“If only, if only…”

Having just read “Why Do We Intoxictae Ourselves”, an essay by Manto, that I had not read before, I am convinced that, as an essayist, he had Hazlittean qualities, that is to say, that he never allows you to forget the dark and antithetical relationship between the power of the imagination and the power of experience. Had he lived longer he might have said goodbye to writing short stories and taken to the essay.

Manto begins by positing the existence of the notion that people drink (or smoke intoxicant stuff) because they want to forget their woes. He then goes on to explore the compulsions which induce people to want to line up their actions with their conscience. As someone who could not do without his tipple, at any hour of the day, the essay is written with clinical perception and remarkable lucidity.

Saadat Hassan Manto (frequently referred to as Minto) was not the only genius who drank himself to death. Dylan Thomas and Meerajee are two formidable poets who come to mind immediately. Interestingly enough, both Manto and Meerjaee died in their forties. (Dylan Thomas died just before he turned forty). Researchers may yet discover that self-destruction reaches its culmination when you cross the age of forty.

The world has been full of painters and sculptors, musicians and actors, poets and playwright who, like Manto, suffered from deprivation —and humiliations — but did not take to drink. Drink to Manto was like a shield he wore to protect himself from his inner broodings. In the last year of his life he was aware that he had lost his self-esteem. He began to borrow money unashamedly; he would accept a pittance for a story without a murmur and the pittance went out to buy cheap liquor. The degradation to which he had sunk made him loathe himself and he began to drink with a vengeance. He had been warned, repeatedly, that cirrhosis was eating him up and that if he didn’t stop drinking he wouldn’t last long. During his sober moments he wrote:

“I am feeling so depressed. I wish I could do something. But what is that something? I keep pondering over it. I feel like writing so many things but there is no time for it. I don’t know what to do about it…”

But he did know. He made frequent promises to give up drinking and, on one occasion, he did. Manto’s sister informed an Indian researcher that he got his small room in Laxmi Mansions tidied up and sat down to write after arranging all the paraphernalia on his table. “Many days passed happily in this manner. We would sit down, unobtrusively, in his room taking turns one by one. One day he said that the routine was leading him nowhere. He thought it would do him good to enter the mental hospital where nobody would come to meet him. After deliberating over it for a few days he entered the hospital. It was his own decision”.

The place Manto went to, the Pagal Khana(House for lunatics), was anything but a hospital. It was more like a prison occupied by derelicts and hardened criminals whose influential relatives had had them certified as insane, a few schizophrenics and some decrepit outcasts. Manto spent nearly a month in this loony bin. Urdu literature will, forever, be indebted to him for it was in the Pagal Khana          that the seeds of his superb work, Toba Tek Singh’, germinated. Toba Tek Singh is a story that is perfect in its balance and its structure. The sequence of events is breathtakingly dramatic. The end is so moving that it makes you reel. It is a most scathing indictment of the senselessness that prevailed on both sides of the border in the wake of partition.

Manto’s other stories on partition that he wrote in Lahore have a frenzied flavour. His literary output in Lahore did not have the ‘soul’ of his earlier ‘memorable’ stories, which were all written in Bombay.

He arrived in Lahore in 1948 and, soon after, began to miss Bombay. He wanted to go back and wrote to Ismat Chughtai about it but nothing came of it. He ran out of money he had brought with him. The lucrative job he had been promised with Gidwani Pictures never materialised. He was down and out. In a letter he wrote to Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi:

“Since long I have felt in the words of Turgenev that I am the redundant fifth wheel of a carriage. I wish I could be of some use to someone.”

In Bombay his film earnings were two to three thousands rupees a month (a substantial amount in the forties) and he picked up a tidy sum by selling his stories. In Lahore he couldn’t even make one tenth of that amount. He should have been able to make some kind of a living out of the newly established broadcasting service (he had worked for All India Radio in Delhi as a scriptwriter and had made a mark as a versatile radio playwright). But the doors of Radio Pakistan were barred to him. Rumour had it that in Bombay he had a row with Zulfikar Ali Bokhari who was now the Head of Radio Pakistan. Manto was advised by several well-wishers to make his peace with ZAB, but he was headstrong about it.

He wrote some film scenarios but the movies turned out to be flops. In any case the movie producers in Lahore were a different breed from their counterparts in Bombay. They felt more comfortable with hacks who danced attendance on them and didn’t mind cringing for their money. Manto was too big a name for them.

It was not just financial movies that drove Manto to despair. The ‘Progressive writers’ denounced him as a renegade and a reactionary. The reactionaries denounced him as a licentious leftist. And the guardians of the newly founded state’s morals condemned him as a purveyor of filth. No wonder his health suffered.

Ill health had dogged Manto throughout his life. He contacted tuberculosis when he was barely 21. Apart from a congenital defect in his abdomen he suffered from pulmonary and respiratory diseases; he had chest pains that made him feel dizzy; he had to have his teeth extracted when he was 30. In a letter to Qasmi, at the time, he wrote:

“I want to write a lot, but my listlessness, my constant tiredness keeps me under its grip and will not let me work. If only I could get a little peace of mind I would collect my thoughts which keep flying like moths in the wind… I will die one day uttering, ‘if only’, ‘if only’….”

 Zia Mohyeddin