The original advocate of goodwill

Saadat Hasan Manto, short story writer, 1912-1955, is all it says on the blue metal board outside the flat in Lakshmi Mansion. To find out the rest, you need to step inside, writes Avirook Sen.

Saadat Hasan Manto, short story writer, 1912-1955, is all it says on the blue metal board outside the flat in Lakshmi Mansion. To find out the rest, you need to step inside.

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Manto, whose chosen weapon was as sharp and as blunt as those that rioters have used through the ages, lived and died here fighting a war against communal hatred, and a battle against whisky.

He also loved cricket: one of his last two wishes was to watch Hanif Mohammad bat in the Lahore Test of 1954-55. (The other was to write about the death of a young woman and her child in Gujarat — she was found naked, raped and dead a few days before, eight years after Partition.) Manto didn't manage to do either.

Nearly 50 years later, Manto's eldest daughter Nighat and her husband Bashir Patel talk about the father, the author and cricket in a drawing room where the odour of alchohol is missing, but the spirit of Manto is everywhere: in pictures, books and in the conversation.

"This is too much," says Bashir, "first you fellows hammer us at cricket and then you land up at home." Fact is, there probably isn't a soul on the planet (or, for that matter outside) who isn't welcome to the house. It's always been that way.

The current series takes them back to 1955. The public mood was the same and, like now, the two governments had played along. "So will they have a green top wicket tomorrow?" asks Bashir, lamenting the current state of the Pakistan team, personified in its close to tears captain Inzamam-ul-Haq. Bashir predicts doom for Pakistan. "You actually support India, don't you?" Nighat tells her husband.

She was just eight when her father died. As Manto's nephew Hamid Jalal wrote in "Uncle Manto", a sort of introduction to a short story collection (Black Milk) by the author, he had said: "Let Hamidlala come home.

I'll go with him to see the Test match" the day before he died. Then, he drank more than his usual quota and began throwing up blood. Next morning, he was gone.

This was January 1955. And Jalal, who was helping Bobby Talyarkhan out with the commentary in the preceding Test match at Bahawalpur, scribbled "The umpire has at last given Saadat Hasan Manto out," on his notepad when he heard the news.

In life, Manto took his chances. The only thing he asked for on his deathbed was whisky, to be paid for by the three rupees and eight annas left in his pocket. Otherwise, who knows, he might just have caught the action in 2004.

But there's a clue in his writing to tell you exactly what he might have thought of this "goodwill series". It's from Toba Tek Singh: "Upar the gur gur, the bay the dhayana of the Hindustan and the Pakistan way fitte moonh."

It’s gibberish. The insane babble of a character tipped over the edge by partition.