Bu (بو) by Saadat Hasan Manto: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: Bu (Odour) by Saadat Hasan Manto: summary with the ending, Randhir and the Ghatan girl in the Bombay monsoon, the 1944 obscenity trial, themes of memory and desire, craft.
It is raining in Bombay and Randhir, alone in his room, sees a girl from the hills sheltering under the tamarind tree below and calls her up. What stays with him afterwards is not her face or her body but her smell, and on his wedding night, with a fair educated bride beside him, that smell is all he can think about.
Saadat Hasan Manto wrote Bu in Bombay in the early 1940s, and it earned him one of his obscenity trials in Lahore in 1944. Readers expecting pornography find a short essay in fiction on how the senses remember; it is frank about sex and for mature readers.
The story in brief
Randhir, young, educated and idle, is lonely during the monsoon. From his balcony he watches a Ghatan, a labouring girl from the Western Ghats who works at the nearby rope factory, standing soaked under a tamarind tree. He invites her upstairs, gives her dry clothes and they spend the night together. Manto spends his prose on one thing: the odour of her body, which Randhir cannot name and cannot forget. He compares it to earth after rain and finds every comparison short.
Time passes. Randhir marries the daughter of a magistrate, fair-skinned, educated, dressed in red bridal silk with henna on her hands. It is the monsoon again. Lying beside her, he registers her smell, faint and sour like milk left out, and realises that nothing in this expensive, approved body reaches him. The story ends with him thinking of the Ghatan girl. Manto offers no resolution.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Standard readings pair the two women as body against status, or nature against refinement, and note that Manto ranks them by smell rather than by class.
The sharper observation is that Bu is about memory rather than desire. Randhir's wedding night is not ruined by lust for another woman; it is ruined by comparison, which is a function of memory. Manto found the one sense that bypasses judgement, and built a story on a man discovering that his approvals do not control what he keeps.
The craft
The story has two scenes, the same season, the same rain, and the turn is the repeat itself. Manto sets both nights in the monsoon so that the second reads as a failed copy of the first. The bride's red and henna and the Ghatan's wet, plain clothes are laid side by side.
The technique worth stealing is the single-sense story. Manto restricts nearly all his description to odour and lets sight and sound go slack, which forces the reader into Randhir's nose. Choose one sense and starve the others, and a short story gains a strange concentration.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Say plainly that the story ranks two women by a sense, not by class, and that this was the scandal.
- Use the two monsoons as your structural point in any essay.
- Mention the 1944 Lahore trial alongside Kali Shalwar and Dhuan.
- For your own fiction, write a scene in which one sense carries all the description.
- Repeat a setting exactly so the second visit reads as comparison.
- Refuse to resolve a memory; let the story end inside it.
Try it yourself
Write a story in two scenes set in the same weather years apart, in which a single smell, sound or texture from the first scene makes the second scene fail, and let the character notice without ever explaining it to anyone.
Questions
What is Bu by Manto about?
Randhir spends a monsoon night with a labouring girl from the Ghats and is possessed by her body's odour. Later, on his wedding night with a fair, educated bride, he finds her scent meaningless and thinks only of the first girl.
Why is Manto's Bu considered controversial?
It describes a sexual encounter frankly and prefers a poor labourer's body to a respectable bride's. Manto was tried for obscenity over it in Lahore in 1944.
What is the ending of Bu?
Lying beside his new wife during the monsoon, Randhir registers her faint sour smell and realises it means nothing to him. The story closes on his memory of the Ghatan girl, with no resolution.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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