Nine years before he died in Lahore, Saadat Hasan Manto was forewarned by an astrologer in Bombay — as the city was then called — that the next couple of years would be detrimental to his life and then all would be well. The controversial Urdu writer, in 1946, was at the peak of his film career in a city he loved unequivocally and called his other home.
Unbeknownst to the self-proclaimed “fraud of the top order”, the “rot” — from years of ill-health, the slump in the film industry and the vitiated climate of communal polarisation that was to follow India post-Independence — was about to set in. This incident is recalled by Hamid Jalal, the writer’s nephew, in an essay, ‘Uncle Manto’, he wrote in 1955. “Perhaps the astrologer had meant that uncle Manto would have a long life as a literary figure,” Jalal writes, “while the bad period would come to an end with physical death.”