Saadat Hasan Manto, "Toba Tek Singh" (trans. Frances W. Pritchett) (India)

It’s December 15. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Saadat Hasan Manto’s story, “Toba Tek Singh”:

After the 1947 Partition that separated India from Muslim Pakistan, the inmates of an asylum in Lahore are transferred to India. But one of the inmates, Bishan Singh, told that now his home town is in Pakistan, refuses to leave, and ends up lying between the fences of barbed wire that artificially limit each new nation, the inhabitant of a no-man’s land. “There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.” The Urdu playwright and short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto was a political activist during the last years of the British Raj, and later in Pakistan. He died in 1955. His gravestone in Lahore reads: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the arts and mysteries of short story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, wondering who of the two is the greater short story writer: God or he.”

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