The translators of “Bombay Stories” are a poet and an Urdu lecturer at Columbia University. I am grateful to them for bringing out these stories in English, but they err toward an excess of American colloquialisms. I have difficulty imagining someone in 1940s Bombay saying things like “I’m out of here” or “You’ll be in a world of hurt.” Take the translation, “buddy.” Wouldn’t the original word “yaar,” in context, be equally comprehensible to a foreign audience, especially since it can be explained in the glossary attached to the book? And why attach a glossary if the explanation for the word “chawl” is inserted in parentheses in the main text, irritatingly interrupting the story? Wouldn’t “tenement” have served better? But I can empathize with the translators; these sorts of choices are a constant kind of trench warfare for any author attempting, line by line, to convey an Indian reality in English.

The most interesting character in this book is Manto himself, the complicit writer, who appears under his own name in several stories. He arranges assignations for his actor friends, tries to tend to the women they injure, reflects with bitter humor about what men and women do to each other.

In 1951, Manto started writing a series of “Letters to Uncle Sam,” a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek special pleading for writers and prescient observations about the American-Pakistani relationship. In one, he writes about his sentence of three months in prison for obscenity. “My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart.”

Manto was tried several times for obscenity, and from a story of sexual obsession like “Smell,” one can see why. His travails, in India and Pakistan, foreshadowed the current dire state of freedom of speech in both countries — but more surprisingly, in the world’s largest democracy. In February, Penguin India agreed not just to withdraw but to “pulp,” in an act of gross literary violence, all copies of Wendy Doniger’s magisterial “The Hindus,” in fear of the right-wing mobs who seem poised to take power in Delhi. In India these days, truth and literature are to be kept far apart at all costs.

But the truth will prevail, because it is disobedient to any kind of authority. Manto once wrote a kind of writer’s prayer, which could serve as jacket copy for this book:

“Dear God, Compassionate and Merciful, Master of the Universe, we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before Your throne and beseech You to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, O Lord, for he runs off from fragrance, chasing filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates what is sweet, but will give his life to sample what is bitter. He does not so much as look at housewives but is entranced by the company of whores. He will not go near running waters, but loves to wade through slush. Where others weep, he laughs; where they laugh, he weeps. Evil-­blackened faces he loves to wash with tender care to highlight their features. He never thinks about You, preferring to follow Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed You.”