The Dog of Tithwal

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  ‘I was sound asleep that night. Suddenly, I felt someone slump into my bed. It was Sen. He was covered in blood. Then Ram Singh rushed into the room holding a knife. By this time, everyone was up. Ranjeet Kumar and Gharib Nawaz ran in and disarmed Ram Singh. Sen’s breathing grew uneven and then stopped. “Is he dead?” Ram Singh asked. I nodded my head. “Please let go of me. I won’t run away,” he said calmly.

  ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we immediately sent for Mummy. She took stock of the situation in her unruffled manner and escorted Ram Singh to the police, where he made a statement confessing to the killing. The next few weeks were awful. Police, courts, lawyers, the works. There was a trial and the court acquitted Ram Singh.

  ‘He had made the same statement under oath that he had made to the police. Mummy had said to him, “Son, speak the truth. Tell them what happened.” Ram Singh had spoken the truth. He had told the court that Sen had promised to get him to sing for films, provided he would sleep with him. He had let himself be persuaded, but was always troubled by what he was doing. One day he had told Sen that if he tried to force him to perform the unnatural act again, he would kill him. And that was exactly what had happened that night. Sen had tried to force him and Ram Singh had stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife.’

  Chadda had written, ‘In this age of untruth, the triumph of truth is astonishing.’

  A party had been organized to celebrate Ram Singh’s acquittal and when it was over Mummy had suggested that he should return to his parents in Lahore. Gharib Nawaz had bought him a ticket and Shireen had prepared food for him to take on the long journey. Everyone had gone to the station to see him off.

  A week or so after this, I was asked by the studio to come to Poona to complete an assignment. Nothing had changed at Saeeda Cottage. It was still the way it always was. When I arrived, a minor party was in progress to celebrate the birth of another son to Shireen. Venkutrey had got hold of two tins of Glaxo baby food from somewhere, not an easy thing at the time. Suggestions were also being invited on a name for the child.

  Everybody was trying to look cheerful, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something the matter with Chadda, Gharib Nawaz and Ranjeet Kumar. A vague sadness hung in the air. Was it the weather which was beginning to turn chilly or was it Sen’s murder? I could not decide.

  For one week I was shut up in Harish’s house because I was in a hurry to complete my assignment. I was a bit surprised that Chadda hadn’t come to see me all this time, nor Gharib Nawaz for that matter.

  Then one afternoon Chadda burst into the house. ‘This rubbish you’ve been writing, have you been paid something for it yet?’ he asked. I told him I had received two thousand rupees only the other day and the money was in my jacket. He took out four hundred rupees and rushed out, pausing just long enough to tell me that there was a party at Mummy’s house that evening and I was expected.

  When I arrived, it was already in full swing. Ranjeet and Venkutrey were dancing with Polly and Thelma. Kitty was dancing with Elma, and Chadda was jumping around like a rabbit with Mummy in his arms. Everyone was quite drunk. My entrance was greeted with guffaws and cheers. Mummy, who had always maintained a certain formality with me, took hold of my hand and said, ‘Kiss me, dear.’

  ‘That’s enough dancing,’ Chadda announced above the din. ‘I want to do some serious drinking now. Open a new bottle, my Prince of Scotland.’ The prince, who was very drunk, appeared with a bottle and dropped it on the floor. ‘It is only a bottle, Mummy. What about broken hearts?’ Chadda said before she could scold the servant.

  A chill fell over the party. A new bottle was duly produced. Chadda poured everyone a huge drink. Then he began to make a speech: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have among us this evening this man called Manto. He thinks he’s great story writer, but I think that’s rubbish. He claims that he can fathom the depths of the human soul. That too is a lot of rubbish. This world is full of rubbish. I met someone yesterday after ten years and he assured me that we had met only the other week. That too is rubbish. That man was from Hyderabad. I pronounce a million curses on the Nizam of Hyderabad who has tons of gold but no Mummy.’

  Someone shouted, ‘Manto zindabad,’ but Chadda continued with his speech. ‘This is a conspiracy hatched by Manto, otherwise my instructions were clear. We should have greeted him with catcalls. I have been betrayed. But let me talk of that evening when I behaved like a beast with Mummy because of that girl with hair the colour of snake scales. Who did I think I was? Don Juan?

  ‘Be that as it may, but it could have been done. With one kiss, I could have sucked in all her virginity with these big fat lips of mine. She was very young, very weak…what’s the word, Manto?…yes, very unformed. After a night of love, she would either have carried the guilt with her the rest of her life, or she would have completely forgotten about it the next morning.

  ‘I am glad Mummy threw me out that night. Ladies and gentlemen, now I end my speech. I’ve already talked lot of rubbish. Actually, I was planning a longer speech, but I can’t speak any longer. I’m going to get myself a drink.’

  Nobody spoke. It occurred to me that he had been heard in complete silence. Mummy also looked a bit lost. Chadda sat there nursing his drink. He was quiet. His speech seemed to have drained him out. ‘What’s with you?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know – tonight the whisky is not battering in the buttocks of my brain as it always does,’ he answered philosophically.

  The clock struck two. Chadda, who in the meanwhile had begun a dance with Kitty, pushed her aside and said to Venkutrey, ‘Sing us something, but I warn you, none of your classical mumbo-jumbo.’

  Venkutrey sang a couple of songs, set to the melancholy evening raga Malkauns. The atmosphere grew even sadder.

  Gharib Nawaz was so moved that his eyes became wet. ‘These Hyderabadis have weak eye-bladders. You never know when they might start dripping,’ Chadda observed. Gharib Nawaz wiped his eyes and took Elma on to the floor. Venkutrey put a record on. Chadda picked up Mummy and began to bounce around.

  At four o’clock, Chadda suddenly said, ‘That’s it.’ He picked up a bottle from the table, put it to his mouth and drank what was left of it. ‘Let’s go, Manto.’

  When I tried to say goodbye to Mummy, he pulled me away. ‘There are going to be no goodbyes tonight.’

  When we were outside, I thought I heard Venkutrey crying. I wanted to go back, but Chadda stopped me. ‘He too has a faulty eye-bladder.’

  Saeeda Cottage was only a few minutes’ walk. We did not speak. Before going to bed, I tried to ask Chadda about the strange party, but he said he was sleepy.

  When I got up the next morning, I found Gharib Nawaz standing outside the garage wiping his eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.

  ‘Mummy’s gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Chadda was still in bed, but it seemed he hadn’t slept at all. He smiled when I asked him if it was true. ‘Yes, she’s gone. Had to leave Poona by the morning train.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the authorities did not approve of her ways. Her parties were considered objectionable, outside the limits of the law. The police tried to blackmail her. They offered to leave her alone if she would do their dirty work for them. They wanted to use her as a procuress, an agent. She refused. Then they dug up an old case they had registered against her. They had her charged with moral turpitude and running a house of ill repute and they obtained court orders expelling her from Poona.

  ‘If she was a procuress, a madam, and her presence was bad for society’s health, then she should have been done away with altogether. Why, if she was a heap of filth, was she removed from Poona and ordered to be dumped elsewhere?’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘Manto, with her a purity has vanished from our lives. Do you remember that awful
night? She cleansed me of my lust and meanness. I am sorry she’s gone, but I shouldn’t be sorry. She has only left Poona. She will go elsewhere and meet more young men like me and she will cleanse their souls and make them whole. I hereby bestow my Mummy on them.

  ‘Now, let’s go and look for Gharib Nawaz. He must have cried himself hoarse. As I told you, these Hyderabadis have weak eye-bladders. You never know when they might start dripping.’

  I looked at Chadda. Tears were floating in his eyes like corpses in a river.

  Translated by Khalid Hasan

  Yazeed

  THE TUMULTUOUS EVENTS of 1947 came and flitted away like a few bad days appearing unexpectedly in an otherwise pleasant season.

  Karim Dad hadn’t simply attributed the upheavals to Providence, sat back complacently and done nothing; rather, he had faced the storm valiantly, like a man. He sparred with the enemy forces quite a few times, not so much to bring them to their knees, but only to offer vigorous resistance. He knew the enemy was far too powerful, but he also knew that to lay down his arms would be an insult not just to himself but to every man. This, at any rate, was how others thought of him, those who had seen him fighting with those brutes and willingly putting his life in harm’s way. But if you asked Karim Dad whether he considered putting down his weapons before the enemy an insult, he would think long and hard, as though pondering a difficult mathematical question.

  He didn’t know how to add or subtract, any more than how to multiply or divide. After the riots of ’47 were over, people sat down to take stock of the losses, both human and material. Karim Dad didn’t involve himself in this computation. All he knew was that the war had claimed the life of his father Rahim Dad, whose corpse he had carried on his shoulders and laid to rest in the grave he had dug by a well with his own hands.

  There had been more incidents like this in the village. Hundreds of young and old men had been butchered; several girls abducted, some brutally raped. Those who had suffered these wounds were crying as much over their own ill fate as over the exceptional ruthlessness of the enemy. But not a single tear was ever spotted in Karim Dad’s eyes. He was proud of his father’s gallantry. Exhausted from fighting against a pack of rioters armed with dozens of lances and hatchets, the old man’s strength had given out and he had fallen. When the news of his death was brought to Karim Dad, he merely addressed his father’s spirit thus: ‘Look, yaar, this isn’t a nice thing to do. Didn’t I tell you to carry some weapon on you at all times!’

  He then dug a pit by the well and interred his father’s dead body. Standing by the grave, he uttered a few words by way of the Fatiha: ‘Only God knows best about sins and recompense. But let me just wish you Paradise!’

  The rioters had dispatched Rahim Dad – who had been not just a father but also a great friend to Karim Dad – with such fiendish cruelty, that any time people recalled his savage murder, they never failed to hurl obscenities at the murderers. At such times Karim Dad never spoke a word. Several of his flourishing grain fields had been completely laid to waste and two houses reduced to ashes, yet Karim Dad didn’t spare his losses a second thought. Now and then, though, one did hear him utter this much: ‘Whatever happened was due to our own failings.’ When asked what those failings were, he chose to remain silent.

  While the village folks were still lamenting over their dead, Karim Dad got himself married to the same blossoming Jaina he’d had his eyes on for some time. Jaina was grieving. Her brother, a strapping youth, had been killed in the riots. He had been the only person left whom she could count on for support since the death of their parents. That she also loved Karim Dad dearly was beyond doubt, but the pain of losing her brother had cast a pall over that love somewhat. Her eyes, lively and smiling before, now never seemed free of tears.

  Karim Dad couldn’t stand wailing and crying at all. The sight of a doleful Jaina annoyed him, but he chose not to mention it to her, thinking that, tender-hearted woman that she was, his words might hurt her feelings even more. However, one day he couldn’t hold back any more. He caught up with her in the field and gave her a piece of his mind. ‘Look, it’s been a whole year since the dead were shrouded and buried. Even they are probably tired of all this keening and wailing over them. Let go of it, my dear. Who knows how many more deaths we’re fated to see in this life. Save some tears for the future.’

  Jaina took umbrage at his words, but what could she do? She was deeply in love with the man. During long bouts of solitude, she tried her best to conjure up some meaning in his words and, eventually, convinced herself that what he had said wasn’t all that unreasonable after all.

  The elders opposed their marriage when the proposal was run past them; however, their opposition turned out to be quite weak. Excessive mourning had sapped their energies so completely that they couldn’t even hold on to oppositions that had every chance of success. And so Karim Dad got married. With the customary wedding fanfare and music, and after every ceremony was duly performed, Karim Dad brought his beloved Jaina home as his bride.

  Since the rioting a year ago, the whole village had assumed something of the depressing air of a cemetery. Thus, when Karim Dad’s marriage arrangements got under way with a lot of hullabaloo and excitement, a vague feeling of trepidation swept over some people. They cringed and felt as though it wasn’t Karim Dad’s but some malicious spirit’s wedding procession that was unfolding before them. Some friends informed Karim Dad about this reaction and he laughed his head off. One day, jokingly, he mentioned it to his new bride, who instantly began quaking with alarm.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Jaina, taking hold of her wrist with its beautiful, bright bracelet, ‘you can’t escape. You’re stuck with this ghost for the rest of your life. Even Rahman Sain’s hocus-pocus can’t rid you of him.’

  Jaina stuck her hennaed finger between her teeth, blushed a little, and got out only this much, ‘Kaimay, nothing seems to frighten you!’

  Karim Dad ran the tip of his tongue over his reddish-brown moustache and smiled broadly. ‘What is there to frighten anyone? Fear doesn’t exist.’

  By now, Jaina’s grief had subsided quite a bit. She was soon to be a mother. To see her in the fullness of her blossoming youth made Karim Dad enormously happy. He would say to her, ‘You were never so stunningly beautiful before, Jaina, I swear. If all this beauty is only for the sake of the baby who’s coming, I’ll have to fight with that little rascal, I’m telling you.’

  Jaina would blush and quickly cover her big, bulging belly with her chador, which made him laugh and tease her even more. ‘Why are you hiding that thief? Don’t I know that all this dolling up is just for that little swine?’

  At that Jaina would become serious. ‘Why are you swearing at the baby? After all it’s your own.’

  ‘And Karim Dad is the biggest swine of them all,’ he would say, his reddish-brown moustache quivering from the rumble of his laughter.

  The ‘Little’ Eid came along, followed a couple of months later by the ‘Big’ Eid. Karim Dad celebrated both with equal fanfare and great fuss. The rioters had attacked his village twelve days before the Big Eid and his father Rahim Dad and Jaina’s brother Fazl Ilahi had both been murdered in that attack. Jaina cried a lot as she remembered their killings but, realizing how Karim Dad was predisposed to put any tragedy behind him, she couldn’t grieve as much as her own temperament called for.

  Sometimes when she thought about it, she wondered how she could have begun to forget the most tragic incident of her life so imperceptibly. She had absolutely no memory of how her parents had died. Fazl Ilahi was six years older than her. He wasn’t just a brother; he had been both father and mother to her. She was absolutely sure that it was for her sake alone that he hadn’t married. And it was to save her honour that he had lost his life fighting the enemy – a fact known to the whole village. His death was truly the greatest catastrophe of her life, a veritable hell suddenly let loose upon her just twe
lve days before the Big Eid. Whenever she thought about that calamity now, the realization that she was drifting further away from its effects never failed to surprise her.

  As the month of Muharram approached, for the first time Jaina expressed her desire to Karim Dad. She was very interested in seeing the decorated horse and the taziyas of Muharram. She had heard a lot about them from her girlfriends. She asked Karim Dad, ‘If I’m feeling up to it, will you take me to see the Muharram horse?’

  ‘I will, even if you aren’t feeling well, and the swine too,’ he replied with a smile.

  She hated the word ‘swine’, took immediate offence to it and often lost her cool. But it was uttered with such endearing honesty that her bitterness was instantly transformed into an indescribable sweetness and she would begin to see how the word ‘swine’ could be filled with genuine affection and love.

  The rumour of an imminent war between India and Pakistan had been circulating for quite some time. Actually, almost as soon as Pakistan was established it had been taken for granted that there would definitely be a war, but when was something the inhabitants of the village couldn’t say with any certainty. If anyone asked Karim Dad about it, his short answer invariably was, ‘It will be when it will be. What’s the point of losing sleep over it?’

  But whenever Jaina heard about that dreaded event, it knocked the living daylights out of her. She was a peace-loving woman by nature. Even ordinary squabbles made her terribly nervous. Besides, during the previous mayhem she’d been witness to a great deal of carnage and bloodshed. Her own brother, Fazl Ilahi, had been mowed down in one such riot. She would cringe with an unknown fear and ask, ‘Kaimay, what will it be?’

  Karim Dad would smile. ‘How would I know? Maybe a boy, maybe a girl.’

  Such a cheerful reply made her feel even more helpless. Soon she would forget all about the dreaded war, focusing all her attention on whatever else Karim Dad was saying. He was a strong, fearless man who loved Jaina very much. After buying himself a rifle, he had quickly become an expert marksman. These things kept her spirits up. But now and then, when she was by the waterfront and heard from a terrified girlfriend of the rumours about war being spread by the village folk, she would instantly go into a daze.