Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  Dr Pereira’s approaching car slowed down; he rolled down the window to shoo the beggars away, as he believed they brought the Sacred a bad name. Then he heard that sickly but clean-cut boy gently shepherding a woman shouting “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, madam,” to no one in particular. Dr Pereira could tell a well-mannered boy when he saw one, and the older woman holding his hand seemed to be in a lot of pain. Dr Pereira motioned them to get in the car. A beggar who excused himself before making his begging pitch was already making an effort to leave all that behind, Dr Pereira believed. A beggar with good manners deserved a chance to be asked a question or two.

  Noor first settled his mother in the back seat, then climbed confidently into the front as if he had been waiting there for a lift. His confidence came from the fact that having spent his childhood behind the closed gates of the Borstal, he would have liked to barge through any door that opened for him. Walking into a room and behaving as if the room belonged to him was something that Noor had already learnt, at a time when other boys his age were only hanging from the windowsills looking in. He was sure that his secret code would work.

  And now he sits in the room where Dr Pereira and his colleagues are arguing whether candidate Alice Bhatti has the strength of character to withstand the pressures of a busy public hospital. Noor might be sitting in a corner, but he is sitting on a chair. He will have to go and fetch tea in a while, but right now he is sitting on a chair taking notes, dutifully recording the minutes of the job interview. He knows that his words in the register will be the only record of this meeting. He leaves out Ortho Sir’s stories, Hina Alvi’s smile and Dr Pereira’s despair, and since he is not required to record what he does in his breaks, there will be no mention of his little encounter with Teddy Butt around an electricity pole. A record of a meeting is not everything that happens in a meeting; sometimes it’s better to leave things unwritten. Dr Pereira has encouraged him to make his own choices. Dr Pereira says that sacred texts as well as profane novels don’t record everything.

  Like most things in life, the result of this job interview depends on many things. Some of these things have happened long before the interview. Noor had tried to advise Alice Bhatti about the potential problems in the interview. “Whatever you say, don’t get angry. And don’t mention Borstal.” And Alice Bhatti had shouted back in a mock-angry schoolteacher’s voice, “What Borstal, you little bastard?” Noor was scared for a moment, then he shouted back, “Good. Now try saying that with a smile.”

  He is relieved that Alice has managed to control her free-floating anger in the interview and that her time spent in the Borstal hasn’t come up. It isn’t as if she stole from her patients or cheated in her exams. She only almost killed a famous surgeon and did time for it. Noor knows that Alice is the kind of person who’ll return a favour by saying fuck you too. He also knows that her fatal flaw is not her family background, but her total inability to say simple things like ‘excuse me’ and ‘thank you’.

  The notes that Noor takes sitting in the corner of the room, a fat register on his thighs, will not really be looked at. Noor is not a factor and his notes will definitely not be a factor in the decision to give Alice the job. It’s a good thing that nobody asks him if he knows Alice, and if so where they met for the first time. Even at the age of seventeen, Noor knows that the appearance of the words Borstal Jail for Women and Children on anybody’s CV will not increase their chances in a job interview.

  Noor is a record-keeper, a steno, a secretary for those who are not budgeted to have a proper secretary. He is a scribbler by day, Zainab’s son by night, and Dr Pereira’s pet around the clock. After all, it’s Dr Pereira who has plucked him and his mother from outside the gates of the Sacred, ignoring hundreds of patients waiting under the Old Doctor, a two-hundred-year-old peepul tree that was believed to provide medical care before they built a hospital and now just provides shade and firewood. It was Dr Pereira who gave them a bed, a job, a chance for Zainab to spend her last days in peace and for Noor to learn the skills that one needed to lead a fulfilled life. Noor is Dr Pereira’s ticket to salvation. When he sees the boy hunched over his register, scribbling, Dr Pereira’s heart swells with pride, he feels the hand of Lord Yassoo on his shoulder, His voice whispering Latin nothings in his ear.

  Although Dr Pereira started him on his education right at the beginning, Noor wasn’t completely unlettered before he arrived at the Sacred.

  He learnt the alphabet in the Borstal after resisting for a whole year. They were very good about certain things in the Borstal. They tried to teach you to wash your hands and they made you learn to read the alphabet and some easier bits from the Quran. They also tried to bugger you at every possible opportunity, but Noor figured out early on that the privileges that were promised after you conceded were temporary. You might get a vanilla ice cream or you might get taken out to a big mosque for Friday prayers, but there were never any guarantees. They could always beat you up and then accuse you of being a habitual homosexual. It wasn’t as if you could go to the jail superintendent and complain that promises had been broken. Also, if you let one of them bugger you and said no to the others, the others felt offended. They felt that they were being discriminated against. People might put up with discrimination in the outside world, but in the Borstal they expressed their hurt by leaving burning cigarettes on your mattress at night, or sometimes they just took away your mattress while you were in the bathroom. In the outside world it might sound like a small deprivation and people might say that no mattress is much better than a burning mattress, but there were no replacements and you ended up sleeping on the cement floor for the rest of your term. There is nothing scarier than a sixteen-year-old in the Borstal who feels he has been discriminated against. Noor made it clear from the start that he was not that type, that he didn’t like vanilla ice cream and had no particular interest in visiting the big mosque for Friday prayers. In fact, the first year he refused to learn a single letter of the alphabet, as he was certain in his eight-year-old’s mind that there was a direct link between A, B, C and someone’s hand creeping up your shorts.

  Now Noor is learning to write properly. At the Sacred, he started by filling out admission forms, people’s names and their dates of birth, their dates of admission. Patients were baffled when he asked them to spell out their names, because many couldn’t spell their names or any other words. Nobody had ever asked them to spell anything. Most of them didn’t know that their name was made up of letters they should have learnt. Noor asked for their identity cards, or any other bit of paper that might have their name written on it.

  Noor wants to get their names right. He wants to get everything right. And here is his first big interview, and he is worried whether Alice is going to get this job or not. He is obviously on her side, because she is the reason he ended up coming from the Borstal to the Sacred: she scribbled the address for him and insisted that he go there and ask for Dr Pereira. But sometimes she says things like what is the difference between a doctor and a donkey? Sometimes she says it in a room full of doctors. When Alice got out of the Borstal, he managed to wrangle an emergency shift for her and she turned up in her civilian clothes and an oversized white coat. Beneath that frayed and stained white coat she could have been a housemaid, newly homeless, or a prostitute fallen on bad times. He felt as if a poor, uncouth relative had walked in when he was trying to impress his new bosses. More than anything else he is worried about getting the minutes of this meeting right. Long after Alice has left the room he is still scribbling away.

  Dr Pereira looks towards him and nods ever so slightly, a signal for him to find an excuse and leave the room. “Should I get some tea?” Noor asks, then closes his register carefully, puts it on his chair and leaves. As soon as he shuts the door, he starts to run and skip. Inside the room he is a brooding, attentive lackey; outside in the corridors of the Sacred he practises a bit of careless living, which, despite his precocious burden, he knows that as a seventeen-year-old he is enti
tled to.

  When people see Noor, their first reaction is, look at that poor little boy, what a pity, working when he should be playing, but they can keep their pity to themselves because Noor considers himself a man of this world. More than even the harsh nights at the Borstal, he remembers waiting outside the gates of the Sacred. He and Zainab stood at the gate for two full days, and although it wasn’t the kind of gate where anyone was stopped, the guard wouldn’t let them in because they looked like a pair of vagrants, the kind of people who would try to walk through every gate they saw. Someone threw them a half-rotten orange. A beggar walked by and advised them that it was an unlucky spot for starting this kind of work.

  People could have called him a poor little boy then because he was the only child of Zainab, and had nobody in the world except some kind friends who were still in jail, who had altered an old pair of trousers for him, stuffed ten one-rupee notes in his pocket and promised to look him up when he became an officer in a big bank. But now Noor is not a poor little boy. He is a ward boy. His name is not on the employees’ list but he has more responsibilities than any paramedic with a full-time, pensionable job. His services are acknowledged. Zainab may not be in the best of health, but she has her own bed, adjustable, it goes up and down; it has a pillow, a blanket, sheets that get changed every few weeks; a curtain separates her from the other miserable wretches on the ward. There are hundreds of patients who are envious, who are eyeing that bed. All the people under the Old Doctor are practically on the waiting list.

  It has taken him three years to achieve his place in life, but Noor is a man now. He puts food on the table even though there is no table. He fills up the registers in the hospital. On the night of the Garden East attacks, when all the doctors and sisters had their hands full, he took out a bullet from the shoulder of a victim. He hasn’t read Gray’s Anatomy, but there is nothing in that fat book that he hasn’t seen strewn on the floor of A&E. “We stitched up one hundred and forty-three people that night,” he boasts to anyone who is interested in those kinds of statistics. They also charged the relatives of the deceased five hundred rupees each for not carrying out post-mortems. Dr John Malick, the medico-legal officer at the Sacred, had his gloved hands drenched in blood and his white coat’s pockets brimming full with five-hundred-rupee notes. “Look, we live in a city where you can get someone cut up for a thousand rupees. What is wrong with charging them half that money for not cutting them up? Do they want a post-mortem? No. Are they interested in the cause of death? No. Does it really matter to them if their lungs gave up first or their heart went pachuk? For them the cause of death is death; they died because death arrived in Garden East and they happened to be buying vegetables there. So buying vegetables is as valid a cause of death as any.” Noor obviously never got any share of that money, just a bun kebab and a can of Pepsi and a big box of diazepam for his mother. He managed to get Alice Bhatti on the shift, though. They needed help, and when he told Dr Malick that he knew this nurse who was between jobs, Malick just nodded and moved on to the next casualty. “A shift here and a shift there,” Noor whispered excitedly in Alice Bhatti’s ear. “And before they know it, you’ll have a full-time job here.” They were surrounded by eight gunnysacks full of body parts that couldn’t be identified and placed with any of the deceased.

  The morning outpatients are beginning to mill around, occupying prime positions right in front of the barred windows, under the signboards that warn that spitting, chewing paan, attacking paramedical staff and talking politics are punishable offences. Some have spent the night adjacent to the window and are still yawning under their worn-out shawls. The patients and their families under the Old Doctor have broken some branches from the tree and started breakfast fires. They look like a ragtag army that has lost its way and is running low on supplies, the kind of army that can’t make up its mind whether it has besieged a castle and is waiting for reinforcements to launch the final assault or just waiting for an ambush to relieve the men of their misery. Something will definitely need to be done about these fires. Noor makes a mental note. He is also the self-appointed health and safety adviser to Dr Pereira.

  He notices that the police van is still parked outside the A&E building. A small police party stands around looking glum, as if waiting for bad news. Teddy Butt is sitting in the back of the van, his thumb in an oversized bandage. He looks drowsy and doesn’t respond when Noor waves to him.

  The medico-legal Dr John Malick has finished his night shift but seems reluctant to go home. He stands outside his office looking at the sun, which is struggling to break through the morning smog. He seems to be complaining to the sun for coming out too early. It is as if he has lots of things to do that can only be done at night, things that will have to wait for his next night shift. Dr Malick is the kind of doctor who actually believes in healing himself. He usually makes this face when his duty hours end before he can finish his nightly bottle of Millennium.

  “Has your jailbird got the job?” Malick shouts to Noor, trying to stifle a yawn.

  “She’s got it,” Noor shouts back. “A temporary one. You didn’t hear it from me. And please take care of my friend Teddy. He has hurt himself again.”

  “Congratulations. All the jailbirds are going to end up here,” Dr Malick shouts back.

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Four

  Alice Bhatti goes on her first visit to Charya Ward alone, but returns an hour and a half later kicking and screaming in Teddy’s arms. No one warns her what awaits her in that forgotten loony bin, no easing-in time, no guided tours, and no orientation course. A slow Monday in A&E, and Sister Hina Alvi thrusts a clipboard in her hands, papers frayed at the edges as if somebody has been chewing on them. Sister Hina Alvi is broad and philosophical in her brief, even sympathetic, which is a surprise, because she usually blames the patients for their own plight. “They eat too much, drink too much, lust too much, can’t stay indoors when they hear gunshots out on the road; they are attracted to bomb blast sites like flies to…” She usually finds a rotting seasonal fruit to complete her analysis of the state of the national health. But today she seems in a generous mood. “These boys in Charya Ward are suffering from what everyone suffers from: life. They just take it a bit more seriously, sensitive types who think too much, care too much, who refuse to laugh at bad jokes. Same rules apply. No touching, no personal information. They can be a bit talkative and lovey-shovey. And although you look like somebody who doesn’t need any more love,” Sister Hina Alvi looks Alice up and down as if trying to decide the right dose of love for her, “people can be greedy. Even if you need it badly, you are not likely to find it there. Just remember it’s called a nuthouse and there’s a reason for that.” She opens her handbag, takes out a heart-shaped crimson pouch and starts preparing a paan. “But as far as I am concerned, the whole country is a nuthouse. Have you read Toba Tek Singh? Nobody reads around here any more. Manto wrote about the nutters in a charya ward and then ended up in one himself. His own family put him there.” She counts out three silver-coated betel nuts and places them on a leaf, rolls it and puts it in her mouth.

  Alice notices that Sister Hina Alvi never offers anyone else one of her paans. She might spend the whole day surrounded by patients and doctors but she is solitary in her pleasures, always glowing with some personal insight, content in a world that makes sense only to her and happy in the knowledge that she doesn’t need validation from anyone. “I don’t know if you have done any psy-care, but there is only one rule you need to remember: you have to tell them that everything is normal. They might have buggered their own sister and then buried her alive, but you must tell them that it’s normal. They obviously did it because some god told them to do it. Of course I don’t think it’s normal for them to do it or for their god to ask them to do it. But in that ward you have to pretend everything is normal. That’s all you need to know about psychiatric care.” Sister Hina Alvi takes out a lime-green handkerchief from her purse, wipes it gently
around her lips, and then examines it for stains. “Do you smoke?”

  Alice, who pretended to smoke an occasional biri in the Borstal, just to win the respect of her fellow inmates, is startled by the question. “No,” she says. “I tried it at school and it made me nauseous.”

  Sister Hina Alvi gives her a benevolent smile, as if they share a secret now and agree that it should stay between them. “Every girl does something. I really worry about those who say they don’t do anything. I worry about the ones who actually don’t do anything. Usually they end up with something worse than cancer.”

  Alice Bhatti has an odd feeling that she is back in the Borstal being accused of not being woman enough. If only she could strip and show Sister Hina Alvi the knife wound on her shoulder or tell her about the time she kicked in the groin a Borstal warden who was in the habit of throwing their pens on the ground and then making them pick them up so that she could take a peek down the front of their shirts. Maybe some other time.

  Alice Bhatti glances at the clipboard. It holds a standard-issue form with standard-issue names. Nothing there to reveal that these people live on the other side: six Mohammeds, three Ahmeds, two Alis. “Whom do I hand over to after the shift?” she asks cheerfully, as if really looking forward to the beginning and the end of her shift. Sister Hina Alvi takes out a set of keys and gives her two chunky ones. “Lock up the door, then lock the key in this drawer, and keep this one with you,” she says, patting the drawer. “I need to go to the waxing person. If you ever decide to get waxed, let me know. There is a first-time discount with my girl.” She winks, gives Alice a bright smile and walks off, swinging her bag, the queen of a sick charya world.