Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Gilgit was confused for a moment but pulled himself together and replied, ‘Khu, I wanted to feed my dog.’

‘So did he eat it?’

‘That swine. . he just sniffed it and let it be.’

‘So what did you gain by killing it? Before, you killed Khan’s quail and fed it to him. Did he eat it?’

‘Yes, he did,’ Gilgit replied proudly. ‘He even chewed up the bones.’

Shahbaz Khan was standing nearby. The minute he heard this he slapped Gilgit on his neck with all his might. ‘You bastard. . now you’re admitting it. Why did you keep denying it before?’

Gilgit kept quiet.

Both girls burst out laughing. Gilgit didn’t much care about the slap, but their laughter wounded him deeply.

Shahbaz Khan was beside himself with anger. The blow alone wasn’t enough. He now assailed him verbally, unloading all the obscenities he knew on his employee. And finally, ‘Why do you love that Tan-Tan or Chan-Chan so much, bastard? You call that thing a dog, huh! He’s uglier than you, so ugly it turns my stomach!’

When Gilgit Khan went up to his hovel some time later, his ears were still buzzing with the girls’ laughter. Tan-Tan was lying in a corner with his legs, which couldn’t be more crooked, resting against the wall.

He thought for some time and then pulled out his jackknife and took a step towards the dog. A sudden thought made him snap the knife shut and put it back in his pocket. He called the dog to him lovingly and took him out for a walk.

The train was fast approaching when the two reached the tracks. Gilgit ordered his loving dog to go stand right in the middle of the tracks. The animal obeyed his master.

The train was considerably closer. Tan-Tan, planted in the middle of the tracks, was looking at Gilgit, his eyes brimming with loyalty. Gilgit glanced at himself. He felt his dog was infinitely better looking than he was.

When the train was almost upon them, Gilgit Khan quickly pushed Tan-Tan off the tracks, but got caught himself in the process. He was turned into minced meat. The dog sniffed at that pile of raw meat and started crying loudly in a heart-wrenching howl.

I am a native of Gujarat, Kathiawar, and belong to the bania caste. Recently, when tanta broke out over the partition of India, I happened to be unemployed. Forgive me for using the word tanta. But does it matter? I should think not. After all, Urdu should accept non-Urdu words, even if they are borrowed from Gujarati.

So yes, I was unemployed, except for my small cocaine business, which still yielded a dribble of an income. When the country split and people from both sides started moving across the border in thousands, I thought, why not go to Pakistan. Even if I couldn’t deal in cocaine there, I would at least be able to set up some other business. So I set out for Pakistan, doing all kinds of small deals along the way.

I arrived in Pakistan with the intention of starting a big business. After studying the situation closely I decided to get into allotments. *I was already adept at easing my way using flattery and bootlicking. I licked butt and sweet-talked, struck up a friendship with some fellows, and managed to get a small house allotted to me. I made a great deal of money by selling this property, and my success gave me the courage to visit different cities and acquire more allotments of residential houses and shops.

Every kind of job requires hard work. I had to run around quite a bit for allotments: sucking up to one person, greasing the palm of another, taking a third to dinner, and yet another to music and dance shows. In short, I had to go through a hell of a lot of trouble. I would wander around sizing up spacious bungalows all day long, scouring the entire city to decide on a big beautiful house whose allotment would bring in a sizeable profit.

Hard work never goes unrewarded. Within a year I’d made piles of money. By God’s grace I had everything now: One of the finest bungalows in the city, hoards of maal-pani in the bank — forgive me for using the peculiar Gujarati jargon, but what’s the harm. Urdu must welcome non-Urdu words. So yes, by God’s grace I had everything that one could hope for: the finest bungalow, servants, a Packard, two and a half lakh rupees in the bank, not to mention several factories and shops. Yes, I had everything, but for some reason my peace of mind had vanished. Even during the days of my small cocaine business I had sometimes felt a certain heaviness sweep over my heart; now, though, it seemed as if I no longer had a heart, or that if there was one it had been pressed under a heavy weight.

What was this weight?

I’m an intelligent man. If a question agitates my mind, I try to look for an answer and always find one. I started thinking with a cool head about what was causing this garbar-ghotaala , *but where was my head?

A woman? Could be. But I had no woman of my own. The one I used to have had met her lord already in Kathiawar Gujarat. However, there were others, but they belonged to other men, for instance, the wife of my gardener. Well, everyone has their own taste. If truth be told, all I care about in a woman is that she must be young — her being educated or a dancer isn’t a must. As long as she’s young, any woman will do for me. †

I’m an intelligent man. Whenever I’m confronted by a thorny problem, I try to get to its root. My factories were running smoothly, my shops were doing extremely well; money was being generated as if on its own. I put all these aside and thought objectively about the matter. All this garbar, I concluded after much thought, springs from my never having performed a good deed.

In Kathiawar Gujarat, I had done many good deeds: such as when my friend Pandorang died, I sheltered his widow in my own home, thus keeping her from selling herself for two full years; or when Vinaik’s wooden leg broke and I bought him a brand-new prosthesis, for which I had to spend forty rupees; or when Jamna Bai came down with venereal disease — saali (forgive me for using it) had no idea what it was — and I took her to a doctor and paid for her treatment for six months. But I hadn’t done anything good for humanity in Pakistan so this had to be what was causing all this garbar in my heart.

So what shall I do, I asked myself. I thought of giving alms. I wandered through the city one day and saw that just about everyone looked like a beggar. Some were starved, others were without a scrap to wear. Whom to feed? Whom to clothe? There were so many. I might just as well have opened an almshouse. But what would a single almshouse accomplish? And where would I get the grain to feed all these people? Should I buy it on the black market? Which begged the question: What’s the point of sinning with one hand and doing a pious deed with the other?

For hours I listened to the woes of countless people about their hardship and suffering. In truth, everyone was suffering: those who slept on shop stoops at night as well as those who slept in their tall mansions. A barefoot fellow was unhappy because he didn’t have a proper pair of shoes, while someone who had a car was losing sleep over not having the latest model. In his own way each person was right about what was eating away at him, and everyone’s needs made perfect sense.

I had once heard Ameena Bai Chitlekar of Solapur — may God have mercy on her — recite one of Ghalib’s ghazals, a line of which has stuck in my memory: Kis ki haajat rava kare ko’i (whose need should one fulfil). Forgive me, this is the second line of the she‘r, or maybe the first.

So there I was, wondering whose need I could take care of when a hundred out of a hundred were in need. Then again, the thought occurred to me that almsgiving wasn’t really a meritorious act. You may not agree with me, but honestly, my many trips to refugee camps and my close scrutiny of the conditions there convinced me that welfare aid had turned many refugees into perfect slobs who sat around doing nothing all day, or wasted their time playing card games or jagaar (forgive me, jagaar means gambling), shouting obscenities at one another, and freeloading — what role could these loafers possibly have played in giving strength to Pakistan. I concluded that almsgiving was absolutely not the right thing to do. But then what could I do that would be a virtuous deed?