Naked Voices

by Sadat Hasan Manto

  A dirty water drain ran on the left. A push from the crowd and I fell into it. When the hail of bullets dried up, I climbed out of the drain and saw that the crowd had dispersed. The wounded lay strewn on the road and the white soldiers stood about laughing and cracking jokes. Brother, I cannot describe the state of my mind at that moment. I suspect I was not entirely in control of my senses. I certainly was not fully conscious of anything around me when I had fallen into the drain. By the time I came out, gradually, very gradually, the events that had occurred began to take shape, form and coherence.

  In the distance, I could hear shouts – as though a lot of people were speaking very loudly and angrily together. I crossed the drain, skirted the grave of the Blessed Zahira, and reached the gate of the Town Hall. There, I found a group of 30-40 excited youth hurling stones at the gate. When the glass panes in the gate fell in slivers on the road, one youth said to another, ‘Let’s go and break the statue of the Queen.’

  Another said, ‘No, no, let’s burn the kotwali instead.’

  A third said, ‘And all the banks, too!’

  A fourth said, ‘Wait! What good will that do? Instead, let’s go and kill the white soldiers on the bridge.’

  I recognized the fourth man. It was Thaila Kanjar. His real name was Mohammad Tufail, but everyone knew him as Thaila Kanjar. He had been born from the womb of a prostitute. And a good-for-nothing he was, too! He had begun drinking and gambling while still very young. He had two sisters – Shamshad and Almas – two of the prettiest prostitutes of their time. Shamshad could sing very well. Rich aristocrats would flock from miles around to hear her. The sisters despaired of their brother and his feckless ways. Everyone in the city knew that they had given him the boot. Yet, somehow or the other, he managed to extract enough money from them to get by. And not just get by, he ate well and drank well. In fact, he was known to be quite a dandy. He was a raconteur and an aesthete. He knew how to spin a tale and crack a joke. There was none of the bawdiness of someone from his ‘trade’. A tall man with a strong well-built body, he had a finely-etched face.

  The excited youth paid no heed to his words and headed towards the Queen’s statue. Once again, Thaila Kanjar said, ‘Don’t fritter away your enthusiasm. Come with me. Come, let us go and kill those whites. They have taken the lives of our innocent people and injured them. By God, if we want we can wring their necks. Come! Come with me!’

  Some of the young men had already begun to walk away; others stopped. When Thaila began to move towards the bridge, they followed him. I said to myself, why are these poor hapless young men walking towards certain death? I called out to Thaila from my hiding place beside a fountain, ‘Don’t go. Why are you bent upon killing yourself and these poor innocents?’

  Thaila heard me and laughed a strange laugh. He said, ‘Thaila only wants to prove that he is not afraid of bullets.’ Then he turned towards the crowd and said, ‘You may turn back if you are scared.’

  How could advancing steps retreat at a time like this? That, too, when the man leading them was walking bravely in the face of extreme danger? When Thaila increased his pace, his companions had to perforce do the same.

  It wasn’t a great distance from the gate of the Town Hall to the bridge – it must have been no more than 60 or 70 yards. Thaila was leading the pack. Two mounted white soldiers stood 15 or 20 steps from the railings on either side of the bridge. They opened fire by the time Thaila, shouting slogans, reached the mouth of the bridge. I had thought he would collapse in a heap there and then but I looked up and saw he was alive and still walking. His companions had fled by now. He turned around and shouted, ‘Don’t run away! Come with me!’

  He had turned around, facing me, when there was another fire. He turned towards the white soldiers, his hand moved along his back. Brother, I shouldn’t have seen anything but I can tell you I saw bloodstains on his white shirt. He moved swiftly, like a wounded lion. The sound of another bullet rang out. He tottered a bit, then controlled himself and moved surefootedly towards one of the mounted soldiers. In the blink of an eye, the horse’s back was empty. The white soldier lay on the ground and Thaila was grappling on top of him. The other white soldier, who was mounted on the other horse close by, got over his initial stupefaction, reined in his panic-stricken horse and opened a volley of shots. I don’t know what happened thereafter. I fainted and fell down beside the fountain.

  Brother, when I regained consciousness, I was home. Some passers- by who recognized me, had brought me home. They later told me that the firing on the bridge had enraged the crowd. As a result, the statue of the Queen had been destroyed. The Town Hall and three banks had been set on fire. Five or six Europeans had been murdered. And there had been much looting and chaos.

  The English officers were not particularly bothered by the loot and arson. The blood bath at Jallianwala Bagh took place to avenge the killing of these five or six Europeans. The deputy commissioner had handed over the reins of maintaining law and order to General Dwyer. On 12 April, the General had marched through the markets and street of the city and ordered the arrest of scores of innocent people. About 25,000 people had assembled in Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April. General Dwyer had arrived with armed Gurkhas and Sikhs and rained bullets upon those poor unarmed people.

  No one could tell right away how many lives had been lost that day in Jallianwala Bagh but later, when inquiries and probes were conducted, it was found that a 1000 people had died and 3000-4000 had been injured. Anyhow, I was telling you about Thaila. Brother, I have told you what I saw with my own eyes. Only God Almighty is faultless and pure. The deceased was guilty of all four sins that are banned by the Sharia. He may have been born from the womb of a professional courtesan, but he was a brave man. I can tell you with complete certainty that he was hit by the first bullet fired by the white soldier. When he had turned around and urged his companions to follow him, perhaps in the heat of the moment he had not realized that the hot lead had already pierced his chest. The second bullet had hit his back, the third his chest. I didn’t see it, but I have heard that when Thaila’s corpse was removed from the white soldier’s body, Thaila’s hands were clasped so tightly around the dead man’s neck that it had been difficult to prise them free.

  The next day when Thaila’s corpse was handed over to his family for the last rites, his body was found to be riddled with shots. The other white soldier had emptied his entire cartridge in Thaila’s body. But by then Thaila’s soul had departed from his body and the white soldier was merely target practising on a dead body.

  I have heard that when Thaila’s corpse was brought home, loud cries of lamentation had rent the neighbourhood. Thaila was not especially popular among his people but the sight of his body, looking like mince meat, had made grown men cry like babies. His sisters, Shamshad and Almas, had fainted. When the body was being taken away for burial, their wailing and weeping had made the assembled mourners shed tears of blood.

  Brother, I had once read somewhere that the first shot fired during the French Revolution had hit a prostitute. The late Mohammad Tufail was the son of a prostitute. In this struggle to bring about a revolution, whether it was the first bullet or the tenth or the fiftieth, no one has made any attempt to find out. Perhaps because he had no real social standing. I think Thaila Kanjar does not even feature among the list of those who died in that blood bath. For that matter, no one knows if such a list has ever been compiled.

  Those were days of tumult. The army held sway. The ogre called Martial Law went about snorting and bellowing through the streets and alleys of the city. In that free-for-all state of chaos, poor Thaila was buried with indecent haste as though his death was the cause of such a great shame on the part of his relatives that they had to instantly remove every trace of it.

  ‘And, brother, Thaila died. He was buried … and … and ….’ For the first time since he had launched into his story, my companion checked himself and fell silent. The train kept rushing on. The tracks began to sing, ‘Thaila d
ied … Thaila was buried.’ There was no gap, no space, no distance, between his death and his burial. As though he had died one minute, and been buried the next. The rattling tracks and the rhythmic beat of those words were so entirely bereft of feeling that I had to drag my mind away from their staccato beat. And so I said to my fellow-traveller, ‘You were about to say something when you stopped?’

  Startled, he turned around to face me and said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, a poignant part of that tale is still left.’

  I asked, ‘What?’

  He began to speak: ‘As I had told you, Thaila had two sisters – Shamshad and Almas – who were extremely beautiful. Shamshad was tall with slender features and big eyes. She sang the thumri very well. People say she had trained under Khan Saheb Fateh Ali Khan. The other, Almas, could not carry a note, but there was none who could match her steps. When she danced, it seemed every pore, every part of her body came alive. Every gesture spoke volumes. Her eyes had a magic that entranced you and caught you unawares.’

  My companion was busy heaping praises upon the duo, yet I thought it best not to interrupt. Finally, he emerged from his long- winded eulogies and came to the sad part of the tale. ‘It so happened, brother, that some toady had gone to the English officers and told them about the beauteous sisters. An Englishwoman had been killed during the riots … What was the name of that witch?…. Miss … Miss Sherwood! And, so it was decided that the sisters would be sent for and revenge would be taken in ample measure. You do understand how, don’t you, brother?’

  I said, ‘I do.’

  My companion took a long, deep sigh. ‘In some delicate matters, even prostitutes and courtesans are, after all, mothers and sisters. But, Brother, sometimes I think our country has lost all sense of shame. When the order was conveyed from the top, the thanedar himself immediately agreed to go. He went to the sisters’ house and told them that the English sahab had sent for them to sing and dance. The soil on their brother’s grave was still fresh. He had been dead for just two days when the orders came: Come! Come and dance before us! Can there be a more terrifying way of causing hurt. I doubt if there can be another greater example of cruelty. Did those who issued these instructions not stop to consider that even prostitutes can have some self-respect? After all, they can, can’t they?’ Evidently, he was asking himself that question even though he was talking to me.

  I asked, ‘Did they go?’

  My companion answered, somewhat sadly, after a while. ‘Yes, yes, they did – and they went dressed to kill.’ Suddenly, his sadness acquired an edge of sarcasm. ‘They went made up to their eyebrows. People say, it was quite an occasion. The sisters were in peak form. Dressed in all their finery, they looked like fairy princesses. Wine flowed like water. People say, at two past midnight, when a senior officer finally gave a signal, the merriment eventually wound up.’ The man got up and began to watch the trees racing past the window.

  His last two words began to dance to the tune of the wheels and the tracks: ‘Wound up, wound up, wound up.’

  I tried to wrench them free from the rumbling inside my head and asked, ‘What happened then?’

  Removing his gaze from the trees and poles running past, he spoke clearly and firmly, ‘They tore off their fine garments. Standing stark naked before the English officers, they said, “We are Thaila’s sisters – sisters of that martyr whom you riddled with bullets simply because he possessed a soul that loved his country. We are his beautiful sisters. Come and besmirch our fragrant bodies with the molten lead of your lust. But before you do that let us spit on your faces – once!”’

  And with that, the man fell silent, as though he would not speak again. I asked immediately, ‘What happened then?’

  Tears came to his eyes. He said, ‘They were shot dead.’

  I said nothing. The train slowed to a halt at the station. He called a coolie to carry his luggage. As he prepared to leave, I said, ‘I suspect you coined the ending of that particular story.’

  Startled, he turned around and asked, ‘How do you know?’

  I said, ‘There was a deep anguish in your voice.’

  Swallowing the bitterness in his throat with his spit, my fellow-traveller said, ‘Yes, those bitches…’ He checked the invectives that rose to his lips. ‘They defiled the name of their martyred brother,’ he said and got off the train.

  COWARD

  The field was clear, but Javed was convinced that the lantern fixed by the Municipal Committee to the wall was staring at him. The wide courtyard, paved in a criss-cross fashion with thin, hand-fired Nanakshahi bricks, lay in front and on its own – as if away from the other buildings. Time and time again he tried crossing the courtyard to reach the corner house but that lantern, which was staring at him with its unblinking needle-sharp gaze, made his resolve totter and he would move away a few paces, closer to the big sewer. If he had wanted, he could have jumped across the sewer and crossed the courtyard in a few paces – just a few paces!

  Javed lived far away from here but had reached here virtually in no time at all. His thoughts had raced faster than his steps. His mind had dwelt on many things on the way. He was no fool. He knew well enough that he was on his way to a prostitute and knew even better why he wanted to go to her.

  He needed a woman – a woman, no matter what kind of woman. The need for a woman had not come up all of a sudden; it had been growing slowly inside him for a long time till it had attained its present form and now, suddenly, he felt as though he could not live another moment without a woman. He must get a woman – a woman whose thigh he could slap lightly, whose voice he could hear, a woman with whom he could talk in the most obscene manner possible.

  Javed was an educated, sober sort of a chap. He knew the rights and wrongs, but in this matter was not willing to think any further. A desire had arisen deep inside him; it wasn’t a new desire by any means. It had sprung up several times before and, each time had been met with frustration despite innumerable attempts on his part. Defeated, he had reached the conclusion that he would never find a complete woman and if he were to continue searching for such a woman, he might one day just fall upon some woman walking by the road – like a mad dog that can bite any passerby.

  Having failed to even pounce upon a passing woman like a mad dog, a new thought had crossed his mind. Now he no longer dreamt of passing his fingers through a woman’s hair. He still had a picture of the woman in his mind – the woman even had hair – but now he dreamt of pulling her hair out by the clumps, like a savage beast.

  By now that image had quite left his mind – the image of a woman on whose lips, he thought, he would rest his own like a butterfly on a flower. Now he wanted to brand those lips with his hot lips. The thought of murmuring sweet nothings in a woman’s ear too had left him by now. He wanted to speak in a loud grating voice – speak of things that were as naked as his intentions.

  Now there was no single, complete woman in his mind. He wanted a woman who had been chaffed and worn out so much that she looked like a low, fallen-down man – a woman who was half woman and half nothing in particular.

  There was a time when Javed would feel a special sort of moistness in his eyes when ever he mouthed the word ‘woman’, when the mere thought of a woman would transport him to a strange moon-like place. He would utter the word – ‘woman’ – with the utmost care, scared as though this lifeless word might break with careless handling. For a long time, he had traversed this sublime, moon-like world relishing its pleasures. Till, finally, he discovered that a woman, the sort of woman he longed for, was only the sort that can be dreamt up by a man with a weak stomach!

  Javed had now stepped out of the world of dreams. For a long time, he had tried to keep his unruly thoughts under control but now his body had woken up in a terrifying sort of way. The swiftness of his imagination had honed his bodily sensations into such fine zones of feelings that life had turned into a bed of needles for him. Every thought had turned into a spear and the woman had acquired a shape and
form that, even if he wanted to, he would have found it difficult to describe her.

  Javed had been human once; but now he hated human beings, so much so that he even hated himself. And that is why he wanted to debase himself in such a manner that all those beautiful thoughts that he had once strewn about his mind like flowers in a garden would be besmirched and soiled. ‘I have been unsuccessful in finding refinement, because all around me there is filth. I now want to destroy every atom and pore of my body and soul with this filth. My nose, that once used to quiver in search of fragrances, now twitches in anticipation at the thought of sniffing out the foulest of smells. And that is why, today, I have discarded the cloak of old thoughts and come to this neighbourhood where everything appears to be clothed in a mysterious stink. How frighteningly beautiful this world is!’

  The courtyard, paved in a criss-cross fashion with thin, hand-fired Nanakshahi bricks, was in front of him. In the wan light of the lantern, Javed looked at the courtyard with new eyes. It appeared to him as though several naked women were lying there – some on their backs, others face down; all had bones jutting out at odd angles. He resolved to cross the brick-paved floor and reach the staircase of the corner house and climb up to the brothel. But the Municipal Committee’s lantern kept staring unblinkingly at him. His advancing steps retreated and he stopped. Thwarted, he wondered: ‘Why is the lantern staring at me? Why is it putting obstacles in my path?’

  He knew it was a figment of his imagination and had nothing to do with reality. Yet, his advancing steps retreated and he stood beside the sewer holding in check all the ugly thoughts rearing in his head. He began to believe that this hesitation of twenty-seven years that had been bequeathed to him as a legacy had seeped into that lantern. That shrinking hesitation, that he thought he had left behind at home like a discarded second skin, had reached here long before him – here where he was about to play the dirtiest game of his life. A game that would cover him with slime and blacken his soul with darkness.