‘No problem. That you tamed Sharda is compensation enough for me. Believe me, huzoor, she was getting on my nerves. But now she can’t admonish Shakuntala.’
Karim left. Sharda came in with Munni in her arms. Nazir gave her five rupees, but she declined. Nazir smiled. ‘What’s this, am I not her father? Why are you refusing?’
Sharda took the money very quietly. Whereas earlier she had seemed quite talkative, now she was unusually quiet and reticent. He took Munni in his arms, kissed her. As he was leaving, he said, ‘Well then, Sharda, I have to go now. If not tomorrow, I’ll come the day after.’
Nazir showed up the very next day. Sharda had slaked his sexual appetite so well, and returned his passion with such an unalloyed spirit of giving that he was completely swept away. He paid Karim the amount due, had him bring a bottle, and sat down with Sharda. He asked her to join him in drinking, but she said, ‘I told you that was the first and last time.’
Nazir continued drinking alone. From eleven in the morning till seven in the evening he remained closeted with Sharda. He returned home feeling extremely sated, even more than the day before. Despite her very plain looks and unusual reticence, Sharda had completely overwhelmed his sensual appetites. Time after time he wondered, ‘What kind of a woman is she? Never before in my life have I seen a woman so undemonstrative yet so sensuous.’
He started visiting her every second day. She had no interest in money, nor did she ever mention it to him. Nazir paid sixty rupees to Karim, who paid ten for the room and deducted seventeen as his commission. But Sharda never mentioned it to Nazir.
Two months went by. Nazir had practically exhausted his budget. He also noticed that his association with Sharda was beginning to affect his marital life. Every time he slept with his wife, he felt that something was missing. He wanted Sharda in her place. This wasn’t a good thing. Being conscious of the impropriety, he desperately wished that his affair with Sharda would somehow end. Eventually, he himself brought up the matter with her. ‘Sharda,’ he said, ‘I’m a married man. All my savings are gone. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to give you up, but at the same time I never want to come here again.’
Sharda was quiet for some time after he spoke. Then she broke her silence. ‘Whatever money I’ve saved, you can have it. Just let me keep enough for the train fare back to Jaipur for Shakuntala and me.’
He kissed her and said, ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t seem to get my meaning. If I can’t see you any more it’s because I’ve run out of money. I was wondering how I might continue to see you despite that.’
She didn’t say anything. When he came to the hotel the next day after borrowing money from a friend, Karim told him Sharda was all set to leave for Jaipur. When Nazir sent for her, she didn’t come. Instead she gave Karim a wad of banknotes for him with the message, ‘Please accept this and write down your address for me.’
Nazir gave his address to Karim, but returned the money. Sharda came with Munni in her arms. She greeted him with ‘Aadaab’ and then told him, ‘I’m returning to Jaipur this evening.’
‘But why?’
Her answer was brief: ‘I don’t know.’ Then she left.
Nazir asked Karim to send her back, but she didn’t come. Nazir left with the strange feeling that his body had gone completely cold; she had abandoned him without really answering his question.
She was gone. She really was. Karim was terribly upset. He complained, ‘Nazir Sahib, why did you let her go?’
‘Friend, I’m not some seth loaded with money,’ he replied. ‘How could I possibly spend fifty rupees every other day, plus another ten for the room, thirty for a bottle, and a little extra as well. I’ve drifted into bankruptcy. By God, I’m in debt.’
Karim was quiet.
‘I couldn’t help it . . . I couldn’t have gone on like this.’
‘Nazir Sahib, she loved you.’
Nazir knew nothing about love. He only knew that Sharda was generous in giving of herself physically. She was the perfect answer to his sensual needs. Beyond that he knew next to nothing about her, except that she had once mentioned in passing that her husband had been a sucker for pleasure. He had left her because she couldn’t conceive for two years, but Munni came along within nine months of their parting. She so resembled her father.
Sharda had taken Shakuntala along. She wanted her sister to get married and live a respectable life. She was very fond of her. Karim had tried hard to get Shakuntala started in the oldest profession. There was no dearth of ‘passengers’ willing to pay two hundred rupees for a night, but Sharda wouldn’t allow it and would start quarrelling with Karim. And when Karim taunted her, saying, ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing?’ she would shout back, ‘If you weren’t in the middle, I wouldn’t do it! I would never let Nazir Sahib spend a penny.’
Once, she had asked Nazir for his photograph so he had brought one from home and given it to her. She had taken it with her to Jaipur. She had never spoken to him about her love for him. Whenever he was in bed with her, she remained totally silent. Nazir would try to provoke her into speaking but to no avail. He only knew that she never held back in giving herself to him physically. At least in that she was sincerity personified.
Nazir felt a sense of relief at Sharda’s departure. She had gravely affected his relationship with his wife. If she had stayed much longer, chances were that he would have become entirely indifferent to his wife. However, as time passed, Nazir slowly reverted to his old life and the memory of Sharda’s touch gradually began to fade from his body.
One day, exactly a fortnight after Sharda left, Nazir was at home busy doing some office work. His wife, who usually collected and opened the morning mail, brought an envelope over to him saying, ‘Can’t tell whether this is in Hindi or Gujarati.’
Nazir looked at the letter and put it aside in the tray, unable to make out the language. A short while later his wife called her younger sister Naima. As soon as Naima appeared she handed her the letter. ‘Perhaps you can read it; you know both Hindi and Gujarati. What does it say?’
Naima glanced at it and said, ‘It’s Hindi,’ and started to read: ‘Jaipur . . . Dear Nazir Sahib . . .’ She stopped. Nazir started. Naima read another line, ‘Aadaab. You must have forgotten me. But ever since I’ve come back here, I’ve been thinking of you . . .’ Naima blushed and quickly turned the page over. ‘It is from some Sharda,’ she said.
Nazir rose quickly, snatched the letter from Naima’s hand, and said to his wife, ‘God knows who it is. I’m going out. I’ll have it read and transcribed into Urdu.’ Without letting his wife say anything, he left the house. He went to a friend and had him rewrite the same letter in Hindi on identical paper and with ink of the same colour, keeping the opening sentences intact but altering the rest of the contents so that it read to the effect that Sharda had met him at Bombay Central and was delighted to have met such an illustrious artist, and so on.
That evening, he gave the new letter to his wife and read out the Urdu translation. When she asked who this Sharda was, he said, ‘A while back I went to the station to see off a friend who knew this girl called Sharda. She was standing on the platform. My friend introduced us. She is a painter too.’
The matter ended there. But the very next day he got another letter from her, which he subjected to the same treatment. He immediately sent a telegram to Sharda advising her to stop sending letters and wait for his new address. At the post office he instructed the mailman for his area to hold back any mail from Jaipur and keep it with him. He would come every morning and collect it himself. He received three more letters in this manner. Afterwards Sharda wrote to him in care of a friend of his.
Sharda, never much of a talker, wrote very long letters. While she had never admitted her love to his face, her letters overflowed with her feelings—the same reproaches and complaints, the same pain of separation that is the staple of love letters. Nazir, though, didn’t feel love for her, the kind of love found in romantic s
tories and novels, and didn’t know what to write to her. He commissioned a friend to do this job. His friend would write out a letter in Hindi and read it to him, and he would invariably say, ‘Yes.’
Sharda was dying to come to Bombay but didn’t want to stay at Karim’s. Nazir couldn’t put her up in a house since houses were scarce and hard to find. He thought about sending her to a hotel but hesitated lest this let out their secret. He had his friend write to her to wait a while longer.
Just then communal rioting erupted throughout the country. A strange panic and confusion seized people in the days just prior to Partition. Nazir’s wife wanted to move to Lahore. ‘I’ll stay there for a while,’ she told him. ‘If conditions get better, I’ll come back, otherwise you come over there too.’
He kept her from going for a few days, but when her brother got ready to leave for Lahore both she and her younger sister went along with him. Nazir was left alone. He mentioned casually to Sharda in his next missive that he was all by himself. She telegrammed to say that she was coming. It seemed from the message that she had already left Jaipur. Nazir found himself in a terrible fix, although his body was feeling a blossoming sense of anticipation. He was thirsting for her body and her genuine devotion. He yearned for the days when he had clung to her for hours, from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening to be precise. There was no question of spending money now, or of Karim’s involvement, or even of the rent for the room. He thought, ‘I’ll take my servant into confidence and everything will be fine. A few rupees will be enough to shut his mouth. He won’t breathe a word if my wife does decide to come back.’
He went to the station the next day. The Frontier Mail arrived but, despite a long search, he couldn’t find Sharda. Maybe something had held her up, he concluded, and she’ll probably send another telegram.
The next day he left for office as usual by the morning train. When the train pulled into the Mahalakshmi station, where he usually got off, he spotted Sharda on the platform and cried out loudly, ‘Sharda! Sharda!’
A startled Sharda looked at him. ‘Nazir Sahib.’
‘What—you here?’
She complained, ‘You didn’t come to meet me so I decided to go to your office. There they told me that you weren’t in yet so I was waiting for you here on the platform.’
He thought for a bit and then said to her, ‘Stay here. I’ll go to office, arrange a few days off and come right back.’
He sat her down on a bench and hurried off to his office. He wrote out an application to be absent for a few days, handed it to the office boy, and took Sharda home. Neither spoke a word on the way, but their bodies were communicating perfectly, drawing ever closer to each other.
‘You’d better bathe,’ he said to Sharda after reaching home. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll have some breakfast prepared for you.’
While she was bathing, he told the servant that a friend’s wife was visiting him; he should quickly prepare breakfast. He then took a bottle from the cabinet, poured a double shot, added some water and gulped it down.
He wanted to make love to her in the same spirit as in the hotel.
Sharda emerged from her bath and started on the breakfast. As she ate, she talked to him about a hundred different things. Nazir noticed a change in her. She had been quite taciturn and had preferred silence most of the time, but now she couldn’t resist using every opportunity to impress upon him how madly she was in love with him.
‘What is this “love”?’ Nazir wondered. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if she never mentioned it? Frankly, I liked her silence better. It communicated a hell of a lot more. God knows what’s gotten into her now. When she talks, it seems as if she’s reading out loud from her letters.’
After she was done eating, Nazir mixed a drink and offered it to her. She refused. When he pressed her, she pinched her nose and drank it just to please him. She grimaced and rinsed her mouth. Nazir felt a twinge of regret. ‘Why did she drink it? It would have been infinitely nicer if she had turned it down in spite of his insistence.’ He didn’t exercise his mind about it further. He sent the servant away on an errand, bolted the door, and lay down with her on the bed.
‘You wrote, when will those days come again,’ she started. ‘Well, they’ve come—and not just the days, but the nights as well. Back then there weren’t any nights, only days—those dirty, filthy days at the hotel. Here, everything is so bright, so immaculate. No more paying rent for the hotel room, or tolerating the presence of pesky Karim. Here, it’s just the two of us, our own masters.’
She told him how badly she’d suffered during their separation, how she survived that agonizing period—the same garbage found in romantic books. Complaints and reproaches, sighs, sleepless nights spent counting stars.
Nazir downed another peg and thought: ‘Who would ever count stars. There are so many, how can anyone possibly count them? Absolute nonsense. Rubbish.’
He gathered her in his arms and held her close. The bed was clean, Sharda was clean, he himself was clean, even the atmosphere in the room was clean. Why then were his senses failing to evoke the same sensations he’d felt with her on that steel bed in the dingy hotel room?
Maybe he hadn’t really had enough to drink—he thought. He got up, poured another peg, swallowed it in one mouthful and lay down beside Sharda again. Immediately, she resumed her litany of separation, the same complaints and reproaches. Feeling fed up, Nazir’s body worked itself into a state of suspended numbness. A nagging thought crossed his mind: Sharda’s body had lost its consuming passion, so much so that it blunted his own desire and became useless, no longer able to ignite his passion. Even so, he lay next to her a long time.
When he finally got out of bed he felt a violent desire to grab a taxi and go home to his wife. But he quickly realized that he was, in fact, home and his wife was in Lahore, which rankled him. Insanely, he wished his home were the hotel.
Sharda’s body was still as physically hospitable as before, but the vibes were no longer the same. There was no haggling over price, no giving with one hand and taking with the other, and there was no hotel filth either. The ambience created by all these things was conspicuously absent. Nazir was in his own home, in the bed where his simple-minded wife slept with him. Ever since this nagging thought took hold of his subconscious he felt quite conflicted. Sometimes he thought the whisky wasn’t potent enough, sometimes that Sharda hadn’t shown him proper regard, and sometimes that it would have worked out if she had just chosen to keep her mouth shut. Then he thought about the fact that she was seeing him after a long and painful separation; the poor thing needed some time to vent her feelings after all. She would become normal in a day or two, like her old self.
A fortnight passed but Sharda still didn’t give him the feeling that she was the same girl he’d carried on with in the hotel. Her baby daughter was in Jaipur. Back then she was with Sharda at the hotel, and Nazir would have medicine sent for to treat her head cold, her boils or her throat. None of this was there any more. She was alone now. Nazir had always thought of Sharda and Munni as one.
Once he had embraced Sharda rather tightly and the pressure had caused a few drops of milk to ooze out of her swollen breasts on to his hairy chest. It had given him a pleasurable sensation. How wonderful to be a mother! And this milk! he’d thought. Men are poorer for their inadequacy: They eat and drink and produce nothing, whereas women take nourishment and sustain others through it. What a sublime experience to be able to nourish someone, especially your own child!
Now Munni wasn’t there with Sharda. The poor woman was incomplete. And so were her breasts. They no longer had much milk in them—that white elixir of life. Now she didn’t protest if he pressed her tightly to his chest. She wasn’t the old Sharda any more, though, in fact, she was every bit the same, perhaps even more than the Sharda he had known. With separation, her sensual ardour had grown keener, and now she also loved him with her soul. Still Nazir felt she had lost her earlier allure or whatever it was.
&nb
sp; Such was his conclusion after a fortnight of being close to her continually. Well, fifteen days of absence from the office was long enough. He resumed his work, leaving for the office in the morning and returning home in the evening. Sharda took to serving him like a devoted wife. She bought some wool and knitted him a sweater, made sure he had enough soda for his drinks when he came home, and kept plenty of ice in the thermos. In the morning she laid out his shaving kit on the table and warmed up some water. After he was finished, she cleaned away the shaving paraphernalia and busied herself with housework. She swept the floors herself.
Nazir couldn’t take this any more.
Until then they had been sleeping together. Now he started sleeping alone on the pretext that he needed to do some thinking. Sharda moved to the other bed. But this only added to his turmoil. While she slept soundly, he lay awake wondering what this was all about. This Sharda—why was she here? Yes, he had spent a few quite marvellous days with her at Karim’s hotel, but why had she stuck to him? What was all this leading to? Where would it end? Love and all that—pure nonsense! It was just a minor thing, and even that was no longer there. It was time she returned to Jaipur.
Not long afterwards Nazir was seized by the thought that he was committing a sin. Of course, he had sinned at Karim’s hotel, and umpteen times even before his marriage. But at that time he wasn’t conscious of sinning. Now, increasingly, he felt as though he was cheating on his wife, his simple-minded wife whom he had lied to so often about Sharda’s letters. Sharda seemed even less attractive to him now. He started treating her coldly, but she was never ungracious to him, never complained to him about his coldness, thinking that, after all, artists tended to be quite moody.
A whole month had slipped away since she had arrived in Bombay to be with him. When Nazir counted the days he felt troubled. ‘Can’t believe this woman has been living here for a whole month. What a rotten egg I am . . . writing a letter to my wife every day like a faithful husband! As if all I care about in the world is her . . . as if life is hell without her. Could there be a greater impostor than me? Deceiving her there and Sharda here. Why can’t I tell this woman plainly, “Look, woman, I no longer feel the same way about you?” But do I really no longer feel the same way, or is she no longer the same Sharda?’
Manto and Chughtai Page 6