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Timeless
storyteller little remembered
in his own village
The Tribune May 11
2012
Manto was born in Paproudi
on May 11, 1912. He spent most of his teenage in Shimla and Amritsar. He
migrated to Lahore after Partition. An old man in his late 70s
is sitting on the village roadside.The way to Manto’s house? “Manto? I
don’t know. Better ask the sarpanch…Yes, I’m from this village…But
Manto?”. He looks puzzled. Manto’s house has seen
several renovations and nothing is left of its original form. Only a dusty
street, where the gate of Manto’s two-room house once opened, is intact.
Manto’s schoolmate Ujagar Singh makes an unobtrusive entry. A year short
of a century, this school dropout studied with Manto till Class I. If
he’s to be believed, Manto was an unlikely hero some 90 years ago. “Manto’s family was
called the Kashmiri family in the village. As kids, we enjoyed saag and
makki di roti. A fruit called ‘phut’, that I hardly get now, was our
favourite. I had no inkling that he would be a great writer one day,” he
says. “Manto was an avid
footballer. He was strikingly good looking. We’d keep visiting his
maternal aunt’s house at Shamspur village,” he recalled. Did he ever get a glimpse
of a rebel in Manto? “Not the faintest when he was a child,” he says.
Ujagar sees Manto through the eyes of a 10-year-old. There’s a ring of
sincerity and affection when he talks of Manto. It’s a friend’s
tribute, not a fan’s adulation. “In the past 90 years,
everything has changed. The village well has long dried up,” says Ujagar,
turning pensive. “In the 1960s, Manto’s
kutcha house was auctioned by the government for Rs 400. But it was no
small amount at that time,” he says. He says he is looking
forward to the Lekhak Manch, Samrala, cutting a cake and then holding a
candlelight march in Manto’s memory. Manto’s epitaph, that he
wrote a few months before his death, reads: “Here lies Sadat Hasan Manto
and with him lie buried all secrets and mysteries of the art of short
story writing. Under tonnes of earth he lies, still wondering who among
the two is the greater short story writer: God or he.” Lekhak
manch
Ujagar
Singh at the makeshift library at Paproudi village. Photos: Inderjit Verma The Lekhak Manch, Samrala,
is celebrating the birth anniversary of Sadat Hasan Manto at his village.
“Way back in 1988, we started the Manto Memorial Cultural Club. Last
year, we opened a small library with the help of Punjabi writer Gulzar
Sandhu,” says manch president Daljeet Singh Shahi. The ‘library’ is
restricted to a shelf in a room at Kalgidhar Gurdwara. “We hope that
within a few months, we would have a separate room to house the
library,” he adds. Rajwinder Samrala, general secretary of the manch,
says they plan to get Manto’s rare book “Siyah Haashiya” reprinted. Gracious
Offer “I’ll donate the house
if there are any plans to preserve it as a national heritage building,”
says Ram Singh, owner of the house that once was Manto’s. He says his
grandfather had bought the house in the 1960s. [Report: Minna Zutshi
a
billboard in Samrala mentions Manto Utsav to be held on May 13.
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