Naked Voices

by Sadat Hasan Manto

  His heart had been filled with such hopes and so much excitement at the prospect of marriage. From the day he had decided to get married, his head had been buzzing with all those tantalising delights with which he had for so long been unacquainted. The thought of marriage would make a strange sort of heat course through his body, a nice, pleasurable sort of warmth. But now the very thought of his ‘first night’ left him cold! He tried several times to rekindle those warmth-inducing feelings but the voices – those picture-painting voices – would destroy everything. He began to feel naked, absolutely naked, and everyone all around him was staring wide-eyed at him and laughing.

  At about 4.00 in the morning he got up and drank a glass of cold water. He thought a bit. Sternly, he tried to dispel the anxiety that gripped him. A cool breeze was blowing. Bholu turned towards Kallan’s corner. The frayed edges of his sack curtain were moving in the breeze. Kallu was lying stark naked beside his wife. The sight nauseated him; it also made him angry: why must the breeze blow on such roofs? And, if it must blow, why must it tease sack curtains such as these? He felt like pulling down all the sack curtains and tearing off his own clothes and dancing naked on the rooftop.

  But he didn’t do that; instead he left for work as always. His friends looked at him knowingly and asked him about his first night. Fuji, the tailor, called out, ‘So, how was it? Hope you haven’t blotted our name?’

  A little later he met a tinsmith who asked him in a mysterious sort of way, ‘Look here, let me know if there is something amiss; I have this great recipe that works wonders.’

  Another fellow thumped him on the shoulder and exclaimed, ‘So, my dear wrestler, how was the bout?’

  Bholu remained quiet.

  According to custom, Bholu’s wife went to her parents’ home. She returned after five or six days and once again, Bholu found himself in the same dilemma. It was as though everyone who slept on the roof had been waiting for his wife to return. The past few nights had been quiet but the night he came to sleep there with his wife the same things started all over again: the whisperings and murmurings, the chur-choo, chur-choo, the coughing and clearing of throats, the knocking of the glass against the pot, the tossings and turnings on creaking beds, the stifled laughs. Bholu would lie awake all night long and stare at the sky. Once in a while, he would sigh deeply and look longingly at his wife and he would fret, ‘What has happened to me? … What has happened to me? … Oh, what has happened to me?’

  This continued for seven nights. Till, finally, in despair Bholu sent his bride away to her parents’ home. Twenty-odd days passed. One day Gama said to Bholu, ‘You are a strange fellow! How can you send your newly-wed bride to her parents’? She has been gone for so many days, how the hell do you sleep alone?’

  Bholu answered briefly, ‘It is all right.’

  Gama asked, ‘What is all right? Why don’t you tell me? What is the matter? Don’t you like Aisha?’

  ‘It isn’t that.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  Bholu did not answer. A few days later, Gama raised the subject again. Bholu got up and left the quarter. A cot was placed outside their house. He went out and sat down on it. He could hear his sister-in-law’s voice. She was talking to Gama inside and saying, ‘You know, you are wrong when you say that Bholu does not like Aisha.’

  Bholu heard Gama ask, ‘What is the matter then? He doesn’t seem at all interested in her.’

  ‘And why would he be interested in her?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Bholu couldn’t hear what Gama’s wife said to him, yet he felt as though someone had put his very being, his identity in a pestle and mortar and ground it to smithereens. Then he heard Gama say loudly, ‘No, no! Who told you that?’

  Gama’s wife answered, ‘Aisha told one of her friends … it reached me in a roundabout way.’

  Gama spoke in a shocked sort of way, ‘This is terrible!’

  Sitting outside, Bholu felt a knife penetrate his heart. Something snapped inside him. He got to his feet and climbed up to the roof. He began to pull and tear all the sack curtains that hung on poles. People heard the commotion and came running. They tried to stop him but he began to fight with them. Soon matters became ugly. Kallan picked a pole and hit him on the head. Bholu fell down in a swoon and lost consciousness. When he came to, he had lost his mind.

  Now Bholu roams around buck-naked. If he sees a sack curtain, he pounces on it and tears it to shreds.

  LOSER ALL THE WAY

  There are people who only enjoy winning, but he liked to lose everything after he had won it.

  He never found it difficult to win, but he often had to put in a lot of hard work to lose. In the early days, when he used to work in a bank, his friends and relatives made fun of his desire to amass wealth. But when he left his job at the bank and came away to Bombay, all too soon he had begun to help out his friends and relatives by lending them money.

  Bombay offered him many avenues, but he had chosen the world of films for himself. There was money in it, and there was fame. He could wander at will in this new world, amass wealth with both hands, and lose it too with both hands if he so wished. And that was why he had chosen to be a player in this field.

  He made – and lost – not lakhs but crores of rupees. It didn’t take him as long to make that money as it did to squander it away. He wrote songs for a film and demanded a lakh of rupees. But it took him some time to fritter it all away at brothels, gay parties, horse racing and gambling dens.

  He made a film. It earned him a profit of ten lakh rupees. Now rose the question of spending it here, there, everywhere. So he devised a way in which there was a slip at every step. He bought three cars – one new, two old which he knew were no good at all. He parked the old cars outside his house – to rot and rust away. The one that was new was locked up inside the garage on the pretext that there was no petrol to be found. A taxi would do very well for him. He would take one in the morning. After a mile or two, he would have it stopped. Then he would enter a gambling den and emerge the next day after losing a couple of thousand rupees. The taxi would remain parked outside. He would get into it, return home and knowingly forget to settle its bill. In the evening he would come out and, upon finding the taxi still waiting, pretend to scold the driver, ‘You oaf, you are still standing here! Come with me to the office and I will have your account settled ….’ And he would once again forget to pay the money on reaching the office ….

  One after the other, several of his films became ‘hits’. He broke all previous records of success. Heaps of wealth grew around him. His fame touched the skies. In a fit of pique, he produced a couple of the most awful films imaginable whose failure too was in a league of their own. As he went down, he pulled others down into rack and ruin. But soon enough he rolled up his sleeves. He consoled those who had been destroyed because of him and produced a film that became the proverbial gold mine.

  He displayed a similar streak of winning and losing when it came to women. He would pluck a woman from a brothel or a party, groom her to perfection, place her on the high pedestal of fame, and then after he had destroyed every last bit of her womanhood, give her ample opportunities to take her affections to another man.

  He met and played with the wealthiest of men and the prettiest of boys. Many fierce battles were fought. The dice was rolled and the game of politics played. But, always, he would thrust his hand in the thorniest bush, pluck the choicest flower and emerge unscathed. The very next day he would strut about with the flower in his buttonhole and create an opportunity to allow an opponent to pounce and get away with his trophy.

  Once when he had been visiting a gambling den on Forres Road for ten days in a row, he became obsessed with the desire to lose. Though he had lately lost an extremely pretty actress as well as ten lakh rupees in a movie, the two events were still not enough to bring solace to his hungry heart. These two losses had occurred rather precipitously and were not entirely his doing. Miffed by his own lack of foresight,
he was now determinedly losing a certain fixed amount everyday at the Forres Road gambling den.

  He would set off every evening with two hundred rupees in his pocket. His taxi would cruise past the grilled cages of the prostitutes and stop beside an electric pole. He would step out, place the thick-rimmed spectacles firmly on his nose, adjust his dhoti, look to the right where an extremely beautiful woman would be sitting holding a broken sliver of glass and meticulously applying her make-up inside her iron-grilled room, and climb the stairs to the casino above.

  For ten days now he had been coming to this casino in Forres Road to lose two hundred rupees every single day. Some days the two hundred rupees would go in a couple of rounds, some days it would be nearly dawn by the time he managed to lose them all.

  On the eleventh day, when the taxi stopped beside the electric pole, he placed the thick-rimmed glasses firmly on his nose, adjusted his dhoti and happened to glance to the right, he suddenly realized that for the past ten days he had actually been looking at an extremely ugly woman. As always, she was sitting on a wooden settee looking into a broken hand mirror and was engrossed in putting on her make-up.

  He approached her iron grill and looked closely at her. She was middle aged, with a smooth dark complexion, and the small blue dots tattooed on her cheeks and chin were nearly the same colour as her skin. Her teeth were crooked, her gums rotting with tobacco and paan. He wondered who in his right mind would come to this woman.

  He took another step towards the iron cage and the woman looked up and smiled. She kept the mirror to one side, and asked crudely, ‘So, seth, will you stay?’

  He looked more closely at the woman who even at her age seemed to think that she could still get clients. He was amazed. And so he asked, ‘How old are you?’

  This seemed to hurt the woman somewhat. She made a face and flung an obscenity at him, probably in Marathi. He realized his mistake and so, with complete innocence, said, ‘Forgive me. I made an idle query, but I am surprised by one thing: I see you sitting here every evening, all dolled up. Do you get any clients?’

  The woman didn’t answer. Once again, he realized his mistake. This time, without any particular eagerness, he asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  The woman, who was about to part the curtain and go inside, stopped and said, ‘Gangubai.’

  ‘How much do you earn everyday, Gangubai?’

  There was genuine sympathy in his voice. Gangubai approached the iron grill. ‘Six or seven rupees … sometimes not even that.’

  ‘Six or seven rupees and sometimes not even that,’ repeating Gangubai’s words he remembered the two hundred rupees in his pocket which he had brought along solely with the intention of losing. Suddenly he was struck by a thought. ‘Look here, Gangubai, you say you earn six or seven rupees every day – I will give you ten rupees every day.’

  ‘To stay?’

  ‘No, but if you like, you can think it is for staying with you,’ and he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a ten-rupee note and passed it though the iron bars of the cage. ‘Here, take this.’

  Gangubai took the note but there was a huge question mark on her face.

  ‘I shall give you ten rupees everyday at this hour, but I have a condition…’

  ‘What condition?’

  ‘That you take the ten rupees, eat your dinner, and go to sleep. I should not see your light on at night.’

  A strange smile flickered across Gangubai’s face.

  ‘Don’t smile; I am a man of my word.’

  And so saying, he went up to the casino. On the stairs, he thought, ‘I had to lose this money in any case. If not two hundred, I still have a hundred and ninety to lose.’

  Several days passed. Everyday, without fail, his taxi would stop beside the electric pole. He would open the door and step out. Through his thick-rimmed glasses he would look towards the right and find Gangubai sitting on the wooden settee in her iron cage. He would adjust his dhoti, approach the grilled cage, take out a ten-rupee note and hand it to Gangubai. Gangubai would touch her forehead with the note in a gesture of salaam, he would climb the stairs to the casino to lose a hundred and ninety rupees. During these days, whenever he would come down after losing all his money – whether it was eleven or twelve in the night or three or four in the morning – he would always find Gangubai’s shop closed.

  One day when he gave the ten rupees and came up, he ended up losing all his money by ten o’clock. He landed up with a hand of cards that relieved him of his hundred and ninety rupees in a matter of a few hours. As he came down and was about to get into his waiting taxi he saw that Gangubai’s shop was open and sitting on the settee in her cage was Gangubai – waiting for her clients.

  He got out of the taxi and approached her cage. Gangubai saw him and looked nervously about, but there was nothing she could do.

  ‘What is this, Gangubai?’

  Gangubai did not answer.

  ‘I am sad to see that you have not lived up to your promise. I told you, didn’t I, that I should not see your light on in the night? But look at you, you are sitting here like this…’

  There was pain in his voice; it touched Gangubai.

  ‘You are bad,’ he said and started to move away.

  Gangubai called out, ‘Wait.’

  He stopped. Gangubai spoke slowly, biting every word with care: ‘I am bad. But who is good here? Seth, you can give ten rupees and cause one light to be switched off, but look around you … See … there are lights everywhere.’

  He turned to look down the length of the narrow street lined with cages. There was a never-ending row of grill-fronted shops and countless bulbs were flickering in the muddy night air.

  ‘Can you cause all these lights to be switched off?’

  Through his thick-rimmed glasses, he first looked at the naked bulb hanging above Gangubai’s head, then at Gangubai’s dusky earth-coloured face and bent his head. ‘No, Gangubai, I can’t.’

  When he got into the taxi, his heart was as empty as his pocket.

  A DAY IN 1919

  It is about those days in 1919, brother, when agitations against the Rowlatt Act had sprung up all across the Punjab. I am talking about Amritsar. Sir Michael O’Dwyer had forbidden Mahatma Gandhi from entering the Punjab under the Defence of India Rules. Gandhiji was on his way when he was stopped near Palwal, arrested and sent back to Bombay. As far as I can understand, brother, had the English not committed this grave mistake, the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, which is the bloodiest chapter in the history of British rule in India, would never have occurred.

  Whether Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs, all held Gandhiji in veneration. Everyone considered him to be a ‘mahatma’, a great man, a truly evolved spirit. When the news of his arrest reached Lahore, all business came to a standstill. When people in Amritsar heard of this, complete and total strikes paralyzed the city within the snap of a finger.

  It is said that by the evening of 9 April, orders banishing Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew from the district had already reached the Deputy Commissioner. However, he wasn’t ready to carry out the orders because he was convinced there was no danger of riots or disturbances in Amritsar. People had been staging peaceful demonstrations to express their discontent, but there was no question of any sort of violence. I am telling you what I saw with my own eyes. It was the festival of Ramnavmi on 9 April. As always, a procession was carried out but nowhere did anyone take one objectionable step against the wishes of the administration. But, brother, Sir Michael was a mad man. He refused to listen to the deputy commissioner. He was convinced that the political leaders of the day were hell bent upon overturning the imperial rule at the Mahatma’s behest. And these same leaders were part of a grand conspiracy behind all the strikes and processions.

  The news of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew’s banishment spread like wildfire. People were sore and heartsick. They were gripped by the fear that something terrible could happen anytime. But, brother, there was no stopping their commitment to the cause. S
hops were shut down and the city looked like a graveyard. But in the stillness of this graveyard lay a clamour. When news of Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew’s arrest reached them, thousands of people gathered so that together they could go to meet the deputy commissioner and petition him to revoke the orders banishing their beloved leaders. But the time, brother, was not right for receiving petitions. A tyrant like Sir Michael was the ruler. Forget accepting the petition, he decreed that the crowd that had assembled was unconstitutional and illegal!

  Amritsar – the Amritsar that had once been the greatest hub of the Independence struggle, the city that had proudly borne the wound of Jallianwala Bagh on its chest like a medal – look at the state of that city today! Anyhow, let that pass. It pains my heart. People say that the English are responsible for what happened here in this sacred city five years ago. Maybe so, brother, but if you ask me the truth, I will say that it is our own hands that are sullied in the blood that was spilt here. Anyhow, let that pass.

  The deputy commissioner’s bungalow was in the Civil Lines. All the big officers and their self-important toadies lived in this exclusive part of the city. If you have been to Amritsar, then you would know that a bridge joins the city and the Civil Lines, and you need to cross this bridge to come to that secluded haven where the city’s elite have built their piece of heaven on earth.

  As the crowd surged towards the gate of the City Hall, they found white soldiers mounted on horses patrolling the bridge. Still, the crowd did not stop. Brother, I was part of that procession. I can’t describe the passion that raged in every breast. Yet every single man was unarmed; they did not even have a stick among them. They had left their homes and spilled out on to the streets with the simple desire to take their single request to the commissioner to free Dr Satyapal and Dr Kitchlew without imposing conditions of any sort. The crowd moved towards the bridge without stopping. The white soldiers opened fire. It caused a stampede. The soldiers were no more than twenty or so; the crowd ran into thousands. Brother, you cannot imagine the panic that even a stray bullet can cause. The chaos that followed had to be seen to be believed! Some fell to the bullets; some were wounded in the stampede.