Manto Memoirs

“His repertoire of Partition stories is a stunning,blinding reflection of those horrific times. People kept making furore over the expletives used in his stories and the dauntng sexual undercurrent. The pathos,the irony and the deepest of human feelings,actions and reactions portrayed in the stories was largely ignored by hardliners who even slapped legal suits on him for obscenity,” says the actor,who went to Lahore to put together pieces of Manto’s life talking to the surviving members of the writer’s family.

“Matriarch of the Rafi Peer family of Pakistan had known Manto so closely,she often put morsels in his mouth when he lay sozzled. From her I received the ultimate compliment for my performance when she said she felt like she had met Manto again after many years,” recalls Bhatt,who had to present the 1-hour-10-minute drama twice,back to back,on demand of an uncontrollable crowd in Lahore. “In Berlin,after my performance an old man came up to me with a book of Manto’s stories translated into Deutsche. He told me that I had done commendable service to the greatest writer in the world.” The play borrows from articles by Manto with titles like ‘Main kyun likhta hoon’,‘Kal savere jo meri aankh khuli’ and ‘Deewaron par likhna’. “When he fell on bad days,he would just scribble an afsaana offhand and exchange it for booze money,” says Bhatt.

Besides acting,Bhatt holds workshops and runs a ‘Theatre Garage’ project. He is also associated with films and has completed writing dialogue for Rahul Dholakia (of Parzania-fame)’s Lamhaa,starring Sanjay Dutt,Bipasha Basu and Kunaal Kapoor,a film on present-day Kashmir.

“I feel uproooted and no matter where I have been and what I have done,my heart has been in Kashmir where I was born and spent formative years of life,” sighs Bhatt.

(Bhatt performs Ek Mulaqat Manto Se at UPSNA,7 PM on Thursday)