One of the subcontinent's finest short story writers, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) belonged to a middle-class Kashmiri family of Amritsar. Educated in Amritsar and at AMU, he arrived in Bombay in '36 to edit a weekly, joined AIR Delhi in '41 and returned in '43 to work for the Bombay Talkies. In January'48 he moved to Karachi. Virtually drinking himself to death, he wrote his own epitaph on August 18,'54: