Arguing with Manto: A Completely Unrespectable Love Story

 I did not fall in love with Saadat Hasan Manto the respectable way.

You know the respectable way. The one where you speak in solemn tones about “great literary figures,” quote a few important lines, nod gravely about historical context, and treat the author like a marble statue that must never be disturbed.

No.

That is not what happened.

What happened was this: one afternoon I stumbled onto his epitaph.

Not the polite version people often print. The original one. The one where he basically says the greatest short story writer in the world lies buried here and wonders whether God or he is the better storyteller.

I stared at that line.

Then I said out loud, to no one in particular - “Seriously?”

The audacity of it. The absolute nerve. The man wrote his own tombstone like a challenge to the universe.

Naturally I had to go look him up.

So I read the Wikipedia article. Which is usually a terrible way to meet a writer, but it did the job. It told me just enough to realize that this man had lived a life that was part tragedy, part chaos, part sheer stubborn defiance.

Then I started reading his writing.

And very quickly I developed a peculiar relationship with him.

It goes something like this. 

First I read a sentence. Then I stare at the page. Then I say, “You did not just write that.” Then I read the next paragraph. Then I put the book down, rub my face, and say, “Why are you like this?”

Take one of his observations: temples and mosques are both stone. Cows and pigs are both flesh.

I remember reading that and physically shifting on my couch.

“Sit down,” I told the book. “Sit here and explain yourself.”

Because really. What kind of person writes something like that and then calmly moves on as if nothing happened?

The answer, of course, is Manto.

He had this infuriating habit of stripping things down to their bare physical reality and leaving the reader to deal with the consequences. Sacred building? Stone. Religious taboo? Flesh. Human hypocrisy? Apparently his favorite sport.

And then came the parts about Gandhi.

Now this is where I nearly fell off the couch.

Because most writers treat Gandhi the way museums treat ancient porcelain—handle with extreme care, place behind glass, speak in reverent tones.

Not Manto.

Manto looked at Gandhi the way a very sharp child looks at an emperor who is clearly missing half his clothes.

He would describe Gandhi’s moral seriousness and then, with perfect calm, poke at the absurdities around it. The public adoration. The political theatre. The way entire crowds behaved as if sainthood had become a national policy.

Reading those passages felt like discovering an unexpected accomplice.

I remember literally saying out loud -- “Wait… you noticed that too?”

It felt almost conspiratorial. 

And of course he did it in that uniquely Manto way—never with dull lectures, always with those quiet, devastating little observations that leave you laughing and uncomfortable at the same time.

At one point I actually imagined the two of us meeting Gandhi together. Manto would say something deadpan and outrageous. I would immediately burst into completely inappropriate laughter. Everyone in the room would look scandalized. Gandhi would probably sigh deeply and ask both of us to leave the ashram.

And we would walk out still laughing like unruly schoolchildren.

That is the effect Manto has.

You start reading him expecting literature. Instead you end up in a long argument with a very clever ghost.

Because the same man will suddenly notice something like a line of graffiti in a train compartment:

Even birds sit as couples on electric wires.
But the seat beside me is empty.
Does no one love me?

When I read that I actually stopped breathing for a moment.

Then I said, very quietly, “Oh you poor fool.”

That is the thing about him. Beneath the sarcasm, the provocation, the outrageous sentences, there is this enormous sensitivity to human loneliness.

He saw it everywhere.

Another time he wrote about walking past a crematorium in Bombay and noticing smoke rising in the air. Right in front of the wall was a film poster for a movie called Zindagi—Life.

I laughed.

Then immediately covered my mouth and said, “No. You made that up. Tell me that didn’t actually happen.”

Because with Manto the world itself starts sounding like satire.

So yes, I argue with him. I roll my eyes at him. I occasionally want to throw a pillow at his head and say, “You did not have to write that, you absolute menace.”

But somewhere along the way something else happened too.

I began to feel an absurd amount of affection for him.

Not the distant admiration one has for a “great writer,” but the sort of feeling you have for a brilliant, damaged friend who keeps saying outrageous things at the tea table.

You read about the poverty, the trials, the alcoholism, the humiliations he endured, and suddenly the sharp-tongued provocateur becomes a very tired human being trying to survive a world that rarely showed him much kindness.

And that is the moment when the irritation turns into something softer.

You stop wanting to argue with him.

You start wanting to sit beside him.

These days he sits at my desk.

Not as a shrine—he would have hated that idea—but simply as a photograph in a frame, watching while I work. Sometimes I catch myself glancing up at him as if he might comment on what I just wrote. Occasionally I even tell him, “Don’t start. I know exactly what you’re thinking. But please don’t say that.” It is a very strange arrangement: a dead writer hanging around a modern desk, quietly provoking arguments, eye-rolls, and the occasional apology for laughing at the wrong moment.

If I ever had to picture him now, though, this is how I see it.

His grave somewhere quiet. The stone bearing that outrageous epitaph.

And there he is, not lying beneath it like a respectable corpse, but sitting casually on the gravestone as if it were a park bench.

Lighting a cigarette.

Looking out at the human race with that familiar half-amused, half-exasperated expression.

Shaking his head.

And at that point I would walk over, drop onto the stone beside him, and say something like: “Listen, you moron. Why did you have to say half the things you said?”

He would probably shrug and take a drag of his cigarette.

And then we would start talking.

And once that conversation begins, it never quite ends.

Colours of my Heart

 It is a standing joke among my old friends that every two weeks I develop a “latest crush.” This started back in my college days, and they were mostly harmless infatuations. I suppose I never quite outgrew the habit. The only difference now is that instead of cricketers or movie stars, the objects of my fascination are politicians, tech leaders, or people of that sort. It’s less “OMG look at him!” and more “I deeply admire this person.”

Faiz entered my life in a strange and unexpected way. He is, so far, the only poet suggested to me by AI—

by ChatGPT, no less—and I remember thinking, why not give it a try? I bought a translated copy of his poems, Colours of My Heart (selected poems translated by Baran Farooqi), and it felt like stepping into another world entirely.

After a few days of reading, staring into space, sighing, shaking my head, and repeating the cycle, I decided to read the poems in Romanized Urdu. Conveniently, the second part of the book offered exactly that. This led to even more staring into deep space, the realization that dusk has many more dimensions than I had ever allowed it, and the sudden understanding that old stone structures can, in fact, speak. (Yes, I am whimsical. The world knows.)

Then came the third phase: why not just learn Urdu?

So I am.

My goal is to read Naqsh-e-Fariyadi in the original Urdu script. Along the way, I’ve found myself painting old structures and pairing them with Faiz’s lines, writing friends’ names in Nastaliq script, and enthusiastically informing family and unsuspecting acquaintances about my newest obsession. At this point, I am fully aware that I have fallen into a deep, unapologetic hole of Persian and Urdu culture—and I am not trying very hard to climb out.

Somewhere along the way, this reading turned into making.

I began painting a series alongside Faiz’s poems—not to illustrate them, but to sit with them. Five large canvases, each anchored in a single word or line: Tanhai, Maghrib, Paas Raho, Tasleem, Nargis. Lanterns left lit. Terraces at dusk. Moonless nights. Morning light that does not soften anything, only clarifies it. Courtyards with still water and flowers that do not explain themselves. These were not narratives, and they were not characters. They were states.

The paintings do not tell Faiz’s poems. They answer them. Sometimes they argue back. Sometimes they simply stay silent in the right way. Over time, it felt less like inspiration and more like conversation—across languages, across decades, across histories that neither of us fully owns.

                                                                                    I should say this clearly --

I am not a novice when it comes to poetry. I have a high bar. You cannot write sloppy lines and call them blank verse and expect me to be charitable. I have read deeply in Bengali and English, and a little in French. I know what care looks like on the page.

What I realized, however, is that I had not read serious poetry in languages outside that small orbit. And then came Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

He swept me off my feet not with ornament or excess, but with his strange, uncompromising ideas of love—love that simply is. Love that does not explain itself, does not apologize, does not ask to be returned in equal measure. It exists. It endures history. It survives prisons, partitions, disappointments, and altered selves.

You can read that love as devotion to a person, or to a country, or to something larger and harder to name—much like the way Rabindranath Tagore dissolves the boundary between the beloved and the divine. Faiz leaves that choice to you.

For me, his love settles among old stone ruins, oil lamps lit at dusk, and thoughts that turn inward. It belongs to spaces that remember more than they speak.

My paintings converse with his lines over time and space. That, I have come to believe, is the best kind of conversation.

No resolution.
No conclusion.
Just presence—held carefully, and then let be.

Navigation, Not Victory

 

For a long time, mountaineering was my metaphor for life.

Climb, slip, climb again. Acclimatize. Wait out storms. Accept that sometimes the most courageous decision is to turn back. Mountains teach humility quickly. They teach patience even faster. They show you—viscerally—that progress is never linear, and resilience is not bravado but the ability to pause without panic.

I thought that was the whole lesson.

But lately, another metaphor has been quietly overtaking it: navigation.

Mountains give you a snapshot of life. Navigation gives you the continuum.

On a mountain, the challenge is vertical. You see the peak. You measure gain and loss. You know when you are up, when you are down, when you are stalled by weather. The feedback is immediate. Brutally honest.

On the ocean, it’s different.

There are no visible milestones. No summit to point at and say, “There.” Some days the wind fills your sails effortlessly and you move as if the world is conspiring in your favor. Other days there is nothing—no wind, no forward motion, just heat, stillness, and the slow drain of uncertainty. The doldrums are not dramatic. They are quiet. That’s what makes them dangerous.

And yet, navigation assumes this will happen.

Traditional navigators never expected favorable winds all the time. They expected variability. They expected misalignment. They expected nights when the stars vanished behind clouds and days when progress could only be felt, not measured.

What mattered was not speed.
What mattered was orientation.

There’s a saying attributed to Mau, the great Micronesian navigator: one who knows the stars would never get lost. It’s often quoted romantically, but it’s far more practical than poetic.

Knowing the stars doesn’t mean staring at them constantly. It means holding a direction internally. It means understanding that even when the canoe is pushed sideways by wind or current, you keep the nose aligned. You correct. You compensate. You don’t confuse drift with failure.

Life feels a lot like that.

Sometimes things line up. Career, family, health, timing—all moving together, cleanly. Other times, nothing responds. Effort produces no visible outcome. You’re not sinking, but you’re not moving either. This is where people panic. They abandon their course because motion has stalled.

Navigation teaches something subtler: stillness is not the same as being lost.

If you know where you’re headed—really know it, not as a wish but as a direction—you don’t need constant confirmation. You make small corrections. You wait when waiting is required. You move when movement becomes possible again.

Mountains teach endurance.
Navigation teaches trust.

Trust that progress doesn’t always announce itself.
Trust that course-correction matters more than speed.
Trust that losing sight of landmarks doesn’t mean losing direction.

And maybe that’s the deeper meaning behind “never getting lost.” It’s not about always knowing where you are. It’s about knowing who you are aligned with, what you are steering toward, and refusing to mistake temporary drift for permanent failure.

The stars don’t rush you.
The ocean doesn’t explain itself.
Neither guarantees ease.

But if you learn how to orient—to keep the nose of your life pointed toward what matters, adjusting gently, persistently—you don’t actually need certainty.

You just need alignment.

And that, it turns out, is enough to keep going.

---

The Sky That Remembered Me - Polynesian Navigation and an Ancient Familiarity

Hawaiʻi has a way of lowering your shoulders before you even realize they were tense.

Coconut trees sway without urgency. The afternoons are warm and unbothered, even in December. Plumeria and hibiscus bloom with the quiet confidence of things that know they belong exactly where they are. There is nothing performative about it. The air smells faintly sweet, faintly saline, like memory.

And then there is the sky.

Not the northern sky I am used to—the one filtered through tall firs and pines, glimpsed in fragments between branches, stars peeking through like shy guests. That sky always feels a little distant, a little observational. This one does not.

Here, the sky opens fully to the ocean. No obstructions. No apology.

Before dawn, standing on a balcony facing the Pacific, I watched Orion—familiar, unmistakable—tilt and sink, star by star, until he disappeared into the water itself. Not fading. Setting. As if the ocean were an equal participant in the choreography. Sirius burned low and bright. Castor and Pollux stood steady, watching. The stars did not feel foreign or exotic. They felt… remembered.

That was the moment something subtle but irreversible shifted.

Polynesian navigation is often described as an ancient maritime skill. That description is technically accurate and profoundly incomplete.

What the navigators of the Pacific developed was not just a method of crossing vast distances of open ocean without instruments. It was an entire way of being oriented in a moving world. They memorized the rising and setting points of stars along the horizon—star houses, not coordinates. They read swells that originated thousands of miles away, invisible causes made legible through pattern and feel. They watched clouds for reflections of land beyond sight. Birds, wind shifts, water color, even the behavior of fish became information.

Nothing was accidental. Nothing was mystical guesswork.

The canoe itself embodied the same philosophy. Lashed together, not nailed—flexible, repairable, responsive. Designed to move with the ocean, not resist it. Strength came from accommodation, not rigidity.

This was not “primitive navigation.” It was precision without domination.

Modern language struggles with this because we are trained to separate astronomy from life, navigation from ethics, engineering from philosophy. Polynesian wayfinding refuses those divisions. The sky is not a backdrop; it is a teacher. The ocean is not an obstacle; it is a collaborator. Knowledge lives in bodies and memory, not just diagrams.

Standing there, watching Orion disappear into the Pacific, I realized why this felt less like learning and more like recognition.

I am Indian. My culture, too, encoded astronomy in story, time in recurrence, and ethics in situational judgment rather than rigid rules. The Mahabharata is not anchored to “once upon a time” but to skies that looked a certain way. Nakshatras were not decorations; they were clocks, seasons, orientation. Knowledge survived because it was lived, spoken, remembered—until colonial systems dismissed it as myth and replaced it with someone else’s certainty.

Seeing Polynesian navigation up close did not feel foreign. It felt like meeting a cousin across an ocean.

What struck me most was this: navigation here was never about conquest. There is no language of “overcoming” the Pacific. Only language of listening, timing, respect, return. The goal was not arrival at all costs, but continuity—of people, of knowledge, of relationship.

In a world that increasingly pretends stability exists if we engineer hard enough, this feels quietly radical.

Perhaps that is why the sky here felt so familiar. Not because I had seen these stars before—but because I had seen this way of knowing before. A way that does not try to pin the universe down, but learns how to move within it without losing itself.

Orion setting into the Pacific was not just beautiful. It was instructive.

It reminded me that navigation is not about knowing exactly where you are.
It is about knowing how to remain oriented when certainty disappears.

And that, it turns out, is not just an ancient maritime skill.
It is a way of living.

On opening a new chapter of my life

It looks like I have not blogged in just over a year, and in my defense there is a big reason for it. I just became a mom. For all those who know me in person also know what a journey I went through to come to this. I posted about my miscarriage before, and there is a whole blog about my infertility and IVF treatments. On the final day (i.e. labor day) I went through a new set of trials because even after going through labor, getting an epidural, I still had to get an emergency c-section because the baby had her umbilical cord wrapped twice round her neck! Anyway, I already knew what a fiesty fighter she is, so she emerged victorious, proving that her name Oindri, meaning thunder aptly suits her.

So now I embarked on this mom-journey. I figured out that feeding and changing diapers can suddenly take up the whole day. I mean, so far, I knew that people have to sacrifice some sleep and that people have to change diapers, but I am failing to calculate how the mere mechanical job of changing diapers can take up so much time! And feeding... by the time she completes one feed, surprisingly, it seems within ten minutes it is time for her next feed! The math is somehow not adding up and I am pretty certain that I am sitting in that nursing chair in her room for around sixteen hours each day.

What does it feel to be a mom? It is still unbelievable. I mean, yes, really, unbelievable! I was just filling up her passport application form, and to fill in my name as the "mother", or seeing my name on her birth certificate as the mother makes my head spin. Like something is wrong there? Are they sure about it? 

Being a mom is an ethereal experience. I am sure the hormones are to blame for part of it, but I am feeling like Nature (or science, because she is an IVF baby) has entrusted in me this huge responsibility of trusting an entire human being in my care. It isn't just sacrificing sleep and waking up several times at night _(those who know me also know how much I love to sleep and that earthquakes or terrible heat, or the fright of an exam have never caused any sleeplessness in me)_, neither is the thought that she is dependent on me for almost everything now, it is the fact that I need to lead my life in a way that inspires her. In order to bring her up right, I need to do the right things in my life. That thought is the one which is challenging me. She would learn everything from me, she would look up to me for advice, watch how I am behaving in difficult times. I can't yell at her when angry and then expect her to stay calm when faced with a difficult situation. I can't sit on the couch all day and then tell her she needs to go play outside. Will it be difficult? Sometimes yes, but since I am already thinking about it, I guess when it comes to really parenting (I mean, she is a little older) then I will be prepared.

So far, she is an amazingly easygoing person with no whining and no fussiness. She went on her first weekend trip to Mt. Rainier and was just perfect. I hope that personality of her will remain along with the sublime strength in her, which has been already apparent in her journey from an embryo to a baby girl!

Kauai Humane Society

With Scout

You surely know how one can check out books from a library, but did you know that you can check out dogs? I call it borrowing some love. 

Kauai is a beautiful island, with unspoiled nature, great hikes through lush green forests, the mighty Pacific Ocean, and it is also home to the Kauai Humane Society. They let you take a dog out on a day-trip to beaches or parks. You need to return them by 5, that's it. When I first heard about it from my co-worker, I thought that was a great idea, so this time when we were in Kauai, we went to see what it is about.

For people who have dogs at home, they know how much those dogs are missed when we are on vacation. To let these people play with dogs for a day greatly makes the vacation a whole lot better. And what does it do for the dogs? They get socialized, a skill very important for them to help get adopted. They also get to come out of their little places and play outside. If they go out on a day trip, they wear their "adopt me" jackets which means other people get to meet them too. And who knows who may have a place in their hearts for which dog? It is of no surprise that a lot of the Humane Society dogs get adopted by visitors.

Scout and Magnolia playing

We got to play with Scout on the first day we were there. Scout is a 9 month old airedale who came to the shelter as a stray. He left front foot was fractured and it healed by itself, but the bone didn't set properly. So she has a funny stride, but that doesn't let her slow down. When we took her out to the yard, first she just ran around, a little shy to come to us. Then within like 5 minutes she came to me when called and soon after sat on my lap. 

The second day we found Scout with her roomie Magnolia. Magnolia is a three-pawed 7-month old pup but she was jumping real high. Scout recognized us from our last visit and while all the other dogs were barking excitedly, Scout gently wagged her tail. That day we took both Scout and Magnolia out to the yard. They chased each other and played a good game of tug-of-war. It was so nice to see some happy doggie time there. This is what happy and healthy dogs do.

It is difficult to not adopt anyone from there, especially when they look up with the trusty, dark brown eyes. As we already have a full house, so it will not be a good idea to get some more. But it is also true that love is the thing that you can give and still have a lot more to give to others. So I'd say that I left a part of me there with Scout, Magnolia, and the rest of them, and also brought back with me a lot of love and trust that they gave me. 

"Mocha'r ghonto" - thoughts on cooking banana florets

I have posted a few times about food in my blog here, but I am not going to post any recipes because I don't want to make this anywhere close to a food blog. I have seen how contents of food blogs are copied from one blog to another, actually word to word, but both (or multiple) authors claiming that her recipe is handed down in her family through generations!! 

Anyway, I have found a lot of joy in re-creating traditional Bengali foods in my kitchen far-away from the rivers and paddy fields of Bengal. There are certain dishes, though, which can be called, in simple language, "advanced". It is like learning the butterfly stroke after you are comfortable with the other three swimming strokes. This week I handled the thing called "mocha". Don't confuse with the coffee stuff, this is what we call banana flowers in Bengali. And heck yes, they are edible.

A whole mocha

This is how a raw whole mocha looks like. The flowers are concealed within layers of purplish firm and smooth skin. As you separate the layers, the florets will be seen. This is the hardest part of cooking this thing. The florets can't just be separated and chopped, they need to be cleaned and sorted individually, by hand. 

Rows of florets

Every floret has one stamen and one small covering along with the petals. That stamen and the covering are not edible. I was wondering who first came up with this. Maybe they cooked it and it tasted bad? Or it was too hard and they couldn't chew or swallow it? Who knows the original reason now? But this method of cleaning and sorting has been passed down through generations in the Bengali kitchens from mother to daughter (or mother-in-law to daughter-in-law). Nowadays we also have YouTube to our rescue.

Before starting the process, we need to rub a little oil on our hands so that the juice doesn't stick or stain them. Traditionally it has always been mustard oil that is used for this purpose, so I chose that. Also, we need to keep a big bowl of turmeric water handy. Once the florets are cleaned and chopped, they are soaked in turmeric water overnight. A little salt is also added to that.

See the big bowl of turmeric water to my left and the small bowl of golden mustard oil to the right.

After an overnight soak, the next morning the whole thing is boiled for like 10-15 minutes before it is ready to be cooked. Generally the other ingredients needed are - lightly fried potato cubes, bengal gram (that is also soaked overnight and boiled later), grated coconut, ghee, daler bori*, and general spices like cumin, dried red chillies, and bright green or red chillies for garnishing. 

The dish has a huge prep work but as all the ingredients are pre-cooked, the actual cooking process is quite easy and fast. It needs a little water to boil all the stuff together and a quick stirring for few minutes. Finally, you can add a teaspoon of ghee for flavor, garnish with some more grated coconut and add a few green or red chilis to make it look good! The best thing is you can serve the dish on one of the purple skins of the mocha itself. 

The finished product!

*PS: Daler bori is a conical shaped thing made out of lentil paste that is dried in the Sun. Dal means lentil. Once dried, those are deep fried till crispy and ground up to add a little extra crunch to this vegetable dish.