My Name Is Radha

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  Trilochan stopped near a water tank. He uttered the coarsest swear word he could think of for Mozel and put her out of his mind. The life of the virginal Kirpal Kaur whom he loved very much was in danger at that moment. Her mohalla had become the haunt of militant Muslims and had seen a few incidents already. The problem was that it had been placed under a forty-eight-hour curfew, but if these chawl Muslims got it into their heads, they wouldn’t be deterred by a curfew. They could easily dispatch Kirpal Kaur and her parents without anyone so much as catching a whiff of it.

  Plagued by such thoughts, Trilochan sat down on a section of the huge pipeline. His kes had grown back some already and, he hoped, would reach its former length within a year. His beard was also growing fast, though he didn’t want it to get too bushy. This barber in the Fort area, he trimmed it so deftly that it didn’t appear as though it had been touched.

  He ran his fingers through his long soft hair and sighed. Just as he was thinking of getting up, the jarring clip-clop of wooden clogs struck his eardrums. Who could that be—he wondered? Quite a few Jewish women lived in the building and they all wore clogs indoors. The sound kept getting closer. Suddenly he saw Mozel. She was clad in the familiar long, loose Jewish tunic and yawning loudly near another water tank, so loudly indeed that for a moment he thought the air around her might shatter.

  He stood up, wondering where she had materialized from so suddenly and what she was doing here at this hour.

  She yawned again. Trilochan felt as if his bones were about to crack from the sound.

  Her large breasts heaved inside her baggy tunic. Several flat, round bluish-black veins swirled before Trilochan’s eyes. He coughed loudly. Mozel turned around and saw him. Her reaction was pretty mild. Dragging her clogs, she walked up to him and gawked at his diminutive beard.

  ‘Oh, you’ve become a Sikh again, Triloch?’

  His beard began to irk him.

  She took a step forward, rubbed the back of her hand against his chin and smiled. ‘Perfect, I can clean my navy blue skirt now,’ she said. ‘Too bad, I seem to have left it in Devlali.’

  Trilochan remained silent.

  She pinched his arm and said, ‘Why don’t you say something, Sardar Sahib?’

  He didn’t wish to repeat his earlier mistakes. Still, he looked closely at Mozel’s face in the faint light of the morning. It didn’t show any noticeable change, except that she looked a bit thin. ‘Have you been ill?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head slightly.

  ‘But you look a little frail.’

  ‘I’m dieting.’ She plopped down on the pipe and started to tap the terrace floor with her clogs. ‘So you’re . . . you’re becoming a Sikh again?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Trilochan said, rather audaciously.

  ‘Congratulations!’ She removed one of her clogs and started tapping it on the pipe. ‘Are you in love with some other girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied softly.

  ‘Good for you. Someone from this building?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ she said, slipping the clogs over her toes and standing. ‘One should always think of one’s neighbours first.’

  He remained silent. Mozel touched his beard with all five fingers and asked, ‘Growing this at the girl’s behest?’

  He was feeling quite unnerved, as if the hair in his beard had become tangled while being combed. ‘No,’ he said sharply.

  Her lipstick looked like a piece of shrivelled meat on her mouth. When she smiled an image of the village butcher in his shop—where jhatka meat was sold—slashing a massive chunk of meat in two with a quick movement of his knife floated in his mind.

  She laughed. ‘I swear I’ll marry you if you shave off this beard.’

  Trilochan felt like telling Mozel to go to hell. He was in love with a chaste, pure-hearted girl from his village and would marry only her. What was Mozel compared to her? Just a lewd, promiscuous woman, ugly, rude and insensitive. But he wasn’t mean, so he only said, ‘Mozel, I’ve made up my mind to marry this girl from my village. She’s a very simple, religious girl. I’m growing back my hair for her sake.’

  Although Mozel wasn’t someone who thought long and hard about anything, she did think for a moment. After a while, swivelling around in a half circle on the heels of her clogs, she said, ‘How on earth do you expect her to marry you if she’s so observant of her religion? Wouldn’t she know you once had your hair cut?’

  ‘She doesn’t know about that yet. I started growing my beard soon after you took off for Devlali . . . to get back at you. I met Kirpal Kaur shortly afterward. But I wrap my turban so cleverly that maybe only one in a hundred people would guess that underneath it my kes is clipped. And in any case, it won’t be long now before it grows back to its former length.’ He started combing his fingers through his soft hair.

  She pulled up her tunic and started scratching her fleshy white thigh. ‘That’s wonderful . . . Damn these mosquitoes, they’ve even invaded here. Look, how badly it bit me.’

  Trilochan looked away. Mozel bent down, moistened her fingertip with a dab of saliva, pressed it over the tiny red spot and then, letting her tunic drop back down, stood up again and asked, ‘So when is the wedding?’

  ‘Can’t say . . . nothing is definite,’ he replied and became pensive.

  After a brief silence, sensing his anxiety, she asked in a serious tone, ‘Triloch, is something wrong?’

  He desperately needed someone, even Mozel, to empathize with him, to appreciate his predicament. He told her everything.

  ‘You’re a complete moron.’ She let out a laugh. ‘Go and get her. It’s not that difficult.’

  ‘Difficult! You don’t seem to understand the precariousness of this situation . . . of any situation for that matter. You’re a devil-may-care sort of person—precisely why we couldn’t hit it off together, something that I’ll regret for the rest of my days.’

  She banged the pipe forcefully with her clog in dismay. ‘To hell with your regret. Idiot, you should be thinking about how to get your—what’s her name?—out to safety. Instead, here you are, moaning about our affair. We would never have made it. You’re a silly fool . . . a coward . . . I want a man, a fearless man. But there’s no time for idle talk. Come on, let’s go and get her.’

  She grabbed his arm.

  A befuddled Trilochan asked, ‘Where to?’

  ‘Where she is—where else? I know every last brick of that mohalla. Come on, let’s get going.’

  ‘But listen . . . there’s a curfew.’

  ‘Not for Mozel . . . Now come on.’

  She dragged him towards the door that led to the stairs. She opened it and was about to go down when she stopped and looked at his beard.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘This . . . your beard,’ she said. ‘Well, okay. It isn’t too long. If you walk bareheaded, no one will take you for a Sikh.’

  ‘Bareheaded?’ He was a bit fazed. ‘I’m not going there bareheaded.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, naively.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, pushing a lock of hair to the back of his head. ‘It isn’t right for me to go there without my turban.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Try to understand. She’s never seen me bareheaded. She thinks I have kes; I don’t want her to know my secret.’

  ‘You really are a nut, a first-rate nut. You stupid ass.’ She stomped her clog on the threshold of the door. ‘It’s a question of her life—what’s her name, this Kaur you love?’

  ‘Mozel, she’s a religious kind of person.’ Trilochan tried to impress it upon her. ‘If she saw me without my turban, she would start hating me.’

  Mozel was pissed off. ‘To hell with your love. Tell me, are all Sikhs as stupid as you? Her life is in danger, and what do we have here: you, dead set on wearing your turban and maybe even those underpants that look like shorts.’

  ‘I wear those all the time,’ he said.
/>   ‘Good for you. But now, do some thinking. She lives in a neighbourhood which is crawling with miyan bhais,* each more ferocious than the other. If you walked in with your turban on, they would make mincemeat out of you in no time.’

  He gave a quick answer, ‘I don’t care. If I go there with you, it will be in my turban. I can’t risk my love.’

  Mozel became irritated; her body quivered with anger, so much so that her breasts shook inside the bodice of her tunic. ‘You ass, where will your love be when you’re not here, your—what’s that dumdum’s name—when she’s not there, her family isn’t there? By God, you are a Sikh. A first-rate idiot Sikh. No doubt about it.’

  That was the last straw. ‘Shut up!’ he screamed.

  She burst into laughter and flung her fuzz-covered arms around his neck. Turning a bit she said, ‘All right, darling, as you wish. Go, don your pagri. I’ll wait for you downstairs in the bazaar.’

  She started to go down but Trilochan stopped her. ‘Aren’t you going to change your clothes?’

  She shook her head. ‘This will work fine.’

  And she went down clip-clopping in her clogs. He could hear them all the way down to the lowest steps of the stairs. He gathered his hair at the back of his head and went to his flat to quickly change his clothes. The turban was already furled so he fixed it on his head neatly, locked the door behind him and went downstairs.

  He found Mozel standing on the pavement, her feet wide apart, smoking a cigarette, just like a man. When he neared her, she filled her mouth with the smoke and released it on his face mischievously.

  ‘You’re really very mean,’ he blurted out in anger.

  ‘That’s nothing new.’ She smiled. ‘Haven’t I heard that many times before? She looked at his turban. ‘Nice job! It does give the impression that you have kes.’

  The bazaar was deathly still; there was not a soul anywhere. The only sound was the breeze, which blew softly as if it too was afraid of the curfew. The lights were on, but they gave off a sickly glow. Usually trams started running by this hour and one could see a lot of activity with people moving about in the street. But now it seemed as though no one had ever walked here nor ever would.

  Mozel walked ahead of him, her clogs clicking on the pavement, shattering the pervading silence with their sharp noise. Trilochan damned her silently for not putting on something better than these godforsaken clogs. He felt like telling her to get rid of them and walk barefoot, but he knew she would never listen to him. Better not stir up a fuss.

  He was deathly afraid—even the slightest rustle of a leaf made his heart skip a beat. She, on the other hand, walked along fearlessly, leisurely blowing smoke as if she was taking the air along a garden promenade.

  As the two of them approached an intersection, a policeman hailed them, ‘Hey, you—where are you going?’

  Trilochan cringed, but she walked over to the cop, fluffed up her hair a little, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you! Don’t you recognize me . . . Mozel.’ Then pointing to an alley, ‘That way. My sister lives there. She’s ill. I’m taking the doctor to see her.’

  The cop was still struggling to recognize her when she pulled out a pack of cigarettes from God knows where. ‘Here, have a cigarette.’

  The cop took one. ‘Light?’ She held out the cigarette still smouldering between her lips.

  The cop took a long drag on his cigarette. She winked at him with her right eye and at Trilochan with her left and then clip-clopped towards the alley leading to Kirpal Kaur’s mohalla.

  Trilochan was silent. He could sense the strange joy Mozel was feeling in defying the curfew. She had always liked to play dangerously. Every time they visited the Juhu beach, she would fight her way through the humongous waves, swimming quite far into the sea, and leaving him petrified with the fear that she might drown. When she returned her body was always full of cuts and bruises, but she didn’t seem to care.

  Every now and then Trilochan looked around furtively, afraid that some knife-swinging fellow might materialize from somewhere. Mozel halted. When he caught up with her, she tried to reason with him. ‘Triloch dear, don’t panic. If you do, something awful will surely happen. Believe me, I know.’

  He kept quiet.

  A few steps into the alley leading up to Kirpal Kaur’s mohalla, Mozel stopped abruptly. Up ahead a Marwari’s shop was being pillaged piece by piece. She studied the situation for a second and said calmly, ‘It’s all right. Let’s keep going.’

  They started moving. Suddenly a man with a big platter on his head bumped into Trilochan, knocking the platter to the ground. He looked at Trilochan closely. That he was a Sikh was written all over him. The man quickly reached for the knife tucked into his waistband, but Mozel came tripping over as if dead drunk and pushed him away. ‘Hey, are you crazy? Killing your own brother? I’m going to marry this man.’ She then turned to Trilochan, ‘Karim, pick up the platter and put it back on his head.’

  The man quickly withdrew his hand from his waistband, looked lustily at Mozel and touched her boobs with his elbow. ‘Go on, saali, have fun!’ He moved on, balancing the platter on his head.

  ‘Bastard, what an atrocious thing to do,’ Trilochan mumbled in disgust.

  She touched her breasts. ‘Atrocious—not at all. It works. Let’s go!’

  She started walking briskly. Trilochan tried to keep pace. They came to the end of the alley and entered Kirpal Kaur’s mohalla.

  ‘Which street?’ she asked.

  ‘The third. That building on the corner,’ he said in a hushed voice.

  She turned in that direction. Despite being densely populated, the whole area was enveloped in an eerie silence; not even the sound of a child crying could be heard anywhere.

  When they came closer, they saw signs of some surreptitious movement. A man darted out of one building and ran into another. Minutes later, three men came out of one building, looked around and dashed into the next. Mozel stopped short. She gestured to Trilochan to get into the cover of the darkness and whispered, ‘Triloch, dear, take off your turban.’

  ‘Never!’ he answered resolutely. ‘I won’t, no matter what.’

  She was annoyed. ‘As you wish. But don’t you see what’s going on?’

  Something awful and very mysterious was indeed going on and both of them could sense it. When two men emerged from the building on the right with gunnysacks on their backs, Mozel’s whole body shuddered for a moment. Something resembling a viscous fluid was dripping from the gunnysacks. Mozel chewed her lips nervously. Perhaps she was thinking of some plan. When the two men disappeared at the end of the street she turned to Trilochan. ‘Look, here’s what we’ll do: I’ll run to the corner building and you come after me, fast, like you’re chasing me. Got it? But all this has to be done in a split second.’

  Without waiting for his answer, she took off towards the building, her clogs clip-clopping noisily on the cobblestones. Trilochan ran after her, fast. Within a few seconds they were inside the building, at the foot of the stairs. Trilochan was out of breath, but she seemed fine. ‘Which floor?’ she asked.

  ‘Second,’ he replied, wetting his parched lips.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’ She started to climb up the stairs. Trilochan followed her. The steps were stained with big splotches of blood and gore. He blanched.

  Trilochan walked part way down the corridor on the second floor until he came to a door. He knocked softly while Mozel stood some distance away, by the staircase.

  He tapped on the door again, stuck his face up to it and called, ‘Maha Singhji! Maha Singhji!’

  ‘Who is it?’ someone asked in a feeble voice.

  ‘It’s Trilochan.’

  Slowly the door opened. Trilochan beckoned to Mozel and they went inside. Mozel saw a wisp of a girl standing to the side, petrified, and only had a few moments to look at her closely. The girl had delicate features and a beautifully crafted nose, now red from a cold. Mozel hugged the girl to her enormous bosom and wiped her own runny nose wi
th the hem of her loose-fitting tunic.

  Trilochan’s face flushed.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said to the girl lovingly. ‘Trilochan has come to take you out of here.’

  Kirpal Kaur disengaged herself from Mozel’s arms and looked at Trilochan with frightened eyes.

  ‘Please ask Sardar Sahib to get ready fast, and your mother too . . . quickly.’

  Just then screams and the sound of scuffles erupted on the floor above them.

  ‘They got him!’ A muffled scream escaped from Kirpal Kaur’s throat.

  ‘Who?’ Trilochan asked.

  Before Kirpal Kaur could answer, Mozel grabbed her arm and pushed her into a corner. ‘Good, they got him. Now take off these clothes.’

  Kirpal Kaur barely had time to react before Mozel quickly stripped her of her shirt. A terrified Kirpal Kaur tried to cover her nakedness with her arms. Trilochan turned his face away. Mozel removed her loose tunic and slipped it over Kirpal Kaur’s body. Now she herself was stark naked. Quickly loosening the waist cord, she pulled the girl’s shalwar down and ordered Trilochan, ‘Go! Get her out of here . . . Wait . . .’ She hurriedly untied the girl’s hair, and said, ‘Now go, get out of here as fast as you can, both of you!’

  ‘Come on,’ Trilochan gestured to the girl. Halfway to the door he suddenly stopped, turned around, and looked back at the stark-naked Mozel. The soft fuzz on her arms was standing upright in the cold.

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ she shrieked, obviously irritated.

  ‘What about her parents?’ he said, softly.

  ‘They can go to hell. You take her and get out of here!’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  All of a sudden the stairs rang out with the sound of hastily descending feet. Several men banged on the door so violently it seemed they would knock it down.

  Kirpal Kaur’s blind mother and handicapped father were moaning in the other room.

  Mozel reflected for a moment, jerked her hair slightly, and said to Trilochan, ‘Listen, I can only think of one thing now: I’m going to open the door.’

  Kirpal Kaur stifled a scream in her dry throat. ‘The door!’