Noted Without Much Comment - Manto's Letters
Way back in 1950s, Saadat Hasan Manto, the mad father of Toba Tek Singh, as he drank himself to death, wrote a bunch of letters to his uncle, who had the name Sam, i.e., Uncle Sam. With lines like the following:
"If a piece of mine appears in a newspaper and I earn twenty to twenty-five rupees at the rate of seven rupees a column, I hire a tonga and go buy locally distilled whiskey. Had this whiskey been distilled in your country, you would have destroyed that distillery with an atom bomb because it is the sort of stuff guaranteed to send its user to kingdom come within one year." ...
"In a few days, by the Grace of God I will die and if I do not kill myself, I will die anyway because where flour sells at the price at which it sells here, only a shamefaced person can complete his ordained time on earth."
...
"Our great Urdu poet Ghalib wrote about a hundred years ago:
If disgrace after death was to be my fate, I should have met my end through drowning It would have spared me a funeral and no headstone would have marked my last resting place
Ghalib was not afraid of being disgraced while he was alive because from beginning to the end that remained his lot. What he feared was disgrace after death. He was a graceful man and not only was he afraid of what would happen after he died, he was certain what would happen to him after he was gone. And that is why he expressed a wish to meet his end through drowning so that he should neither have funeral nor grave.
How I wish he had been born in your country. He would have been carried to his grave with great fanfare and over his resting place a skyscraper would have been built. Or were his own wish to be granted, his dead body would have been placed in a pool of glass and people would have gone to view it as they go to a zoo."
they make for wonderful reading.
My Daily Notes
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