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Nakedness of Body and Mind!

Manto is known for his broken heart – he never recovered from Partition and the blood of that division ran raw and red through him for the rest of his life. He seemingly fulfilled most of the clichés about writers, a massive ego, a love of the bottle, an understanding of life at its lowest level and above all, above everything, a love of his language Urdu!

This collection of sixteen stories and three sketches, newly translated from Urdu to English by Rakhshanda Jalil, brings to light the dark underbelly of society. Of course, there is a reason for that. The stories date from after Partition and belong to the writings for which Manto is known. They were written when his life was also at an all time low, filled with bankruptcy, mental problems and depression alleviated or exaggerated by drink.

Despite his personal problems, Manto never lost his grip on the pulse of human nature. He saw life in the raw and was not ashamed to expose it. The lives of the poor, for example, which are characterized by an utter lack of privacy where a sackcloth curtain is the only cover and that pitifully inadequate. A sackcloth curtain can destroy all the romance of a marriage and it does. Or there are descriptions of the ordeals of prostitutes worn out by overwork and the bitterness of their lives in The Candle's Tears or Loser all the Way; pimps who manage to combine ruthlessness and humanity in a surprising way in The Hundred Candle Watt Bulb, the utter helplessness of men forced into sexual encounters under circumstances of which they have no control in Naked Voices and Coward. There is no false pity or attempts to be maudlin. Manto looks his unprepossessing world fairly and squarely in the eye.

Manto’s sympathy and observation was not restricted to men. Naked Voices has a number of stories centered on women like Bismillah, By the Roadside, Comfort, The Candle Tears, The Rat of Shahdole, The Hundred Candle Power Bulb and By God. They are stories of love, loss and heartbreak and were obviously the result of hours of minute Toulouse Lautrec style observation. Whores, women without men to protect them confronted by a doubtful future, the anguish of a woman who finds herself pregnant and gives birth by the roadside, abandoning the baby the moment it leaves her body.

Partition is the main character in the stories, the true villain that destroys lives. All the factors that set Manto apart from other writers is encapsulated in one of his Partition stories, Sahay. The story tells of how a group of friends fall apart during the political maneuverings. The only Muslim among them, Mumtaz, finds himself leaving for Pakistan after one of his friends confesses that he may be forced to kill Mumtaz. To Mumtaz, Pakistan is “a country that would remain a stranger to him no matter how hard he tried”. However, he has no choice but to go. Through Mumtaz one may say that Manto exposed his own religious philosophy, as something transcending “ the sort of thing in which ninety-nine per cent of us are trapped”.

The collection also includes three very vivid essays or word sketches which some may call typical of Manto’s schizophrenia, the author being aware of his own importance and flaunting it to the hilt.

However the sketches provide an opportunity for the writer to expose his political theories to the world in a cynical tongue-in-cheek vein. The sketch entitled Saadat Hasan accuses 'Manto the writer' of being a liar, a thief and a failure! In a Letter to Uncle Sam, is a tirade against imperialism disguised as an innocent letter written by an impoverished nephew to his uncle in America, a man who is flush with the riches of capitalism and prosperity.

The pity is that one cannot read Manto in his original beloved language, though Rakhshanda Jalil’s translation gives one the feel of the stories and promises more works of Manto to come.

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