Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  “My name is not Abu Zar.” The boy’s voice is melodic, cultured, as if he has been taking singing lessons. “That was my friend’s name. I mean that was the name he took. My name is Afzal and my mother doesn’t live in Buffer Zone. None of my family lives in this city.”

  For a few moments there is complete silence. They have entered an area of total darkness. They leave streetlights behind as they approach Buffer Zone. Teddy can hear not-Abu Zar breathing. Something pops in his nostrils like little crackers going off or a broken bone finding its lost home.

  Confusion in such circumstances might seem tragic or tragicomic depending on what you find funny and what makes you sad, but it is a very useful tool in Teddy’s line of work. If they insist right to the end that they are somebody else, then they live in the hope that the confusion might be cleared up at the last moment. Even when you feel the barrel on the back of your neck, you can say to yourself that they are killing someone else, not you. You go down protesting and hoping to correct a mistake that someone made in an official file, which is better than going down weeping or even worse just going completely silent with fear.

  The Hilux makes its inevitable stop fifty feet from a phone booth. On these nights Inspector Malangi behaves as if it’s him who is going to die, so he always wants to call his family first, wants to talk to his children.

  Teddy accompanies him to the phone booth. They climb over a pile of gravel and walk in silence like two sleepy night workers. He knows there is no point in bringing this up, but if he doesn’t bring it up now, he’ll have to think about it later. And this is not the kind of work he would like to take home. “This guy we have got is not Abu Zar, he is just the driver; not even a driver, he just borrowed his motorbike. The real Abu Zar is in Sweden.”

  Malangi holds the door of the phone booth open and turns towards Teddy. “What do you think we should do? Raid Sweden? Our jurisdiction ends at that bridge over there. We can’t even pick up a common thief from Clifton. Do you want to know how many people lay dead in Garden East after he and his friend drove by? One night with your wife and you are teaching me law enforcement.” He sighs. “We all tend to go a bit soft. Look, Bakhtawar has her maths test today. Can I talk to her first?” Inspector Malangi shuts the door and starts dialling.

  Far on the horizon, a cement factory exhales a cloud of milky smoke, and a faint red dawn struggles behind it.

  “I’ll pick you up from school, my dear. Don’t forget to read the questions twice before you start answering them. Remember, read them twice, because you might miss something the first time.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Fifteen

  Alice visits her father in the morning to get her things. French Colony seems filthier than she had left it a couple of days before. The walls are covered with posters announcing a two-day-long Quantum Healing Festival to be led by a visiting preacher, Edward Qaiser from Oklahoma, who claims to sell the thing that Catholic evangelists all over the world seem to sell, the promise that the lame shall walk.

  And when they can walk, Alice Bhatti wonders, where will they go? How about real miracles, like the drains shall remain unclogged? Or the hungry shall be fed? Or our beloved French Colony shall stop smelling like a sewer?

  In his youth it had been suggested to Joseph Bhatti that he should start charging for his ulcer cures. “God gives me a gift and you want me to sell it?” he retorted. And then he would add, probably in jest, “And the gift I have is not even mine. It’s a gift from the Musla god. He probably mistook me for a potential Musla. You can’t sell what’s not yours. You don’t choose your neighbour and your neighbours don’t choose their own god. And you shouldn’t provoke your neighbour’s god.”

  As she approaches her street, Alice Bhatti has a slight sense of trepidation. She feels no emotional pull, no sudden rush of childhood memories; she looks away when she sees a vaguely familiar face approaching. She is ashamed of the fact that she is embarrassed to call this place home. Before she went to the Borstal via nursing school, Alice had never really felt like a grown-up; she was always defined by her father, his profession, French Colony, Reverend Philip and his insistence on framing all life’s problems in wedding parables. In fact it was during her time in the Borstal that she first felt free. No mother to tell her to keep her hair tidy, no father to tell her to keep the tidy hair covered. Just a lot of women with bad teeth and memories that wouldn’t go away.

  She finds the door to her house open, but there is no sign of Joseph Bhatti. Then she hears the sound of wood being chopped in the backyard. She starts taking out her clothes and putting them in a gym bag that she has brought from Al-Aman apartments. She takes her toothbrush, two lipsticks, a moisturiser and some imitation jewellery and puts them in a little vanity case. It’s only after she has placed her bag in the middle of the bed that she realises how little she’s taking from this home: twenty-seven years of life and she is taking with her a beggar’s dowry.

  Joseph Bhatti appears in the doorway, wiping his brow. He is wearing a white vest and his dhoti is folded up and tucked above his knees. The grey hair on his chest is covered in fine sawdust. He is surprised to see Alice Bhatti but he doesn’t seem displeased.

  “I see you are all packed up and ready to go. You could have waited for me to go first.”

  Alice Bhatti has never figured out how a certain kind of man can manage to play victim and saviour in the same breath. He wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t come back for a couple of years, but now he is giving her that ‘see, I am being abandoned again’ look.

  He thinks he was abandoned by Alice Bhatti’s mother. And who abandoned her mother in the first place?

  ♦

  At the age of twelve, Alice Bhatti is not sure if her mother has just passed away, or has died in a tragic accident, or left this world to become Yassoo’s eternal bride. They keep telling her that He took her and she wants to ask why, but everyone is too busy cuddling her, patting her head, as if she hasn’t become an orphan but won a prize at school.

  Three days after Alice Bhatti’s mother’s funeral, Joseph Bhatti goes back to work and comes back with a baby peacock, except that Alice can’t tell that it’s a peacock because it’s covered in black mud and is either fast asleep or dead. It smells of rotting fish.

  “Look, Mother of Alice, what I found,” Joseph Bhatti shouts as he enters the house. He is startled for a moment when he realises that Mother of Alice is not home, she is in paradise with her new husband, Yassoo Masih. Alice stares back at him from beside the tap that is used to wash clothes and crockery as well as for Sunday showers. She is scrubbing a pan slowly, her mind still struggling to accept the fact that her mother is not coming back from work. She saw the coffin, walked behind it, joined in when they sang pity on the soul of thy handmaid, but her twelve-year-old brain still can’t comprehend concepts like everlasting salvation and the perils of the mortal life. So if Mother of Alice is never coming back, who will cook, who will do the dishes, who will wash her hair? is all she thinks. And then she picks up the dishes and sits under the tap. She doesn’t want her mother to find filthy dishes when she returns from her tryst with Yassoo.

  Joseph Bhatti can’t remember how he addressed his wife before Alice was born. He called her nothing; just oye, or listen, or what’s for dinner? or did you hide my bottle? or here is my salary or sometimes when he returned from work with a salvaged object, look what I found. Now, standing in the doorway, cradling a bird dripping black filth, Joseph Bhatti is startled by his own voice and the lack of response to it. Nobody says: Father of Alice, you have brought home more kachra, you can’t stay away from garbage even when you are off duty.

  They always referred to each other as Mother of Alice and Father of Alice, as if they had been waiting to become parents so they could abandon their old names. They always referred to his work as duty, as if his duty was not clearing up clogged sewers but directing the traffic or standing watch on a glacier to defend his country’s borders.

&n
bsp; Joseph Bhatti stops in his tracks for a moment when he realises that he’ll never be called Father of Alice by anyone again, but then he continues as if Mother of Alice’s accidental little death should not get in the way of a sweet habit nurtured over twelve years.

  Alice Bhatti is not used to being addressed by her father. He makes toys for her, little birds from discarded wood usually, but he is not the kind of father who hugs his child or cuddles her to sleep, especially if the child in question is a twelve-year-old girl. But when Joseph Bhatti sees Alice sitting under the tap, furiously scrubbing a pot, trying to be her own mother, he comes to her and puts his hand on her shoulder and says the words that she has been hearing since they brought her mother home covered in a white sheet: “What can we do, my child? He took her.”

  Before the funeral, it seemed they hadn’t merely covered her body but prepared her for export to some far-off country with strict packaging regulations. With two clean knots at both ends of the shimmering white shroud, she looked like a giant vegetable being sent to cold storage. Reverend Philip, who conducted the funeral service, seemed more excited than sombre and kept saying, He took her. In fact he was so excited that to Alice it seemed that Reverend Philip had given Him a hand when He was taking her. Or at least that He had consulted Father Philip before taking her.

  “Our Lord took her away when she was in the prime of her youth; now she looks down upon us from the heavens and smiles upon us and her smile lights up our lives. She wasn’t ours to keep, she was Yassoo’s bride, and there she lives with Him in paradise, and this arrangement will last for eternity. But she left us a gift of life; she gave us the gift of Alice. Our hearts are filled with His blessings that He took her from us but in taking her from us He returned her to us for all eternity. Our hearts are full of memories of her and our memories are filled with her generous heart. But our hearts go out to our brother Joseph Bhatti who is still grieving.”

  How did He take her from them?

  Alice Bhatti’s mother died at work. At somebody’s house where she worked full time. She had quit her three part-time cleaning jobs at three different houses to get this one job because they wanted someone full time. This house was so big it could have housed all the three houses where she had previously worked. In fact the whole Bhatti household could fit under their travertine marble staircase, which needed to be washed and polished every day. It was on this staircase that she slipped and died. He took her. It’s entirely conceivable that if you are washing travertine marble with soapy water you can slip and crack your skull, you can die. When He wants to take you, He can make the marble staircase slippery. He can make you put more soap in water than required for travertine marble. He can make you trip over that bucket of soapy water you put on the stairs and forgot.

  But it is not very likely that when you slip on that staircase you’ll also accidentally scratch yourself on your left breast with such violence that those who wash your body will see four parallel sharp gashes drawn with human nails. It’s also unlikely that during that fall on the staircase you’ll somehow manage to spill someone’s sperm on your thighs.

  He took her.

  There were rumours that Reverend Philip had accepted a gift of ten thousand rupees on Joseph Bhatti’s behalf to stop the autopsy and let the owners of the house with the staircase off the hook. But the truth is that even those who believed this rumour – or maybe even started this rumour – didn’t believe for a moment that the owners of the house with a marble staircase of that size would let any hook sink into them.

  So yes. Maybe it was He who took her.

  A gardener from the house with the marble staircase from where He took her turned up at the funeral service, and the way he behaved it was clear to everyone that he was a Musla and had never been to a Catholic service of any kind. Whenever Reverend Philip mentioned Mother of Alice’s name (which by the way was Margaret Bhatti, and many people heard her name uttered for the first and the last time at her funeral service), the gardener started to wail in an injured animal’s voice. And when everyone stood up to join the choir singing praises to the Lord who took her, he kept sitting with his hands covering his face and muttering something in Bengali. The congregation believed he was offering some Musla prayer, as they clearly heard him say the word Allah repeatedly.

  After the service, over a pot of biryani that Reverend Philip had generously donated, the crying stranger at the funeral service was discussed in whispers. The person sitting on the gardener’s left, who was the only one who had spoken to the stranger and hence found out that he was a gardener from the house from where He took her, insisted that he had heard him saying ‘murder, murder, murder’ during the prayer. The person sitting on the right of the gardener accused the person sitting on the left of spreading vicious rumours and violating the sanctity of a post-funeral meal. He even offered to swear on the Holy Bible to prove that the stranger was actually saying ‘martyr, martyr, martyr’.

  The stranger himself had left immediately after the funeral prayers, without attending the biryani feast. He was never heard from again.

  “Mother of Alice.” Joseph Bhatti lowers the bird into Alice’s arms and says, “It’s not a hen. It’s a peacock.”

  Alice Bhatti has never seen a peacock in her life, except in her year-one class book where P stood for Peacock or Pakistan. But this bird in her arms looks nothing like the one in the picture. It looks and smells like a piece of wet garbage. She holds it under the water tap, and as the mud starts to wash away, she sees crescent sheens of green and blue under it, the patterns of yellow and gold emerge slowly and as the soap washes away the mud, spots of red and brown complete the picture from her book. She uses her bar of Capri soap, which is reserved for their Sunday baths, and starts to scrub it. The peacock squirms in her hands, puffs up its wings and shudders violently, sending soapy water drops all around. Some goes into Alice’s eye, and she rubs it with the back of her hand, managing to get more soap into it. She is crying but Joseph Bhatti can’t tell. He goes into the corner with the stove and asks, “So what are you going to make for supper?”

  This is how Alice becomes Mother of Alice, and she does not like it one bit. “Nothing,” she says. “Or do you want me to cook this?” She lets go of the bird, which stretches its wings, takes a short flight, then hops around the courtyard trying to find a place to hide.

  ♦

  “What are you making?” Alice Bhatti asks her father, as if enquiring about dinner arrangements. Joseph Bhatti wraps his dhoti around his knees, sits down on the bed, picks up the bag as if checking its weight to guess how long she is going for, and seems satisfied with its light weight. “I have been working on a cross, with my own hands, but I can’t show it to anyone before I have finished it. I will send it to Italy. You’ll see. Everyone will see.”

  “A cross? That’s what this world needs. Another cross.”

  “Yes. The world needs this one. You know that our Lord Yassoo’s faith didn’t spread beyond Egypt until they learned to mass-produce wooden crosses,” he says, emphasising every word, as if trying to explain the Old Testament to high-school students. “What we need to do now is make our own, with our own hands. Stop this merchandising.”

  “They are everywhere now,” says Alice Bhatti. “You can buy them really cheaply, in all materials, all shapes. I have seen some that double as telephones and alarm clocks. There are Chinese ones that can recite the Holy Bible in thirty-one languages.”

  “You should have brought him with you,” says Joseph Bhatti. “I know that whoever he is, he is not a Choohra. I hear he is a Butt. Probably fair-skinned, traces his ancestry to Central Asia via Kashmir. But just because they became Muslas doesn’t mean that they are any better than us.”

  “He is at work,” says Alice, picking up her bag. “He does night shifts, but I’ll bring him over soon.”

  Alice used to tell her dorm mates at the nursing school that if Yassoo came back to life today and roamed the world and saw it full of so many crosses, wouldn’t
he conclude that it was a world of perpetual pain?

  And for once, He would be right.

  ♦

  Joseph Bhatti will one day sit down to write what will be called his last testament. It will be published in some newspapers as an open letter; in Catholic Monthly it will be described as ‘the last desperate plea of a wronged man’. The Good News Weekly will call it ‘the sad rant of a grieving father’. It will go on to describe him as ‘someone who divided the community, someone who was against the very concept of community, someone who practised religion as if it was black magic, who brought his already beleaguered Church into disrepute by openly hobnobbing with black magicians and spiritual quacks and then petitioning the Vatican against his own church. He washed his dirty linen in the holiest of holy places.’

  Joseph Bhatti has never believed in daily, mundane suffering. He has always hated their little petitions, their letters to the editor; he always leaves the room when he hears the word ‘persecution’. He doesn’t know yet that late in his life he will be forced to write a petition. But then what kind of father wouldn’t demand justice for his daughter?

  He still has his tumbler and set of candles. But these days he is mostly called for stomach cancers, and that too only when patients have been sent back home from hospital to spend their last days with the family. He can still light a candle. He can still recite Sura Asar one hundred and one times without getting breathless. But life has beaten him into submission. Now he says things like “It’s Allah who cures, I only light the candle and speak his words.” And after he has done his procedure and knows in his heart that it will not work, he doesn’t stay, doesn’t accept any hospitality: “No thank you, I already ate. I don’t drink tea.”