Saadat Manto: Bombay Stories

KHUSHIYA was thinking.

He bought some black tobacco paan and sat down in his favourite place near the paan seller’s stall. The raised stone platform there became his domain at eight thirty every night when the auto supply shop closed, clearing away its clutter of tyres and miscellaneous parts.

He was slowly chewing his paan and thinking. The paan mixed with his saliva to form a thick juice that oozed between his teeth and squirted throughout his mouth. He felt as though his teeth were grinding up his thoughts, which the paan juice then dissolved, and maybe this was why he was reluctant to spit.

Khushiya was swishing the paan juice around inside his mouth and thinking about what had happened to him just half an hour ago.

He had gone to the fifth alley in Khetwadi where Kanta, the new girl from Mangalore, lived in the corner. Khushiya had heard she was moving and so had gone to find out if this was true.

He knocked on Kanta’s door, and a woman’s voice called out from inside, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Khushiya!’

A few minutes later the door was pushed open from inside, and Khushiya entered. When Kanta closed the door behind him Khushiya turned to look, and yet he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Kanta was completely naked; I mean she had a towel wrapped around her but it wasn’t hiding much — everything that she had to hide was on full display.

‘So, what brings you here, Khushiya?’ Kanta asked. ‘I was just about to wash up. Sit down, sit down. You should’ve told the tea boy to bring up some tea. After all — you know, right? — that worthless Rama ran away.’

Khushiya was dumbfounded — he had never been so unexpectedly confronted with a naked woman. He was so flustered he couldn’t figure out what to say, and he wanted to avert his eyes from the naked spectacle in front of him.

He rushed for words, ‘Go, go on and wash up.’ Then he regained his composure. ‘But why did you open the door when you were naked? You should’ve told me. I would’ve come back. But go, go wash up.’

Kanta smiled. ‘When you said it was you, I thought, what’s the big deal? It’s only my Khushiya, I’ll let him in …’

Sitting on the platform, Khushiya could still see Kanta’s smile. He could sense her naked body standing in front of him, and he felt as though it was melting right into his soul.

She had a beautiful body. It was the first time Khushiya realized that a whore, too, could be attractive. This surprised him, but he was even more amazed to see that Kanta was not at all ashamed of her nakedness. Why was that?

Kanta had already answered this. She had said, ‘When you said it was you, I thought, what’s the big deal? It’s only my Khushiya, I’ll let him in.’

What’s the big deal?

Khushiya was Kanta’s pimp. From that point of view, she was his, but that was no reason to be stark naked in front of him. That was something special. Khushiya tried to imagine what Kanta must have meant.

In his mind’s eye, he was still looking at Kanta’s naked body. It was as tight as hide stretched taut across a drumhead. He had looked her up and down, and yet she hadn’t cared at all. Still in shock, he had let his eyes rove over her sexy body, but she didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. She stood there as though bereft of any feeling, like a wanton stone statue!

Come on now — there was a man standing in front of her, a man who like all men are always undressing women, and after that imagining God knows what else! But she hadn’t minded a bit, and her expression had betrayed no shame. She should have been a little ashamed! She should have blushed a little! Granted she was a whore, but even whores don’t behave like that.

He had been a pimp for ten years and had learned all his prostitutes’ secrets. He knew that the girl living at the end of Pydhoni shared her place with a young man she pretended was her brother, and that she had a broken record player on which she played for him the song ‘Why, You Fool, Are You Always Falling in Love’ from her Untouchable Girl record. He also knew that this girl was deeply in love with Ashok Kumar, and that countless hustlers had scammed her for sex by pretending to set up meetings between her and the actor. He also knew that the Punjabi girl who lived in Dawar wore a coat and pants only because one of her boyfriends had told her that her legs looked just like those of the actress in Morocco . She had seen this film many times, and when her friend told her that Marlene Dietrich wore pants to show off her beautiful legs (for which she had a large insurance policy), then she began to wear pants too, even though she could hardly fit her butt into them. He also knew the South Indian girl from Mazagaon liked to sleep with cute college boys because she was fixated on having a beautiful child despite the fact that this was impossible because she was infertile. And he knew that the skin of the black Madrasi woman who always wore diamond earrings would never get lighter and that she was wasting her money on whitening creams.

He knew everything about his girls, but he never suspected that one day Kanta Kumari (whose real name was so difficult, he could never remember it) would be standing in front of him naked. It was his life’s greatest surprise.

Khushiya continued to think, and the paan juice had built up in his mouth so much so that he was having problems chewing the small bits of betel nut that passed between his teeth.

Drops of sweat appeared on his small forehead, like the drops of water that emerge from paneer when you gently squeeze the soft mass through cheesecloth. His masculine dignity had been affronted, and when he remembered Kanta’s naked body, he felt humiliated.

Suddenly he said to himself, ‘I’ve been disgraced! I mean a girl stands in front of you stark naked and says, “What’s the big deal? It’s just my Khushiya?” Hell, she treated me like I wasn’t the real Khushiya but the cat that’s always dozing off on her bed, right?’

Now he was sure he’d been insulted. He realized that he implicitly expected women, whores included, to take him for a man and so to dress modestly in his presence, as had been the tradition for so long. He had gone to Kanta’s room to find out when and where she was moving and beyond that hadn’t thought about what she would be doing when he got there. If he had tried, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with much more than a few possibilities:

1) She would be lying on her bed with a cloth strip tied around her forehead to combat a headache.

2) She would be picking fleas out of her cat’s fur.

3) She would be removing armpit hair by applying that foul-smelling powder he couldn’t stand.

4) She would be on her bed with cards spread out, busy playing Patience.

But that was the limit of his imagination. She didn’t live with anyone, and so he hadn’t expected to find anyone else there. He had gone there on business, and suddenly Kanta — I mean the clothes-wearing Kanta whom he always saw dressed for the day — appeared before him completely naked, or just about. Faced with this spectacle, Khushiya felt as though he had a banana peel in his hand while the banana itself had fallen to the floor. No, he felt something else: he felt as though he himself had been stripped naked.

If it had come to just this, Khushiya could have gotten over his surprise — he could have thought of some excuse or another. But the problem was the slut had smiled and said, ‘When you said it was Khushiya, I thought, what’s the big deal? It’s only my Khushiya, I’ll let him in.’ This was still eating him up. ‘The bitch was smiling!’ he kept muttering to himself. Her smile had seemed as naked as her body, but what a smile! He felt as though he had looked into her body — as though a carpenter had scraped off dissimulation and he had gazed into her being.