I hate the police, for they’ve always accorded me the treatment reserved only for the meanest criminals.
Recently, when the Karachi periodical Payām-e Mashriq reprinted without permission my short story ‘Ūpar, Nīche, aur Darmiyān’ from the Lahore-based newspaper Ehsān, the Karachi administration lost no time in issuing a warrant for my arrest.
Two sub-inspectors of police, along with four constables, came to my house and surrounded it. I was not at home. My wife told them so, adding that, if they wanted, she could send for me. But they insisted that I was hiding inside and she was lying.
Actually, at the time I was at Chaudhry Nazeer Ahmad’s publishing establishment Nayā Idāra, which also doubled as the office of the literary journal Saverā, writing a short story. I had barely written a dozen lines or so when Chaudhry Nazeer Ahmad’s brother Chaudhry Rashid Ahmad, the owner of the Maktaba-e Jadīd publishing house, walked in. After a few minutes silence he asked, ‘What are you writing?’
‘A short story . . . a rather long one.’
‘I’ve come to give you some very bad news,’ he said in a terribly anxious tone.
You can well imagine how I reacted to that. What could the bad news be? I wondered for a few moments. Many possibilities came to mind. I wavered among them but couldn’t figure it out. Finally I asked Chaudhry Rashid, ‘Brother, what’s the matter?’
‘The police have surrounded your house. They’re adamant that you’re hiding inside and they’re trying to break in.’
Hearing this, Ahmad Rahi and Hameed Akhtar, who were sitting beside me, became very upset. They decided to accompany me. We hopped into a tonga and headed for my home. When we got there, we saw the police standing outside the door of my flat. My sister’s son (Hamid Jalal) and my brother-in-law (Zaheeruddin) were standing by their cars, busily talking to the policemen. ‘You’re welcome to search the house if you want, but believe us, Manto is not inside.’
Just then Ahmad Rahi, Hameed Akhtar and I arrived. We had already instructed Chaudhry Rashid Sahib to phone the newspapers so that they would publish an account of whatever happened to me in the next day’s issue.
We also saw Abdullah Malik engrossed in talking to the police officers outside the door. Abdullah Malik is a communist and whatever he writes is unabashedly and quite overtly ‘red’, but, strangely, I’ve never spotted a trace of true ‘redness’ in him.
So there he was, talking to the sub-inspectors and the constables, who had threatened my wife that if she didn’t let them in to search the house they would attempt to force their way in.
I’m sure my arrival must have caused them sufficient embarrassment. I invited them politely to step inside the house, which they graciously accepted. They were a pair of pretty rude and headstrong police officers. I asked them the purpose of their visit. They said they had come from Karachi and had a warrant to search my house. I was hugely surprised. I am not someone who deals secretly in contraband, or sells opium or illegal wines and liquors, not even a pinch of cocaine. Why did they want to search my house? In any case, the first question they asked me was: Where is your library?
What could I have told them? Here in Pakistan my entire ‘library’ consisted of only a few books, of which three were dictionaries. So I said, ‘Whatever books I owned were left behind in Bombay. If you’re looking for a particular magazine or piece of paper, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Bombay. Here is the address.’
They failed to appreciate my witty response, so bereft were they of any sense of humour, and started rummaging through my house. My house is not some bar or tavern, though I did have half a dozen empty bottles of beer which they didn’t bother to glance at. There were a few porcelain bowls in a cupboard and some papers in a small box on the tea table. They went through the box methodically and looked at every single scrap of paper. They found some newspaper clippings, which they promptly confiscated.
I politely asked them to show me the search warrant they had brought from Karachi but they refused. The one who had it in his hand simply waved it at me from a distance saying, ‘This, here.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘The thing that has brought us here.’
When I made it plain that I was not about to let them continue without seeing the warrant, one of them, holding on to it firmly, opened it and said, ‘Here, you can read it.’
On reading it I discovered that the warrant wasn’t only for a house search but also for my arrest.
So now there was the question of bail. The officers were so headstrong that they wouldn’t accept it from anyone, not even my nephew or my brother-in-law who are both gazetted officers. The police officers told them: ‘But you’re government employees, what if you were let go from your jobs tomorrow?’
Thereafter, I twice wrote to the Karachi court to be excused from being present at the hearing on account of illness and attached the relevant medical certificates with my request. But, of course, that was only a temporary solution. I couldn’t hope to be lucky all the time. Eventually, I had to go to Karachi.
An interesting joke: There was no one in the house to arrange for bail when the warrant for my arrest finally arrived. I went looking for friends but, as luck would have it, found none. Finally, I went to see Muhammad Tufail Sahib. He is a very decent man. He went with me willy-nilly, or maybe willy-willy, and posted the bail. How? Well, he runs a literary establishment (he is both the editor and the owner of the journal Nuqūsh) and the balance of the books in his shop is guarantee enough that he can put up a bail for five thousand rupees.
And, here is another joke. Listen. Tufail Sahib did post the bail, but now he feared that I might not show up on the date of the hearing.
As God is my witness, I was absolutely penniless. I didn’t even have money to buy a drop of poison, as the saying goes. Tufail Sahib materialized at my door at five in the morning, with two second-class train tickets in his pocket. He also gave me the fare for the tonga, accompanied me to the station and hung around with me until the train started moving. He had asked one of my friends, Naseer Anwar, to go with me, perhaps to forestall any possibility of my not reaching Karachi and jumping bail.
What I went through in Karachi I’ll tell you some other time. Right now, I’m too terribly ill to continue.
Two
I had started writing an article entitled ‘The Fifth Trial’ in one of the issues of Nuqūsh (nos. 29–30; Feb.–Mar., 1953) but was unable to finish it on account of my severe illness. I’m still unwell, and it seems I will remain so forever. ‘Your illness,’ some friends quip, ‘is all you’ve got.’ By ‘all’ they perhaps mean my short story and non-fiction writing.
Tufail Sahib, the editor and owner of the literary magazine Nuqūsh, has also written an article about me, entitled ‘Manto Sahib’. Brother Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, who has, unfortunately, been appointed the stand-in editor of Imroz, has penned the following review of this article under the name of ‘Critic’:
Muhammad Tufail’s article ‘Manto Sahib’ is personal and, to a large extent, overly intimate. In our opinion he should have kept those secret matters bearing on his and Manto’s mutual relationship a secret. Were the relations of publisher/editor and writer to be revealed in the open so unabashedly, there would be no place left for either of them to hide. Who doesn’t have flaws and weaknesses, but to expose them in print like this! At least in our opinion, it is overstepping the bounds of moderation. It is true that unveiling the little flaws of writers and artists does help to bring out their personalities more fully, but such unveiling that it disgraces! However, the article does leave the impression that Tufail Sahib means well. He seems to have been carried away by emotion and has said certain things that would have been better left unsaid, or at least not in the way he has said them.
I had already sent the following letter to Tufail Sahib before Qasimi Sahib’s review appeared in print:
My brother, as-salāmu alaikum!
Last night Safia* told me that you have written an article
about me in Nuqūsh. I couldn’t read it properly at the time as I’d had too much to drink. Since Safia liked it, I asked her to read it to me. She read some random parts, which I absolutely didn’t like; I even cursed you up and down. Then I fell asleep.
Reading it myself the next morning, I liked it a lot. I don’t disagree at all with whatever you have chosen to say about me. Regardless of my flaws, I’m very happy that your account of them is blissfully free of any trace of hesitation. Whatever I am, it is there in your article, and in abundance. It mentions certain things about me that I had in me all along; it’s just that I was not aware of them.
Humbly, Saadat Hasan Manto
I don’t wish to say anything more about that article. I’d be the last person to stand in the way of truth. If I drink, why should I deny it? Equally, if I have borrowed money from someone, I shouldn’t deny that either. If the world wants to put me down for this reason, let it. If I worried about what the world has to say, I wouldn’t have written in excess of one hundred short stories. Mr Critic* comments: ‘It is true that unveiling the little flaws of writers and artists does help to bring out their personalities more fully, but such an unveiling that it disgraces!’ I don’t know whether I’ve been disgraced since Tufail Sahib’s article. Time will tell.
I do want to say one thing, though, about that article. If what really moved Tufail Sahib to put off his brother’s medical treatment and come to my aid was his sudden recollection of his elders’ saying, ‘One should never provide a guarantee on behalf of someone,’ then I truly regret it. Had I only known of his weakness, I’d never have appeared in the court. He would have been arrested and would have looked for someone to bail him out. I would then have said to him: Mister, time to remember the advice of your elders which you threw overboard out of politeness. Forget about the bail, and come with me to the slammer . . .
As you’ve probably read in the first part of this article, it is an account of my fifth trial.
So my friend Naseer Anwar and I arrived at the railway station. Tufail Sahib had already bought our tickets. Our problem now was how to find room in a carriage. Then again, we had carried a supply of beer bottles, and there was no room to be found for them either. Suddenly I remembered that one of my classmates, Yaqub Taufeeq, was assistant stationmaster at the Lahore station. By chance, he was on duty at the time. I talked to him and he quickly arranged seats for us. And so we set out for Karachi.
A maulvi sahib was also travelling in the same carriage. He was rolling his prayer beads on his fingers. Darn it, what a fiasco, I said to myself. Then I thought of a way. ‘Come on, open a bottle,’ I said to Naseer Anwar. He quickly pulled out a beer from under our seats, uncapped it, and handed it to me. The maulvi sahib exited the carriage at the next station, his fingers still rolling the beads.
I remember another amusing anecdote. A man entered our carriage at Lahore with his wife in tow. We could have put up with the man somehow, but his wife, that was impossible—well, actually, it was she who could not have put up with us. So when the couple got in, I told the man plainly, ‘Look, sir, we’re both hard drinkers and we’re carrying some fifteen bottles of beer. When we’re drunk, we have no control over what comes out of our mouths. You’re a respectable gentleman and travelling, perhaps, with your wife. It would be better if you found room in some other carriage.’
As I’m writing this piece, Tufail Sahib tells me that this man who was with his burqa-clad wife went straight to the stationmaster and complained that two rogues were ensconced in such and such carriage where they had been allotted seats. The stationmaster showed great surprise and said, ‘Oh, but it’s Saadat Hasan Manto, a thorough gentleman, who’s travelling in that carriage.’ The man wouldn’t buy it and insisted, ‘No, he himself told me that he’s one hell of a drunkard.’
Anyway, they were finally off our backs. They were assigned seats in a different carriage and we felt relieved.
The trip to Karachi was absolutely ghastly. Even the second-class carriage was miserably full of dust. But, thanks to the beer, we somehow overcame the discomfort of the journey. At Karachi I wanted to stay in a hotel but couldn’t afford it. Finally I decided to stay at Khwaja Naseeruddin’s, but only because my wife had insisted, ‘Look, you must stay with my brother . . .’ One can ignore the whole world, but not the brother of one’s wife—no, sir! So I put the whole world aside and went to stay with my brother-in-law, who is a thorough gentleman. He has a good job, makes a decent salary, and lives in a spacious flat. He took excellent care of us. By chance, the flat next to his was unoccupied, and he got it for us. I felt no desire to prolong my stay in Karachi. The city failed to excite me, a bummer, especially after my fifteen years in Bombay.
The next day we appeared before the Additional Magistrate Sahib. His office was in a small room in a very unexceptional building. As I had been through several lawsuits at Lahore, I was quite familiar with the manners of its court; familiar, that is, with a place that was singularly devoid of manners. I stood before the Magistrate Sahib, transmogrified into the perfect image of submission. He looked at me and asked, ‘What do you want?’ The polite tone of his voice took me by surprise. I submitted, ‘Sir, my name is Saadat Hasan Manto. You’ve summoned me under Section 292 of the Obscenity Law concerning my piece “Ūpar, Nīche, aur Darmiyān”.’ He looked at me closely and then said, ‘Please sit down.’
I thought he was asking someone else to sit down as such courtesy was alien to the Lahore courts with which I was familiar. So I remained standing.
Finding me still standing, he said again, ‘Please sit down, Manto Sahib.’
I took a seat on the bench close to his desk. After some time he turned to me. ‘Why did you take so long to come?’
‘Sir, I was ill.’
‘You should have sent a medical certificate.’
‘I was too ill to even think about sending it,’ I lied.
He heard my lie, remained silent, and then said, ‘What do you want?’
What do I want? I began to wonder. I only wanted to be out of this mess, and I wanted to be out of it pretty damn quick. The thought of Tufail Sahib repeatedly drifted into my mind. He had bailed me out and, being well acquainted with my devil-may-care nature, had later even come to my home early in the morning with two second-class tickets to ensure I made it to Karachi. I thought for a while and said to the Magistrate Sahib, ‘Please wrap up my case; I want to return home as soon as possible.’
‘Not so fast. I’m afraid it will take some time. I still haven’t read your story. God willing, I’ll read it today and give my decision tomorrow.’
Both Naseer Anwar and I bid him goodbye, piled into an autorickshaw and went looking for a bar to drink a few beers in. I found the autorickshaw quite fascinating. It speeds along making phut-phut sounds, traversing long distances in a matter of minutes, and doesn’t cost much to ride.
The next day when we showed up at the court the Magistrate Sahib returned my salaam and asked me to sit down. I did. He pulled out a small piece of paper and said, ‘I’ve written out my judgement.’ He then looked at the reader and asked, ‘What’s the date today?’ The man promptly replied, ‘The twenty-fifth.’
I’m a bit hard of hearing. It’s been some time that my ears don’t hear well. I thought he had fined me twenty-five rupees. ‘Sir, a fine of twenty-five rupees?’ I asked.
A twenty-five-rupee fine foreclosed any possibility of appeal, and my sentence would have remained. The Magistrate had probably decided on a fine of five hundred rupees, but when he heard me say twenty-five, he smiled, picked up his pen, struck out the original amount and changed it to twenty-five.
Naseer Anwar quickly took twenty-five rupees from his pocket and paid the fine, saying to me, ‘You got out of it with a negligible fine. You didn’t want to get into the headache of appeals and constant knocking about the courts, did you? Don’t you remember what all happened during the trial for “Thandā Gosht”?’
I remembered it and shuddered.
&nb
sp; I thanked God for getting me out of this mess so quickly.
I was about to say goodbye to the Magistrate and leave when he asked me, ‘When are you going back to Lahore?’
‘Today, if I can.’
‘Please don’t go today. I want to chat with you.’
I was hugely surprised. Why did he want to meet me? I wondered. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll put it off until tomorrow.’
‘Where can I see you tomorrow at four in the afternoon?’
I rattled off to him all the bars I had been to for beer. He was a pious man. So we finally settled on a coffee house.
Although the time that had been decided for the meeting was four o’clock, we arrived fifteen minutes late. He was already there. After we talked formally for a while, he said, ‘Manto Sahib, I consider you a great short story writer of our time. The reason I wanted to meet with you was that I didn’t wish you to go back thinking that I am not an admirer.’
I was flabbergasted. ‘If you’re an admirer, sir, then why did you fine me?’
He smiled. ‘Why? I’ll give you my answer after a year.’
Several months have gone by. Only a few remain. Let’s see what kind of rabbit the Magistrate Sahib, who looked like someone who keeps his word, pulls out of his sleeve.
Manto and I*
Mehdi Ali Siddiqi
It was the beginning of 1953.
I was busy with work. The courtroom was filled with litigants. My deputy came and told me, ‘This gentleman would like to have his case taken up expeditiously.’
I looked up. A good-looking man of medium height, somewhat indisposed and quite anxious, with the top few buttons of his sherwani undone and a muffler thrown around his neck, was saying in a shaky, rather choking voice, ‘I am Saadat Hasan Manto. I have come from Lahore. I am very ill. I accept my offence. Please, decide my case as soon as you can.’
My Name Is Radha Page 49