A Short Summary Of Manto's 'Open It'

Manto’s fictional short story, “Open It” articulates the chaos and depravity of the refugee camps during India’s partition through the eyes of Sirajuddin, a father who recently witnesses his wife’s murder, and who has lost his daughter, Sakina, amidst the pandemonium. From the opening sentence of the story, Manto makes it clear that there appears to be nothing ordinary about the train ride that Sirajuddin has just taken, as it takes the train eight hours to travel a short fifty kilometres from Amitsar to Mughalpura. The narrator notes how Sirajuddin needs “help and sympathy,” yet no help or sympathy exists in the refugee camps, and even those citizens of society who should be trustable, such as doctors and “self appointed social workers” are not trustworthy (Manto 70). In order to grasp the power of Manto’s story, the reader must acknowledge the details he chooses to leave out. “Open It” speaks to the violence surrounding women during the partition, and in leaving key details out—such as the doctor’s reason for breaking out into a cold sweat, or Sakina’s own perspective—Manto couples the violence of partition with a sense of helplessness, confusion, and incompleteness. In avoiding explicit description of the atrocities that Sakina experiences, Manto relies on the reader’s own knowledge and imagination of partition to show how silence, rather than speech, more properly captivates the horror of partition. Furthermore, Manto presents Sirajuddin’s character as naive, and