Short stories
The Quilt
لحاف
Ismat Chughtai · 1942
Synopsis
A woman remembers the winter when, as a child, her mother left her with Begum Jan, wife of a nawab who neglects her for the company of young boys. Shut away in her large house, the begum lives only for the care of her servant Rabbu, who massages her ceaselessly and joins her at night under the quilt. From her bed, the child watches the shadow of the quilt shifting on the wall, like an elephant.
Context
The story appeared in 1942 in Lahore in the Urdu journal Adab-i-Latif, then in a collection. It draws on the affair that rumour attributed, in Aligarh, to a begum and her masseuse. Prosecutions for obscenity, joined to those aimed at Manto for another story, brought the author before the Lahore court with her publisher, Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi, and the calligrapher of the volume; she refused to apologise. At the 1946 hearing, the prosecution's witnesses could not point to a single obscene word, and she was acquitted.
Who it is for
A very short story, in Urdu, in which everything is suggested and nothing is named; the author's own account of her trial makes a useful complement.
Prizes and reception
It remains the most famous of her short stories, to the point of eclipsing the rest of her work; translated into English, Hindi and French.
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