Saadat Manto - Bombay Stories

My aesthetic taste had suffered a shocking blow earlier when I had seen Mummy with Chaddah in the tonga. I was sorry I had had such bad thoughts about them, but it troubled me over and over why she used so much ugly make-up. It demeaned her — it ridiculed her maternal feelings for Chaddah, Gharib Nawaz, and Vankatre and God knows who else.

I asked Chaddah, ‘Hey, why does your Mummy use so much flashy make-up?’

Chaddah answered, ‘Because people like bright things. It’s very rare to find simpletons like us, people who like soft music and muted colours, people who don’t want to be young again and who don’t try to trick old age by acting young. People who call themselves artists are fools. I’ll tell you an interesting anecdote. It was during the Baisakhi fair in your Amritsar, in Ram Bagh where the prostitutes live. Some farmers were passing by. A strong young man raised on pure milk and butter and whose new shoes were dangling on his staff looked up at a whorehouse and saw a dark-skinned whore. She was wearing wild-coloured make-up and her oil-soaked hair was grotesquely pasted onto her forehead. Elbowing the ribcage of his friend, he said, “Hey, Lehna Sayyan, look up on the fifth floor — there’s—” ’ God knows why Chaddah didn’t go ahead and finish his sentence because he usually didn’t have any reservation about swearing. He laughed, filled my glass with rum, and said, ‘For this farmer, this witch was a fairy from Mount Caucasus, and the beautiful girls of his village were like clumsy buffaloes. We’re all fools — mediocre fools — mediocre fools because nothing in this world is high class — it’s second or third class — but — but — Phyllis is very special — like a snake’s scales—’

Vankatre raised his glass, poured rum on Chaddah’s head and said, ‘Scales, grails — you’re out of your mind.’

Chaddah licked the rum dripping off his forehead and said to Vankatre, ‘Now tell me, bastard, how much did your daddy love you? You’ve cooled me off, so tell me how much!’

Vankatre turned serious and said to me, ‘By God, he loved me a lot. I was fifteen when he arranged my marriage.’

Chaddah laughed loudly, ‘He made you into a cartoon, that bastard! May God give him a kaserail ki peti in heaven so that he can woo a beautiful bride for you!’

Vankatre became even more serious. ‘Manto, I don’t lie — my wife is truly beautiful. In our family …’

‘Your family be damned. Talk about Phyllis,’ Chaddah said. ‘No one can be more beautiful than her.’ Chaddah looked toward the corner where Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar were sitting. He yelled at them, ‘Founders of the Gunpowder Plot! Listen, no conspiracy on your part will work! Chaddah’s going to win!’ Then he turned to his servant. ‘Hey, isn’t that right, the Prince of Wales?’

The Prince of Wales was looking yearningly at the fast-emptying rum bottle. Chaddah erupted in laughter, poured half a glass and gave it to him. Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar were whispering to each other about Phyllis and secretly scheming against each other.

The lights were now on in the living room, as the light had faded outside. I was telling Chaddah the latest news from the Bombay film industry when we heard Mummy’s shrill voice on the verandah. He shouted out in excitement and went outside, and Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar exchanged suggestive glances and looked toward the door. Mummy entered the room chatting with the five Anglo-Indian girls accompanying her, each one different from the others — Polly, Dolly, Kitty, Elma, and Thelma — and the boy Chaddah called Sissy because he looked like a eunuch. Phyllis came in last, accompanied by Chaddah who had his arm wrapped around the thin waist of the platinum blonde — a conquering display that Gharib Nawaz and Ranjit Kumar didn’t like.

With the arrival of the girls, the party broke into full swing. All of a sudden everyone was talking English so quickly that Vankatre couldn’t keep up, and yet he did the best he could. When none of the girls paid any attention to him, he sat down on a sofa next to Elma’s older sister, Thelma, and asked her how many more Indian dance steps she had learnt. He started explaining Dhani, and as he kept time out loud—‘one, two, three!’—he choreographed some steps. On the other side of the room, the other girls were gathered around Chaddah as he recited dirty English limericks from his trove of thousands. Mummy was ordering some soda and snacks, Ranjit Kumar smoked and stared intently at Phyllis, and Gharib Nawaz kept saying to Mummy that if she needed any money, she should just ask.

The Scotch was opened and the first round of drinking began. When Phyllis was called in, she gave her platinum blonde hair a light shake and then said that she didn’t drink whisky. Everyone insisted, but she didn’t listen. Chaddah pouted, and so Mummy poured Phyllis a small drink and raised it to her lips saying sweetly, ‘Be a brave girl and drink it up.’

Phyllis couldn’t refuse. This made Chaddah happy, and in his good mood he raced through another few dozen risque limericks.

Everyone was having a good time. Suddenly it occurred to me that people must have started wearing clothes all those millennia ago when they got sick of their nakedness, and similarly, people run to nakedness nowadays when they get sick of their clothes. Modesty and debauchery reach a balance, and debauchery has at least one virtue in that it momentarily frees people from the boredom of routine. I looked toward Mummy sitting arm in arm with the young girls and laughing at Chaddah’s limericks. She was wearing the same trashy make-up beneath which you could still see her wrinkles, and yet she was happy. I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.

Polly was standing in a corner talking with Ranjit Kumar about her new dress, telling him how it was due to her cleverness alone that she had got herself something so nice for so cheap, as she had transformed two worthless pieces of cloth into a beautiful dress. And Ranjit Kumar replied in earnest, promising to have two new dresses made for her despite the fact that he worked for a film company and so could never hope to receive the needed money in one single payment. Dolly was trying to get Gharib Nawaz to lend her some money, promising him that once she got her salary from the office she would repay him, and while Gharib Nawaz knew that this wouldn’t happen just as it hadn’t in the past, he nonetheless accepted her promises. Thelma was trying to learn the very difficult steps of Tandau dancing, and while Vankatre knew she would never succeed, he kept instructing her. Thelma, too, knew she was wasting their time, and yet she was memorizing the lesson with passionate concentration. Elma and Kitty were quickly getting drunk and talking about some Ivy who last time at the racecourse had placed a bad bet on their behalf in order to take revenge for God knows what. Chaddah was putting Phyllis’s blonde hair in the golden Scotch and drinking the liquor. Sissy kept digging a comb out of his pocket to tend to his hair. Mummy went around the room, talking here and there, ordering a soda bottle to be opened or broken glasses picked up from the floor, and she was watching over everyone like a dozing cat that keeps track of her five kittens through half-opened eyes, always knowing where they are and what mischief they are up to.

What part — what colour or what line — was wrong with this picturesque scene? Even Mummy’s make-up seemed like a necessary part of the whole. Ghalib says, ‘The prison of life and the chains of grief are one. / How can people escape grief before death?’ If the prison of life and the chains of grief are truly one, what law prevents people from trying to escape a little suffering? Who wants to wait around for the Angel of Death? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to play the interesting game of self-deception?