"Hamid's Baby" by Saadat Hadas Manto (1953)

"Hamid's Baby"


"Whorehouses and shrines—I feel at peace nowhere else. I’ll quit going to whorehouses soon enough because my money’s about to run out. But India has thousands of saints. I’ll go find one when my time comes.’ ‘Why do you like whorehouses and shrines?’ I asked. He thought for a moment and then answered, ‘Because there, from top to bottom, it’s all about deception. What better place could there be for a person who wants to deceive himself?’ ‘If you like listening".

Saadat Hasan Manto (often called "The Sage of Pakistan") was born in 1912 in Sampala, in then British India, he died in Lahore Pakistan in 1955.  He published twenty two collections of short stories.  He wrote about the impact of the Partition, the lives of those involved with Bollywood, but his best work seems to often involve prostitutes, pimps, and their clients.  Just like Guy de Maupassant.  The extreme poverty and the rigid caste system funneled millions of women into prostitution, the rigid moral code which stipulated a woman should remain a virgin until marriage produced a massive demand.  The workers range from super expensive actresses to young girls following the family tradition.  Many Dalit women became prostitutes.

"Hamid's Baby", I decided to post on this particular story as it can be read online, is a very well done work.

A wealthy older friend of Hamid's late father has arrived from Lahore for a ten day
visit.  He expects Hamid to be at his beg and call as he tours the brothels of Bombay.
The friend's wallet is crammed with 100 Rupee notes.  We soon learn a fresh young girl just in from her village is 100 rupees for 24 hours.  Of course women can be had for much less.  We also learn gangsters charge 1000 Rupees to kill someone.

They hook up, after renting a nice private taxi, with a well known pimp.  He takes the pair to several brothel apartments but nothing suits the guest.  Finally the pimp says ok I know of a Maratha girl, 17, just starting working recently, very innocent and lovely.  They go there and Hamid is struck by how lovely she is and almost offended when he finds out you can have her for 100 rupees.  His friend doesn't want her, saying he doesn't really fancy her.  He recognizes Hamid does and insists on treating him, Hamid is married with kids and feels a bit ashamed of himself, but he goes to a hotel and has sex with the girl while his rich friend goes off with the pimp to explore the decadence and depravity of Bombay.

Hamid becomes infatuated with the girl and sees her twenty days in a row.  Realizing this is a dangerous course of action for a married man, he stops going to the brothel apartment to get her.  But then four months later he feels the urge to go back.  To his dismay she is visibly pregnant.  Fearing he is the father he buys her drugs supposed to cause a miscarriage but they don't work.  He knows his marriage will be ruined if his wife discovers his indiscretion. Her pimp when the man returns to see if she is still pregnant tells Hamid he sent her back to her village to have her baby.   About six months later, shortly after the baby would have been born, Hamid goes to her village.  Once he gets there he hires a gangster to kill the baby but the gangster has a heart and he just turns the baby over to Hamid and tells him to kill the baby, a boy.  Hamid is just ready to smash the baby with a huge grinding stone when he decides to see what his baby looks like.  I will leave the ending for new readers.

The best way I'm aware to sample Manto's work is in the collection Bombay Stories.

His work belongs in the canon of short stories.

Mel u

Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto (2014)

"Whorehouses and shrines, I feel at peace  no 

where else."- Saadat Hasan Manto

 

Saadat Hasan Manto was born 1912 in Ludbiana in the Punjab region of India and died 1955 in Lahore, Pakistan.  Bombay Stories, edited and translated from Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, is a really valuable anthology of fifteen short stories written by Manto from 1945 to 1955.  Literary works about the dark side of the great India mega cities are very popular now and are among the best so far of 21st century literature.  The editors of the anthology in their very informative remarks say that Manto was the first to write about the gangsters, pimps, film industry people, whores and their customers who made  much of the population of Bombay, now sadly called 'Mumbai'.  In every one of these stories prostitutes, Manto uses the term, "whore" a lot, play a part.  In about half of the stories prostitutes are the central focus of the stories.  Gangsters feature in several of them.  Manto made, or tried to make, a living as a Bollywood screenwriter and through his short stories, and elements of this appear frequently.  Manto did not spare himself.  If I were able to time travel and do a tour of the brothels of Paris in 1855, I would love to have had Flaubert or Guy de Maupassant as my guide.  If made a similar tour in Bombay in 1950, Manto would be the perfect  host.  His life was as tortured as any Irish poet. 

These stories are very gripping.  You feel you are in back alleys of Bombay. In teeming apartments, in whorehouses, talking to gangsters and getting drunk or high with your last rupee.  I found it fascinating to learn one of his first published works was a translation of Oscar Wilde's play about Russian revolutionaries, Vera into Urdu  He also translated short stories  of Gorky and Chekhov as well as some of Victor Hugo's works into Urdu.

These stories should be on the reading list of any lover of the short story and Indian Literature.  Some may find his treatment of women debasing.  He did marry and tried to be a good husband but it was not meant to be. Some of the stories are very funny,in parts.  Some, maybe most, are at their core tragic.  There is an excellent translator's afterword.  The only fault I have with the anthology is we are not told when and in what magazines the individual stories first were published.  This is important information. 

I was provided a free copy of this book.

Mel u

"The Insult" by Saadat Hasan Manto (1948, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed)

Novels about the dark side of the great Indian Mega Cities are common place now.  Some of them are among the best of 21th century literature, as I know it.  Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955, born Samrala, India) was among the very first writers to focus on the lives of the millions of people living on or beyond the edges of polite society in Bombay. "The Insult" takes us into the life of a Bombay prostitute in 1947 or so.  We see her various clients and we ponder what drives them to visit her.  It is rarely just sex as most have wives.  Manto's evocation of her sensuous nature and voluptuous body did make me wish for a moment I was back in old Bombay, before they changed the name, with ten rupees to spare.  We get a bit of an understanding as to why she became a whore (not a lot of euphemisms in Manto- the much more gentle R. K. Narayan uses the term "public woman").  Lots of her clients temporarily fall in love with her and make all sorts of promises to save her from her life.  In fact she sort of likes it.  She gets ten ruppes  from her clients (Manto says prostitutes normally get from ten to a hundred rupees so she
is at the bottom of the hooker hierarchy.  Her pimp, who has 120 girls under him, gets a cut of 2.5 rupees per customer.  You can see the starkness of Manto in the opening lines of "The Insult".  She loves the compliments her customers pay to her body and thrives from the temporary euphoria.

You can see the harsh world Manto depicts and the deep rooted corruption of Bombay in these opening lines of "The Insult".

I have posted on several of Manto 's wonderful stories and you can find background information on him in those posts.  I was given a free copy of the collection in which I read "The Insult ".  It is a first rate anthology.

The New Yorker recently had a very good article on Manto

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.htm

Please share your experience with Manto with us.

 

"Khushiya" by Saadat Hasan Mamto (1949, 15 pages)

In his very interesting afterward to a forthcoming collection of short stories by Saadat  Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955) Matt Reeck credits Manto as the first author to focus on the dark side of Bombay (now known as Mumbai) in his stories about thugs, prostitutes, slum dwellers, Bollywood writers, and the rural immigrants who made up eighty percent of the populace of Bombay in 1948.  He also wrote extensively on the catastrophic results of the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two countries.  Novels about the reality behind the glitter of modern India mega-cities have won or been short listed for the Booker Prize.  His work reminds me of the great Yiddish language writer Lamed Shapiro who wrote stories of the pogroms against Eastern European Jews.  It is almost as if Manto broke the ice and a great out flow of pain resulted in literature of great depth.  On a side note, in my post on Manto's short story "Mozelle" I was in a quandary as to why Manto choice to make the central figure in the story a Jewish woman.  From Reeck I learned that there were extensive Jewish communities in the Bombay area since 1600.

One side effect of the migration of poverty stricken people to Bombay, the majority of immigrants were men, was a great expansion in the number of prostitutes.  Whole areas of the city were given over to prostitutes and many women did it as a side line.  For various complicated reasons, prostitutes were often from the Dalit (Untouchable) castes and their pimps and gangster overlords were from higher castes.  There is no sense of condemnation in Manto's story.  He is just portraying life.  

Khushiya is a pimp.  However, he personally at age twenty eight had had it seems no sexual contact with women.  Religious and caste taboos kept him from touching the prostitutes.  In fact before the day of the story, he last saw a naked woman when he accidentally got a glimpse of a woman in the shower at age ten. Today he decides to go check on one of his charges.  He does not think she is home so he walks into her apartment.  To his shock, she is all but naked.  He is grossly insulted when she makes no effort to cover herself, as if her were a cat, not a man.  He takes an extreme step to prove his manhood, nothing violent but actually I liked how it ended a lot and thought Khushiya had for sure resurrected his manhood.

For sure Manto's stories are very powerful, the best can stand with the greatest of short stories.

There are fifteen stories collected in Bombay Stories (I was given this book by Viking International and offer my thanks.)  For sure I will read them all.  

Please share your experience with Manto with us. (There is background information on him in my prior posts on his stories)

Mel u

"Mozelle" by Saadat Hanson Manto (1951- first published in The Hindu Times-translated from Urdu by C. M. Narain )

Saadat Hasan Manto's most famous works are his short stories about the senseless violence caused by the 1947 partition of Indian into two countries.  (There is background information on him in my prior posts om his work).  The stories show how people used religious differences as their excuse for horrible crimes against those of different religious faith.  I have recently begun to read short stories by Lamed Shaprio set in the time of vicious anti-Semetic pogroms in the Ukraine, circa 1915 and I find startling similarities among the stories of Shapiro and Lamed.  I am pretty sure Manto never read any of Shapiro's stories but I think they would have felt a kinship as men and as writers.

"Mozelle" deals with the relationship of a Jewish woman and a Shik man, in Bombay during the terrible post partition riots in which Hindu and Muslims turned on each other and both turned on Shiks.  Mozelle is a Jewish woman living in Bombay.  Her portrayal by Manto is a little troubling.  The Shik man wants to marry her, a shocking deviation from his cultural norms.   She is just having fun, she has many boyfriends and exhibits a promiscuity that would get a woman from Bombay labeled a whore.  Manto continually talks about her large breasts and white skin.  You have to wonder why is a Jewish woman treated like this,is there a suggestion of the corruption of the west, why is she Jewish and why the obsession with her large breasts.  Maybe Manto figures it will seem exciting to readers in 1951, maybe he likes large breasts, or maybe his editors said to punch up his work.  Anyway Shiks are hated by both Muslims and Hindus as they were very loyal to the British.  We learn a good bit about Shik culture, about the fact that men must not cut their hair or beards.  When Mozelle deserts him, he soon meets and falls in love with a demure very traditional Shik woman who wants to marry.  He learns rioters are going to her neighborhood and killing any Skihs they find.  I don't want to reveal more of the story other than to say Mozelle ends up naked in the rescue of the Shik woman.

This is a very interesting story.  

I have access to more of Manto's stories and hope to read some additional stories by him this year.

Please share your experience with Manto with us.

"One More Dead Body" by Kartar Singh Duggal 1982 translated from Punjabi by Balwant Gargi

"One More Dead Body" by Kartar Duggal is a totally entertaining very insightful story that lets us see "real" life in the family an office worker living in a big city in India.   As the story opens we learn the husband has to face a terrible two hour each way commute to work on the crushing trains.  His in-laws want to know when they will be blessed with their first grandchild but he tells us he is basically so tired when he gets home he does not feel like being with his wife.   There is a wonderful two hundred apartment building only ten minutes by bike from his job.  He has been trying to get an apartment there for a very long time then he is so happy when they can move to the new place.  He and his wife love it there.  It is so nice no one ever moves out.  Vacancies only arise when a resident dies.  However, instead of enjoying four more hours of leisure and working on his first son, he decides to use the extra time to work overtime.  He only comes home to eat and collapse in bed.  One day he in a never happened before event gets sick at work and goes home in the middle of the day.  He walks in on his wife in bed with another man and goes nut.  He removes his shoe and begins beating the man who vacates as soon as he can.  Then he begins to hit his wife with the shoe screaming out at her "whore" in a voice all the neighbors can hear.  

A few days later the building manager shows up with a letter of eviction and tells the couple the neighbors have reported them for bad behavior and have put out claims the wife is a prostitute.  Suddenly we learn what is most important to the man.  He tells the landlord's agent that all couples have fights and the neighbors are making up this story as they want to put their relatives in his apartment.  Then he turns on the manager and demands an apology for his insults to his wife.  The manager thinks for a moment then apologies and tears up the notice of eviction. 

I know it will be hard for most to access this story (first published in The Hindu Times and reprinted in Best Indian Short Stories, Vol Ii edited by Khushwant Singh -this and Vol I are probably your best introductory volumes to the Indian short story.)

Kartar Singh Duggal was born in 1917, in Dhamal, Rawalpindi District, Pakistan. He writes with equal ease in Panjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and English and excels in all genres of writings.

His works have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages. He has received many honors and awards including the Padma Bhushan, Sahitya Akademi Award, Ghalib Award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid Award, and Soviet Land Award.

He has served as Director, All India Radio and Director, National Book Trust. He has also been Advisor (Information), Planning Commission of India.

The Library of Congress has 118 of his works.  He died in 2012.

"Siraj" by Saadat Manto (1951)

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955, born Samrala, India, died Lahore, Pakistan) is considered one of the greatest Urdu language short story writers.  He is most known for his fiction about the impact of the Partition of India.   His life was constant struggle to make a living from journalism and his fiction.   

"Siraj" is an entertaining well plotted story set, like others of Manto's stories, is set in the mean streets of Bombay (Mumbai) among pimps, prostitutes and their customers.  Sirja has caused a lot of trouble for her pimp.  She gets more than her share of clients but she never has any form of sex with any of them, not as much as hand holding.  Siraj, like many of the street girls of Bombay was from a small town in rural India.  Her past is kept a bit mysterious but she seemed to have disgraced her family in a failed romance in which she was the pursuer. The pimp is friends with one of his clients and when the client says he wants Siraj for the evening the pimp tells him not to bother as she won't provide service like he is used to receiving. He tells the pimp he will seduce her but he in fact ends up with no satisfaction and falls in love with Siraj.  Here is her description:

"i I had seen Siraj once or twice. She was really skinny but beautiful, and her prominent eyes overshadowed every other feature of her oval face. When I saw her for the first time on Clare Road, I was puzzled. I wanted to tell her eyes, ‘Excuse me, please move aside a little so I can see Siraj.’ Needless to say, it didn’t happen.”

Siraj maneuvers her client into falling in love with her. She gets him to take her back to her home town and in a twist ending we learn how she wound up a prostitute.

Novels about the "dark" side of Indian Mega-Cities are all the rage now.  Manto wrote about this seventy years ago.  He knew first hand what he was writing about.  

I read this in Best Indian Short Stories Vol. Ii, edited by Kushwant Singh.  It was translated by Fatima Ashmed.

Mel u

"Two Rupees" by Saadat Hassan Manto

"Two Rupees" by Saadat Hassan Manto (1951, 5 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

My Prior Posts on Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto was born 100 years ago in British India, in Punjab.   He was a very prolific writer publishing twenty six collections of short stories, worked as a Bollywood script writer in Bombay (a city he loved above all others).   He wrote in Urdu.   (There is more data on him in my prior posts.)

  

Lately I have read some interesting brand new novels that are about the "dark side" of Bombay or as it is now called, Mumbai.   I enjoyed reading these works but Manto was doing this a long time ago.  I have a special fondness for stories and novels about Mumbai/Bombay as it is the home town of more of my readers than any other city.  

  He was actually arrested and tried for obscenity six times, partially in retaliation for his devotion to the truth.

"Two Rupees" (I will provide a link where you can read this story) is about a prostitute and her young daughter who she is introducing into the business.   The story is set in the slums of  Bombay.   The people live almost right on top of each other so there is a lot of gossip.   Two women in the area love to talk trash about each other, suggesting the other is a prostitute.  One for sure is and the other, though she is married, does have some men visitors who look like they are not from that part of town.   The heart of this story is the developing career as a sex worker of the five-teen year old daughter of one of the women.   She loves it when men in fancy cars come to pick her up.   We know that she has sex with them and that her mother takes most of the money.   One days some men from Hyderabad come pick her up along with another girl even younger.    The men, who seem pretty young and I am not sure what politically is to be made of the fact that they are from Hyderabad, maybe just out of town boys doing in the slums of Bombay what they cannot do at home for fear of being observed, are thrilled to have the two girls in the car with them.  They start feeling their legs and such.   The girls are so happy to be in a car and they know what will bring in money so they do not object.   The price for the girls is two rupees.  I do not know what two rupees in 1951 means in modern rupees but one suspects it is not much.   There is an interesting twist at the end, a sad one as is often the case in the short stories of Manto.   

You can find the story online in English HERE

I will be posting on more stories by Manto.   

I offer my great thanks to Rohan of Rest is still unwritten for the link to this story and several other ones by Manto. He lives in Mumbai and his blog is very interesting source of insight into the culture of the country. I follow it and find it very insightful.

Mel u

"Kingdom's End" by Saadat Hasan Manto-

"Kingdom's End" by Saadat Hasan Manto  (1949, 5 pages)

The Short Story Initiative  

September

Hosted by A Simple Clockwork

Nancy C of A Simple Clockwork has converted her weekly event on short stories into a series of month long focuses on different aspects of the short story.   Every month there will be a theme.   I am very excited over this project.   Two and half years ago I had read in five decades of constant reading read maybe at most 20 short stories.   I always said., as most readers do, that I needed something "more substantial" to sink my teeth into.  Since March 2010 I think I must have read close to 2000 short stories.    I think the short story is the oldest literary form, tracing its roots back to at least 6000 years BC in ancient Indian texts.   Anyway the purpose of this post is to let people know about the event and to post briefly on a very great, dark story set in Bombay short story by a master of the art, Saadat Hasan Manto.

Here, take from Nancy's blog are the themes for the year.

September - Getting to know each other

October - Crime/suspense short stories

November - Indian short stories

December - Sci-fi short stories

January - Russian short stories

February - Classic short stories

March - Japanese short stories

April - Speculative fiction

May - Irish short stories

June - Short stories by feminist writers

July - African short stories

August - Award-winning short stories

September - Short stories adapted into movies

Nancy has proposed some question for September to help us get started.

1. Why do you want to join The Short Story Initiative?- To network with others who love short stories and to encourage others to try what is a genre many think they do not like.

2. What kind of short stories do you read? Is there a specific genre or culture or nationality you would like to explore through short stories?- I am seeking to read great short stories, to read the very best. Lately I have been reading a lot of Irish, Filipino, and Indian short stories but I am very open on the nationality of the stories I read.

3. Who is your favorite short story writer? Why?- Tough question, I will list five-Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, R. K. Narayan, Flannery O'Connor and among the living, Ethel Rohan. I have posted on each of these writers but I have no good answer to why. Maybe after I read another 2000 I will!

4. What is the most memorable short story you have read? Super tough question- "Solid Object" by Virginia Woolf.

5. What is your experience with short stories in the past? Is it a good or bad experience?- Answered this in my opening paragraph

6. Share one book confession when it comes to short stories? Sometimes I keep a great collection of books on my nightstand so I can see it when I get up so I know I have a reason to wake up!

7. Share something about yourself that has nothing to do with short stories. maybe another time.

For my first participation in The Short Story Initiative I will post on a very dark story by Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955, Pakistan-there is some background information in my prior posts on his work) set in Bombay. Bombay, now known officially as Mumbai, is city in the world from which my blog gets the most readers. I have also read several new novels recently that attempt to lay bare the dark side of the city. All I can say is that Manto already did this 60 years or so ago!

"Kingdom's End" by Saadat Hasan Manto is about an unemployed for years man living in Bombay. He normally sleeps on the pavement but he has gotten some luck lately. A friend is going to be out of town for a few weeks and he invited the man to stay in his office to keep away robbers. The man is perfectly capable of working, he used to be a film director and script writer (Manto was also) but he does not care to be tied down. He lives from charity of people he knows and has taught himself to live on next to nothing and eat what ever he can find. One day the phone rings. It is a woman with a wrong number but he strikes up a conversation with her and she starts calling regularly and they have more and more intimate conversations. He never asks her name, never what she looks like or seeks a meeting. The woman asks him why and he says basically he does not feel like the assertion. The story is short, the ending is terribly sad and grim. It is a small masterwork of the art of the short story.

You can read it here.

I offer my great thanks to Rohan of Rest is still unwritten for the link to this story and several other ones by Manto. He lives in Mumbai and his blog is very interesting source of insight into the culture of the country. I follow it and find it very insightful.

Mel u

Saadat Hasan Manto-Great Urdu Writer-"Toba Tek Singh"- ٹوبہ ٹیک سنگھ)

"Toba Tek Singh"  by Saadat Hasan Manto (1955, 7 pages-translated by Sundeep Dougal )  ٹوبہ ٹیک سنگھ) 


A Short Story by the Great Urdu Chronicler of the Partition of India


Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955-Samrala, Punjab, India) was a very prolific writer but it his work  the literary chronicler of the terrible human consequences of the 1947 Partition of India into the two countries of Pakistan and India that will bring him to the status of an immortal.   (There is a very good article on Manto in Wikipedia).    The country of Bangladesh  also arose from this partition.  At least 500,000 people died as a result of the mass migrations that the partition caused.   


Manto began his literary career translating the works of Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde into Urdu.    Urdu is one of the two official languages of Pakistan (the second is English).   It is a subdivision of Hindustani and is intelligible to speakers of contemporary Hindi.   Linguistics do not see Urdu as a fully independent language but, I believe, for political reasons many insist that it is.   Readers of Hindi can read Urdu and vice versa.   He was born into a Kashmiri Muslim family of barristers.   He is best known for his short stories and "Toba Tek Singh" is considered by all his greatest work.   His stories are about the real life of the ordinary person.   In the course of his career he was tried six times for obscenity but never convicted.   I really urge you to read the Wikipedia article on him (the author of the article is very much an admirer of Manto and has written one of the best of the of the many author articles I have read there).  


"Toba Tek Singh"  (the title refers, I think, to a city in India) deals with what happens in a mental hospital when the governments of Pakistan and India decide a few years after the partition that all those living in mental hospitals should be sent to their proper country (Muslims to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India).   The result creates absolute chaos in the hospital in the story.   This is just a hilarious story.   I am actually surprised that the story did not get Manto in serious trouble with the government as some of the conversations of people in the mental hospital seem to mirror the views of leading politicians of the time.  


I have to quote a bit from the story as it is just so funny and so well done.

Two or three years after Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan that lunatics, like prisoners, should also be exchanged -- that is, Muslim lunatics in asylums in India should be sent to Pakistan, and Hindus-Sikhs in asylums in Pakistan transferred to India.Whether or not this was a reasonable idea, high-level conferences were held here and there, as decided by the learned, and finally one day a bill was passed for the exchange of lunatics.

"Some inmates were not really insane. A majority of them were murderers whose relatives had bribed the officials to admit them into the asylum so that they could escape the noose.
They had a bit of an idea as to why India had been divided and what this Pakistan was, but as for the actual events, they too were clueless. They could not glean much from the newspapers. The guards were illiterate and ignorant and their conversations weren't very illuminating and edifying either.
They only knew that there's a man named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, called the Quaid-e-Azam; who'd created a separate country for Muslims, called Pakistan.
Where this Pakistan was, what its geographical location was, about this they did not know anything. Which is why all those lunatics, who were not completely mentally-imbalanced, were confused whether they were in Pakistan or in India. If they were in India, then where was this Pakistan? And if in Pakistan, then how could it be that they, sometime back, living in the same place, were in India?
One lunatic got so caught up in this whirl of India-Pakistan, Pakistan-India, that his condition worsened. One day, while sweeping, he suddenly climbed on to a tree and sitting on a branch, declaimed non-stop for two hours on this delicate matter of India and Pakistan.
When the guards asked him to climb down, he went up even more. When threatened, he said, "I don't want to live in India, nor in Pakistan ... I'll remain on this tree."
After quite some time, when his fit of madness subsided, he climbed down, and started crying, hugging his Hindu-Sikh friends. He was overwhelmed with the thought that they would leave him and go away to India.
In an M.Sc-pass Radio Engineer, who was a Muslim and a bit of a stay-away, given to taking long walks in the garden by himself all day, such a change manifested itself that he took off all his clothes, handed them over to an attendant, and took to parading around stark naked.
A fat Muslim from Chaniot, who had been an active worker of the Muslim League, suddenly stopped bathing fifteen to sixteen times a day as he used to. His name was Mohammed Ali; but now he proclaimed from his cell that he was Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Inspired by this, a Sikh lunatic became Master Tara Singh. Apprehending blood-shed, both were declared dangerous and locked up separately."


Normally I do not quote a lot from the works I read, but this, to me, is a brilliant incredibly funny and for the times very bold story.   I am sure it managed to offend people all over India and Pakistan.  




I am glad I ventured outside of my comfort zone into the realm of Urdu literature.    In any language "Toba Tek Singh" is a wonderful story that way transcends its setting.   If you can read this without laughing out loud you must be in a very bad mood!    If Jonathan Swift lived in India in the mid-20th century he might have written a story like this.   


I think this story belongs in the canon and I urge all to take the time to read it.


You can read it online HERE in just a few minutes.   


If anyone has any suggestions for short stories written by authors from Pakistan or Bangladesh please leave a comment.   I am venturing into new to me reading areas and I would welcome guidance from the many readers of my blog with more experience in this area.    I am open to a joint venture on an event on short stories from the Indian subcontinent.  


Mel u