Randhir had opened her bra’s tight, close-fitting straps; its impression could be seen in the soft flesh on her back and chest. There was also a stain on her waist from her tightly tied drawstring. Her heavy necklace, with its sharp points, had left indentations on her chest, as if nails had dug forcefully at it. Those same days of rain. The raindrops falling on the peepal’s smooth, soft leaves, making the same sound Randhir had heard throughout that night. The weather was perfect; a cool breeze blew; but the powerful scent of henna flowers was mixed into it.
Randhir’s hands ran like air over this pale, fair-skinned girl’s milky white breasts. His fingers set loose a shiver through her soft body. When he pressed his chest against hers, he could hear the sound of every chord that had been struck in this girl. But where was that cry, the cry that he had inhaled in the smell of that Marathi girl, the cry that was infinitely more comprehensible than that of a child thirsty for milk, the cry that after exceeding the limits of the voice (from which it broke), became inaudible?
Randhir was looking out of the window grilles. The peepal’s leaves clattered very near him, but he was trying to look much further than that, to where a strange dim light was visible through murky clouds, a light like the one he had seen in the Marathi girl’s breasts, a light, which like the contents of a secret was both hidden and evident.
In Randhir’s arms, lay a fair-skinned girl whose body was soft like dough mixed with milk and butter; from her sleeping body came the now tired scent of henna; to Randhir, it was as unpleasant as a man’s last breath, and sour, like a belch. Discoloured. Sad. Joyless.
Randhir looked at the girl who lay in his arms as one looks at curdled milk, with its lifeless white lumps afloat in pallid water. In the same way, this girl’s womanliness left him cold. His mind and body were still consumed by the smell that came naturally from the Marathi girl; the smell that was many times more subtle and pleasurable than that of henna; that he had not been afraid to inhale, that had entered him of its own accord and realised its true purpose.
Randhir made one last effort to touch this girl’s milky white body. But he felt no trembling. His brand new wife who was the daughter of a first class magistrate, who had attained a BA, who was the heartthrob of so many boys in her college did not quicken his pulse. In the deathly scent of henna, he searched for that smell that in those same days of rain, when in an open window the peepal’s leaves were washed, he had inhaled from the dirty body of a Marathi girl.
A note on the author
Saadat Hasan Manto has been called the greatest short story writer of the Indian subcontinent. He was born in 1912 in Punjab and went on to become a radio and film scriptwriter, journalist and short story writer. His stories were highly controversial and he was tried for obscenity six times during his career. After Partition, Manto moved to Lahore with his wife and three daughters. He died there in 1955.
A note on the translator
Aatish Taseer was born in 1980 and educated at Amherst College. He has worked as a reporter for Time magazine and is the author of Stranger to History, which will be published next year. He divides his time between London and Delhi.