Manto : Kingdom's End and other Stories

This collection of short stories includes "Toba Sek Singh" which came highly recommend by the author of "Pakistan - A Hard Country".

That story got no further than its clever concept: the post-partition exchange of "lunatics" between India and Pakistan -- leading one to ask how lunacy might be determined in such a broken, crazy world.

Saadat Hassan Manto (1912-1955) was a journalist and Bollywood script writer who eventually moved to Pakistan -- and like many journalists, he seems to have been immersed in the daily grind of street life of bums, whores, madmen, junkies, and criminals -- on top of which, he lived through the sectarian riots that accompanied the 1948 Partition.

So his view of life is rather bleak- with a  gentle soul's sense of despair regarding life in a cruel, crazy, violent world. Not surprisingly, he became an alcoholic, accounting for his early death, as recounted in the final story as written by his nephew.

Most memorable was "Mozail", the story of a flirtatious young Jewish woman who teased and tormented her Sikh boyfriend before finally using her wits, and possibly sacrificing herself, to save him and his fiance from a murderous Muslim mob.  She may be the only positive primary character in the book -- and of course it's ironic that her ethic identity lets her move freely in a world where Hindus, Muslim, and Sikhs are all trying to rape, plunder, and murder each other.

I got the feeling that Jews and Sikhs were only superficially known by the author - so he shows us stereotypes.

The title story, which must have been the editor's favorite, concerns a Bollywood director who has retired  to live on the streets off the charity of friends.in the business. His self centered isolation is interrupted by an anonymous phone call that he receives while temporarily staying in the apartment of a friend. The female caller is apparently fascinated by his cheerful and inventive sense of loneliness -- and as they build a telephonic relationship his lonely kingdom is threatened.  The author resolves that problem by having him collapse and possibly die in some kind of paroxysm.  Like most of his stories, this one ends suddenly, grimly, surprisingly, and not very satisfactorily.

Just like the author's own life.

Most of these stories would appeal to a reader searching  for "just how bad can it get?"

And it can always get worse.

When he died, Manto was contemplating his next story as inspired by a newspaper account of a young woman and her child who were found naked and dead by the side of a road,  the victims of gang rape.

Extending for 26 pages, "Mummy" is the longest story in this collection -- and happily it concerns the gentler world of actors and writers in Bollywood.  Mummy is a widow who takes struggling creative people under her wing - but is eventually accused of pandering by the police and driven out of  town.

A farewell party is held for her - and in the final sentence one of her admirers is weeping: "Tears flowed in his eyes like corpses in a river"

How horrible to live where such an  image is so readily accessible.