What remains of Manto’s Bombay?

"Main chalta phirta Bambai hoon" went Saadat Hasan Manto's famous line. The beloved and despised, empathetic yet brutally honest, always controversial Urdu-language writer spent about a decade of his short life in Bombay, in the 1930s and '40s, and fell deeply, irrevocably, in love with what he called his true home. But then, traumatised by Partition, he forced himself to make a new home and life in Lahore. He never got over the heartbreak.

This is why, walking through Manto's Bombay with his family, 70 years after he left, is so special.

I am sitting at Kyani & Co, an Irani bakery and café in South Mumbai's Marine Lines, with Nusrat and Shahid Jalal, Manto's youngest daughter and her husband, and filmmaker Nandita Das. The Jalals have come from Lahore for the premiere of Nandita's film, Manto, and I couldn't be more thrilled to be spending my Sunday walking though Bombay with the three of them. I am worried that the elderly Jalals might not be able to cope with the humidity and crowds, but their enthusiasm puts me at ease. "Abbajaan loved Bombay so much. So you can't imagine what a treat it is for me to be here, seeing the city for the first time and walking around his Bombay like this," says Nusrat.

We begin our walk in the narrow lane right next to Kyani, fronted by a tall, scalloped archway. This is where, Nandita explains, a scene from one of Manto's stories was shot. "It's the opening scene of Sau Candlepower ka Bulb, where a prostitute whistles at Manto [played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui] from that window [she points] and asks if she should come down or he will come up." Nandita was keen to intersperse the film's script, which she has written, with a few of his stories. This was partly to give viewers a glimpse of his work and partly because the line between fact and fiction in his own writing was often blurred. "I wanted to keep that seamlessness, where you almost don't know you've gotten into another story."

A few steps away is Edward Theatre, a decrepit single-screen cinema built in the 19th century, where something called Maut ka Khiladi is playing. We walk up to a small flat above the theatre, which, in Manto, becomes his Bombay apartment. Inside, it's all tall ceilings, old-fashioned window panes and clusters of lightbulbs with floral-patterned holders. Nandita walks around excitedly, pointing out to the Jalals what furniture she kept and what was not used, how some of the modern features, like the switchboards, had to be covered.

In the car, we talk about Bombay's famed cosmopolitanism, much of which, Nandita points out, has eroded over time. "It wasn't so ghettoised earlier," she explains to the Jalals. Where Manto lived in a building populated equally by Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Muslims, today's housing societies are segregated on every kind of identity. "It's reflective of the world today, isn't it?" Nusrat nods thoughtfully. "Bahut zyaada exclusionary ho rahi hai, puri duniya. Abbajaan would have been so upset by this kind of thing, because he didn't identify people like that. Even in his Partition stories, you often didn't know the religious identity of the person committing a crime or of the victim." Shahid suddenly reminds us of one of Manto's Partition sketches, in which rioting mobs force a man to drop his pants so they can check his genitals and therefore, his religion. He and Nusrat quote lines from the sketch, and just like that, we are in the middle of a story.

Cut to the intricately carved balcony railings and Edwardian neoclassical façades that line Murzban Road in Fort. In the film, the street is shown from Manto's window as he, his wife, Safia, and their eldest daughter, Nighat, gaze at the crowds celebrating the birth of India at the stroke of that midnight hour. "Tum ek azad Hindustan mein paida hoge," he says to Safia's pregnant belly—so confident was he that he would remain in India, in his beloved Bombay that gave him shelter, a chance, a life.

That didn't happen, and in January 1948, acutely aware of what it was to be and feel Muslim, all the time, in a newly independent and increasingly sectarian India, Manto got on a ship to Pakistan. Our next stop, Sassoon Docks, is heaving with scores of fishermen and women cleaning their fresh catch. Nandita used these docks as the setting for one of Manto's most emotionally wrenching moments—when he and his friend Shyam Chadda raise a toast to each other's new countries and hold each other one last time as fellow Indians.

Back in the car, as Shahid and Nusrat gaze at the Art Deco buildings on Marine Drive and Nandita points out where she shot the film's opening scene, the conversation turns to Partition, and how Radcliffe's hastily drawn borders decided the fate of millions in just a few days. Nusrat tells us how her father was so traumatised by the events of 1947 that for a while just after, he simply couldn't write. Even his Partition stories, arguably the best-known of his writing, came a long time after he moved to Lahore. And then, we segue, of course, into Toba Tek Singh—Manto's most famous story, about the madness of Partition, the panicked confusion, the blind rage, the unexpected humanity, the sheer absurdity of it all. (Just then, Nusrat and Nandita's phones beep—it's Nuzhat Arshad, Nusrat's older sister, who has just crossed the Wagah border into Amritsar and will soon be on a flight to Bombay for the film premiere. Nusrat and Nandita have been checking their phones all morning for updates, and when they get this news, we all let out a relieved cheer.)

We're now on Grant Road, surrounded by the parts of Bombay that Manto lived in, frequented and wrote so prolifically about. This was his Bombay—colourful, diverse, throbbing with life and the characters that peopled his stories: prostitutes, pimps, writers, dancers, gamblers, gangsters—all crammed within the narrow confines of chawls bursting at the seams.

While we can't enter his old flat on Clare Road, we walk through the tiny, sepia-tinted lanes around Congress House. Nusrat and Shahid are keen to see how this neighbourhood has been shown as Lahore in the film, and Nandita happily obliges. "This is a trade workers' office that we turned into the office of Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, a writer and literary critic whom Manto befriended after moving… Oh, this became Tehsin Pictures, the Lahore film studio!"

We end our walk, fittingly, with lunch at Sarvi, a small, dilapidated place in Byculla where Manto used to eat regularly. Over seekh kababs, bheja masala fry and massive rotis dripping with butter, Nusrat tells me that the biggest difference she sees between Lahore and Bombay is in the freedom the latter visibly provides its people, especially women, in public spaces. "I remember Abbajaan writing that Bombay told him ‘You can do what you want. No one will find fault with you. Nor will anyone subject you to moralising… You may live on the footpath or in a magnificent palace; it will not matter in the least to me.' Today, I saw some of what he meant."

Manto, directed by Nandita Das, releases across India on Friday, 21 September. Watch the teaser here: