Review of short stories collection releasing in the US on March 25th.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: In Saadat Hasan Manto’s amazingly honest and guileless world, pre-partition Bombay is a buzzing, boisterous, licentious cocoon, a hive with a million mouths lapping at the honey inside – unlimited sex, drugs, fame, wealth and power. Most of the men and women get trapped, drudged inside the combs. Happiness for them turns into more expectation than reality; life a seduction with too many fault lines, misery and heart break waiting at the next corner.
Bombay Stories (Vintage International, paperback, 289 pages; $16), the first ever translated short story collection of Manto, by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, being released in the US, on March 25th, is an eye opener for even those who are inured to the sins and charms of the city now known as Mumbai. Salman Rushdie reckoned Manto to be the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story.
From Rushdie himself, to writers like Suketu Mehta, Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes, Kiran Nagarkar, Gregory David Roberts, Vikram Chandra to Jeet Thayil, Bombay’s guts and underbelly has been exposed to an extent that even those who have never been to the city feel they know it too well. Over decades, a gush of noir films like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, have filled in the blanks to the city’s mysteries.
But then here comes a unique collection of fiction that was the printing block of all that has ever been written of the city, and nothing like ever before. For those who have a premonition that reading any book of stories set in Bombay would be as familiar as seeing roulette tables in Vegas, here is fair warning on Bombay Stories: expect the expected in the unexpected.
Writers who emulate Manto remember the alphabets, but forget to decipher the space between the letters in the printing block set by him: the innocence of coming to age in teeming chawls, the decorations in rooms of prostitutes, love lives of pimps, kindness of gangsters, the never ending addictions, sexual depravities of film stars. The freshness and poignant immediacy of Manto’s stories in this vibrant collection, some written more than 80 years ago, is haunting.
Manto, a Kashmiri Muslim who was born in Ludhiana in Punjab, and died in 1955 at the age of 42 in Pakistan, of liver cirrhosis – by his own admission he worked only for the purpose to drink – was a university dropout, an academic failure, but that didn’t prevent him from being one of the most prolific writers that the sub-continent has produced. He published, in Urdu and Hindi, 22 collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, and two collections of personal sketches, even as he pursued a full-time career as a Bollywood film and radio scriptwriter and a journalist and editor.
Manto faced trials in Pakistan several times for his bold works on the themes of sexuality, but was never convicted of those charges. In his later years, after he left Mumbai to go to Pakistan to join his family post-partition, he became penniless, was forced to go to different newspaper offices, write a story there for instant payment.
One of the unique aspects of Bombay Stories – compiled from some of the stories Manto wrote in the years he spent in the city, in two phases, from 1936-1941, and from 1942-1948, before his departure for Lahore – is that it’s as much a work about the city and its people, as it is about Manto himself.
It would be easy enough to mistake some of the stories being more memoir than fiction, but perhaps Manto, in his eponymous self in some of the stories, was doing what he best knew: writing about the lives of people he came to know, mainly through his work editing film magazines, and writing scripts for films, but also living in poor neighborhoods, in chawls and tenements, experiencing hard life.
The equal sympathy and level-headedness Manto has for seedy characters, the prostitutes and pimps, local toughs, as well as for the whims and eccentricities of the rich and famous, is testimony to that in the 14 stories that make the collection. It’s remarkable that Manto keeps this balanced perspective of being immersed in his characters, not get subsumed in judgment.
In Ten Rupees, an outing for a teen girl – who has been thrown into prostitution from the time she attained puberty by her mother to eke out a living – with three men who pay for her services, encapsulates the carefree spirit of society of the Mumbai of the 1930s, unbridled happiness and thrill, fleeting as it may be, than sexual mores.
Turn to The Insult, and the loveless, exploited prostitute whose world comes crumbling in an instant through the briefest of exchange with a client, could well be the girl who exulted in her youth and freedom in Ten Rupees. Turn the compass some more, and the madam in Mummy encompasses all the debauchery from youth to old age, with its nasty consequences.
In Smell – one of his most powerful stories, for which Manto faced trial – unbridled lust has poetic cadence, unquenchable desire for a laborer woman turns unexpectedly to dismay for a rich man with his fetching wife on their nuptial night. Manto brilliantly turns upside down the notion of beauty and sex, deconstructs life to its true essence. Most of his stories have that bare all feel to them, an indestructible quality. The same thread as in Smell is to be found in Hamid’s Baby also.
Because Mumbai is so clearly etched in modern readers’ minds, the sparse description of the city and its landmarks does not compromise Manto’s stories. His brief sketches of poverty and struggle suffice, with many of the characters who come as immigrants to the city, willing to bend any which way to stay on, an indelible aspect of his stories. Manto himself despaired in real life once he left Mumbai for good. In stories like Janaki, Babu Gopi Nath, and Siraj, Manto draws compelling narratives which seem realistic, as well as the stuff of masala potboilers from celluloid.
Manto is best known for his stories emanating from the partition, and he gives a glimpse of his grip on writing about religious strife, in Mozelle, a story titled on a Jewish girl, who does an unthinkable, mind bending act at the end of the story.
Stories influenced by the mafia is spread throughout the collection, with pimps galore, but comes sparkling to life in Hamid’s Baby and Mammad Bhai, the latter being the last story in the collection.
While there is a streak of philosophizing even when he describes the life of pimps and prostitutes, and men who prey on women, Manto is at his lightest when it comes to these two stories, with a nuance for the comic. Bollywood scriptwriters scratching their heads for sequels to the Munnabhai MBBS films, may well look to Manto’s works for inspiration.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar)
To contact the author, email to editor@americanbazaaronline.com