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Look here, if you insult me again, I’m going to break your jaw.” Then it happened. If you asked Ram Dai how Sarita’s father (who had worked for the railway) reacted when his boss swore at him, then Ram Dai would immediately tell you that he got enraged and told off his boss, “I’m not your servant but a servant of the government. Then she would sigh deeply and launch into a recitation of her deceased husband’s story, which all the building’s women knew by heart.

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In addition to this refrain, the women of the building were always hearing from Sarita’s mother how she was going to marry off Sarita to a respectable man so that she might learn how to read and write a little, or how the city government had opened a school nearby where she was going to send Sarita because her father very much wanted her to know how to read and write. Every third or fourth day she had to go looking for Sarita and would repeat these very words to Ram Dai as she sat all day near the stairs with a basket in front of her as she tied red and white strings around the cigarettes. Ram Dai continued cutting bidi leaves and didn’t answer, seeing as how Sarita’s mother usually went around muttering like this. She’s not a little girl anymore, and yet she runs around all day with those good-for-nothing boys.” If I find her, I’m going to beat her to a pulp. “Have you seen Sarita anywhere?” Sarita’s mother asked her. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, Ram Dai was sitting there cutting bidi leaves. They’ve already caught two hundred girls. The police are always on the lookout to nab someone. He told the men, “Sirs, things are very dicey these days. Really, how could rich men stand such a neighborhood? But Kishori was clever, and so he never brought men up to the chali but would have Sarita dress up before taking her out. Sarita’s mother knew that rich men with cars don’t come around every day, and in fact it was only thanks to Kishori that she got a good customer once or twice a month because otherwise rich men would never come to that dirty neighborhood where the stench of rotting paan and burnt-out bidis made Kishori pucker his nose.

Kishori was sitting inside, and he had announced that three rich men were waiting in their car in the nearby shopping market. She had even gone over to the open toilet and had called for her, “Hey, Sarita! Sarita!” But she was nowhere in the building, and it was just as her mother suspected-Sarita had gotten over her bout of dysentery (even though she hadn’t taken her medicine), and without a care in the world she was now playing with the girls at the corner of the alley near the trash heap. But who knew where Sarita had run off to. Sarita’s mother had asked Kishori to sit down, had ordered some coffee-mixed tea from the tea boy outside, and had already searched for her daughter throughout the chali’s three floors. She was at the corner of the alley playing with the girls, and her mother was looking for her in the chali (a big building with many floors and many small rooms).

Saadat hasan manto short stories