Toba Tek Singh
Two or three years after Partition the two governments decide that lunatics should be exchanged like convicts, and the news works its way through a Lahore asylum: one inmate climbs a tree and will not come down, one has declared himself Jinnah, a Muslim who reads the Zamindar every day has stopped bathing. Bishan Singh, a Sikh who has not lain down or slept in fifteen years and speaks a private gibberish, wants only to be told whether his village of Toba Tek Singh has ended up in India or in Pakistan, and no official, inmate, or visitor can answer him. Manto, tried six times for obscenity and dead of drink in Lahore at forty-two, wrote what Urdu and Punjabi readers treat as the last word on 1947.
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