Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2 Read online

  Best Indian Short Stories

  Volume II

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  a joint venture with

  New Delhi

  Contents

  Introduction

  ONE Namu, the Dhobi

  P.L. DESHPANDE

  TWO No Status for Saints

  B.K. KARANJIA

  THREE Confessions of a Dustbin

  M. KARUNANIDHI

  FOUR The Corpse

  KAMLESHWAR

  FIVE The Foreigner

  SHIV K. KUMAR

  SIX The Fat Frog

  P. LAL

  SEVEN An Accident

  R.K. LAXMAN

  EIGHT The Gold Frame

  R.K. LAXMAN

  NINE Woman at the Window

  R.K. LAXMAN

  TEN Hush

  MANOHAR MALGONKAR

  ELEVEN Palace Orders

  MANOHAR MALGONKAR

  TWELVE A Slice of the Melon

  MANOHAR MALGONKAR

  THIRTEEN Temple Mouse

  MANOHAR MALGONKAR

  FOURTEEN The Landlady

  INDER MALHOTRA

  FIFTEEN Mozelle

  SAADAT HASAN MANTO

  SIXTEEN Siraj

  SAADAT HASAN MANTO

  SEVENTEEN Miss Scrooge

  DINA MEHTA

  EIGHTEEN An Unprofitable Sin

  MOHAN RAKESH

  NINETEEN The Woman at the Bus Stop

  MOHAN RAKESH

  TWENTY The Accident

  BHISHAM SAHNI

  TWENTY-ONE The Agnostic

  KHUSHWANT SINGH

  TWENTY-TWO The Bottom-Pincher

  KHUSHWANT SINGH

  TWENTY-THREE The Kama Sutra Game

  KHUSHWANT SINGH

  TWENTY-FOUR The Second Nose

  YASHPAL

  Introduction

  For the little over nine years (1969–79) I had the privilege of editing The Illustrated Weekly of India, it retained the top position in the country for the quality of short stories and poems published by it. I cannot take all the credit because besides being the captain of the small team of assistant editors and subeditors I had little role to play except keeping a close watch on what was accepted and what was rejected. Though I read a lot of poetry I could not tell the difference between good modern verse and purple prose cut up in lines of different lengths and passed off as poetry. I left it to renowned poets to make selections from contributions sent to me. I was a little more involved in the selection of short stories as I had definite views on what went into making an episode into a good short story. On an average we received almost a dozen stories a day. I passed them on to my short stories editor with instructions that she make résumés of them for me to decide which to accept and which to send back. I went over every one we accepted, and, if necessary, polished up the language. Within a few months it became a matter of prestige for young authors to have their stories published in The Illustrated Weekly of India. I persuaded the management to double the rates of payment: we paid more than any journal in the country, and established authors no longer scoffed at what we paid them. Many well-known writers in regional languages got three times more for their works translated into English than they got from language publishers.

  In this anthology you will read stories by many writers well known in their regional languages as well as those who made a name for themselves in English literary circles. We have P.L. Deshpande, B.K. Karanjia, M. Karunanidhi, Kamleshwar, Shiv K. Kumar, P. Lal, R.K. Laxman, Manohar Malgonkar, Inder Malhotra, Saadat Hasan Manto, Dina Mehta, Mohan Rakesh, Bhisham Sahni and Yashpal. Besides this the volume has three stories by me. Between them they represent every part of the country from the far north to the deep south, from its eastern borders along Bangladesh to its western frontier with Pakistan. Almost every regional language and every religious community is represented. The anthology is in fact a kind of all-India curry cooked with spices gathered from different parts of the subcontinent.

  Is there something special about the Indian short story? I think there is. It sticks to the traditional rules of the craft. It is in fact short and not a novella or an abridged novel. It revolves round one or at the most two or three characters and does not have a long list of dramatis personae as in novels. It is limited in time and space and does not span decades or spread out in different locales. It also has a well-formulated central theme and does not touch upon several topics or clashes of personalities. It has a distinct beginning, a build-up and usually a dramatic end, frequently an unexpected one which sums up the story. Western short stories tend to be prolix, leaving the reader to guess what they are all about. That is why many critics believe that the West has lost the art of writing short stories. In India, on the other hand, the short story is as vibrant as ever. Since the taste of the pudding is in the eating, it is for the reader to decide whether what has been offered is delectable – or I am guilty of exaggerating its merits.

  – Khushwant Singh

  ONE

  Namu, the Dhobi

  P.L. DESHPANDE

  ‘Get out, Namu! Don’t you dare show me your face again.’ Namu, the dhobi, is quite used to my saying that – at least twice a month – ever since my stars decreed that my clothes should be lost or damaged by him and him alone. He is never ruffled. He would only say to my wife: ‘Sister, give me the clothes.’

  It beats me how this fellow became a dhobi and not a saint. Never seen such utter nonchalance.

  I met Namu for the first time in a film studio at Kolhapur. I knew he had been going about saying: ‘P.L. Sahib and I entered the film industry at the same time.’ If only the clothes laundered by him were as neat and immaculate as the answers he gave! You should see him taking on an awkward situation. Hardly a crease on his face; not a tenth of those on the clothes alleged to have been ironed by him. In a casual film-starrish manner, he tells them: ‘I have eight pictures on these days.’ Meaning, of course, he has been engaged to wash the clothes of the director, the actors, the actresses and the cameramen working in eight films.

  Namu is still in the film line; I walked out of it long ago. He has shifted from Kolhapur to Poona. He has seen several ‘assistants’ – who used to be kept busy getting their director paans and cigarettes whenever he felt like them – blossom into directors. Some of them made quite a name for themselves. But to Namu one of them was still ‘Chintya’, another ‘Antya’ – the nicknames of their nondescript days.

  We can understand a dhobi breaking the buttons on your clothes. It comes naturally to him. But Namu’s tricks are of a higher order. Once, when I was going over the plot of a story with a film director, who should walk in but Namu in a natty shirt carrying a laundry load! I noticed the shirt; but, before I could ask him about it, the director shouted: ‘My shirt on you, you scoundrel!’

  ‘Fits me just right,’ said Namu coolly, as he went on folding the clothes.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Leave the clothes here…and out!’

  ‘Oh! But Sahib, you have just signed a new contract, haven’t you? You can get a dozen shirts like this one.’

  ‘But filching a shirt! Damn it…’

  ‘Now, now, Sahib, if I had filched it, surely I wouldn’t have come here wearing it. Would I have, P.L. Sahib? Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you indeed! Have they put you here to pinch shirts?’

  ‘This is not the world for an honest man, Sahib.’

  ‘Eh? You talking about an honest world?’

  ‘Well, I was only speaking my dwailak, Sahib.’

  Now dwailak was Namu’s corruption of dialogue and he mouthed such corruptions o
f English words with ease and assurance. Particularly the jargon he picked up from the film studios. Anything said cleverly was dwailak to him.

  ‘What dialogue?’ I asked.

  ‘Isn’t the Sahib’s new picture named An Honest World? And your story, Sahib, is it kamic or just weepy?’

  ‘How does it concern you?’

  ‘Of course, if it’s your story, it must be kamic. Well, give me the clothes, Sahib.’ The latter to the director.

  ‘Nothing doing.’

  ‘And what’s the cast, P.L. Sahib? Is it Sulochana or Hansabai?’

  ‘What about putting you in it?’

  ‘Well, I’m there in each one of your pictures, Sahib, ain’t I?’

  And that wasn’t untrue either. Namu was always there in the mob scenes. In the bunch at the paan shop, or among a theatre audience (wearing a smart suit – some customer’s, that is), or in a historical picture, sword, shield and all, yelling out the war cry: Har Har Mahadeo! The producer too was pleased, for he saved an extra’s wages.

  Namu baffles me. I don’t think I have ever come across anyone so unblushing. He was most unpunctual in bringing the laundry. Got some kind of a pleasure out of it, I suspect.

  ‘Namu, you were to have brought the clothes yesterday. Why didn’t you?’

  With the expression on his face unchanged, Namu replied: ‘Had a bit too much yesterday…’

  ‘Too much of what?’

  His reply: wordless but most vivid. He straightened out his thumb and jerked it to his mouth.

  ‘Namu, didn’t your father or mother ever tell you of something called shame?’

  ‘Sahib, you must get new pants made. The next time these are washed, they will be all holes.’

  ‘How can that happen to pants in three months?’

  ‘Look, this pant’s seat is finished, true and proper.’ He held up a pair of trousers, exhibiting both sides, as evidence to support his statement.

  ‘None of your business! Stop it!’

  Every time Namu calls with the fresh laundry, he and my wife carry on a debate for a good half an hour on whether the pieces given to him were eleven or thirteen. Each time my wife threatens to deduct the cost of the lost pieces from his bill – and the next time the lost chaddars show up. Asked to explain, he comes out with something like: ‘It’s human to err. After all, man is imperfect.’

  ‘Enough!’ I know the rest of it. It’s lifted from a film for which I did the dialogue. Namu has such innumerable bits by heart. And songs too. And also the lingo of film makers, though he has a way of using it inappropriately.

  ‘Seen M.D. Sahib’s picture? All fog.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fog…!’ He had heard some cameraman speak of his stock of film turning out ‘fog’. Since then, to Namu, ‘fog’ has meant plain bad. He went on: ‘The acting is fog and the songs are utterly fog. The very first week the picture has collected less than the holdor phigar, Sahib.’

  ‘How do you know what the hold-over figure is?’

  ‘I do the laundry for the manager of Minerva Talkies, Sahib. He said so.’

  ‘Fine! The manager of Minerva talks to you about his business, does he?’

  ‘Well, he was telling his distributor: I only kept my ears open.’

  Nothing seems to defile this dhobi. No taint seems to stick. At the muhurat ceremony of a film, he would push himself right to the front. If a story is being discussed in the office or even a business proposal, Namu sees no reason why he should not be hanging around. Not that he wants to pass for a respectable person. He is not cramped by any feeling of inferiority because he is a dhobi. He roams the streets with the laundry load on his back. I envy him his freedom from affectations and inhibitions.

  My wife and I once went to see an English film. Like any white-livered middle-class couple, we had bought upper-class seats. Shortly after the show started, I suddenly felt somebody slapping my thigh. Taken aback, I peered to try and see who it could be.

  ‘Won’t you have a paan, P.L. Sahib?’

  I seemed to recognize the voice. It was Namu! Dressed up. Without a word, I accepted the paan.

  ‘Some tobacco?’

  ‘No, bothersome. One can’t spit.’

  Pat came the reply from Namu: ‘Right under the chair. Maaro pichkari!’

  ‘Hush!’ Somebody hissed from the front row.

  ‘Idiot! What’s there to be seen in a dakumentry. The main picture starts after the interval.’

  Came the interval. Sitting next to Namu was a woman well past her youth. She wore a highly respectable look, but I knew she was a film extra. She greeted me with a proper namaste.

  ‘This is my family, Sister,’ Namu introduced her to my wife.

  Well, well. My wife had met his ‘family’ when we had been to his place in Kolhapur once for a puja!

  ‘Ah yes. We met at Kolhapur,’ said my wife, trying to make it proper.

  ‘Oh no, not that one. This is a stepney.’ He wasn’t in the least embarrassed. Only we were.

  Changing the subject, I asked: ‘Namu, what can you make of an English film?’

  ‘I have a free pass.’

  ‘Oh! So you wash and wear and tear the clothes of the manager here too?’

  ‘No, the doorkeeper’s. But it’s a swell picture, Sahib. What love scenes! They’ve whisked the trolley round and round!’

  Mercifully, the lights went off and the film came on. But Namu continued to educate me, prodding me with his elbow, on the laang shot and the clojup and all the rest.

  But we have got used to his ways and don’t mind them, I suppose. Rather like himself. He has no grievances. I don’t recall his ever talking against anyone with indignation, nor ever getting elated, for that matter. He is like the telegraph transmitter whose tone does not vary whether it is conveying birthday greetings or news of death. Film studios are humming with gossip and scandal and they love to colour them. But when Namu brings one to you, it is in a bleached form. He puts as much feeling into it as there is in, say, an example in an arithmetic textbook.

  ‘Sahib, they put handcuffs on Annasaheb,’ he told me casually one day.

  ‘What Annasaheb?’

  ‘Of the Navayug Studio.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked, surprised. I had always felt, however, that some day Annasaheb was going to get it. Only the muhurat had come a little earlier than I’d thought. Annasaheb had quite a long and varied record of cheating. I was tickled by the pious Annasaheb, with his ash-smeared forehead and the soulful Vitthala Panduranga in his mouth, wearing handcuffs.

  ‘Six months at the most,’ said Namu, taking out my shirt buttons.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How much longer? Do they hang you for drinking liquor?’

  ‘Oh! So Annasaheb was nabbed for drinking, was he?’

  ‘Look, Sister. This chaddar’s already torn.’

  ‘You must’ve done it yourself!’ my wife shot back from the inside room.

  ‘Forget about the chaddar, Namu. Annasaheb used to drink?’

  ‘Every day. Note down the pieces.’

  ‘This is news to me, Namu. But who could be supplying the stuff?’

  ‘Ganpat, from the labratary. Pants two, Nehru shirts six…’ All this in the same even tone.

  ‘Keep the clothes aside, Namu. You mean Ganpat from the laboratory?’

  ‘The one with a glass eye. See for yourself, this pyjama has no string.’

  ‘But tell me, how could Ganpat get the liquor?’

  ‘They work a still just behind the studio.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I too get my drinks from there.’

  That clinched it. What composure! Fit for a saint. Not one superfluous sentence, nor word. In the studios, they keep chewing any juicy bit they have got hold of. Not Namu.

  ‘Kulkarni’s popped off, Sahib.’

  That’s how one morning, taking out the laundered clothes, Namu dismissed Kulkarni. Actually, Kulkarni’s was a most tragic affair. I haven’t seen the
likes of him among the flute players in filmland. Slight and delicate-looking Kulkarni hardly spoke but he had a shy smile all the time. You should have seen him when his face lit up on getting a tune right: his eyes would sparkle, his lips would tremble.

  Everyone was so fond of him…. And why should this boy have killed himself? Everyone in filmland was deeply moved – the good ones and the bad ones. A producer, notorious for his meanness, on his own sent Kulkarni’s mother some three or four hundred rupees that were the young man’s dues. Those two or three days we had talked of the suicide and of nothing else. So I was mad with Namu for being so offhand about it.

  ‘Namu, why was this Kulkarni popped off?’

  ‘It’s three days.’

  ‘I know. He took his own life. God knows what ailed him.’

  ‘Kamal played him false. Here, this maachis was in the pocket,’ Namu said, placing before me the box of matches he had found in a pocket of a pair of trousers in washing.

  ‘What Kamal?’

  ‘One of Mane’s extras.’

  ‘Which one? That fairish one?’

  ‘Yes. Very light eyes. Side heroine in that picture Lal Kandil…’

  ‘Of course, you know all the gossip of the town, don’t you?’

  ‘Kulkarni’s my customer.’ For a moment, Namu forgot that Kulkarni was dead.

  ‘I had once warned him.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Kamal…!’ And Namu, as he tied up his bundle, added a word – or two violent words – of proper ‘red-light’ hue to describe her. Then he went on. ‘Now she’s got her chance in the Bombay industry. You remember that Punjabi party which came to Deccan Studio for shooting? Well, the director made her an aapher for his next picture…’

  Namu was, of course, repeating the tittle-tattle of the studio; but with his very own detachment.

  ‘Why should he have killed himself?’

  ‘Chicken-hearted blighter!’ And with that Namu hitched up his load and walked out.

  My contact with Namu came to an end – shall I say my sartorial contact? I have nothing to do with films now. But, off and on, I happen to meet former colleagues in that profession. And I hear the same old talk about contracts and finance and distributors. Some of them have continued to be ‘assistant’ for years together. Some evenings they get together at Jeevan Hotel and, sipping their tea, confide to one another their rather improbable plans. The other afternoon, I found such a bunch there. I joined in. I was getting along fine with that friendly crowd when one of them called out: ‘Come here, Namdevrao.’ The man addressed looked quite stout and his moustaches were most impressive. Walking up, the man asked me: ‘Do you recognize me, P.L. Sahib?’