Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Why in the world did he feel so drawn to Christian girls? — he’d often wondered. Well, yes, they did show off all the seductive assets of their bodies to good effect, spoke unabashedly of their irregular periods and even their former love affairs, and swayed their legs the minute some dance tune or other drifted into their ears — but any woman could just as easily boast of these qualities, couldn’t she?

When Randheer gestured to the ghatan to come up he had no thought whatsoever of getting her into bed with him. Noticing how thoroughly soaked she was, he feared the poor thing might catch pneumonia, so he said, ‘Take off those wet clothes! You’ll catch a cold.’

She thought she understood what was implied and blushed. When Randheer took out a fresh white dhoti and handed it to her, she hesitated for a moment and then undid her kashta , its grime made more visible by the rain. She pushed it aside and quickly wrapped the white dhoti around her hips and started to undo her snugly fitting choli, the two ends of which she had secured in a tight knot that had disappeared in the faint but grimy cleavage of her shapely breasts.

With her worn nails she struggled with the knot for quite a while but couldn’t loosen what the rainwater had tightened so firmly. Eventually she gave up and muttered something to Randheer in Marathi which meant, ‘What shall I do? It just won’t open.’

Randheer sat down beside her to give it a try but he couldn’t make the knot budge either. In exasperation he grabbed the two ends and tugged on them so vigorously that the knot came undone. His hands jerked from the force of the pull, baring two trembling breasts. For a moment he felt as though, with the dexterity of a master potter, his own hands had shaped a lump of soft, moist clay into a pair of exquisite cups on the girl’s chest.

Her youthful breasts had the same rawness and allure, the same moist freshness and cooling warmth that oozes from vessels just fashioned by a potter. A strange glow was implicit in the earth tones of those pristine young breasts. A diaphanous layer of a sort of muted luminescence beneath their darkish colouring was giving off that strange glow, which was almost not a glow. The two mounds on her chest looked more like a pair of earthen lamps set afloat on the muddy waters of a pond.

Yes, it was a day during the rains — a day just like this one. The leaves of the peepul were trembling outside the window. The ghatan’s dripping-wet, two-piece garment was lying on the floor in a messy heap, while she herself was wrapped around Randheer. The warmth of her naked, unwashed body evoked the same sensations in his own that he felt in the hot, filthy hammams of the barbers during blustery winters.

She had clung to his body all night long, as if their two bodies had melded together. They hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words. There had been no need to. Their breath, their lips, their hands conveyed all that needed to be communicated. With the tenderness of the gentlest breeze, his hands caressed her breasts all through the night — and however light the touch, her tiny nipples, in the middle of their large, dark, coarse areola, responded, sending a wave of tremulous pleasure through her body that never failed to arouse the same in his own.

Such tremors were not something Randheer hadn’t experienced before. He had, many times, and he was familiar with the pleasure they gave. Hadn’t he, after all, spent many nights with his chest pressed against the soft or firm breasts of some girl or other? And even spent time with such capricious girls that they had no qualms about sharing the kind of intimate stories about their families that are usually kept from strangers? He’d had sexual relations with women who took the initiative and did all the work themselves without encumbering him in any way. But this girl from the hills whom he’d beckoned up — she was something else altogether. So unbelievably different!

A strange smell wafting from her body flooded his senses all night — a smell at once pleasant and nauseating. It flowed from every part of her body: under her arms, around her breasts, her hair, her belly — it permeated every breath he took. All night long he wondered about this smell: without it creeping into every crevice of his mind, crowding out all his thoughts, new and old, would he have felt as close to this ghatan as he did now? Absolutely not!

This smell had fused them together for the night. They had taken possession of each other so totally, plunged into each other’s depths so fully that they were carried away into pure human ecstasy — fleeting yet somehow immutable, in motion yet frozen, like a bird soaring so high in the sky’s limitless azure that it appears perfectly still.

Even though he was familiar with the smell radiating from every pore of the girl’s body, he couldn’t quite describe what it was. It was like the smell of earth that had just been sprinkled with water. But not exactly. It was different somehow. And it didn’t have the artificial aura of lavender or attar. It was something primal and timeless — like the relationship between man and woman.

Amazingly, though Randheer detested the odour of perspiration and routinely dusted his body with talcum powder and dabbed his underarms with deodorant after every bath, he found himself madly kissing the ghatan’s hairy armpits over and over — yes, over and over — and feeling no revulsion; instead he found it strangely pleasurable. Damp with sweat, her soft, underarm hair was releasing a scent that was very conspicuous and yet completely unfathomable. He felt that he knew it, was familiar with it, and even understood what it signified, but couldn’t explain it to anyone.

It was a day during the rains — just like today. He was looking out of the same window. The peepul leaves were trembling in the pouring rain, their rustling sound blending into the atmosphere. It was dark outside, but the darkness was suffused with a soft fluorescence, as though a little light had escaped from the stars and descended to the earth with the raindrops. .

Yes, it was a day during the rains. His room had a single teakwood bed then; now it had two — the new arrival was placed next to its mate — and a brand new dressing table stood in one corner. It was the same season, the same weather, and a barely discernible light was coming down from the stars along with the raindrops, but now the atmosphere was filled with the overpowering scent of henna.

One bed was empty. On the other, Randheer lay face down, watching raindrops dancing on the fluttering leaves outside the window, and lying next to him was a fair-complexioned girl who seemed to have fallen asleep after her futile attempts to cover her nakedness. Her red silk shalwar lay bunched up on the empty bed, the tasselled end of its dark red waist-cord dangling down the side. Her other clothes were also on that bed. Her shirt with a golden floral pattern, her bra, underpants and dupatta were all of a deep red colour — a garish, dark red — and saturated with the strong scent of henna.

Flecks of glitter were scattered in her dark black hair like specks of dust, and glitter, together with a heavy layer of powder and rouge, gave an unbelievably strange colour to her face — pallid, as though all the life had been squeezed out of it. The dye from her bra had bled, leaving reddish stains on her fair chest.

Her breasts were milky-white with just a hint of blue and her underarms were shaved clean, leaving behind a grey shadow. Randheer glanced at her several times, and each time found himself thinking that he’d just pried open some crate and taken her out — as if she was a consignment of books or china. Her body had marks in several spots just like the marks and scratches left on books and china from packing and shipping.