KARACHI: It is not easy to connect some of Saadat Hasan Manto’s unflinching stories to his own life’s trajectory and present them as a single piece without sounding jerky or giving away continuity jumps, for it requires familiarity with the author on two levels — literary and personal.

The latter is more important because unless you have a fair degree of understanding of the writer’s disposition as well as of the time he lived in, you won’t be able to do justice to Manto’s character.

Ajoka Theatre did that pretty well on Saturday night when the group staged Kon hai yeh gustakh?, a two-hour-long attempt at revisiting Manto, during its first presentation in the fourth National Academy of Performing Arts Festival.

The play establishes Manto’s (Usman Raj) association with undivided India in the very first scene as he discusses the effects of partition with his friend, film actor Shyam (Kamran Mujahid). Reference is immediately made to the horrors of bloodshed (mistreatment of a Sikh family from Pindi etc), but it is also established that Manto loves Bombay, the city where he found work.

However, the focus of the play is the stories that Manto wrote during different phases in his life, which are interspersed with his personal journey and are enacted. It all begins with Siah hashyey and carries on with masterpieces such as Khuda ki qasam, Thanda gosht, Khol Do, and Toba Tek Singh.

The trial that Manto had to face because of Thanda gosht becomes an integral part of the story of the writer’s life, signifying his disillusionment with the kind of shape that the newly formed Pakistan had begun to take at the time. This is further highlighted as he writes letters to Uncle Sam.

The play not only relies on Manto’s narration and the enactment of his stories though. It intelligently uses film music of the era and black-and-white footage from the late 1940s and the early ‘50s to heighten the impact of the scenes.

The woman who intermittently becomes part of the narrative and confuses Manto that what her reality is (he assumes that she’s representing the women characters that he has penned) looks like a piece of the picture that makes the otherwise straightforward play a bit of a puzzle.

Overall, Kon hai yeh gustakh?, written by Shahid Nadeem and directed by Madeeha Gauhar, works well, primarily because of the way the personal and the creative sides of Manto are woven into the script.

Only if actor Usman Raj had tried to say his lines a tad more introspectively — less pedantic in his use of language — it would have done a world of good.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2015

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