A man, a self-described idler, is crashing in an empty office for a few weeks, happily reading the same book over and over, when a call from a wrong number sparks a strange romance. He and the woman talk off and on for weeks. He never learns her name. Just when he overcomes his impish refusal to love, he takes ill with what seems to be tuberculosis and dies coughing blood and muttering over the phone.

This story, titled “Kingdom’s End,” opens The Dog of Tithwal, a collection by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon. Born in 1912, Manto, who is described in the introduction as “Punjabi/Kashmiri/Indian/Bombay-Wallah/Pakistani,” is known primarily for his stories about the violent absurdity of the Partition of 1947, which gave rise to an independent India. This context might make the small tragedy of the consumptive lover seem out of place as an opening gambit. But it isn’t. It makes perfect sense.

Like his stories, Manto’s many-slashed self-description is both personal and universal, emblematic of the mutating power of Partition. After suffering under centuries of colonial oppression, modern India emerged out of multiple nationalist campaigns and coincided with the decline of the British Empire. At the same time, a second new nation, Pakistan, was born. The new nations went instantly to war. Hindu and Muslim nationalists attacked each other, and roving gangs massacred civilians of the opposing faith (not to mention Sikhs). Nearly a million people died in the chaos.

This violence, this madness, is never far from Manto’s stories. In the titular story, a dog has his roving ground split suddenly by the new border. He continues, as a dog should, to zoom merrily around (no one has shown him the new lines). Opposing soldiers, dug in against each other, play with the dog at first. But then each side becomes convinced he’s spying for the other one. They shoot at him across no-man’s land, wounding and then killing him. The soldier who did the killing “ran his hand over the still-hot barrel of his rifle and muttered ‘He died a dog’s death.’” And that’s it. There’s no conclusion, no lesson. Just the mad boredom of war, where sides exchange fire over an imaginary line, staring at others who may recently have been friends.

Few of the stories in this collection are as directly about war and violence. In some, of course, the smoke of battles and riots is ever-present. But in most of the stories, the scent is one more familiarly that of cities: of oil and sweat, of the thin grime that covers everything, of the effort to make a living with the decks stacked against you. Manto is a gifted and empathetic observer of the daily grind and how it is interrupted by sudden and awful turns, how sorrows accumulate as the years slip by. His stories are of drivers and cops, of pimps and prostitutes, of young men not able to make enough scratch to get a wife, of daughters disobeying their families for love, with grim results. Manto’s writing recalls that of Joseph Roth, whose portraits of Germany’s interwar underclass anticipated the madness to come more fully and accurately than any sociological study.

One story, “License,” shows his story-telling power. A strapping coachman with his whole life ahead of him gets a fare from a pretty young woman. They fall in love and marry, over the objections of his family. He is arrested for kidnapping and sentenced to prison, where, in the course of a paragraph, he dies from TB. He says to her, “If I had known I was going to die so young, I swear on the one, ominipresent God, I wouldn’t have made you my wife. I’ve done you a great injustice. Forgive me.” He dies.

Had the story ended there, it would have been merely sad. But Manto shifts the perspective to the young widow, now struggling to find her place. As a widow alienated from her family, Nesti has few options; an outcast, her life is essentially over. She is gulled by her husband’s former friends and stifled by a cruelly misogynist bureaucracy, which prevents her from getting a coachman’s license to continue her husband’s business. Denied due to her gender, “the real Nesti, the person within, was redacted to ashes.” The next day she submits a different application, and receives a license to sell her body instead.

Manto tells women’s stories with sympathy and a clear eye. In these stories, circumstances force women into prostitution, or to selling their daughters to rich men, just to stay alive. Some mourn their fate, some are indifferent, and some attack it with a ferocious desire to live their lives. Manto always finds unpredictable humanity in all his sketches.

Even stories that delve into the fantastic, such as “The Monkey Revolt” — in which monkeys demand to be recognized as more evolved and humans engage in the argument — are connected to the turbulent times. All of them, whether directly about Partition, or about a country and countries in flux, uncertain, breaking apart from within and without, deal with a line.

Partition was about a border, an imaginary line that divides reality. A similar process occurs in these stories. A sudden illness, a chance meeting, a wrong turn, a random stranger, a strange and unpredicted revelation, a quiet realization: these moments interrupt the course of a life, separating before from after. There are hinges; there are pivots. Sometimes the ground falls away. Sometimes you are walled in by circumstance, by fate, or by decisions made by others — by the powerful, or simply by a rich man in a fancy car looking for cheap fun. Manto skillfully portrays what happens when people lack control over their fates, when the earth shakes and smoke rises, when life becomes easily bought and more easily discarded.

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