Junior tries to straighten his revolver first, then drops it on the floor and begins to weep. Sister Alice puts the razor blade in the fold of a paper napkin, then puts it in a little plastic bag, seals it and chucks it in the waste bin.
“Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift.” Before leaving the room, she turns around and says, “And stop screaming. You’ll wake Begum Qaz.”
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Eight
Teddy has brought a mauser to his declaration of love. He has brought a story about the disappearing moon as well, but he is not sure where to start. The story is romantic in an old-fashioned kind of way; the Mauser has three bullets in it. He is hoping that the Mauser and the story about the moon will somehow come together to produce the kind of love song that makes old acquaintances run away together.
Before resorting to gunpoint poetry, Teddy Butt tries the traditional route to romancing a medical professional; he pretends to be sick and then, like a truly hopeless lover, starts believing that he is sick, recognises all the little symptoms – sudden fevers, heart palpitations, lingering migraine, even mild depression. He cries while watching a documentary about a snow leopard stranded on a melting glacier.
He lurks around the Out Patients Department on a Sunday afternoon, when Sister Alice Bhatti is alone. She pretends to be busy counting syringes, boiling needles, polishing grimy surfaces, and only turns around when he coughs politely, like you are supposed to when entering a respectable household so that women have the time to cover themselves. Alice Bhatti doesn’t understand this polite-cough protocol and stares at him as if telling him, see, this is what smoking does to your lungs.
Teddy Butt is too vain to bring up anything like stomach troubles or a skin rash, both conditions he frequently suffers from. Boldabolics play havoc with his digestion. His bodybuilder’s weekly regime of waxing his body hair has left certain parts of him looking like abstract kilim designs. For his first consultation with Alice, he has thought up something more romantic.
“I can’t sleep.”
He says this sitting on a rickety little stool as Sister Alice takes notes in a khaki register. “For how long have you not been able to sleep?” With any other patient Alice would have reached for the wrist to take the pulse, would have listened to the chest with a stethoscope, but with Teddy she knows that he is not that kind of patient.
“Since I have seen you” is what Teddy wants to say, but he hasn’t rehearsed it, he is not ready yet.
“I actually do go to sleep. But then I have dreams and I wake up,” he says, and feels relieved at having delivered a full sentence without falling off the stool.
Alice Bhatti wants to tell him to go to the OPD in Charya Ward; that is where they deal in dreams. The whole place is a bad dream. But she knows that he wants to be her patient and Senior Sister Hina Alvi has taught her that when a patient walks in with intent, you listen to them, even if you know they are making up their symptoms. She presses on with her diagnosis.
She can also see the outline of a muzzle in the crotch of his yellow Adidas trousers. He looks like a freak with two cocks.
“What kind of dreams?”
Teddy has only ever had one dream, the one with a river and a kaftan-wearing God in it. The dream always ends badly as a drowning Teddy discovers that he can’t walk on water even in his dream. God stands at the edge of a silvery, completely walk-able river and shakes His head in disappointment, as if saying, it’s your dream, what do you expect me to do? But somehow in this potentially romantic setting, bringing up God and His kaftan and His disapproval seems inappropriate. “I see a river in my dream.” He conveniently leaves God out.
“A river?” Alice Bhatti taps the pen on the register without writing anything.
Teddy feels he is being told that his dream is not sick enough.
“It’s a river of blood. Red.”
Alice looks at him with interest. This Teddy boy might be a police tout, but he has a poetic side to him, she thinks.
“Any boats in that river of yours?” she asks with an encouraging smile, as if urging him to go on sharing more of his dream with her, to go ahead and dream for her. Teddy accepts the challenge. “It has bodies floating in it, and severed heads, bobbing up and down.” He realises that his dream doesn’t sound very romantic. “And some flowers also.”
“Do you recognise any of these people in the river? In your dream, I mean.” Teddy shuts his eyes as if trying hard to recognise a face from the river. He was hoping that somehow his midnight yearning for Alice and his insomnia would walk hand in hand and form a rhyming, soaring declaration of love that would reverberate through the corridors of the hospital. Instead he is stuck with embellishing details of a bad dream.
“I can’t really stop your dreams, but I can give you something that will ensure that you sleep well. And if you sleep well then you might start having better dreams.” She scribbles a prescription for Lexotanil, then puts it aside. “Actually I might have some here. An hour before you sleep. Never on an empty stomach. And no warm milk at night. Sometimes indigestion can give you bad dreams.”
Alice gives him a brief smile. “You might want to change that bandage on your thumb. I hope you didn’t hurt it in a dream.” Then she turns around and goes back to counting her syringes. She does it with such studied concentration that it seems the health of the nation depends on getting this count right.
Teddy Butt stumbles into the OPD the following morning, bleary-eyed, moving slowly. His voice seems to be coming from underwater. There is a sleepy calm about him. Even the muzzle of the gun in his trousers seems flaccid. “I didn’t have any dreams. What did you give me? What did you mix in that pill?” His words are accusatory but his tone is grateful.
“I didn’t mix anything. It was a Glaxo original, supposed to help you sleep. Do you want more?” Alice reaches into her drawer and stops. She notices that he is wearing a little cross on a gold chain around his neck. She shows the slight, spontaneous irritation that natives feel when tourists try and dress up like them. “What’s that thing you are wearing?”
“Just a locket,” Teddy Butt says. “A friend from Dubai got it for me.” The man whose neck Teddy snatched it from was indeed visiting from Dubai. One ear and the side of his face were blown off in an unfortunate accident during an interrogation. The man from Dubai had almost strangled Teddy with his handcuffs before Inspector Malangi put his Beretta near his left ear, shouted at Teddy, “Knee on the left, bhai. Your left, not mine,” and shot him. The chain with the cross was the reward Inspector Malangi gave him for keeping the man pinned down at that difficult moment. Teddy hadn’t killed the man; he was only holding him down. It was his job. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. If he hadn’t done this job, he would definitely have had to do some other job. And who knows what he might be required to do in that new job? He runs his forefinger along his chain and presses the cross into his chest with the satisfaction of someone who is lucky enough not to have the worst job in the city. He had felt the man’s breath on his knee when he tried to bite him before getting shot.
For a moment he thinks whether he can source a matching necklace for her.
“It’s a cross, not a locket,” says Alice. “Why would a man want to wear jewellery anyway?” She scribbles another prescription for Lexotanil on her pad and turns away.
Teddy Butt is flummoxed and walks off without answering, without asking anything. He goes to his room in Al-Aman apartments and sleeps the whole day. He doesn’t have any dreams, but after he wakes up and starts doing weights, he watches a fascinating documentary about Komodo dragons that hypnotise their prey before going for the underside of their throat.
Teddy decides that he is going to tell Alice Bhatti everything, but he will need her full attention. From what Teddy can tell, women are always distracted, trying to do too many things at the same time, always happy to go off on tangents; that’s why they make good
nurses and politicians but not good chefs or truck drivers. He also realises that he can’t do it without his Mauser.
Teddy is one of those people who are only articulate when they talk about cricket. The rest of the time they rely on a combination of grunts, hand gestures and repeat snippets of what other people have just said to them. He also has very little experience of sharing his feelings.
He has been a customer of women and occasionally their tormentor, but never a lover. He believes that being a lover is something that falls somewhere between paying them and slapping them around. Twice he has come close to conceding love. Once he gave a fifty-rupee tip to a prostitute who looked fourteen but claimed to be twenty-two. Encouraged by his generosity, she also demanded a poster of Imran Khan, and that put him off. Teddy promised to get it but never went back because he had always believed that Imran Khan was a failed batsman masquerading as a bowler. On another occasion he only pretended to take his turn with a thirty-two-year-old Bangladeshi prisoner after a small police contingent had shuffled out of the room. He just sat with her and played with her hair while she sobbed and cursed in Bengali. The only word he could understand was Allah. He had walked out adjusting his fly, pretending to be exhausted and satisfied, even joking with the policemen: it was like fucking an oil spill.
But Teddy Butt can be very articulate, even poetic, with a Mauser in his hand, and after much thought this is what he decides to do. He tries practising in front of the full-length mirror in his room. “You live in my heart.” With every word he jabs the Mauser in the air, like an underprepared lawyer trying to impress a judge. He worries that his gun might send the wrong signal, but he is convinced that he will be able to explain himself. People always try their best to understand when their life depends on listening properly. He changes the dressing on his thumb as if preparing for a job interview.
♦
“You can’t go around the Ortho ward with that.” Alice Bhatti has emerged carrying a bedpan in one hand and a discarded, blood-smeared bandage in the other, and starts admonishing him while walking away from him. “Don’t waste your bullets, this hospital will kill them all anyway.” Teddy feels the love of his life slipping from his grasp, his plan falling apart at the very first hurdle. He grips the Mauser, stretches his arm and blocks her way.
Alice Bhatti looks confused for a moment and then irritated. “What do you want to rob me of? This piss tray?”
With the Mauser extended, Teddy finds his tongue. “I can’t live like this. This life is too much.”
“Nobody can live like this.” Alice Bhatti is attentive now and sympathetic. “If these cheap guns don’t kill you, those Boldabolic pills will. Get a job as a PT teacher. Or come to think of it, you could get a nurse’s diploma and work here. There is always work for a male nurse. There are parts of this place where even women doctors don’t go. Charya Ward for example hasn’t had a…”
Teddy doesn’t listen to the whole thing; the words ‘PT teacher’ trigger off a childhood memory that he had completely forgotten – a very tall, very fat PT teacher holds him by his ears, swings him around and then hurls him to the ground and walks away laughing. The other children run around him in a circle and decide to change his nickname from Nappy to Yo Yo. Teddy puts the gun to Alice Bhatti’s temple and snarls in his little girl’s sing-song voice, “Give me one good reason why somebody wouldn’t shoot in this hospital? Why shouldn’t I shoot you right here and end all my troubles?”
Mine too, she wants to say, but Teddy’s hand holding the Mauser is trembling, and one thing Alice Bhatti doesn’t want in her life is a shootout in her workplace.
He orders Alice to put her tray and bandages down, which she does. She has realised that Teddy is serious. Suicidal serious maybe, but he is the kind of suicidal serious who in the process of taking his own life could cause some grievous bodily harm to those around him.
Ortho ward is unusually quiet at this time of day. Number 14, who is always shouting about an impending plague caused by computer screens, is calm and only murmurs about the itch in his plastered leg. A ward boy enters the corridor carrying a water cooler on a wheelbarrow; he sees Alice and Teddy and stops in his tracks. Embarrassed, as if he has stumbled on to someone’s private property and found the owners in a compromising position, he backtracks, pulling the wheelbarrow with him. Alice doesn’t expect him to inform anyone.
“What do you want, Mr Butt?” Alice Bhatti tries to hide her fear behind a formal form of address. She has learnt all the wrong things from Senior Sister Hina Alvi.
You live in my heart, Teddy Butt wants to say, but only jabs the air with his Mauser, five times. In the Borstal Alice heard many stories about men in love brandishing guns, and in all of them when men are unable to talk you are in real trouble. She looks at him expectantly, as if she has understood what his Mauser has just said, likes it and now wants to hear more.
Mixed-up couplets about her lips and hair, half-remembered speeches about a life together, names of their children, pledges of undying love, a story about the first time he saw her, what she wore, what she said, a half-sincere eulogy about her professionalism that he was sure she would appreciate, her shoulder blades, all these things rush through Teddy Butt’s head, and then he realises that he has already delivered his opening line by pulling out a gun.
Now he can start anywhere.
Alice Bhatti thinks that she should not do Sunday shifts any more and instead help her dad with his woodwork. If she lives to see another Sunday, that is.
She looks beyond Teddy. At the top of the stairs, a man sits facing the sun like an ancient king waiting to receive his subjects. His legs amputated just above the knees, he sits on the floor, wearing full-length trousers that sometimes balloon up in the wind. He has a stack of large X-rays next to him. He picks them up one by one, holds them against the sun and looks at them for a long time, as if contemplating old family pictures.
Teddy Butt decides to start with her garbage bin. “I go through your garbage bin. I know everything about you. I see all the prayers you scribble on prescriptions. You never write your own name. But I can tell from the handwriting.” He sobs violently and holds the Mauser with both hands to steady himself. The muzzle of his gun slides down a degree, like an erection flashbacking to a sad memory. Alice sees it as a sign from God. Bless our Lord who art descended from the heavens. She is a tad too quick in her gratitude. God accepts it with godlike indifference. And Teddy straightens his gun. He seems to have found his groove and starts to speak in paragraphs, as if delivering the manifesto of a new political party that wants to eradicate poverty and pollution during its first term in power.
“The love that I feel for you is not the love I feel for any other human being. The world might think it’s the love of your flesh. I can understand this world and their thinking. I have wondered about this and thought long and hard and realised that this is a world full of sinners, so I do understand what they think but I don’t think like that. When I think about you, do I think about these milk jugs?” He waves his Mauser across her chest. Alice looks at his gun and feels nauseous and wonders if the peace and quiet of this corridor is worth preserving. “I think of your eyes. I think of your eyes only.”
The octopus of fear that had clutched Alice Bhatti’s head begins to relax its tentacles.
In her heart of hearts, Alice, who has seen people die choking on their own food, and survive after falling from a sixth floor on to a paved road, knows that Teddy means every word of what he has said. And he isn’t finished yet.
“I was standing outside the hospital, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. It was a full Rajab moon. Then I looked up at the balcony of Ortho Ward and saw you empty a garbage bin. I saw your face for a moment and then you disappeared. Then I looked up again and saw that the moon had disappeared too. I rubbed my eyes, I shut them, I opened them again. I stood and kept looking up for forty-five minutes. People gathered around me. I held them by their throats and kept asking them, where has the moon gone? And t
hey said, what moon? We have seen no moon. Did you just escape from Charya Ward? And then I knew that I can’t live without you.”
A thick March cloud has cloaked the sun outside. The perfect spring afternoon is suddenly its own wintry ghost. The man with the X-rays is trying to shoo away a kite, which, confused by the sudden change in light, thinks it is dusk and swoops down in a last desperate attempt to take something home. The legless man is fighting the kite with the X-rays of his missing legs.
The final bell rings in the neighbouring St Xavier’s primary school and eighteen hundred children suddenly start talking to each other in urgent voices like house sparrows at dusk.
Alice Bhatti bends down, picks up the piss tray from the floor and holds it in front of her chest. She speaks in measured tones. “I know your type,” she says. “That little gun doesn’t scare me. Your tears don’t fool me. You think that a woman, any woman who wears a uniform is just waiting for you to show up and she’ll take it off. I wish you had just walked in and had the guts to tell me you want me to take this off. We could have had a conversation about that. At the end of which I would have told you what I am telling you now: fuck off and never show me your face again.”
Teddy Butt flees before she is finished. He runs past the legless man taking a nap with his face covered with an X-ray, past the ambulance drivers dissecting the evening newspapers, past the hopeful junkies waiting for the hospital to accidentally dispense its bounty.
As he emerges out of the hospital he raises his arm in the air, and without thinking, without targeting anything, fires his Mauser.
The city stops moving for three days.
The bullet pierces the right shoulder of a truck driver who has just entered the city after a forty-eight-hour-long journey. His shoulder is almost leaning out of his driver’s window, his right hand drumming the door, his fingers holding a finely rolled joint, licked on the side with his tongue for extra smoothness, a ritual treat that he has prepared for the end of the journey. He is annoyed with his own shoulder; he looks at it with suspicion. His shoulder feels as if it has been stung by a bee that has travelled with him all the way from his village. His left hand grips the shoulder where it hurts and finds his shirt soaked in red gooey stuff. He jams the brake pedal to the floor. A rickshaw trying to dodge the swerving truck gets entangled in its double-mounted Goodyear tyres and is dragged along for a few yards. Five children, all between seven and nine, in their pristine blue and white St Xavier’s uniforms, become a writhing mess of fractured skulls, blood, crayons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lunchboxes. The truck comes to a halt after gently nudging a cart and overturning a pyramid of the season’s last guavas. A size-four shoe is stuck between two Goodyears.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 7
