SOURCE: THE HINDU

To celebrate the birthdays of Saadat Hasan Manto (May 11) and Ruskin Bond (May 19), new collections of their short stories are being published. Manto’s stories, written in Urdu, are available in several English editions ( Mottled Dawn: 50 Sketches and Stories of Partition, translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin Modern Classics;  Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, also edited and translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin,  Stars from Another Sky:  The Bombay Film World of the 1940s); in  The Pity of Partition (Princeton University Press) , Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto’s stories, sketches, essays and letters to write a biography as also the history of partition and its devastating impact. To coincide with his birthday,  The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1: Poona and Bombay (Aleph) is out, translated by Nasreen Rehman. The first of a three-volume series, it has all of Manto’s 255 known stories translated into English. Volume I collects 54 stories and two essays written by Manto about his time in Bombay and Poona in colonial India, and includes well-known stories like ‘Mummy’ and ‘Janki’. “Manto wrote several Bombay stories after 1948, across the border in Lahore, Pakistan, which read like dystopian love letters to the city he claimed to embody, describing himself as, ‘Bombay in motion’,” writes Rehman in her introduction. Volume Two has stories set in other parts of India before 1947, including some rather well-known stories of partition in Punjab, such as ‘Cold Flesh (Thanda Gosht)’; Volume Three has all the stories set in Pakistan, but it opens with ‘The Drawstring (Khol Do)’, which begins in India and ends in Pakistan. “His lexicon is everyday Urdu, and his style has the spontaneity of informal conversation, amplified by his regular appearance in his narratives,” she says. A new collection of short stories by Ruskin Bond ( Song of the Forest: Stories from Here, There and Everywhere/Aleph) gathers the best of his recent fiction, written over the past 10 years or so. In his foreword, David Davidar calls it a “feast of fiction” from a literary master, in which “hilarious stories about crooks and conmen rub shoulders with horror stories, murder mysteries, and diaphanous literary marvels.”