Saadat Manto - Bombay Stories

Dhundhu poured his cold coffee-tea into his saucer, drank it in one gulp and then lit a bidi.

‘Siraj grabbed him?’

Dhundhu raised his voice. ‘Yes! She grabbed that bastard and said, “Where do you think you’re going? Why did you force me to leave my home? I loved you, and you said you loved me. After we ran off from Amritsar, we came here and stayed in this very hotel, remember? And then you disappeared in the middle of the night and abandoned me. Why did you bring me here? Why did you convince me to run off with you? I was ready for anything, but you fled at the last moment. Come here. Now I’ve got you here again. I still love you. Come here.” And, Manto Sahib, she threw herself on him. Tears started rolling down that bastard’s cheeks. He begged for forgiveness, “It was wrong of me. I was scared. I’ll never leave you again …” Who knows what he was blabbering. Then Siraj motioned for me to leave and I went out.

‘In the morning I was sleeping on a cot when she woke me. “Let’s go, Dhundhu,” she said. “Where to?” “Back to Bombay.” “What about that bastard?” “He’s sleeping. I put my burqa over him.” ’

Dhundhu ordered another coffee-mixed tea, and then Siraj came in. Her face looked fresh and her large eyes were poised and calm.

FOR the first time in four years, Trilochan found himself looking up at the night sky, and that was only because he had come out onto the terrace of the Advani Chambers to think things over in the open air.

The sky was completely clear but hung like an enormous ash-coloured tent over all of Bombay. For as far as he could see, lights burned through the night. It seemed to Trilochan as though countless stars had fallen from the heavens and had attached themselves to the buildings, which in the dark of the night loomed like enormous trees, around which the fallen stars glimmered like fireflies.

For Trilochan this was a completely new experience, a new plane of existence, to be out beneath the night sky. He realized that for four years he had lived caged in his apartment, oblivious to one of nature’s greatest gifts. It was about three o’clock, and the wind was delightfully light. Trilochan had grown used to the electric fan’s artificial breeze, which oppressed his very existence: every morning he got up feeling as though someone had been pummelling him all night long. But now he felt rejuvenated, as the morning’s fresh breeze washed over his body. He had come up to the terrace feeling anxious, but after only half an hour, the tension had eased. He could now think clearly.

Kirpal Kaur lived with her family in a neighbourhood known for its fanatic Muslims. Many houses had already been burned, and several people had died. Trilochan felt it was no longer safe for them to live there, but a curfew was in effect and no one knew how long it would last, maybe forty-eight hours. He felt he could do nothing because he was surrounded by Muslims of the most violent sort. Then troubling news reports were coming one after another from the Punjab saying that Sikhs were terrorizing Muslims. At any moment, any Muslim could very easily seize delicate Kirpal Kaur’s wrist and lead her to her death.

Her mother was blind. Her father was paralysed. And her brother was staying in Deolali to supervise his newly acquired construction contracts there.

Trilochan was very upset with Niranjan, Kirpal Kaur’s brother. Trilochan read the paper every day and had told Niranjan a full week before about the intensity of the sectarian violence, advising him in clear words, ‘Niranjan, drop this small-time contracting work. We’re passing through a very delicate time. Whatever your obligations are here, you really have to leave. Come to my place. No doubt there’s less space there, but we can find a way to get by.’

But Niranjan hadn’t listened. He had let Trilochan finish his lecture, then smiled through his thick beard and said, ‘Hey, you’re worrying for no reason. I’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing here. This isn’t Amritsar or Lahore. It’s Bombay, Bombay! You’ve been here for, what, four years? I’ve been living here for twelve years, twelve years!’

Who knows what Niranjan took Bombay to be. He must have thought the city kept some charm so that when violence broke out, it would quell itself. Or he thought it was like a mythical fort, upon which no harm could be wreaked.

But in the cool morning breeze, Trilochan could clearly see that the neighbourhood was not safe at all. He was even preparing himself mentally to read in the morning papers that Kirpal Kaur and her parents had already been killed.

Trilochan actually didn’t care about Kirpal Kaur’s paralysed father and blind mother. If they died and Kirpal Kaur escaped, it would suit him just fine. And if Niranjan was killed in Deolali, it would be even better because then no obstacle would remain. At the moment Niranjan sat like a boulder in his path, and so whenever Trilochan got the chance to talk to Kirpal Kaur, instead of calling him Niranjan Singh he would call him ‘Boulder’ Singh.

The morning breeze blew slowly over Trilochan’s close-cropped hair, pleasantly chilling it. But his worries wouldn’t subside. Kirpal Kaur had just entered his life. Unlike her brother, she was very gentle and delicate. She had grown up in the countryside but hadn’t absorbed that hardness, that wear and tear, that manliness, usually found in Sikh country girls who spend their lives moving from one strenuous labour to the next.

She had a slim figure, as if she still hadn’t filled out. She had small breasts, which would have been more pleasant if plumper. In comparison to average Sikh country girls, her skin was fair, more like the colour of raw cotton, and her body was glossy like the texture of mercerized clothes. She was extremely shy.

They were from the same village, but Trilochan hadn’t spent much time there. He had left for high school in the city, where he had begun to live permanently. After high school he had enrolled at college, and while during those years he had gone to his village countless times, he had never heard of Kirpal Kaur, probably because he was always in a hurry to get back to town as soon as possible.

Then his college days had become a distant memory. Ten years had passed since he had last seen his college hostel, and in that time many strange and interesting events had taken place in Trilochan’s life: Burma — Singapore — Hong Kong — then Bombay, where he had been living for four years.

And in these four years, this was the first time he had seen the clear night’s sky. A thousand lights glowed, and the breeze was pleasant and light.

While thinking about Kirpal Kaur, Trilochan thought of Mozelle, a Jewish girl who had lived in the Advani Chambers. Trilochan had fallen hopelessly in love with her, a kind of love he had never experienced in his thirty-five years.

He crossed paths with Mozelle the very day he got an apartment on the second floor of the Advani Chambers through the help of one of his Christian friends. At first she seemed frighteningly crazy. Her bobbed brown hair was in irremediable disarray, and her lipstick, cracked in spots, clung to her lips like clotted blood. She was wearing a loose white gown whose open collar revealed a generous view of her breasts, large and marked with blue veins. Her upper arms, which were bare, were covered with a dusting of extremely fine hairs as though she had just come from a beauty salon where during her haircut these hairs had fallen onto her arms to stick like crushed nuts on sweets. But more than anything, her lips held his attention: they weren’t that thick, but she had smeared burgundy lipstick across them in such a way that they seemed as fat and as red as chunks of buffalo meat.