The Price of Freedom
Saadat Hasan Manto
1912–1955
a p enguin since 1998
Saadat Hasan Manto
The Price of Freedom
Translated by Khalid Hasan penguin archive
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Chosen from Selected Stories, published by Penguin Books India 2007
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Toba Tek Singh
A couple of years after the partition of the country, it occurred to the respective governments of India and Pakistan that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners, should also be exchanged. Muslim lunatics in India should be transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums should be sent to India.
Whether this was a reasonable or an unreasonable idea is difficult to say. One thing, however, is clear. It took many conferences of important officials from the two sides to come to the decision. Final details, like the date of the actual exchange, were carefully worked out. Muslim lunatics whose families were still residing in India were to be left undisturbed, the rest moved to the border for the exchange. The situation in Pakistan was slightly different, since almost the entire population of Hindus and Sikhs had already migrated to India. The question of keeping non-Muslim lunatics in Pakistan did not, therefore, arise.
While it is not known what the reaction in India was, when the news reached the Lahore lunatic asylum, it immediately became the subject of heated discussion. One Muslim lunatic, a regular reader of the fire- eating daily newspaper Zamindar , when asked what Pakistan was, replied after deep reflection, ‘The name of a place in India where cut-throat razors are manufactured.’
This profound observation was received with visible satisfaction.
A Sikh lunatic asked another Sikh, ‘Sardarji, why are we being sent to India? We don’t even know the language they speak in that country.’
The man smiled. ‘I know the language of the Hindostoras. These devils always strut about as if they were the lords of the earth.’
One day a Muslim lunatic, while taking his bath, raised the slogan ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ with such enthusiasm that he lost his balance and was later found lying on the floor unconscious.
Not all inmates were mad. Some were perfectly normal, except that they were murderers. To spare them the hangman’s noose, their families had managed to get them committed after bribing officials down the line. They probably had a vague idea why India was being divided and what Pakistan was, but, as for the present situation, they were equally clueless.
Newspapers were no help either, and the asylum guards were ignorant, if not illiterate. Nor was there anything to be learnt by eavesdropping on their conversations. Some said there was this man by the name of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, or the Quaide-Azam, who had set up a separate country for Muslims, called Pakistan.
As to where Pakistan was located, the inmates knew nothing. That was why both the mad and the partially mad were unable to decide whether they were now in India or in Pakistan. If they were in India, where on earth was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how come that until only the other day it was India?
One inmate had got so badly caught up in this India— Pakistan— Pakistan— India rigmarole that one day, while sweeping the floor, he dropped everything, climbed the nearest tree and installed himself on a branch, from which vantage point he spoke for two hours on the delicate problem of India and Pakistan. The guards asked him to get down; instead he went a branch higher and, when threatened with punishment, declared, ‘I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I wish to live in this tree.’
When he was finally persuaded to come down, he began embracing his Sikh and Hindu friends, tears
running down his cheeks, fully convinced that they were about to leave him and go to India.
A Muslim radio engineer, who had an MS c degree, and never mixed with anyone, given as he was to taking long walks by himself all day, was so affected by the current debate that one day he took off all his clothes, gave the bundle to one of the attendants and ran into the garden stark naked.
A Muslim lunatic from Chaniot who used to be one of the most devoted workers of the All India Muslim League, and was obsessed with bathing himself fifteen or sixteen times a day, had suddenly stopped doing that and announced his name was Muhammad Ali – that he was Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This had led a Sikh inmate to declare himself Master Tara Singh, the leader of the Sikhs. Foreseeing serious communal trouble, the authorities declared them dangerous and shut them up in separate cells.
There was a young Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone off his head after an unhappy love affair. When told that Amritsar was to become a part of India, he went into a depression because his beloved lived in Amritsar, something he had not forgotten even in his madness. That day he abused every major and minor Hindu and Muslim leader who had cut India into two, turning his beloved into an Indian and him into a Pakistani.
When news of the exchange reached the asylum, his friends offered him congratulations, because he was now to be sent to India, the country of his beloved. However, he declared that he had no intention of leaving Lahore because his practice would not flourish in Amritsar.
There were two Anglo- Indian lunatics in the European ward. When told that the British had decided to go home after granting independence to India, they went into a state of deep shock and were seen conferring with each other in whispers the entire afternoon. They were worried about their changed status after independence. Would there be a European ward or would it be abolished? Would breakfast continue to be served or would they have to subsist on bloody Indian chapatti?
There was another inmate, a Sikh, who had been confined for the last fifteen years. Whenever he spoke, it was the same mysterious gibberish: ‘Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain.’ Guards said he had not slept a wink in fifteen years. Occasionally, he could be observed leaning against a wall, but the rest of the time he was always to be found standing. Because of this, his legs were permanently swollen, something that did not appear to bother him. Recently, he had started to listen carefully to discussions about the
forthcoming exchange of Indian and Pakistani lunatics. When asked his opinion, he observed solemnly, ‘Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the Government of Pakistan.’
Of late, however, the Government of Pakistan had been replaced by the government of Toba Tek Singh, a small town in the Punjab which was his home. He had also begun inquiring where Toba Tek Singh was to go. However, nobody was quite sure whether it was in India or Pakistan.
Those who had tried to solve this mystery had become utterly confused when told that Sialkot, which used to be in India, was now in Pakistan. It was anybody’s guess what was going to happen to Lahore, which was currently in Pakistan, but could slide into India any moment. It was also possible that the entire subcontinent of India might become Pakistan. And who could say if both India and Pakistan might not entirely vanish from the map of the world one day?
The old man’s hair was almost gone and what little was left had become a part of his beard, giving him a strange, even frightening, appearance. However, he was a harmless fellow and had never been known to get into fights. Older attendants at the asylum said that he was a fairly prosperous landlord from Toba Tek Singh who had quite suddenly gone
Tek Singh
mad. His family had brought him in, bound and fettered. That was fifteen years ago.
Once a month, he used to have visitors but, since the start of communal troubles in the Punjab, they had stopped coming. His real name was Bishen Singh, but everybody called him Toba Tek Singh. He lived in a kind of limbo, having no idea what day of the week it was, or month, or how many years had passed since his confinement. However, he had developed a sixth sense about the day of the visit, when he used to bathe himself, soap his body, oil and comb his hair and put on clean clothes. He never said a word during these meetings, except occasional outbursts of, ‘Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain.’
When he was first confined, he had left an infant daughter behind, now a pretty, young girl of fifteen. She would come occasionally and sit in front of him with tears rolling down her cheeks. In the strange world that he inhabited, hers was just another face.
Since the start of this India—Pakistan caboodle, he had got into the habit of asking fellow inmates where exactly Toba Tek Singh was without receiving a satisfactory answer, because nobody knew. The visits had also suddenly stopped. He was increasingly restless, but, more than that, curious. The sixth