Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  Lewd gestures, whispered suggestions, uninvited hands on her bottom are all part of Alice Bhatti’s daily existence. She has a whole doctrine perfected over the years to deal with all of that, but there is something about this parched tongue tracing circles around the receding grey gums that makes her shudder. It is in this moment that Alice Bhatti realises that even if she gets this job, she might end up castrating someone. Or at least gouging a pair of eyes. Or slashing a tongue. Or pulling up those gums with pliers to cover the shame of the naked teeth.

  She looks up at the lizard again. It has moved but it isn’t going anywhere. It stays stuck to the wall like an emblem that has forgotten its purpose.

  Alice Bhatti had woken up that morning to the sound of Joseph Bhatti sawing a large wooden beam he had brought home last night. That was the only thing he had brought home all month, and he was now busy cutting it into a cross as big as an electric pole. She had woken up thinking she’d better get this job.

  But she hadn’t woken up thinking of a tongue going around, licking imaginary nipples. Has she missed something about the gesture? Is she overreacting?

  As she walks out of the room at the end of the interview, she stops by the boy, Noor, who is still scribbling. He lifts his eyes to acknowledge her presence for the first time. “Is your mother dead yet?” she asks with the indifference of someone who has just flunked a job interview. Then she lowers her voice to a whisper. “There is a police van outside. I hope they are not here for you.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Two

  “If there is one thing I have learnt about our hospitals it is this: when these doctors get drunk, they suddenly remember their principles, their stupid oath… what is it called? That Hippo-something.” Inspector Malangi puts an arm around Teddy Butt’s shoulders. “Even doctors who work in this slaughterhouse. You would think the mornings are a safe bet. But look at us now. We are being fed medical ethics for breakfast.” His hand traces the immense bulging shoulder that won Teddy Butt the title of Junior Mr Faisalabad three years ago.

  Like most people in local governance, Inspector Malangi knows that an arm around someone’s shoulder is the first step towards law enforcement. His battered blue police Hilux is parked close to the steps that lead to the A&E of the Sacred, a handcuffed man lies face down in the cabin, and three members of his team with rusting Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders are leaning against the vehicle. Inspector Malangi seems unsure of all that he has learnt in thirty-six years of policing this city. With his walrus moustache and sunken eyes he could pass as a high-school headmaster, but with three stars on the shoulder of his black cotton shirt, his low-slung police belt and an ancient Beretta in his side holster, nobody is likely to mistake him for anyone except the head of the G Squad trying to finish his shift and go home. The Beretta is only decorative, though. He has drawn it sometimes and fired it close to people’s ears when they were not paying attention. But otherwise every time he has had to use a weapon himself he has felt that he has failed at his job.

  He walks towards the rows of concrete flowerpots, leaning on Teddy’s shoulder as if trying to physically convey to him the burdens of his duty. “You may not wear this uniform.” He fingers the epaulette on his black police shirt. “But now you are a member of this family. You may think, what kind of family am I stuck with? But then everyone says that about their family. You may not love your family, but as far as I know, this is the only family you have got.” The concrete flowerpots are full of dried-up twigs and discarded medicine bottles and the occasional sprouting syringe. The whole abandoned gardening effort looks like somebody’s good intentions got corrupted on the way. Inspector Malangi breaks a twig and starts poking his ear with such concentration it seems he is digging for an answer deep inside.

  Teddy Butt is attentive and solid on his feet. When Inspector Malangi puts an arm around your shoulder this early in the morning and declares you a family member, you have to feel and behave like a loyal family member.

  “So I have got a criminal but no crime that I can prove right now. Or at least that’s what that whatsisname medico-legal Malick thinks. Did anyone tell him what happened in Garden East? When he is sober, you can get him to sign his own mother’s post-mortem report. The bastard never looks at anything before signing, but half a bottle of Murree Millennium in his stomach and he is telling me I need some evidence, that suspicions of sabotage and intents of mass murder can’t be proved in a medical lab. I have got Abu Zar in handcuffs but I can’t keep him because a drunk Choohra doctor suddenly decides that he is not going to play God any more. What does he want me to do? Shoot myself in the head and then ask for a certificate that this fellow has hurt me in the line of duty? For three months we have been looking for the man responsible for the Garden East attack and I know it’s him.” Inspector Malangi gestures towards the back of the van, and the man there moans like a dying animal.

  Teddy Butt looks towards the tiny office adjacent to the Accidents and Emergencies department. A battered ambulance is parked outside, with its driver asleep with his head on the steering wheel. The board outside the medico-legal’s office reads, No arms or ammunition allowed inside the duty doctor’s office. Teddy stares at the tiny shack as if sizing up an enemy bunker.

  “Why don’t we book him for drinking?” he says. He likes saying ‘we’. It makes him feel as if he is the one putting handcuffs on a renegade doctor who will not cooperate with the law this early in the morning. It makes him feel an integral part of the family.

  “Yes, we can book him for half a dozen things. Do you even know how much a bottle of Millennium costs? How can he afford Millennium on his salary? Probably steals and sells kidneys. OK, Teddy, say we book him for that, what if his replacement doesn’t drink but still has principles? Look, his shift ends in half an hour. And then you’ll have to deal with Auntie Hina Alvi and, trust me, she has more principles than I have pubic hair. She has probably got a cock too. That woman scares me.”

  Teddy Butt is not sure if he is supposed to laugh, so he chuckles as if clearing his throat. He is new to the squad, an honorary member, and is still learning the rules. He squeezes his empty hand into a fist and starts lifting imaginary dumbbells. He does this in cases of extreme darkness. When he did it last, he had gone to meet Inspector Malangi hoping to find work as an informer. He had taken a box of sweets with him but had found himself in a lock-up with half a dozen starving addicts in extreme withdrawal.

  The Gentlemen’s Squad is a group of like-minded police officers, not really an entity commissioned by any law-enforcing authority. The name of the unit doesn’t exist on any official register, on letterheads or websites. There are no annual audits or medals for bravery; it does not hold press conferences to unveil the criminals it catches or kills, or more often catches and then kills. It is a group of gentlemen who, not given to any flights of literary imagination, have decided to call themselves the Gentlemen’s Squad. It is a crew of reformed rapists (I have got three grown-up daughters now, you know), torturers (it’s a science, not an art), sharpshooters (monkeys really, as we spend half our lives perched on rooftops and trees) and generally the kind of investigators who can recognise a criminal by looking at the way he blows his nose or turns a street corner. They have survived together for such a long time because they believe in giving each other space, they come together for a good cause like they have today, and then disperse to pursue their own personal lives.

  “You know I don’t like taking work home. The kids are preparing for their exams,” says Inspector Malangi. “At my age I have to sit with them and do maths revision. Why don’t you help out and get us something broken that’ll look good to the medico-legal so that we can have this hero to ourselves for a few days? And then I’ll get him to confess to Garden East and all the others that he has been planning.” Inspector Malangi pulls out a rusted Kalashnikov with a solid wooden butt, empties its magazine, then on second thoughts removes the magazine, puts it in his pocket and throws the ri
fle at Teddy. “Something small will do. Just get me a thumb. Let’s throw a bone to the dog and go home.”

  Teddy Butt knows that this is not a suggestion, not even an order, just an expectation, how a father would expect to be addressed as father or abba or daddy by his sons.

  “Here I go and here I come back.” Teddy snaps his forefinger and thumb before running off, not realising that this might be the last time he’ll be able to snap his fingers, to produce that reassuring, consider-it-done sound.

  Teddy runs past some patients sleeping on the steps, curses a sweeper who is raising clouds of dust in the corridor and finds Noor where he expected to find him, at his mother Zainab’s bedside, massaging her feet gently and with dedication, as if a good foot massage was the only cure for the three types of cancer that Zainab is suffering from. Teddy gets his vitamins from Noor; sometimes before his competitions he gets a free IV drip to give his body that extra sheen that judges seem to love. Teddy believes that since Noor has learnt the art of making friends in jails, he would do anything for a friend.

  Noor sees Teddy running towards him with a gun, tucks his mother’s feet under the blanket and meets him at the door. Teddy knows that Noor doesn’t like to conduct their transactions in front of his mother, so he speaks in an urgent whisper. “I need a thumb, and I need it now.” He shoves the gun into Noors hands, as if handing over a receipt for a faulty purchase and demanding a refund. They both start walking down the corridor that leads to the back of the A&E, stepping over at least three people sleeping on the floor, stirring in their dreams.

  “It’s too early in the day. I am sitting in on an interview. I am on a short break, just came out to have a look at Zainab. I have to write lots of notes,” Noor mumbles, in the hope that he won’t be asked to do something time-consuming. Or nasty.

  “It’s all your friend’s fault. Inspector Malangi has got this guy Abu Zar in the back of the van. Very dangerous. But he is insisting that he hasn’t done anything. You don’t know these people; it’ll take us at least a few days before we can make him talk. But your Dr Malick won’t give us a certificate saying that this man injured one of us. Imagine, Dr Malick wants proof. When he gets drunk, he becomes all principled.” Noor stops to wheel a stretcher out of the way, but Teddy keeps talking, as if giving the context, pinning the blame, underlining the flaws in the system will somehow reduce the pain, or at least justify it, make it worth his while.

  “Where are his principles when he is signing blank postmortem reports? Inspector Malangi comes to ask for a piece of paper and suddenly he remembers his principles? Should we let an attacker go just because he hasn’t attacked us yet? We can nail Dr Malick for that Millennium bottle in his office. Do you even know how much a bottle of Millennium costs? We can nail him for how he gets the money for that bottle. What does he sell, a kidney for a litre bottle? We have got death certificates where he has written ‘cause of death – renal failure’ when the renal has been shot to bits, when the renal doesn’t even exist any more. It’s because of him that I need a thumb and I need it now. Because after his shift we’ll have to deal with your Auntie Hina Alvi, and she has more principles than a man has hair. We can nail her too, but right now I need a thumb.” Teddy laughs a hollow laugh. Noor stays sullen.

  They reach an electricity pole and stop. They both know what to do next. Noor is in a hurry to get back to give Zainab her medication and then rush to the interview. Teddy has his family’s expectations to fulfil. They look up simultaneously towards the top of the pole, where a number of kites, perched on the electric wires, are waking up from their slumber and looking down at them suspiciously. Then both Noor and Teddy glance around to check if anyone is watching them. To their mutual dismay, nobody is.

  “Will it hurt a lot?” Teddy asks, as if it has just occurred to him that what they are about to do is something that might involve some physical discomfort. Noor sighs, as if he can’t understand why people keep asking the same question. He lives in a world where people want their share of pain measured, labelled, packaged, with its ingredients identified in plain language. They want it to come with an expiry date and a guarantee that there is this and no more.

  He sees people crying before pain hits them. Will it hurt, they ask, how much will it hurt? They want a scale of this pain, they want it packaged in small doses. They ask, Will it hurt this much? as they mime a scale with their forefinger and thumb, and then widen it and ask if it will hurt this much or this much. And, like a professional, Noor always lies, because he knows that the anticipation of pain is slightly worse than pain itself, always shrugs his shoulders, pats their backs and says, “Don’t worry, sir, you won’t feel a thing.”

  “You won’t feel a thing,” says Noor, tapping the electricity pole. “For the first moment. Then your fuse will blow. All lights will go out. It’ll hurt like nothing has hurt before.”

  “Don’t scare me, just do your job,” says Teddy, gripping the pole with his right hand. Then he changes his mind and puts his left hand around the pole, thumb pointing towards Noor, who is holding the gun by its barrel, wielding it like a cricket bat.

  The electricity pole is splattered with leaflets and stickers and bits of graffiti. The Coalition for the Protection of Honour of the Mothers of the Faithful, reads the poster with a chador covering a faceless woman. Liberty or Death, demands a little sticker under a red hatchet and the proposed map of a state where liberty or death will prevail for eternity. Three slogans in different colours proclaim Dr Pereira to be a dog, a donkey and a Christian preacher.

  Noor tests the rifle in the air like a batsman getting the measure of the swing he should expect.

  “I used to play drums but I never made it to the band,” Teddy says mournfully, as if his thumb is about to be punished for not being an adequate drum player.

  Noor rests the gun on the ground and mumbles, “If you come back later, I could just give you someone’s X-ray with a foot fracture or something.”

  “No, Inspector Malangi specifically asked for a thumb. Let’s not waste time. He has his children’s exams coming up.”

  Noor takes a last look at Teddy’s hand around the electricity pole and notices that his forearm is hairless and has beads of perspiration running over it. It’s a bodybuilder’s forearm. Noor shuts his eyes, grips the muzzle firmly and swings the rifle with full force. The wood hits the pole and he hears a dull sound like a school bell announcing a break. The kites on the wires flap their wings and lift off. One of them shrieks as if to tell them to take their silly game somewhere else.

  Teddy is relieved, but only for a fraction of a second, before he sees his thumb, alive and intact, a bit bloodless and white but still all there.

  “I am the one who needs to shut his eyes. You need to aim. With your eyes open. Come on now,” Teddy says, shutting his eyes tight and gripping the pole with full force as if trying to uproot it.

  It’s only when Noor hears the bone crunch against the metal and sees blood splattering on the posters that promise a thousand-year war to protect the honour of the mothers of the faithful, with Teddy screaming and dancing on one leg and shouting unspeakable filth about Noor’s own mother, that Noor realises that he should have administered a local anaesthetic. He has a cupboard full of that stuff in the supplies store.

  Teddy doesn’t look back to thank him, doesn’t even remember to take the rifle back from him, but runs, cradling the remains of his thumb like a hunting dog dashing back to his master, carrying back the catch in triumph with the hope of a reward for a job well done.

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Three

  If anybody had seen Noor the day he arrived at the gates of the Sacred, they wouldn’t believe that he was the same boy who now sat in the Chief Medical Officer’s room taking notes, acting all babu-like. He was only fourteen years old, pale and skinny as a stick, and nobody thought that he would be allowed into the building, especially as he had one arm around an old woman who wore cheap sunglasses and looked like someon
e who had just embarked on a career in panhandling. They wouldn’t believe he was the same boy who now helped out the law enforcers one moment, then went to sit in a meeting and take copious notes another. When he had arrived, he knew only two words of English. Excuse. Me. And those were the two words that gave him a new start in life.

  The day Noor arrived at the gates of the Sacred, he had to hold up his trousers with one hand and put the other one around the shoulders of his mother Zainab, who, after years spent in the relative quiet of the Borstal, was getting a migraine from the traffic noise. The two words of English that he knew, he tried on everyone. This irritated people. They looked at him with contempt. Multilingual beggars were still beggars; even worse, they were beggars with pretensions. Nobody paid them any attention. Beggars were trying new tricks every day, pretending to be white-collar workers fallen on bad times, with a smattering of chaste Urdu to soften hearts that had hardened in the face of the bottomless greed of half-naked children and droopy, blind old women.

  Nobody could have imagined then that by the time he was seventeen he would be practically running the Sacred. When he said farewell to his friends in the Borstal, it would not have crossed their minds that one day he would be sitting in the same room as senior doctors, decorated paramedics, double FRCS holders, taking notes for important job interviews. That he would be keeping records of admissions and discharges, donations and expenditures. Yet it was the same boy who, three years ago, had been standing outside the gate of the Sacred Heart, holding his mother’s hand, shifting from one foot to the other, reassuring her that he had got the right address, tugging his loose trousers, his farewell present from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, madam. He had repeated the words like a password that would grant him access to a world where people constantly excused each other. He was quite puzzled about the writing on the wall, which claimed that Dr Pereira, the man whose address he had been given when leaving the Borstal, was a dog. Why was a doctor a dog? Noor had thought he could read basic stuff, but he wasn’t sure any more. Maybe the words had different meaning beyond the walls of the Borstal.