Manto was twenty-three or so when he was struck by tuberculosis. Initially he tried to stifle the pain by drinking more country liquor than usual but when even that didn’t serve to dull the ache in his chest, he was packed off to the mountains. Born to Kashmiri parents but raised in the Punjab, this was Manto’s first visit to Kashmir. Though he never managed to go beyond Batot, he was clearly enchanted by the land of his forefathers and its people. He also had his first, and some believe his only romantic experience, with a tantalizing shepherd girl. Many of his stories draw on the time he spent among these idyllic hills and vales. In A Letter, he speaks (presumably) of her as a girl who was ‘young and totally young … one who left some beautiful inscriptions on the pages of my life.’
Manto went to Bombay in search of work sometime in 1935, landing a job as editor of a weekly called Mussavvir. The glamour and gaiety of the city’s high society, as also the grit and grime of its underbelly, provided ample fodder for a man of Manto’s disposition. The red light district of Forres Road, the chawls of Nagpara, the paanwallas, taxi drivers, washermen, Parsi landladies and Jewish hotel keepers, the editors of motley Urdu newspapers became rich sources of inspiration. Manto wrote prolifically and some of his most memorable characters are drawn from the people he met in these halcyon days in Bombay from 1935 to 1947. Manto hobnobbed with film stars, first as a film journalist and then as a scriptwriter, made money and frittered it all away on drinking, gambling and the good life. He did, briefly, live in Delhi for a year and a half when he worked at the All India Radio but irreconciliable differences with the legendary Pitras Bukhari, the station director, made him give up the only job he enjoyed, one that also fetched him a regular salary.
No one quite knows why Manto went away to Pakistan. Was it in a huff or on a whim? Was it to seek a better future, broken as he was by chronic drinking and acute poverty? Was it the thought of starting afresh, on a clean slate as it were, that attracted him whenever he did think of his wife and three daughters whom he loved dearly? Was it out of genuine disenchantment with the increasingly strident and communally charged atmosphere of the so-called bohemian film industry? Or was it, as some suggest, the dream of owning an ‘allotted’ mansion the moment he crossed over? One gets a glimpse into Manto’s state of mind when he made the journey across in Sahay and in Zehmat- e-Mehr-e-Darakhshan, but with Manto there never are any clear answers.
Manto migrated to Pakistan in 1948 and lived there for the next seven years. These were years of hard drinking, acute penury, a near hand-to-mouth existence and a time of ever-mounting frustrations and humiliations. The mansion of his dreams did not materialize, nor did he, by all accounts, seriously pursue the ‘allotment’ issue. The film industry in Lahore was in doldrums and there was very little work for a writer who wanted to write his own sort of stories. Yet Manto wrote like a man possessed, often producing one story a day, a bit like a hen laying an egg a day! Some of his finest work was produced during these years of near- manic productivity, poverty and profligacy. Manto died on 18 January 1955 in Lahore of cirrhosis of the liver. His last wish, literally made with his dying breath, was for a drink of whiskey.
This collection — subjective as all collections inevitably are — attempts to provide a glimpse into the formidable body of work that is Manto’s legacy. There is far more to Manto, I do believe, than Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do or Kaali Shalwar. While these stories have been most anthologized and are therefore most well known, they are by no means representative of Manto’s writings. Most of these provocative stories belong to the last years of his life when the shadows were darkening not just in his personal life but over the subcontinent too and when Manto’s demons had begun to trouble him to the extent of driving him, briefly, into a mental asylum. These are dark stories, unrelieved by even a tinge of the humanity and liberalism that one sees in his early work. Unfortunately, it is these stories that are understood, in popular perception, to define Manto’s oeuvre. The truth, however, is that his world is peopled by the good as much as the bad; if anything, Manto possesses the rare knack of making the reader share his delighted discovery of goodness and beauty whenever he comes across it in the midst of wickedness and ugliness. Maybe it was the age he was born in, or the circumstances of his own life that made Manto see the darkness more acutely than others. But Manto was not blind to light. He cherished goodness whenever he stumbled upon it.
Manto was many things but he was definitely not a poseur. He wrote what he saw or felt; his stories, therefore, cover many subjects. There is, of course, the Partition and the communal divide that left a gash on not just men like Manto but on millions who were affected by the terrible events before and after 1947. Some writers shape their oeuvre, others have it shaped by events and circumstances larger and beyond them. The cataclysmic events of the Partition influenced many writers who lived during that period. So, while Manto wrote almost obsessively about the events that lead to the division of the subcontinent and the terrible suffering it inflicted on innocent people, he wrote on other subjects too. Most notably on sex! So much so, that those who do not see Manto’s prolific outpouring over a period of twenty-odd years, often regard him as a writer unhealthily obsessed with sex.
Having read Manto in driblets over a longish period of time and then systematically and comprehensively at the time of making this selection, I can say that Manto wrote about human nature in all its diversity. And he wrote about all sorts of people. While he wrote with particular empathy about women, simulating a certain naturalness in speech and behaviour that can only come from close interaction and minute observation, he wrote with astonishing perspicacity about fellow men as well. And all sorts of men: writers, film-makers, photographers, social workers, office workers, village folk, tinsmiths, tongawallahs, washermen, water-carriers, pimps, shopkeepers, in short he could claim a nodding acquaintance with every form of low life, high society-types and those in the middle rungs as well.
In this selection, I have strived to give as broad-based a sampling of Manto’s work as possible. There are dark stories of the evil that lies hidden in the hearts of men. There are stories of exploitation, double standards, greed, corruption, lust, in short every imaginable vice and venality. Bismillah is one such story as is Comfort. The Maker of Martyrs and Loser All the Way are light-hearted spoofs on man’s degeneracy and moral bankruptcy. But there are other stories of the goodness too that Manto saw in men who lived less-than-exemplary lives, like the pimp in Sahay. Then, there are stories such as Sharifan in which otherwise decent men are forced to commit acts of bestiality; the culprits here are not the men but the circumstances that they find themselves in. The horrors of Partition are central in some stories like Sharifan and incidental in others like By God. In Hundred Candle Watt Bulb, a woman kills her pimp because she hadn’t slept in a long, long time and he keeps forcing her to sleep with customers. No one knows how long the woman’s torment had been going on, who the woman was or how she met the pimp. Nothing matters in the explosive end when the woman, agonized beyond endurance by her lack of sleep, clobbers the pimp with a brick and finally sleeps, her head covered with her dupatta, lying in the blinding glare of a hundred candle watt bulb, blissfully oblivious. What did this woman want from life? Sleep. And the pimp stood in the way of her and sleep. So she kills him.