Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  “I think both partners need to understand that it’s always a compromise. If people give each other space…”

  “Men don’t understand. Just remember that. They don’t.” Hina Alvi, it seems, has had enough of the wisdom of the newly-wed. “I mean, they might have a fine understanding of how a carburettor works or how a human brain is wired, but ask them to understand your sadness on a sunny afternoon and their brain starts doing push-ups. They want to physically lift your sadness and smash it to bits. God, sometimes they want to tie RDX to your sadness and put a timer on it. They think understanding means climbing up a mountain and disappearing into a cave. And that man, your compromise, it does seem that he was locked up in a cave for a very long time. Who knows, maybe you can teach him to live in this world.” Hina Alvi starts to open the box of sweets. “Congratulations. We all crave sugar sometimes, but you work in a hospital, you have seen those gangrened limbs. That was all sweet sugar once.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Eighteen

  The dogs tighten the circle around Teddy and then take turns barking at him, as if arguing about what to do with this man who stands in their middle, frozen, the only thing moving a tremulous circle of light emanating from his right hand. “What are you doing there?” he hears Inspector Malangi shout in the distance behind him. “Castrating stray dogs? We have a job to finish. Bring back the boy.” Teddy hasn’t even noticed how and when not-Abu Zar disappeared. For the moment he stands still and listens to the dogs.

  ♦

  Teddy knows exactly what to do when confronted by a mad dog or dogs in a pack who behave in a mad fashion because of peer pressure. He learned his lesson when he was in class seven, on a sweltering June day when he had limped back home, a big gash on his right calf, blood streaming into his shoe, canine teeth marks on his hand. As he entered his home, his father, the PT teacher, started to bark at him, his big jowly cheeks expanding and contracting like fish gills. “You are running away from dogs, you sissy puss? You didn’t know there were dogs on this street? You never noticed that sometimes they challenge people? What was all that training for? A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.”

  For Teddy’s father, everyone who was born after Partition was a sissy puss, because nobody quite met his criteria of not being a sissy puss: how much buffalo’s milk had they drunk? Had they ever been injured in a real bull race? Had they ever bicycled three hundred miles to watch a Shanta Apte film? Had they ever stolen a government horse? Hell, had they ever stolen anything? And no, electricity didn’t count; you were still a sissy puss.

  PT teacher hooked his thumbs into the braces that held his khaki-coloured shorts around the girth of his belly, stared at Teddy and bared his teeth. “You are always supposed to be what?”

  “Prepared,” Teddy murmured, and felt as if he had run away from a pack of mad dogs only to be confronted by the leader of that very pack.

  PT teacher blamed Teddy for the attack. “It’s your fidgety self, the fear inside your Teddy heart that attracted the dogs to you. They can smell a faggot from miles away. Come with me. I’ll show you if the same dog dares to attack me. Hell, let’s see if that dog even raises its eyebrow. And you will think it’s because you are small and I am large. Now, if you have ever studied science, you’ll know that dogs can’t tell the difference between big and small. A dog doesn’t care about your size; a dog can smell your heart, read your thoughts. And your heart is nothing but a big blob of fear. Ask yourself. What are you afraid of? A dog can bite. So? You have got teeth too. A dog can jump, you can jump. But a dog can’t plan ahead, can’t formulate strategies. In short, a dog can’t prepare. But you can. You can also think, but your brain works like a woman’s brain: always worrying what will happen next, when will the roof fall? The roof will not fall. Or the roof will fall when the roof falls. Your sweaty hands and your shivering legs can’t stop the roof from falling.”

  PT teacher starts to unbuckle his belt, hands trying to find the loop, lost in no man’s land between the abrupt descent of his belly and his rising thighs. Teddy goes into a corner and assumes the position, looking down at his shin where blood has begun to congeal in the shape of a dog taking a nap. Teddy hears howls of laughter. “See, I am trying to breathe here and my son thinks that I want to thrash him. Is that all I do in this house? Don’t I work all day to put food on the table? Who works hard all day to keep this roof over your head? But you and that mother of yours always pretend I am some kind of slave master holding you hostage.” Teddy turns around embarrassed, pain momentarily forgotten. PT teacher is sitting on the mat, his belly resting almost on his knees. “Come and take them out,” he says, and then mumbles his mantra: “The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.” Teddy kneels beside him and wriggles his hand into the left pocket of PT teacher’s shorts. His shorts are frayed but made of expensive cotton material. Butter jeans, he likes to call them; apparently the only factory that made them was burnt down during Partition.

  PT teacher scratches his armpit, then opens another button on his shirt, licks his finger and starts caressing his nipple, which is swollen and seems to be on fire. With practised manoeuvres Teddy manages to hook the earrings into his forefingers and pulls them out of the pocket. Two gold circles studded with fake pearls. He puts them into the sweaty hand of PT teacher, who places them in front of him like a Hindu priest making an offering. Teddy’s mother appears as if in response to his offering, carrying a plate of food. She puts it in front of him and scoops up the earrings and starts to put them in her ears.

  The ritual is repeated in reverse every morning. Before leaving home, PT teacher shouts for Teddy’s mother. Teddy’s mother comes scurrying in, puts the plate of breakfast in front of him and starts to remove her gold earrings, the only jewellery she owns, in fact the only thing she owns in the entire world, then puts them on PT teacher’s outstretched palm. PT teacher starts eating his breakfast after putting the earrings in his pocket.

  The breakfast consists of a raw onion and stale bread from the previous night. PT teacher believes that onion is the elixir of life; it cleans the blood and keeps his vision clear. He can still read the newspaper without glasses and shoot a ball into the hoop from twenty yards. He never reads the newspaper, though. “An apple a day only keeps the doctor away,” he often lectures Teddy. “But an onion keeps the devil away. It keeps your blood clear and keeps the bad thoughts out.” The only bad thought that Teddy has ever had is about PT teacher collapsing and dying in front of the school assembly as five hundred boys in their white PT kits shout: “We are prepared.” Teddy has tried eating onions to purge himself of his bad thoughts, in the hope that PT teacher will pick him for the school band.

  PT teacher has told his colleagues that during the Partition riots somebody cut off his mother’s ears to get her earrings, and he doesn’t want that to happen to his wife. His fellow teachers think that he is a mistrustful, stingy old bastard who believes that if he keeps his gold in his pocket when leaving home then his wife will not elope with anyone. There is a rumour that he did have another wife, who ran away with someone, taking all her jewellery. Others say that his wife eloped because he was spending all his time with the young members of his Scout troop. There is yet another rumour that at the time of Partition, as a teenager he went around cutting off refugee women’s ears to get hold of their earrings and now obviously doesn’t want that to happen to his wife. He can’t quite get it into his head that Partition happened more than half a century ago, at a time when the clip-on earring hadn’t been invented.

  As the son of a PT teacher, Teddy sometimes expects special status at his school, a front-row place in the PT class, vice-captaincy of the football team, or at least to be allowed to ring the school bell once a week. But PT teacher also doubles as the Scout master and believes in the Baden-Powell principles, so Teddy must first deserve, then desire; he must prove that he practises the principles
of fairness and equality and that every day he does at least one thing that should count as a service to the community. There are boys in PT teacher’s troops who get special gymnastic training, go on camping trips, spend after-school hours in his office learning to tie reef knots. Teddy is singled out to go and sit under a tree all by himself and practise drums with sticks and a pair of bricks. Under the shadow of this flag, we are one, we are one. He practises the same beat day after day in the hope that if he can prove his commitment, he’ll get a proper drum to practise on and then be chosen to play in the school’s marching band and maybe get the silver stick to lead it.

  It’s on one of those after-school afternoons when Teddy is under the tree with his sticks beating a pair of bricks that the boy who is already the head Scout and the football captain and inter-school gymnastics champion emerges from PT teacher’s office with PT teacher’s arm around his shoulder and the band leader’s silver stick in his hand.

  Teddy stopped eating onions after that day and let his bad thoughts run wild. After school he stayed back, went into the corner and smashed one brick over the other, all the while mumbling, Under the shadow of this flag we are one we are one. He didn’t stop till both the bricks were smashed into little pieces.

  ♦

  Here, surrounded by six dogs with not-Abu Zar nowhere in sight, Teddy feels as if he is back under that tree, a mad drummer punishing a pair of bricks as someone else walks away with the prize.

  Later, over breakfast at a roadside café, Inspector Malangi doesn’t touch his tea, but makes sure that Teddy eats properly. Teddy tries to push his plate away after one helping of omelette, but Malangi orders more toast, another omelette. Another cup of tea? Maybe a bit more sugar? Come on, eat all your eggs, you are newly married, you need the fuel.

  It’s only when it’s time to leave and Teddy lays his flashlight and TT on the table that Inspector Malangi puts an arm around Teddy’s shoulders and takes him aside. “You have to find this boy if our family is to stay together. I’ll be asked questions. Thirty-six years of service…” He fingers the epaulette on his shoulder. “They will laugh at me that I fell for ‘Oh, I need to pee’. Even pickpockets know better tricks. And we are talking a high-value target here. I should have known. I didn’t believe that boy for a moment. I didn’t believe him when I had two hundred and forty volts running through his testicles. My only mistake – and let me emphasise that I don’t believe it’s a mistake yet – was that I trusted you.” Inspector Malangi walks him out, close to the edge of the road, not caring about the trucks that whizz past.

  “I still feel maybe we should have looked a little bit longer in the bush. We could have set up a checkpoint on the Super Highway,” Teddy mumbles. His stomach full of eggs and toast, he suddenly feels very sleepy and yearns to be in his bed, under the blanket, with Alice. Inspector Malangi sighs and loosens his grip on his shoulder. The thought crosses Teddy’s mind that Inspector Malangi is planning to push him under one of the speeding vehicles.

  “Of course there was no guarantee what else might be waiting for us in that bush. We couldn’t even tackle a bunch of mutts.”

  Teddy shakes his head as if he agrees. But in his heart he still believes that he is only partially responsible for not-Abu Zar’s escape. What were the others doing? Where was the cordon? Why didn’t anyone turn on the searchlights when they heard the dogs bark? How did they let not-Abu Zar get away without firing a single shot?

  “When you told me that this boy wasn’t Abu Zar, did you believe it?” Inspector Malangi steers him away from the road, as if he has just realised that they might be run over.

  Teddy breathes in and stands still for a moment. He understands that his fate depends on this question. Not only on his answer, but how he frames it.

  “I do believe that he was telling the truth, but not for a moment did I believe that… I mean, not for a moment did I waver… But you see, it’s complicated. He was definitely not Abu Zar. In fact I think that even the other Abu Zar, the one in Sweden, is not Abu Zar. You can only be Abu-something if you have a child. And both of them are single and the other guy lives in Sweden. I think they were lovers and then something went wrong. We may never find out, but the very fact that he has gone to Sweden…”

  “So we are agreed. You believed him. And I believe you. If he is not Abu Zar, and if even Abu Zar is not Abu Zar, then he could be anybody. He could even be you. So it’s in our interest that you go and find him.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Nineteen

  “What kind of man comes home from work with a full stomach?” Alice Bhatti turns the knob on the stove and looks at Teddy with complaining eyes. He is leaning on the kitchen door looking sheepish, as if he was waiting to be scolded for coming back late. He even has a long story ready, a little present to give. He hadn’t thought about the consequences of the large meal he was forced to eat after losing not-Abu Zar. “I am really full.” He moves his hand over his stomach, as if presenting a reliable eyewitness. He doesn’t know how to explain to Alice that in his line of work, kindness and cruelty are badly mixed up. Have you eaten? Eat some more. Now die.

  “Don’t do that,” says Alice, coming towards him, then stopping a few inches away. “After eating a meal, if you touch your stomach, it grows and grows.” Teddy laughs. His shoulders sag, as if he has just put down a large weight he was made to carry all day and was not expecting to be rid of so easily. He lifts up his T-shirt, grabs her hand and presses it against his hard belly. “Twelve years of lifting weights…” He sucks in his stomach as Alice throws a couple of light punches at it. “I must have lifted this whole city in weight. This is not going to go anywhere. Even when I am old and dying in your arms.”

  Alice runs her fingers over his stomach, counting the flesh ridges. “I want one like that.” She can’t remember if she has ever made such a direct demand to a man. Or to a woman. Marriage, she suddenly realises, is a liberation army on the march.

  “It was not always like this. It was very difficult in the beginning.” Teddy puts his hand on her shoulder. “I have never liked the taste of eggs.”

  “You have six every morning. Raw,” says Alice.

  “That’s work.” He taps his stomach. “Those yolks slosh around in my stomach till noon. But the omelettes that the inspector made me eat this morning, those almost killed me. Kindness kills me.”

  “I still want one like that.” Alice pokes his stomach with her forefinger. “Even if I have to eat all those eggs.”

  “We can start right now,” says Teddy, caressing her hand. It seems that for the first time in his life he has been asked for something he can readily give. “A woman’s tummy won’t become this hard. It’ll become flat, though. Actually it shouldn’t become hard.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You don’t want to suffocate the baby.”

  Alice blushes, as if it has never occurred to her that their marital intimacy could lead to babies.

  “There is a special routine for women. It involves breathing exercises. Let’s try that,” says Teddy.

  “You told me you never knew a woman before you met me, so how do you know these women and their special routines?”

  Teddy lifts the hem of her shirt, runs his hand over her belly then grips the part where her ribcage gives way to the slightly protruding bulge of her stomach. “I know people who know people who know women. They make a living selling flat tummies. Now inhale.”

  Alice takes a quick, deep breath. “No, not like that,” he admonishes her and playfully pinches her flesh.

  Alice is excited, not in a carnal way, but at the thought that her new husband is teaching her how to breathe.

  “You are a trained professional and you don’t know how to breathe,” says her new husband, running his fingertips along the length of her throat, then slowly bringing his hand down between her breasts to her lower stomach, tracing the trajectory of air travelling through her body. She inhales slowly. He makes encouraging sounds. �
�Hold it there and count to three,” he says, when she can’t take in any more air. He puts his hand just below her ribcage. “Exhale,” he says, and she exhales slowly, feeling slightly dizzy as her lungs deflate.

  Alice opens her eyes and sees that there is a look of intense concentration on Teddy’s face, as if he is trying to extract a bullet from someone’s head, someone not dead yet.

  “Now when you exhale, suck your tummy in, first inwards, then upwards.” His palm pushes her stomach in, then upwards, as if trying to force it to retreat behind her ribcage. “No, no, as soon as you start sucking it in, start thinking of sucking it up, there should be an overlap halfway through. Women are supposed to be able to do many things at the same time and you can’t do two things with your own tummy?” He pretends to be annoyed. Her ribs tickle and she bursts out laughing. “Look.” Teddy lifts his T-shirt, tucks it under his chin and breathes in with his eyes shut. When he exhales, his stomach contracts and then disappears under his ribcage, leaving behind a steep concave that reminds Alice of the starving Buddha. Or was that Yassoo’s body as he lay in that cave afterwards?

  ♦

  Later she is stretched out on his bench press looking at the ceiling, her arms raised, holding the weight bar. Teddy stands above her and takes two five-kilogram bumper plates from the plate tree and slips them on to either side of the bar. Her arms tremble a little. He bends down, puts his hands on her shoulders and presses them firmly down on the bench. He adjusts her posture, parts her legs slightly and brings her feet in, then presses her knees with his hands and asks her to start. She brings her arms down and lifts the weight with her full force. “No jerks,” he says. “No rush. You are not in a weightlifting competition. Let them become part of your body and then move with them, like you are putting a baby to sleep: rock them gently. Arms up, breathe in. Arms down, breathe out. Don’t carry the weights, let the weights carry you.” Every time she raises the bar, she feels a tug in her lower stomach. Her trembling arms become steady. He watches her with the beaming eyes of a proud father and the intense concentration of a punishing guru. A flock of birds rushes through her chest every time their eyes meet.