Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Daddy was at his hotel, where a lady stenographer was rubbing eau-de-cologne on his forehead.

One day a band also played for her. The desolate garden sprang into sudden boisterous life. None other than the owner of Ajanta Studio decorated the flowerpots and the doors. Extremely dark lipsticks were flummoxed by the riotous colours he had let loose, and one even darker shade was so overcome that she instantly dropped down to his feet and became his student.

He had also designed her wedding dress, giving it a motley of facets. Looking directly at the front, she looked like bunches of many-coloured drawstrings; a fruit basket from the side; a floral curtain draped over the window when seen from a distance; from the back, a pile of crushed watermelons. . and a jar filled with tomato sauce from a different angle. From above, a specimen of some quaint art; from down below, the obscure poetry of Miraji.

The eyes of connoisseurs were so impressed that they burst into spontaneous praise for her. . most of all the bridegroom, who firmly resolved to become an abstract painter the day after the wedding. So he went to Ajanta with his wife. . where he found out that he was getting married and he has been shacked up at his wife-to-be’s for the past several days.

His wife-to-be was the same one who wore her lipstick much darker than the other merely dark ones. At first, for a few months, the bridegroom’s interest in her and abstract art endured. However, with the closing of Ajanta Studio and its owner’s disappearance without a trace, the bridegroom went into the salt business, which yielded great profits.

In the course of carrying on his salt business, he met a young woman whose milk jugs hadn’t run dry. He fell for them. No band played, but a wedding did come about. The first wife gathered her paintbrushes and went to live elsewhere.

The initial bitterness stemming from their differences eventually gave way to a strange sweetness. Her girlfriend who, after dumping her first husband for a new one and travelling across the whole of Europe, was now suffering from tuberculosis, portrayed this sweetness in cubic art: numberless clear and transparent cubes of sugar stacked one on top of the other amidst cacti in such a way that they gave the impression of two faces with honeybees sitting on them sucking nectar.

Her second girlfriend ended her life by swallowing poison. When she got this tragic news, she slipped into a coma. No one could tell whether this was a fresh assault of unconsciousness or the continuation of the same old one that had resulted from the initial raging fever.

Her father was in eau-de-cologne, where his hotel massaged his lady stenographer’s scalp. Her mom had handed over the entire management of the household to the stout, middle-aged servant. She could drive now, but was taken seriously ill. Still she cared a lot about the driver’s motherless pup and fed him her mobile oil.

The life of her sister-in-law and her brother was moving along on an even keel, becoming more mature and robust with the passage of time. They always met each other with great courtesy and love. Suddenly one night, when the maidservant and her brother were busy taking account of the household, her sister-in-law dropped by. She was alone, with neither a pen nor a brush in her hand, and yet she cleared the account of both in one fell swoop.

All that was seen in the morning were two blobs of coagulated gore, looking like two big pom-poms, which were then tied around the neck of her sister-in-law.

Only now did she emerge somewhat from her deep sleep. The differences with her husband, bitter at first, had been replaced by a strange sweetness. She made an attempt to daub it with a measure of bitterness. She took to alcohol. She failed because the amount imbibed was negligible. . she increased it, indeed so much that she was swirling in it. . people thought she would drown any minute, but each time she came up to the surface, wiping the residue from her lips and laughing hysterically.

When she got up in the morning she felt as if every fibre of her being had wept bitterly all night long. From the graves that could have been dug, all the babies that could have been born to her were wailing inconsolably for the milk that could have been theirs. But where was any milk to be found. . It had been sucked dry by wild tomcats.

She started drinking more to drown in the bottomless sea, but her desire remained unfulfilled. She was intelligent, educated and talked matter-of-factly, without inhibition, on sexual matters. And she did not feel there was anything wrong in establishing sexual relations with men. Yet, sometimes in the stillness of the night, she longed to go behind the hedges like one of her bad-mannered hens and lay an egg.

People began to avoid her when they saw her drunk, a mere bag of bones. . She understood everything and didn’t run after them. She lived alone in the house, chain-smoking, drinking, lost in distant thoughts. . She slept little and roamed around the kothi.

In the servant’s quarter across from the kothi, the driver’s motherless child kept up a litany of cries for the oil which had run dry in her mother. The driver had crashed the car. It was in the garage, her mother in the hospital, where one of her legs had already been amputated and the other was about to be.

Now and then when she peeked inside the quarter, she felt a vague tremor in the depths of her bosom, but that horrid tasting residue was too meagre to even wet the child’s lips.

For some time now her brother had been living in a foreign country. Finally, in a letter from Switzerland, he informed her that he was there to seek medical treatment, that the nurse was exceedingly nice, and that he was planning to marry her as soon as he got out of the hospital.

The stout, middle-aged servant disappeared after stealing a bit of jewellery, some cash, and a lot of clothes belonging to her mom. Sometime later, following unsuccessful surgery, her mother died in the hospital.

Her father did make a token appearance at the funeral, and was never seen again.

She was all alone now. She had let go of all the servants, including the driver. She found an ayah for his baby. Every burden was now off her shoulders, except her own thoughts. If anyone ever showed up to see her, she screamed from inside the house, ‘Go away. . whoever you may be. Go away! I don’t want to see anyone.’

She had found her mother’s countless priceless jewels in the safe and had quite a few of her own for which she felt no attachment. In the evening she would sit in front of the mirror naked for many hours, decorate her body with all the jewellery, drink and croon obscene songs in her off-key voice. Since there was no other house in the vicinity, she had all the freedom she could hope for.

As it is, she had already bared her body in many ways. Now she aimed to bare her soul as well. But she felt the greatest difficulty in doing so. The only way she could think of to overcome her formidable diffidence was to drink, and drink with abandon, and make use of her naked body. . but the supreme tragedy was that her body, stripped of its last shred of clothing, had actually become invisible.

She had tired of drawing pictures. . her painting paraphernalia had been lying in a small box for quite a while now. One day she took out all the colours, mixed each one with water in a large bowl, cleaned her brushes and set them to one side, and installed herself stark naked before the mirror. She started painting her body with altogether new features, strange dimensions. This was her attempt at completely baring her being.

She could only paint the front of her body. She spent the entire day in this enterprise, without eating a morsel or taking a drink of water. She stood in front of the mirror and tried out different paints, tracing crooked lines. Her brushstrokes reflected perfect confidence and surety of touch. . about midnight she drew away a little and observed herself closely, feeling satisfied. Then she proceeded to decorate her paint-smeared body with every one of her jewels and once again examined her body in the mirror. Just then she heard a sound suggestive of a presence.