My Name Is Radha

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  Sardar stopped at the door. The sound of her footsteps made Haibat Khan look up. She greeted him. He didn’t respond. He looked terribly upset. But the woman stopped shaking her legs and spoke directly to Sardar, ‘We’re here; at least prepare something for us to eat.’

  ‘Just say what you would like and it will be made ready,’ Sardar replied hospitably.

  The woman, whose very features and bearing screamed that she was used to being in control, said, ‘Well then, let’s go to the kitchen and get the fire going. You’ve got a big cooking pot, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sardar affirmed, nodding her big head.

  ‘Go and wash it. I’ll be along shortly.’ She got up from the bed and started watching the gramophone.

  ‘I’m afraid there won’t be any meat,’ Sardar apologized.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be there,’ the woman said, placing the stylus on the record. ‘You just do as you’re told. Make sure the fire is blazing hot.’

  Sardar withdrew. The well-dressed woman now addressed Navab with a pleasant smile, ‘Navab, we’ve brought you a pair of gold bracelets.’

  She dug into her vanity bag and produced the bracelets wrapped in a thin, red paper. They looked quite heavy and gorgeous.

  Navab was staring at Haibat Khan who sat next to her, sunk in deep silence. She glanced at the bracelets and asked him in a very soft but frightened voice, ‘Khan, who is she?’

  ‘Who am I?’ said the woman, toying with the bracelets. ‘I’m Haibat’s sister.’ She looked at him and he cringed at her answer. Then she again spoke to Navab, ‘My name is Halakat.’

  Navab was at a loss to understand. She was mortally afraid of the woman’s eyes, which, though definitely beautiful, were dangerously widened. They seemed to be raining down plumes of fire.

  The woman moved forward, grabbed Navab’s wrists and put the bracelets on them. Suddenly she stopped, let go of the girl, and ordered the man, ‘You make yourself scarce, Haibat Khan. I want to doll her up before presenting her to you.’

  Haibat Khan was in a daze. When he didn’t get up, the woman spoke sharply, ‘You heard me, didn’t you? Now go out!’

  He left with his eyes fixed on Navab. He was feeling terribly agitated. He didn’t know where to go or what to do.

  On his way to the veranda, he passed by the makeshift kitchen with a gunnysack curtain and saw that Sardar already had the fire going. He walked out to the dirt road beyond the reeds without speaking to her. His condition was like that of a half-crazy person. Even the slightest sound made him jump.

  A lorry was coming along in the distance. The urge to stop it, hop aboard and disappear gripped him. But when it drew near, it swirled up an atrocious cloud of dust that enveloped him completely. He tried to call out, but couldn’t because of all the dust choking his throat.

  When the dust settled he felt as though he was half dead. He wanted to go back to the house behind the reeds, the house where he had spent many days and nights of indescribable bliss by the side of that coltish girl, but he couldn’t. His feet refused to budge.

  Standing on the side of the dirt road for a long time, he wondered what was going on. His affair with the woman who had accompanied him here went back a long time. Her husband had been a close friend of his and he had first visited her to commiserate with her at her husband’s death. As luck would have it, this turned into an affair. Barely two days after his friend’s death he returned to her house. She ordered him inside as if he was her servant and offered herself to him.

  Haibat Khan was a rank amateur where women were concerned. That Shahina had expressed her feelings for him, never mind her terribly commanding manner, was no small thing for him. No doubt she was extremely wealthy, but it was not her wealth—partly her own and partly her late husband’s—that he cared about. His only interest in her was that she was the first woman in his life. If he had allowed himself to be cowed by her overbearing manner, it was because he was a complete novice.

  Standing by the dirt road, he kept thinking for a long time. Finally, he couldn’t hold back and walked over to the house. There, in the makeshift kitchen, he saw Sardar frying some meat. He continued towards the room with the palang but found the door closed. He rapped softly on it.

  Some moments later the door opened. The first thing he saw was blood all over the floor. He trembled. Next he saw Shahina leaning against the door. ‘There,’ she said to him, ‘I’ve dolled her up for you!’

  With difficulty Haibat Khan moistened his parched throat with saliva and asked, ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Some of her is on the bed, but the best parts are in the kitchen.’

  Haibat Khan didn’t quite understand. All the same, terror engulfed him. He couldn’t get a word out, and remained rooted to the spot by the door. It wasn’t just the gore; he also spotted small pieces of flesh on the floor and . . . and a sharp kitchen knife. It looked as if someone was lying on the bed, covered in a blood-soaked sheet.

  Shahina smiled and said, ‘Shall I lift the sheet and show her to you . . . your bedecked and adorned Navab—why, I made her up myself. But first, you should eat. You must be starving. Sardar is making a delicious meat dish. I carved the meat myself.’

  Haibat Khan began to shake. ‘Shahina!’ he screamed. ‘What have you done?’

  She smiled. ‘Darling, this is not the first time. My husband, may God bless him with Paradise, was as unfaithful as you are. I butchered him and threw pieces of his flesh for the crows and buzzards to feast on. I love you, so, instead of you, I have . . .’

  Without completing the sentence, she pulled the sheet off the heap on the bed. Haibat Khan choked on his scream and fell unconscious.

  When he came to, Shahina was at the steering wheel and they were driving through an unfamiliar terrain.

  Smell

  It was a day during the rainy season—a day just like today. Outside the window, the leaves of the peepul tree stood drenched in the rain. A young woman from the hills, a ghatan, was lying curled up against Randheer on the spring mattress of the teak bed, which had now been moved away from the window a bit.

  Beyond the window, the rain-washed leaves quivered like earrings in the milky darkness of the night, very much like the shivers the girl clinging to him sent coursing through his body.

  Randheer had been reading an English-language newspaper the whole day and had been through not just every news item but practically all the ads as well. Towards evening he stepped out on to the balcony to amuse himself a bit and spotted the girl under a tamarind tree, shielding herself from the downpour. She probably worked in the neighbouring rope factory. He cleared his throat and coughed a couple of times to draw her attention and, after a while, he motioned to her to come up.

  He’d been feeling quite despondent for the past several days. With the war going on, nearly all the Christian girls in Bombay, who could be had at a bargain price, had enlisted with the Auxiliary Force. Some had moved to the Fort area and set up dancing schools, which only gora soldiers were allowed to enter. Randheer was feeling quite miserable. One reason was that the Christian girls were no longer readily available. Another was the colour of his skin—although enviably suave and well mannered, educated, in good health and quite a bit more handsome than most young men, he was barred from practically all the brothels of the Fort area. After all, he was not a gora.

  Before the war came along he had physical relationships with umpteen Christian girls around the Nagpara and Taj Hotel areas. He was far more adept in matters of the flesh than any of the Christian boys with whom those girls conducted fleeting affairs just to appear chic until eventually settling down with some fool or other.

  He had called the ghatan over to get even with Hazel who had recently acquired this air of mannered haughtiness. Hazel lived in the flat below his. Every morning, outfitted in her army uniform, her khaki cap set at a rakish angle over her short-trimmed hair, she marched out of her place with such a swagger as if she expected everyone to roll themselves out as a carpet f
or her to walk on.

  Why in the world did he feel so drawn to Christian girls?—he’d often wondered. Well, yes, they did show off all the seductive assets of their bodies to good effect, spoke unabashedly of their irregular periods and even their former love affairs, and swayed their legs the minute some dance tune or other drifted into their ears—but any woman could just as easily boast of these qualities, couldn’t she?

  When Randheer gestured to the ghatan to come up he had no thought whatsoever of getting her into bed with him. Noticing how thoroughly soaked she was, he feared the poor thing might catch pneumonia, so he said, ‘Take off those wet clothes! You’ll catch a cold.’

  She thought she understood what was implied and blushed. When Randheer took out a fresh white dhoti and handed it to her, she hesitated for a moment and then undid her kashta, its grime made more visible by the rain. She pushed it aside and quickly wrapped the white dhoti around her hips and started to undo her snugly fitting choli, the two ends of which she had secured in a tight knot that had disappeared in the faint but grimy cleavage of her shapely breasts.

  With her worn nails she struggled with the knot for quite a while but couldn’t loosen what the rainwater had tightened so firmly. Eventually she gave up and muttered something to Randheer in Marathi which meant, ‘What shall I do? It just won’t open.’

  Randheer sat down beside her to give it a try but he couldn’t make the knot budge either. In exasperation he grabbed the two ends and tugged on them so vigorously that the knot came undone. His hands jerked from the force of the pull, baring two trembling breasts. For a moment he felt as though, with the dexterity of a master potter, his own hands had shaped a lump of soft, moist clay into a pair of exquisite cups on the girl’s chest.

  Her youthful breasts had the same rawness and allure, the same moist freshness and cooling warmth that oozes from vessels just fashioned by a potter. A strange glow was implicit in the earth tones of those pristine young breasts. A diaphanous layer of a sort of muted luminescence beneath their darkish colouring was giving off that strange glow, which was almost not a glow. The two mounds on her chest looked more like a pair of earthen lamps set afloat on the muddy waters of a pond.

  Yes, it was a day during the rains—a day just like this one. The leaves of the peepul were trembling outside the window. The ghatan’s dripping-wet, two-piece garment was lying on the floor in a messy heap, while she herself was wrapped around Randheer. The warmth of her naked, unwashed body evoked the same sensations in his own that he felt in the hot, filthy hammams of the barbers during blustery winters.

  She had clung to his body all night long, as if their two bodies had melded together. They hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words. There had been no need to. Their breath, their lips, their hands conveyed all that needed to be communicated. With the tenderness of the gentlest breeze, his hands caressed her breasts all through the night—and however light the touch, her tiny nipples, in the middle of their large, dark, coarse areola, responded, sending a wave of tremulous pleasure through her body that never failed to arouse the same in his own.

  Such tremors were not something Randheer hadn’t experienced before. He had, many times, and he was familiar with the pleasure they gave. Hadn’t he, after all, spent many nights with his chest pressed against the soft or firm breasts of some girl or other? And even spent time with such capricious girls that they had no qualms about sharing the kind of intimate stories about their families that are usually kept from strangers? He’d had sexual relations with women who took the initiative and did all the work themselves without encumbering him in any way. But this girl from the hills whom he’d beckoned up—she was something else altogether. So unbelievably different!

  A strange smell wafting from her body flooded his senses all night—a smell at once pleasant and nauseating. It flowed from every part of her body: under her arms, around her breasts, her hair, her belly—it permeated every breath he took. All night long he wondered about this smell: without it creeping into every crevice of his mind, crowding out all his thoughts, new and old, would he have felt as close to this ghatan as he did now? Absolutely not!

  This smell had fused them together for the night. They had taken possession of each other so totally, plunged into each other’s depths so fully that they were carried away into pure human ecstasy—fleeting yet somehow immutable, in motion yet frozen, like a bird soaring so high in the sky’s limitless azure that it appears perfectly still.

  Even though he was familiar with the smell radiating from every pore of the girl’s body, he couldn’t quite describe what it was. It was like the smell of earth that had just been sprinkled with water. But not exactly. It was different somehow. And it didn’t have the artificial aura of lavender or attar. It was something primal and timeless—like the relationship between man and woman.

  Amazingly, though Randheer detested the odour of perspiration and routinely dusted his body with talcum powder and dabbed his underarms with deodorant after every bath, he found himself madly kissing the ghatan’s hairy armpits over and over—yes, over and over—and feeling no revulsion; instead he found it strangely pleasurable. Damp with sweat, her soft, underarm hair was releasing a scent that was very conspicuous and yet completely unfathomable. He felt that he knew it, was familiar with it, and even understood what it signified, but couldn’t explain it to anyone.

  It was a day during the rains—just like today. He was looking out of the same window. The peepul leaves were trembling in the pouring rain, their rustling sound blending into the atmosphere. It was dark outside, but the darkness was suffused with a soft fluorescence, as though a little light had escaped from the stars and descended to the earth with the raindrops . . .

  Yes, it was a day during the rains. His room had a single teakwood bed then; now it had two—the new arrival was placed next to its mate—and a brand new dressing table stood in one corner. It was the same season, the same weather, and a barely discernible light was coming down from the stars along with the raindrops, but now the atmosphere was filled with the overpowering scent of henna.

  One bed was empty. On the other, Randheer lay face down, watching raindrops dancing on the fluttering leaves outside the window, and lying next to him was a fair-complexioned girl who seemed to have fallen asleep after her futile attempts to cover her nakedness. Her red silk shalwar lay bunched up on the empty bed, the tasselled end of its dark red waist-cord dangling down the side. Her other clothes were also on that bed. Her shirt with a golden floral pattern, her bra, underpants and dupatta were all of a deep red colour—a garish, dark red—and saturated with the strong scent of henna.

  Flecks of glitter were scattered in her dark black hair like specks of dust, and glitter, together with a heavy layer of powder and rouge, gave an unbelievably strange colour to her face—pallid, as though all the life had been squeezed out of it. The dye from her bra had bled, leaving reddish stains on her fair chest.

  Her breasts were milky-white with just a hint of blue and her underarms were shaved clean, leaving behind a grey shadow. Randheer glanced at her several times, and each time found himself thinking that he’d just pried open some crate and taken her out—as if she was a consignment of books or china. Her body had marks in several spots just like the marks and scratches left on books and china from packing and shipping.

  When he undid the clasps of her tight-fitting bra Randheer noticed that it had creased her back and the soft flesh of her bosom. And the cord of her shalwar had been done up so tightly it left a mark around her waist. The sharp edges of her heavy, jewel-encrusted necklace had apparently grazed the delicate skin of her bosom in many places, as if unforgiving nails had scratched it.

  Indeed, it was just like that other day. The rain was producing the same sound as it pelted down on the tender leaves of the peepul—the same pitter-patter that had filled his ears that other night long ago. The weather was divine. A cool breeze was blowing softly . . . but it was laden with the cloying scent of henna.

&nbs
p; Of course his hands had roved over the girl’s milky-white bosom for a long time, like the breath of a gentle breeze; he’d felt her body quiver in intermittent waves under his touch, felt the suppressed passions stirring within her. When he pressed his chest to hers every pore of his body heard the notes rising from her body—but where was that call: the call he had sensed in the strong odour emanating from the ghatan’s body, more compelling than the cry of an infant thirsting for milk, the call that had gone beyond the limits of sound and needed no words to convey it.

  Randheer was looking out through the grillwork of the window, somewhere far beyond the trembling leaves of the peepul, into the distance where he could make out an unusual subdued glow enmeshed in the dark grey of the clouds, the same glow he had seen radiate from the breasts of the ghatan, hidden like a secret, but discernible all the same.

  He looked at the inert body of the girl stretched out beside him, as soft and white as flour kneaded with milk and butter, the scent of henna leaping from it now fading. He found it immensely revolting—this exhausted smell in the throes of death, somewhat tangy, oddly tangy, like the sour belches of indigestion. A pathetic, sickly smell!

  He glanced at the girl lying next to him again. The femininity in her being seemed strangely compressed . . . the way white globs float listlessly in colourless liquid when the milk has gone bad. Actually, the smell that flowed from the ghatan so naturally, unbidden and without effort, still pervaded his senses. It was a smell infinitely more subtle and pervasive than the perfume of henna, not at all eager to be smelled, but flowing quietly into him to settle into place.

  In one last attempt, Randheer ran his hand over the girl’s milky-white body but felt no tremor. His new bride, the daughter of a distinguished magistrate, with a bachelor’s degree, the heart-throb of countless boys at her college, failed to rouse her husband’s passion.