“Other details were missing. Had he brought her to the railway station? Had she got into the carriage with him?…All questions. There were no answers. He wished he could weep but tears would not come.”

This specific passage from the short story “The Return” by Manto struck me purely based on the syntax and how it provokes the exact feeling in the reader that it is meant to convey of SiraJuddin. The short sentences ignite panic, a sense of fear, and mangled surroundings. The way I imagine panic settling in is when details disappear, words mesh together and questions don’t have answers; There is no solution in sight. This exact feeling is so well encapsulated in this particular phrase, as Sirajuddin is settling into panic without his daughter and his realization that his wife has been brutally murdered right before his eyes. It is one of his lowest points. It is unsettling for the reader to read such short and straightforward sentences that packs such a high emotional load, and it works so perfectly in conveying the trauma and chaos that emerged from the moment he woke up to his realization of his wife’s death and daughter’s absence. His loss of memory and confusion is also expressed through his questions that are entered mid sentence. “Had he brought her to the railways station?” The reader cannot answer this question, bringing Sarajuppin’s stress onto the reader as well, giving these short sentences contain such a powerful emotional charge.

Hannah Khanshali

 I think by “shocked, suspended as it were over a bottomless pit” the author means to say that Sirajuddin was facing a deep trauma and confusion. He is unaware of what he should do since he just watched his wife die, and his daughter is now missing. Thus, the bottomless pit can symbolize the endless trauma that Sirajuddin continues to face during this time. 

 The short passage about the lost daughter and her worried father intrigues me, but at the same time leaves me in confusion. I am intrigued as soon as I began to read because it started with commotion, we as readers do not know what happened, all we know is that children and family members have either gone missing or are dead, which leaves me wondering what happened. The words “ Attack…fire…escape…railroad station…night” capture my attention almost immediately because it signals that something horrid has happened and it leaves me guessing for answers. Throughout the passage, the Sirajuddin (the father) is looking for his daughter, Sakina. He then proceeds to ask armed men to help him find his daughter and within some days, they complete this task but do not share this knowledge with Sirajuddin. The daughter is injured and is taken to the hospital where her father finds her, and to his and my shock, she is alive. This leads to my confusion because when the guards found Sakina they seemed to be in her best interest, but why not tell her father? Why leave her hospitalized? 

“He was shock, suspended as it were over a bottomless pit.”

This quote about Sirajuddin feeling like he was over a bottomless pit puzzles me because it reminds me of the kinds of dreams that you have where you are falling and some people say that they mean that you are growing which is a good thing since it’s means you are becoming a big kid, but in this case, it is ironic because this traumatic event is where his world is withering. He is unsure of the state of his family which means everything to him. This idea of bottomless pit symbolizes inevitable pain which may be the loss of his loved ones. As you are falling you think about the fate of the death that is in store and the loved ones. His only motivation for pushing through is his loved ones because part of him has accepted what the change in regime means for him.

“She is alive. My daughter is alive,” Sirajuddin shouted with joy. The doctor broke into a cold sweat.

The last three lines of ‘The Return’ stood out to me as capturing dehumanization due to war, in different ways. There is Sirajuddin who shouts with joy merely at the fact that Sakina is alive, despite her traumatized condition. The reality that Sakina’s state is a good outcome in Sirajuddin’s eyes points to depravity and terror being normalized in a time of conflict. We also have the doctor’s contrasting perspective to Sirajuddin of breaking into a cold sweat because he can recognize that Sakina has been raped.

However, the last lines do not give the perspective of Sakina at all. Throughout the story, Sakina progressively loses agency over her body and never regains it, even when she is reunited with her father and receiving medical care. Just as the last few lines give us information on what the doctor and Sirajuddin feel at the sight of Sakina, we can only interpret Sakina’s perspective on the rapes and surviving in the context of her physical reactions to men. This lack of Sakina’s perspective really stood out to me in these lines and speaks to her overall loss of autonomy.

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