Saadat Manto - Bombay Stories

Chaddah sat down on a bed with broken springs and smacked his lips thinking about the upcoming XXX rum. Then he said, ‘Wait is wait … so you’ve finally found your way over here.’ Suddenly he became pensive, ‘But what should we do about your wife? She’s going to get pissed.’

Chaddah was unmarried but was always considerate of others’ wives. In fact he respected them so much that he decided never to marry. He always said, ‘My inferiority complex has denied me this reward. When the question of marriage comes up, I always feel like I’m ready for it, but afterwards I think I’m not worthy of a wife and so I gather up all my marriage plans and deep-six them.’

The rum came quickly and the glasses too. Chaddah had asked for six, but the Prince of China had brought only three because the other three had broken on the way. Chaddah didn’t seem to care about the broken glasses but thanked God that the alcohol was safe. Without wasting any time, he opened one bottle, poured the rum into the brand-new glasses and then said, ‘Welcome to Pune!’

We downed our drinks in one shot.

Chaddah poured another round and then got up and went to the other room. When he came back he said that my wife was still sleeping and he seemed concerned about this. He said, ‘I make so much noise that I bet I’ll wake her up. So let’s … no, wait … first I’ll order some tea.’ Then he took a sip of rum and called his servant, ‘Oh, Prince of Jamaica!’

The Prince of Jamaica came at once and Chaddah told him, ‘Look here, tell Mummy to make some first-class tea and send it over ASAP!’

The servant left. Chaddah finished his glass and poured himself a smaller shot. ‘I’m not going to drink a lot,’ he said. ‘The first four shots make me very emotional, and I have to help you take bhabi to Parbhat Nagar.’

Half an hour later, the tea arrived. The dishes were clean and arranged nicely on the tray. Chaddah took off the tea cosy, smelled the tea and exclaimed, ‘Mummy is a jewel!’ Then he suddenly started to curse at the Prince of Ethiopia, and he was yelling so loud that my ears began to throb. Then he picked up the tray and said to me, ‘Come on.’

My wife was now waking up. Chaddah gently placed the tray down on a rickety stool and respectfully intoned, ‘Your tea, Begam Sahib.’ My wife didn’t like Chaddah’s obsequious joke, but the tea service looked so good that she couldn’t refuse it. Her mood improved after she drank two cups, and in an insinuating tone she said, ‘You two already had your tea?’

I said nothing, but Chaddah bowed and then confessed, ‘Yes, it was wrong of us, but we knew you’d forgive us.’

My wife smiled, and Chaddah laughed loudly. ‘We two are very high-class pigs — nothing is forbidden to us!’ he said. ‘Let’s go, we’ll take you to the mosque.’

My wife didn’t like this joke either, and in fact, she hated everything about Chaddah. While she basically hated all my friends, she reserved a special hatred for him because he mocked social conventions. But I don’t think he ever thought about etiquette, or if he did he felt that such nonsense was a waste of time, on par with a game of Snakes and Ladders. His eyes gleamed as he looked at my angry wife, and then he called out, ‘Prince of the Country of Kebabs! Go get a tonga, a Rolls Royce one!’

The Prince of the Country of Kebabs left with Chaddah for another room. My wife and I found ourselves alone, and I tried to convince her that she shouldn’t be angry. I explained that sometimes you find yourself in circumstances you never could have imagined, but that the best way to get through them is to let things go. But as usual she didn’t listen to my Confucian advice and continued to grumble to herself. Then the Prince of the Country of Kebabs came in to announce the Rolls Royce tonga outside, and we set off for Parbhat Nagar.

It was fortunate that only my film buddy’s wife was there. Chaddah asked her to entertain my wife for a while and in doing so said, ‘Wives prefer their own company. When we come back, we’ll see how you two ladies got along.’ Then he turned to me, ‘Manto, let’s get your friend from the studio.’

Chaddah went about things in such a whirlwind that he never gave anyone time to contradict him. He grabbed my arm and led me outside before my wife could stop us. Once we were in the tonga, Chaddah relaxed, ‘Okay, that’s over with. Now what are we going to do?’ Then he burst out laughing. ‘Mummy! Great Mummy!’

I was about to ask him who exactly Mummy was when Chaddah started talking about something and I couldn’t get a word in.

The tonga returned to Chaddah’s house. It was called Sayeedah Cottage, but Chaddah called it Kabidah Cottage because he said everyone living there was depressed. And yet later I found out that this wasn’t true.

The cottage looked uninhabited from the outside, but in fact many people lived there. Everyone worked for the same film company, which paid monthly salaries every three months and then not even in full. When I was introduced one by one to everyone who lived there, I learned they were all assistant directors: some were chief assistant directors, and some were aides to these assistants and some aides to these aides. Every other person was an assistant to someone and was trying to raise cash in order to set up his own film company, though if you judged them by the way they carried themselves, you would have thought they were all film stars. Back then it was the era of wartime rationing and yet no one had a ration card, so they bought on the black market even those things you could get cheap with just a little effort. They went to the tracks in the racing season; otherwise, they gambled with predictable results. They lost money every day.

There were so many people living in the house that the garage was also used as a living space for the family of a woman named Shirin and her husband who, maybe just to break the monotony of their pursuits, wasn’t an assistant director but worked for the film company as a driver, although I never saw him there and had no idea when he came and went. Shirin was very pretty and had a little boy who was the centre of attention whenever anyone had free time, and yet she herself spent most of her time in the garage.

The best part of the house went to Chaddah and his two buddies — two actors who got roles but weren’t yet stars. One was Sayeed, whose stage name was Ranjit Kumar. Chaddah would say, ‘Sayeedah Cottage got its name from this bastard, otherwise it would be Kabidah Cottage.’ Sayeed was handsome but didn’t talk much, and sometimes Chaddah would call him ‘Tortoise’ because he did everything so slowly.

I never found out the real name of the other actor but everyone called him Gharib Nawaz. He was from a rich Hyderabadi family and had come to Pune to get into acting. His salary was 250 rupees a month, yet he had been working for a year and had received that much just once, and that time he had given it to Chaddah who was being pressured by some bloodthirsty Pathan to pay back a loan. He wrote romances for the film company, and sometimes he tried his hand at poetry. Everyone who lived in the Cottage had an outstanding debt with him.

There were also the brothers, Shakil and Aqil. Both were assistants to some assistant director and always wrapped up in impossible schemes.

The three big ones — I mean, Chaddah, Sayeed, and Gharib Nawaz — treated Shirin extremely well, but they never went into the garage at the same time. There was no fixed visiting schedule, and if they found themselves together in the house’s main room, one would go to the garage where he would stay for a while, sitting and talking to Shirin about household affairs, and the other two would busy themselves doing their own things. Those who were the assistant types did favours for Shirin: sometimes they brought things back from the market, sometimes they ran laundry errands, and sometimes they comforted her crying child.