Remembering Manto in NYC
The winter sun had long withered away. I was tired, dog
tired... just back from a excruciating day in the mind numbing
suburban sprawl called New Jersey. I was headed for a meeting of
the Lease Drivers Coalition, a local initiative in organizing the
primarily South Asian yellow cab driver population of the city. I
hail a cab at 14th Street too tired to
walk the 15 odd blocks to meeting. A slighly beat up cab pulls up.
I get in.. and smile... the driver is a Pakistani - Mohammed Sheik.
A conversation begins... brief introductions and then I ask - Where
are you from in Pakistan? His reply is slow to come, as if
considering: Toba Tek Singh. I sit up, "Toba Tek Singh!!"
He looks up at me in the rear view mirror and smiles... "Aap
Sadat Hasan Manto ke bare me sounch rahe hai na" ("you
are reminded of Sandat Hasan manto, aren't you?"), he asks.
"yes of course" I respond.And indeed I was. I had read
Manto's Toba Tek Singh many years ago... the black dark turgid
humour of two nations, two governments, exchanging mental asylum
inmates across the blood spocked border... just months after
partition.... and one lone sigh searching for his village, refusing
to be simply exchanged... Manto, wrote this in 1948... his take on
what partition was all about, his understanding of its logic and
his unflinching judgement of the two States it had produced are all
woven in. Its one of those stories that slaps you across the face
and makes you sit up. "Yes I am, indeed."
He smiles... slowly he begins talking... we talk about this
story and then that. "Manto" he says "his cynicism
wasn't cynicism... it was a cry of anger and sorrow mixed together
that we read as cynicism" I concur. Our conversation twists
and turns, suddenly both of us are consumed by an urge to explain
Manto. The fifteen blocks have been long covered. We sit by the
roadside talking. "How can you expect anything else from a man
who had been abandoned... who saw an idea he lived daily, not
simply thought of, but lived, being destroyed. Its a brutality born
out of being torn apart..." Mohammed says.
Its late. A little past 11:30 PM... I am trying to get home. I
need to sleep. I hail another cab... get in... another Pakistani
brother... and our conversation begins... When we get to the point
where in he says he is from "Toba Tek Singh" I am just
too stunned to react. "This can't be true" I tell myself.
But my new friend, he knows nothing of Manto... but he knows who
Toba Tek Singh was. "Kooaen Khodta tha" he says,
"Toba Tek Singh, was a man who gave us water." He tells
me a story. A few years ago, some mullas (religious heads) wanted
to change the name of our village - they didn't like the
"Hindu" name. "A few of us got together and we beat
up the mullas... how could we allow that" my new friend
says... "he after all gave us water."
Biju Mathew
Generally considered to be the finest
short story writer in Urdu. He is a disturbing writer who shocks
the reader with his candidness, sometimes with his crudity. Whether
he writes of sex or the life of prostitutes, on social or on
political issues, his stories are full of fire. His frankness
greatly agitated the self-styled moralists of his day he had to
face charges of obscenity against several of his stories in the
court. Discarding emotionalism and slogans, Manto adopted a plain,
realistic style with which he explores the depths of human
psychology. His stories about the 1947 killings and disturbances
are a moving record of the period. Their grim realism evokes the
tensions and tragedy of the time with powerful directness. Manto
has created memorable characters and there is hardly anyone in Urdu
literature who approaches his skill at characterisation. He has
been accused of misanthropy and bitterness, but his social
criticism is profound and his censure of hypocritical attitudes
devastating. Manto does not rely on abstract reasoning in his
approach. He is an artist who feels instinctively and expresses
himself without inhibitions. He is however sympathetic to his
characters for all his fire and fury and does not despair of
humanity. His motivating concern seems to be to make his readers
aware of meanness and selfishness, as also concern and feeling, in
the most unexpected places.
[Reproduced from "Pakistani Short Stories" edited by Waqas
Ahmad Khwaja, UPS Publishers' Distributers Ltd., New Delhi.
1992]
