ODOR
Saadat Hasan Manto

I
t was again the monsoon season.
Drops of rain had begun their patter on the leaves of the pipal tree near the window. Inside lay the teak bed on which a Ghatan girl had slept with Randhir.
Beyond the window, in the night’s milky darkness, the pipal leaves bathed in the rain, quivering like earrings.
On the spring mattress of the bed, the Ghatan girl had clung to Randhir like gooseflesh. Some hours earlier, he had seen her under the tamarind tree, sheltering from the downpour. She probably worked in the rope factory nearby. Randhir had watched her from his balcony, where he had come for a change from the mustiness of his room. He had wanted a diversion, for all afternoon he had done nothing but read the same newspaper again and again. He had cleared his throat and coughed. This had attracted her attention and he had beckoned her to come up. 
For several days he had been feeling very lonely and dejected. One reason was the war, which had put beyond his reach those Anglo-Indian girls who used to come out with him for the evening and even for the night. They were not expensive and because of his English education he had preferred to date them rather than go to the brothels. With the coming of the war, some of them had enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, others had joined the newly opened dancing schools in the Fort area. As only Tommies were admitted to these schools, Randhir had felt frustrated. His favorite girls had gone off the market. The only ones available were in the dancing schools, where white skin was the passport for admission; nothing else mattered. This had made Randhir very bitter, for he had felt that he was better educated, more refined, and healthier than the average Tommy.
Before the war Randhir had had many a rendezvous with his girl friends of the Nagpada and Taj Mahal Hotel areas. He knew more about these girls, physically, than did the Christian boys with whom they flirted, until they married the most gullible of them.
Randhir had called the Ghatan girl over to his flat because he had been hurt by the airs Hazel had put on since her enlistment. Every morning he would see her leave her flat, directly below his own, in her uniform, her khaki cap set at a rakish angle, walking as if all passers-by were only waiting to spread themselves out, like sacking on the pavement, for her to walk on.
Randhir had often wondered why he was so attracted by girls like Hazel. Was it because they made themselves physically attractive by accentuating their curves and contours, or was it for their lack of inhibitions? They never felt abashed at referring to their menstrual irregularities, they told stories about their former lovers, their feet automatically tapped the floor on hearing a dance tune, and in bed they were like patent medicines with directions for use.
When Randhir had beckoned the Ghatan girl, he did not have any intention of taking her to bed. Noticing her drenched clothes, he had thought that the poor girl might get pneumonia, and had said, “Take off those wet clothes, you may catch a cold.” 
She had understood him, though she did not know his language. Red webs of shame had suddenly floated in her eyes. When Randhir had handed her a fresh white dhoti, she had hesitated for a moment, and then abruptly she had loosened her dirty coarse kashta, made filthier by the rain. As the soaked garment collapsed around her legs, she had swiftly covered her thighs with the dhoti. She had then tried to take off her tight choli by opening a tiny knot, almost embedded in the deep and narrow hollow between her breasts.
Her worn-out nails had pecked at the tiny wet knot several times but had failed to loosen it. In despair, she had said something to Randhir in Marathi which meant, “What am I to do; it won't open?”
Randhir had sat down beside her and investigated the knot. But soon he had lost his patience, and gripping the strings on either side of the knot, he had given a sudden jerk. At once the string had snapped, and his hands had brushed over her breasts, which had come trembling into view. For a moment Randhir had felt like a potter, using freshly kneaded clay, who had suddenly molded two cups on the Ghatan girl’s chest. Her breasts had the pliancy, the moist roughness, and the cooling warmth of vessels that have just come off the potter’s wheel. Spotless and mud-colored, they had shone dully with a strange glow which seemed to come from a luminous layer beneath her translucent skin. Her uplifted breasts had looked like lamps lit at the bottom of a muddy pool.
It was again the season of rains.
Beyond the window the pipal leaves had dripped with rain. The Ghatan girl’s soaked, two-piece dress was on the floor in a filthy heap. The girl had clung to Randhir. The warmth of her nude, unwashed body had reminded him of a hot bath in winter in a filthy public hamam.
All night she had clung to Randhir, as if they were one. They had hardly exchanged a word or two, for their panting was as eloquent as their lips and hands were expressive. All night Randhir’s hands had fondled her breasts, like the caress of the breeze. Occasionally, her dark areolas, with their coarse grain and the tiny nipples, had stiffened and started a tremor that would streak through her body and communicate itself even to Randhir.
Randhir had experienced such tremors hundreds of times, and was familiar with the delicious sensation they imparted. He had spent many nights with girls, clasping their taut or soft breasts against his own. He had slept with all sorts of girls, simple and talkative ones who gave him information about their families that no stranger should know, and the type who bore all the physical burden in bed and would not let him exert himself. But this Ghatan girl, who had come up to his flat from her shelter under the tamarind tree, had been quite different.
All night Randhir had inhaled a strange odor from her body, an odor both unpleasant and pleasant. He had sought for it in her armpits, her hair, breasts, navel, and in every other part of her body where it could pervade his nose. He had thought that he would never have felt the nearness of the girl but for this odor which had penetrated every layer of his mind and had seeped through his memories, new and old.
For one night Randhir and the girl had been fused together by this odor; they had merged into each other and slipped down to fathomless depths where they had been transformed into pure ecstasy, a state which they thought would be perpetual in spite of its evanescence, and still and stable even though there were fluctuations. They had been like a little bird that soars into the blueness of the sky, higher and higher, until it becomes a motionless dot.
Randhir was familiar with the odor that had exhaled from every pore of the Ghatan girl’s body, but he had not been able to analyze it. It was like the fresh smell of earth sprinkled with water—but no, this odor was different. It was not an artificial smell like that of lavender or attar, but something natural and eternal, like the relationship that has existed between man and woman since the beginning of time.
Randhir hated perspiration. After a bath he usually powdered his armpits or used deodorants. It was surprising that he had kissed the hairy armpits of the Ghatan girl many times—yes, many times—and had felt no aversion. In fact, it had given him a peculiar feeling of pleasure. The tiny hair in the armpits, bedewed with perspiration, had given off the same odor that had been obvious and yet so incomprehensible. Randhir had felt that he knew this odor, that he recognized it, understood it, but he could not describe it to anyone else.

T
he monsoons were back again.
Randhir looked out of the window and saw the swaying pipal leaves bathing in the rain, the sound of their rustle and patter merging in the atmosphere. The night was dark, not pitch dark but of the darkness that seemed to have absorbed some subdued pearly light washed down from the stars by the raindrops. The season was the same when there was only one teak bed in the room, but now another lay beside it. In the corner stood a new dressing table.
It was again the season of rains, the season of marriages.
The raindrops were flushing the stars of their milky light, but the atmosphere was filled with the strong perfume of henna. One of the beds was empty. On the other lay Randhir, looking beyond the window at the dance of the raindrops on the swaying pipal leaves. By his side was a milky-white girl who had fallen asleep trying unsuccessfully to cover her nakedness. Her red silk shalwar lay on the other bed, one end of its dark-red cord dangling by its side. Also flung on this bed were the other clothes of which she had been stripped, her green shirt with red flowers to match the shalwar, her brassière, underwear, and dupatta. All were red, marriage red, and scented with henna.
Gold powder lay in the girl’s black hair, like dust. The blurred make-up on her face, a mixture of gold dust, powder, and rouge, was like a pallid mask of death. Her creamy breasts were blotched with the color of her red brassière.
Her breasts were as white as milk, a whiteness that has a faint tinge of blue. Randhir glanced at the girl several times and thought: “It seems as if I have just pulled out the nails from a crate and lifted her out,” for she had scratches on her body like packing marks on books and crockery. When Randhir had unknotted the cord of her tight-fitting brassière, he had felt the ribbing on the soft flesh of her back and bosom, and the creased imprint left around her waist by the cord of her shalwar. A heavy and sharp-edged gold necklace, set with jewels, had bruised her breast as if it had been scratched wildly with nails.
It was the same season of the monsoons.
Countless raindrops were falling again on the soft, delicate pipal leaves. Randhir heard the familiar patter throughout the night. It was a pleasant season. A cool breeze was blowing, but it carried with it the scent of henna. For a long time Randhir’s hands stroked the girl’s bosom, white as fresh milk. They brushed her breasts gently, like the caress of the breeze. His fingers roving over her soft, milky body felt racing tremors and stirred suppressed passions. When he pressed his breast to the girl’s bosom, every pore of his body heard the twanging of the girl’s strummed emotions—but where was that note, that call of the Ghatan girl’s odor, which had been more compelling than the cry of a suckling baby, that cry which had gone beyond the limits of sound and for him, somehow, had become a nameless perfume.
Randhir was looking out through the bars of the window. Close by, the pipal leaves were rustling, but he was trying to look beyond, far beyond them, at the luminous gray clouds. They had a strange glow like the one that had lurked in the Ghatan girl’s breasts, a glow that was hidden like a secret object but yet was discernible.
By his side lay a girl whose body was as white as flour kneaded with milk and ghee. Her sleeping body gave off the perfume of henna, which had now grown faint. Randhir felt a sudden aversion for this dying perfume. It had a peculiar tang, like the taste of the mouth after belching—unsavory and insipid.
Randhir looked at the girl by his side. He found her skin covering her body like whitish curdled grains of sour milk floating without life in a colorless liquid. His senses were permeated with the odor which had exhaled effortlessly from the body of the Ghatan girl. It was an odor lighter but more penetrating than the attar of henna, reaching the olfactory organs without even the intake of the breath.
Randhir rallied and again stroked the milky body of the girl. His hand countered numbness; there was no responsive tremor. His new bride, the daughter of a magistrate, a graduate, the heartthrob of the boys of her college, had failed to kindle his masculine interest. In the dying perfume of henna attar, he continued to grope for the odor of the Ghatan girl, the odor he had inhaled from her unwashed body in these very days of the monsoons, when the pipal leaves had bathed in the rain.

    --Translated from Urdu by Hamid Jalal