The Dog of Tithwal
A stray dog in no-man's-land — and what it costs when two armies need everything to mean something.
★ An editorial appreciation. The full story appears in Urdu in Manto's collected works. English translations include Khalid Hasan's "Manto: Selected Stories" (Penguin).
Somewhere near the Kashmir front in 1947, Indian and Pakistani soldiers eye each other across a strip of no-man's-land. A stray dog wanders in. The Indians name him Shera; the Pakistanis call him Jhunnu. Each side insists he is theirs.
When the dog trots over to the Pakistani post one afternoon, an Indian soldier shoots him for being a traitor.
On paper, this is an absurdist comedy. It is also one of the most devastating things written about Partition — and Manto wrote it without raising his voice once.
What makes "The Dog of Tithwal" extraordinary is what it refuses to do. It refuses sentimentality about the dog. It refuses to make either side clearly monstrous. It refuses, above all, to explain. The dog simply exists: sniffing for scraps, wagging its tail, constitutionally unable to understand what a border is. It is the soldiers who cannot tolerate this. They need the dog to be something — a symbol, a piece of territory, a proof. The dog's indifference drives them to fury.
Manto wrote this in Lahore, a few years after Partition, when he was drinking himself to death and writing with a clarity suggesting the alcohol had burned away everything nonessential. He had left Bombay for Pakistan and the wound of that migration never closed. Partition stories were everywhere that decade — but most made a case for one side's suffering, or hunted for a villain. Manto wasn't interested in cases. He was interested in how exactly a thing like Partition happened to specific people: what it did to their language, their humor, their ability to remain human.
At fewer than 2,000 words, "The Dog of Tithwal" achieves what most novelists never manage in a career. Read it in Urdu if you can. If not, Khalid Hasan's translation preserves enough of the dry, merciless tone.