The Garland

Saadat H Manto

( Sir Ganga Ram is considered to be the father of Modern Lahore. The story is set during the post partition mob fury in Lahore)

The mob suddenly veered to the left, its wrath now directed at the statue of Sir Ganga Ram, the great philanthropist of Lahore. One man smeared the statue’s face with coal tar. Another strung together a garland of shoes and was about to place it around the great man’s neck when the police moved in, guns blazing. The man with the garland of shoes was shot.

The crowd dispersed. They shouted
‘He is shot. Let’s take him to Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.’

So the man with the garland of shoes for Sir Ganga Ram was bandaged in the hospital established by Sir Ganga Ram.

( The statue of Sir Ganga Ram was attacked by a frenzied mob in the aftermath of the Partition Riots in 1947, and broken.)

Saadat Hasan Manto was born in Ludhiana and was schooled in Amritsar and AMU. In 1948 he migrated to Pakistan. In the islamised nation of Pakistan, sessions judge ruled that he would be sent to jail if he continued to write provocative stories. He stopped writing, sank into depression and was admitted to the mental Asylum at Lahore. He died in 1955 at an early age. Had he continued in Bombay, probably he would have lived longer.

Manto had been implacably opposed to partition and had refused to go to the newly formed Pakistan.
One evening he was sitting drinking with his Hindu colleagues at the offices of the newspaper in Bombay where he worked when one of them remarked that, were it not for the fact they were friends, he would have killed Manto. The next day Manto packed his bags and took his family to Lahore.

He has chronicled his experiences inside a lunatic asylum of Lahore in the aftermath of partition vividly in his famous story – Toba Tek Singh. This story found a place in the best 100 stories by BBC.