Saadat Manto - Bombay Stories

Mozelle blindly raced up the staircase. She was still wearing her wooden sandals. The men regained their composure and set off after them. Mozelle slipped. She fell down the staircase, hitting each hard stair and ramming against the iron railing. She landed in the corridor below.

Trilochan immediately came back down the stairs. He bent down and saw blood running from her nose, mouth, and ears. The men gathered around them, but none of them asked what had happened. Everyone was quiet, as they looked at Mozelle’s pale, naked body, cut up everywhere.

Trilochan shook her arm. ‘Mozelle! Mozelle!’

Mozelle opened her big Jewish eyes, red with blood, and smiled.

Trilochan took off his turban, unwrapped it, and covered her naked body. Mozelle smiled and winked at Trilochan as blood bubbled from her mouth.

‘Go, find out whether my underwear is there, I mean …’

Trilochan understood, but he didn’t want to get up. This angered Mozelle, and she said, ‘You’re a real Sikh! Go and see.’

Trilochan got up and returned to Kirpal Kaur’s apartment. Through her dimming eyes, Mozelle looked at the crowd and said, ‘He’s a Muslim, but because he’s so tough, I call him a Sikh.’

Trilochan came back, and his look told Mozelle that Kirpal Kaur had already left. Mozelle sighed in relief, and a tide of blood gushed from her mouth.

‘Oh, damn it!’ she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. Then she turned to Trilochan. ‘All right, darling — bye bye …’

Trilochan wanted to say something, but the words stuck in his throat.

Mozelle removed Trilochan’s turban. ‘Take it away — this religion of yours,’ she said, and her arm fell dead across her powerful chest.

IF you walked from Faras Road down what people called White Alley, you would find some restaurants at its end. Restaurants are everywhere in Bombay, but these ones were special because the area is known for prostitutes.

Times have changed. It was almost twenty years ago that I used to frequent those restaurants. If you went past White Alley, you would come to the Playhouse where movies were shown all day. Lively crowds swarmed outside its four theatres, and men rounded up customers by ringing bells in an ear-splitting fashion and yelling, ‘Come in — come in — two annas — a first-class film — two annas!’ Sometimes these bell ringers would even forcibly push people inside.

There were masseurs, too, who knocked their customers’ heads around with what they claimed was a very scientific method. Getting a massage is all fine and well, but I don’t understand why people in Bombay are so enamoured of it, why all day and night they feel the need for an oil massage. If you want, you can easily find a masseur at even three o’clock in the morning, and all night you can be sure to hear someone calling out from this or that street corner, ‘Pi — pi — pi’ , which is Bombay shorthand for ‘massage’.

Faras Road was really a road’s name but it was used for the entire neighbourhood where prostitutes lived. It was a large area. There were many alleys with their own names, and yet for the sake of convenience they were all called Faras Road or White Alley. There were hundreds of shops with cage façades in which women of all different ages and complexions sold themselves. They were available from eight annas to a hundred rupees and were of every sort — Jewish, Punjabi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Anglo-Indian, French, Chinese, Japanese; you could get whatever sort you wanted. Just don’t ask me what they were like. All I know is that somehow they always had customers.

A lot of Chinese lived in the neighbourhood, and though I don’t know what they all did for business some had restaurants with signboards covered in insect-like up-and-down script advertising God knows what. In fact all different sorts of people lived and did business there. There was one alley called Arab Sen although the people who lived there called it Arab Alley, and probably between twenty and twenty-five Arabs lived there working as pearl merchants. The rest of the alley’s residents were Punjabis or were from Rampur.

I rented a room there for nine and a half rupees a month. The room got no natural light, and so I always had to keep a lamp on.

If you haven’t been to Bombay, you might not believe that no one takes any interest in anyone else. But the truth is that if you are busy dying in your room, no one will interfere. Even if one of your neighbours is murdered, you can be assured you won’t hear about it. In all of Arab Alley there was only one man who took an interest in everyone else, and that was Mammad Bhai.

Mammad Bhai was from Rampur. There wasn’t anyone better in the martial arts — fighting with clubs, wooden sticks, or swords. I often overheard his name mentioned in the restaurants of Arab Alley, but for the longest time I never got to meet him.

In those days I left my room at daybreak and didn’t get back till very late, but I very much wanted to meet him. In the neighbourhood, he was a legend and there were countless stories about him. People said that when billy-club-carrying gangs, twenty or twenty-five strong, jumped him, he would dispose of the assailants in under a minute, then walk away without even one hair out of place. There were also stories about his unsurpassed skill with a knife. He was the quickest in all of Bombay, so quick in fact that his victim wouldn’t realize he had just been stabbed but would walk ahead for a hundred steps before suddenly collapsing. People knew this could be the work of only Mammad Bhai.

I wasn’t interested in witnessing his knife-wielding expertise so much, but I had heard so many stories about him that I couldn’t help but want to see him up close. His presence overshadowed the entire neighbourhood. He was a gangster, and yet people said he was a resolute bachelor and never looked at anyone’s wife or daughter. He sympathized with the poor and often gave a little money to the destitute prostitutes not just in Arab Alley but in all the alleys in the vicinity. Nonetheless, he never visited these women himself but sent a young apprentice to bring back whatever news they had.

I don’t know how he made a living. He ate well and wore nice clothes, and he owned a small horse-drawn cart to which he yoked a strong pony. He drove the cart himself and was accompanied by two or three loyal apprentices. He would take the cart out for a tour of Bhindi Bazaar or go to a saint’s shrine and then return to Arab Alley and go to an Iranian restaurant where he would sit with his apprentices and energetically discuss hand-to-hand combat.

A Marwari Muslim dancer lived next to me, and he told me hundreds of stories about Mammad Bhai, including how he was worth a 100,000 rupees. One time this man got cholera, and when Mammad Bhai found out, he called all the doctors of Arab Alley into his room and said, ‘Look, if anything happens to Ashiq Husain, I’m going to kill every one of you.’ In a reverential manner, Ashiq Husain told me, ‘Manto Sahib, Mammad Bhai is an angel! An angel! When he threatened the doctors, they shook in fear. They looked after me so well that I was better in two days!’

In the dives of Arab Alley, I heard more stories about Mammad Bhai. One young man — an aspiring martial artist and so probably one of Mammad Bhai’s apprentices — told me Mammad Bhai kept a dagger tucked in his waistband that was so sharp he could shave with it. He kept it without a scabbard, the knife’s cold metal pressed against his belly, and the blade was so sharp that if he bent just a little wrong he would become old news fast.

You can imagine how each day my desire to meet him only increased. I don’t remember what exactly he looked like, but after so many years I can still recall anticipating that he must be enormous, the kind of man Hercules bicycles would use as a model in their advertising.