Of the streets where Manto walked

Of late, much has been said, and rather beautifully, about what is called the ‘undercity’— Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers are among the books on the subject.
But over 60 years ago, before independence and when Byculla was still a posh suburb of the city, Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto lived out his fiction in the city’s seamy bylanes, and the undercity was his centrestage.
As we celebrate his centenary, veteran journalist and Bombay beat specialist Rafique
Baghdadi helps us trace Manto’s mental map of the city. He lived here for over eight years, leaving it once in 1941 to go to Delhi for four years and then, finally, after partition. Manto was born in 1912 in Sambrala, Punjab, India. He died, at the age of 43, in Lahore, Pakistan. And he lived his imaginative life in the middle of these two partitioned states and wrote about the separation with great poignancy.
In Pakistan, in the latter years of his short life, he wrote rather emotionally about his love for Mumbai. “Four and a half years ago, when I said goodbye to my second home, Bombay…I was sad at leaving a place where I had spent so many days of a hard working life. That piece of land had offered shelter to a family reject…”
While Manto did not himself spell out his disappointment at having to leave India, his wife Safia wrote about it in a letter to his biographer, translator Khalid Hasan says. She said he started drinking heavily when he was living alone in Mumbai, and then, later, when he ran out of work, drank himself to ill-health.
Grant Road
In his stories about pimps, sex workers and neighbours, most written after he left Mumbai, Manto doesn’t give us much except the absolutely essential details of the locale. But Baghdadi tells us he spent many inspired hours in the neighbourhood around Kennedy Bridge, which he calls Pawan Bridge (for the breeze) and which once overlooked the windows of courtesans’ quarters. We scour the locations for the scraps we can find.
The trail starts at Grant Road Station East, standing outside which it is easy to travel back to the 1930s and 40s. We walk through the labyrinthine neighbourhood and through a tunnel, wondering which cobblestones Manto stepped on and what he saw around him.
We come to the neighbourhood that was recently in the news when the Queen Mary School complained it was living in constant fear of sex pests. The 137-yearold school, which boasts of alumni such as Nargis Dutt, Shabana Azmi and Shobhaa De, is located near the ‘red light area’. Manto’s story Three Simple Statements plays out in a public urinal next to Congress House and Jinnah Hall in this area. We come to this landmark but don’t spot a urinal. Fortunately for fiction writers, the geography of the mind need not correspond to the confines of the real world.
Kennedy Bridge
We take the stairway up to the Kennedy Bridge, on one side of which is Jyoti Studio, which belonged to Ardeshir Irani. Manto, who wrote the script for the first indigenously made colour film Kisan Kanya, came here for work. Manto, who wrote about nine films, also worked with Bombay Talkies, Malad, and Filmistan, Goregaon. At both places he was a friend of actor Ashok Kumar, who he portrayed in a sketch later. In fact, in Eight Days, starring Ashok Kumar, he played an Air Force officer. Of the movies he wrote, Mirza Ghalib, written in 1948 but filmed after he had left for Pakistan, is perhaps the most famous. His most acclaimed short story Toba Tek Singh was also turned into a film. We end our walk in the area with Lamington Road.
Foras Road
At Lamington Road, we take a cab and drive through Falkland Road. Baghdadi points out a sign prohibiting ‘immoral activities’ outside a ‘wadi’ from Manto’s era while on this street. We come to Foras Road, where the writer set stories such as The Man Who Liked to Lose, bringing to life the impelling tales of sex workers. His uninhibited writing brought him many charges of obscenity.
In A Question of Honour, he describes the area full of cafes, restaurants and cinemas. He describes Sufaid Gully, located off the street, as the place where ‘prostitutes of every race and description can be found’.
One of his short works Siraj, about a pimp and a sex worker, is set near the Nagpada police station, a neighbourhood that was also known for its multicultural ambience. We eat at old Sarvi restaurant at the junction, from where we presume a Manto character orders kebabs.
Arab Gully
It was on this street — off the junction of Grant Road and Lamington Road — now called Maulana Shaukat Ali Road, that Manto once rented a room. In Perin, the narrator says, “I was in Bombay and living in what I can call utter poverty. At night I slept in a kholi, a tiny room, for which I was charged nine rupees every month. It had neither water nor electricity and it was abominably filthy. At night, every variety of bug fell from the ceiling on to my body and there was no shortage of rats…” He evokes this street in The Question of Honour: ‘with twenty to twenty-five Arabs living there, all apparently in the pearl trade’. This street, which has a dead end and houses a mosque, is now surrounded by high-rises, heightening the feeling that much time has passed since Manto lived.
Clare Road
Our pilgrimage ends on Clare Road in Byculla where he lived and married in his later years in Mumbai. We go into what used to be Adelphi Hotel and is now the Ismailia Co-Operative Housing Society. He lived on the second floor of one of any in a cluster of buildings. But who knows. Certainly not any of the residents, who direct us from one part to the other, most utterly unaware of a man called Saadat Hasan Manto.
Saloni.Meghani @timesgroup.com