, when Partition wasn’t even in our imagination. It was summer time. I was feeling down, God knows why. I guess all unattached, single men feel gloomy in the summer. Anyway, one day I decided to go to Kashmir. I packed a few essentials and went to the lorry stand. I bought a ticket and boarded. When the lorry arrived at Kad, I changed my mind. What is there in Srinagar, I thought. I’ve already seen it many times; I’ll get out at the next stop, Batut. It’s a salubrious place. Tuberculosis patients especially go there and leave cured. So I got off at Batut and stayed in a hotel, a rather bare-bones one, but all right. I was quite taken with Batut. I went climbing on the slopes every morning, ate a breakfast of toast and pure butter on my return from the hike, and then read some book or other lying down.

‘I was spending my days pleasurably in the salubrious environment of the place. I’d become friends with all the shopkeepers in the area around the hotel, especially Sardar Lahna Singh who was a tailor. I would spend hours at his shop. He was a fanatic about listening to and telling love stories. His sewing machine would keep whirring and he’d be absorbed in those stories.

‘He knew every last thing about Batut. Who was having an affair with whom, who’d had a tiff, which girls had just started to put on airs — you name it. His pocket was always full of such gossip.

‘In the evenings, the two of us went for a stroll on the downward slopes, all the way to the Banihal Pass, and then walked back up slowly. There was a cluster of mud dwellings to the right of the first bend in the road if you were coming from the hotel and headed towards the slopes. One day I asked Sardarji whether those quarters were meant to be lived in. I asked because they had caught my fancy. Yes, they were for living in, he told me. “A railway babu from Sargodha is staying there these days. His wife is ill.”

‘She must have tuberculosis, I concluded at once. God knows why I’m so scared of this disease. From that day on I never passed by those quarters without covering my nose and mouth with a kerchief. I don’t want to prolong the story. In short, eventually, I became friends with Kundan Lal, the railway babu. I soon realized that he wasn’t at all concerned about his wife’s condition. He was simply going through the motions of being a caring husband. He visited her occasionally and lived in a separate dwelling, which he disinfected with phenyl three times a day. It was his wife’s younger sister Sumitri, hardly fourteen years old, who took care of her with unflinching devotion.