Whatever. It is as evident as daylight that all of world literature is the product of just these two relationships. Even revelations, a kind of heavenly literature, don’t fail to touch on bread and stomach, man and woman.
The question then arises: If these issues are so primeval that even sacred books mention them, why are contemporary writers still harping on them? Why is the relationship between woman and man never left alone and, as someone has said, obscenity bruited about. The answer is simple. If the world could give up lying and thieving through a single act of exhortation, just one Prophet would have sufficed, but, as you know, the list is rather long.
We writers are not prophets. We look at problems from different perspectives in different circumstances and present them according to what and how we perceive them. But we never foist anything upon anyone.
We’re not lawgivers, not even inquisitors. Framing laws and keeping track of people’s morals is for others. Of course, we take the government to task, but we never aspire to become rulers ourselves. Yes, we draft plans for buildings, but we aren’t builders; we diagnose ailments, but don’t run hospitals.
We don’t write about sex per se. If anyone thinks otherwise, they are mistaken. Rather, we write about the circumstances of particular men and women. If a husband hates his wife for her simplicity and her preference for white clothing in our story, other women should not take it as an incontrovertible norm. However, if you want to know what circumstances caused this hatred and why, you will definitely find the answer in the story.
Those who read our stories to find ways to titillate their senses will certainly be disappointed. We are not wrestlers who can teach you proven holds and manoeuvres to knock down your opponent. But if we see someone flat on his back in the arena, we can speculate and explain to you what might have caused his defeat.
We are optimists who never fail to see a silver lining even in the darkest cloud. If a prostitute spits out the paan spittle from her mouth, aiming it at the passer-by under her balcony, we neither laugh at the passer-by nor curse the whore. We just pause, let our gaze tear through her revealing clothes down to her dark, sinful body, deep into her heart and grope around inside, morphing, in our imagination, into that self-same filthy, revolting whore, and strive to describe not just the incident in all its vivid detail, but also to find its true motivation.
If a beautiful, healthy young girl from a respectable family runs away with an ugly, scrawny, penniless young man, we don’t call her a wretch. Surely others will drag her past, her present and her future before a moral tribunal. Conversely, we will do nothing of the sort; we will instead try to undo the tiny knot that had numbed her sense of judgement.
Humans are not very different from one another. One person can commit the same mistake another has. If one woman can open shop in the bazaar to sell her body, so can every other woman. Man is not culpable; his circumstances are—circumstances that lead him to commit his mistakes and live through their consequences.
I Too Have Something To Say*
In 1942, my short story ‘Kālī Shalwār’ [The Black Shalwar] appeared in the special annual number of the monthly literary magazine Adab-e Latīf (Lahore). Some people consider it obscene. I’m writing this article to disabuse them of their mistaken notion.
Writing short stories is my profession. I know all the ins and outs of this art. I have written many others on this subject before the story in question. None of them are smutty, nor will the many more which I will write on this subject in the future be so.
Storytelling goes all the way back to the fall of Adam, and will continue, I believe, till doomsday, though it will go through many incarnations. However, man will persist in communicating his feelings to the ears of other men. A lot has already been written about prostitutes; a lot more will be written. What one sees will always provoke discussion and writing. Prostitutes are not a recent phenomenon; they have existed in our midst for thousands of years. They figure even in sacred books. Now that there is no longer any scope for a fresh heavenly book or a new prophet, you won’t read about them in the sacred lines of revelations, but rather in newspapers, magazines, or books, which you can pore over, unencumbered by the need to surround yourself in the spiralling haze of aloes-wood and frankincense smoke, and, when done, toss in the trash bin.
Well, I’m someone who writes in such magazines and books. I write because I feel I have something to say. I share with others the way I see things, and the angle from which I see them. If writers are lunatics, please consider me a lunatic as well.
The backdrop of ‘Kālī Shalwār’ is a prostitute’s lodging. It isn’t as astonishing as the nest of a weaverbird, about which we hear all kinds of wonderful things. In Delhi, they have set up an area exclusively for such women and built numberless residential units to house them. My Sultāna also lives in one such unit. She hasn’t constructed it herself like the weaverbird, nor does she catch fireflies to light it in the evening like that bird. For light, there was electricity, and since she couldn’t get that for free, any more than she could the unit in which she lived, she had to work. Had she been married, all this would have come to her free. But she wasn’t married and she was a woman. When a woman is obliged to pay for lodgings and electricity and is saddled with a good-for-nothing layabout like Khuda Bakhsh, who trusts in God and runs after fakirs and holy men, it’s obvious that she can’t be the kind of woman we see in our respectable homes.
My Sultāna is a brothel woman. She does precisely what women do in a brothel; it is her profession. Who doesn’t know these women? Nearly every city and town has its red-light district. Who isn’t aware of running gutters—nearly every city and town has them, and they’re there to carry away the filth.
If we can talk about our marbled bathrooms, about soaps and lavenders, why can’t we talk about these drains and gutters that carry away the filth of our bodies? If we can talk about temples and mosques, why not about whorehouses visited by some people on their way back from those temples and mosques? If we can talk about opium, bhang, charas and wine contracts, why not about brothels where this stuff is consumed liberally?
We treat bhangis as untouchable. Whenever one of them passes by carrying the basket of our filth, we instantly cover our noses with handkerchiefs. Surely we find it all revolting, but just as surely we can’t deny their existence, any more than we can deny the faeces we discharge daily from our bowels. Medications for treating constipation and diarrhoea exist because it is necessary to purge noxious matter from our bodies. New ways to flush out the filth are being thought up continually because it piles up daily. If by some miracle our bodies could be transformed and its functions undergo a radical change, we wouldn’t be caught dead talking about constipation and diarrhoea. Likewise, if some mechanical methods could be invented to dispose of our filth, sweepers would go out of business.
If the talk is about sweepers, garbage and filth will inevitably figure in it. Just as inevitably, what prostitutes do will feature in the conversation when we talk about them.
We don’t visit a prostitute’s chamber to offer ritual prayer or shower blessings upon the Prophet. Why, we go there because . . . Well, it’s obvious. We go there because we can, and buy freely and without objection what we’ve come for. Now, if we’re allowed to go there without restriction, if any woman can decide to become a prostitute of her own free will, get a licence and start selling her body, if such a transaction is sanctioned by law, then why can’t we talk about her?
If talking about her is obscene, her existence is no less obscene. If taking about her is forbidden, her business too should be forbidden. Remove the prostitute and we’ll cease talking about her without any prompting.
We talk openly about lawyers, barbers, laundrymen, innkeepers and kunjars; relate stories about thieves, shoplifters, thugs and highwaymen; fabricate tall tales about fairies and genies; make preposterous claims such as the Earth is balanced on the two horns of a bull; author Dāstān-e Amīr Hamza and the tale of Totā-Mainā;
praise the mace of Landhūr the wrestler; talk about ‘Amr the Trickster’s magical cap and bag; and recite stories of parrots and mynahs who can speak in any language. We can talk about wizards and their incantations and how to neutralize the effects of their spells, and discuss whatever our fancy demands about spells cast by spirits, and about the practice of alchemy. We can quarrel about the length of beards and trousers and hair. We can think up new recipes for cooking rogan josh, pilaf and korma and wonder what kind and colour of buttons would go well with a green fabric. Then why can’t we think about prostitutes and talk about their profession or comment on their clients?
We can make a girl and boy fall in love and set up their first rendezvous at the tomb-sanctuary of Dātā Ganjbakhsh and drag along an old hag as their go-between so the two restless souls can meet often. We can squash their romance in the end or make them take poison and arrange for their coffins to be borne out from their respective neighbourhoods at the same time, and have the lovers buried, by some miracle, in adjoining graves, and, if need be, arrange for angels to shower flowers over them . . .
Why, then, can’t we talk about the life of a prostitute, who needs no angels or flowers? When she dies no one from neighbourhoods other than her own joins the funeral procession and no grave ever wants to be next to hers. Her existence itself is a coffin which society is carrying aloft on its shoulders. Unless she is interred for good, there will be talk about her.
Even if this corpse is in a state of decomposition, is stinking, is grotesque and revolting, what is so wrong in seeing its face? Does she have no connection to us? Is she not one of our own? We will remove the shroud from her face now and then to look at it and show it to others.
That’s precisely what I’ve done in my ‘Kālī Shalwār’: shown the face of just such a corpse. Have a look.
A warehouse stretched from one corner to the other on that side of the street. To the right, huge bales and piles of different goods lay under a metal roof. To the left was an open space with innumerable intersecting railway tracks. Whenever the iron tracks flashed in the sun, Sultana’s eyes fell on her hands where the protruding blue veins looked very much like those tracks. Engines and carriages were moving all the time in the open space, this way and that, creating a veritable din with their chug-chug and clatter. On the days when Sultana woke up early in the morning and went out to the balcony, a strange sight greeted her: engines in the misty dawn spewing out thick smoke that climbed slowly towards the murky sky like plump, beefy men. Clouds of steam rose noisily from the tracks and quickly dissolved in the air. Now and then the sight of a shunted carriage left to run on its own along a track reminded her of herself: She too had been pushed out to run on her own along the track of her life. Others simply changed the switches and she kept moving forward—to God knew where; one day, when the momentum had slowly spent itself, she would come to a halt, at some place unknown to her.
Could there be more revealing hints than these for an intelligent reader? Here I’ve made a successful attempt to present the true conditions of Sultāna’s life. When the Delhi municipal authorities were setting up a special, separate area for prostitutes they could not have imagined how tellingly the warehouse would come to represent Sultāna’s life. The juxtaposition of those special housing units and the warehouse would provoke the sagacious to write several stories like ‘Kālī Shalwār’.
I have pulled away the shroud from over the corpse’s face in yet another story. I begin my famous story ‘Hatak’ [Spurned] thus:
Drained from the day’s gruelling work, Saugandhi had fallen asleep almost as soon as she hit the bed. Minutes ago, the city’s sanitary inspector—she called him ‘Seth’—had gone home to his wife, dead drunk, after a prolonged session of stormy sex which had left even her bones aching. He would have stayed for the night but for the regard he had for his wife who loved him dearly.
The money that she had received from the inspector for her services was still stuffed in her tight-fitting bra, now stained with the man’s drool. Ever so often the silver coins clinked a bit with the rise and fall of her breathing, the sound blending with the irregular rhythm of her heart. It was as if the molten silver of the coins was dripping into her bloodstream. Her chest was on fire, partly from the half-bottle of brandy the inspector had brought along and partly from the raw country liquor they had downed with plain water when the soda ran out.
She was lying face down on the large teakwood bed, her bare arms splayed out like the bow-shaped rib of a kite that has come loose from its dew-drenched paper. The grainy flesh visible in her right armpit had acquired a bluish tint from frequent shaving and looked like a graft from the skin of a freshly plucked chicken.
This then is the portrait of Saugandhi, a sister of Sultāna. I end the story thus:
When the dog returned, wagging his stumpy tail, and sat at her feet flapping his ears, Saugandhi was startled. She felt a terrifying stillness around her, a stillness she had never experienced before. A strange emptiness engulfed everything, and she couldn’t help thinking of a train standing all alone in its metal shed after disgorging every last one of its passengers. This feeling of emptiness which had suddenly arisen weighed heavily on her. She made repeated attempts to fill the void but failed. She was trying to stuff her brain with countless thoughts all at once, but it was like a sieve. As fast as she filled it, everything filtered out.
She sat in the chair for the longest time. When she couldn’t find anything to distract her mind with even after a long and desperate search, she picked up her mangy dog, put him down beside her in the spacious teakwood bed, and went to sleep.
If you read ‘Kālī Shalwār’ closely, you will conclude the following:
1. Sultāna is an ordinary prostitute. She ran her business at first in Ambala and later moved to Delhi at her lover Khuda Bakhsh’s suggestion.
2. Khuda Bakhsh was a man who had put his trust in God and believed in the saintly graces—karāmāt—of fakirs.
3. Sultāna was consumed by despair when her business failed to pick up in Delhi. Her despair progressively grew worse when Khuda Bakhsh started chasing after fakirs and holy men.
4. Muharram was just around the corner. Sultāna’s girlfriends had already got their black outfits made; Sultāna couldn’t, because she had no money.
5. Just at that point Shankar drops in from the blue. A footloose and fancy-free man, he too has nothing other than his sharp intelligence, quick wit and eloquence. In exchange for these assets he demands from her the commodity she sells for a given price. Sultāna doesn’t accept this deal.
6. The second time, it is not Shankar who comes up to her; it is she who beckons to him, accepting him merely as a casual event in the stagnant waters of her life. She cheers up on seeing him, but can’t get the thought out of her mind that she doesn’t have a black shalwar to commemorate Muharram. She tells him: ‘Muharram is coming and I don’t have enough money for a black shalwar. You’ve already heard from me all about my woes. I’ve given my shirt and dupatta to be dyed just this morning.’
7. On the first of Muharram Shankar returns to her with a black shalwar . . . Khuda Bakhsh’s God and his belief in holy men don’t help much. What does help is Shankar’s sharp intelligence. If this is the impression you get after reading the story, well then, it is not a story that offends one’s sense of morality. If that is the case, it is certainly not a song that people might sing, and sing repeatedly, to titillate themselves. No gramophone company would put it on a record because it is bereft of stirring dadras and thumris.
8. Stories like ‘Kālī Shalwār’ are not written for amusement. Upon reading them you don’t start drooling with a surfeit of sensual passion. I haven’t committed an immoral act by writing it. In fact, I’m proud that I wrote it, and thank God that I didn’t write a masnavī with such lines as these in it:
Out of breath while scuffling
Covering while taking liberties
Your forcing your lips against mine
Your pus
hing your tongue against mine
Your taking me in your love’s embrace
Your clinging to me in your passion
Your calling out my name in moans
Your gently swatting me with sagging hands
Your faltering whispers while supine
Your watching me with glazed eyes
Your asking me to let you be in God’s name
That you are tired and sleepy; to not shake you
Your helpless body becoming languid all at once
Then rising suddenly and your calling out, ‘Enough!’
All desire is now spent.
Like the day night’s dark has spent.
Will your lust ever reach its climax?
Or will this go on the whole night?
There is nothing left in me of desire.
And it is now morn, no longer is it night.
Enough or I might now hit you,
Or call out to someone to help
When every limb has been knocked out of shape,
Pray, why wouldn’t one scream.
If you remained unbent still
None would hold up with you in this game.
(Extract from the Masnavī of Mīr Dard)*
And thanks also that I haven’t written such blazing poetry as this to slake my thirst and inflame my starving sensual desires:
Keeping your lips pressed to mine
But not letting your head rest on my arm
Teasing me by lying on my chest
And becoming cross when I speak of my desire
The pleasures of your tongue in my mouth
The manifest hint of your desire in your acts
And when I wish for something more
When I desire a greater intimacy
You place your hand and furiously refuse
My Name Is Radha Page 52