Sister Hina Alvi peels off her gloves and throws them in a bin. Alice Bhatti mops the blood on the floor, collects yards of bandages and heaps of absorbent cotton, and while doing it, glances at Hina Alvi and realises that she is crying. Silently. She is scrubbing her hands at the sink, but Alice is sure that she is crying. There are no tears, no sound comes out of her mouth, but Alice can see that her face is broken, as if someone has clumsily rearranged her features. Her upper body shakes and her silent sobs echo in the delivery room. Hina Alvi covers her head and part of her face with her dupatta, as if getting ready to offer her prayers, and then abruptly leaves the room without giving Alice any instructions.
She stands next to the sink, lukewarm water washing over her hands, her eyes dry. She feels cold.
She dries her hands with the hem of her coat and goes and stands beside the bed, staring alternately at the sleeping mother and the dead baby. Without thinking, she kneels down and takes the baby’s hand into her hands. She opens the bluish fist and finds that the palm is smooth, with not a line, not a wrinkle. She holds the baby’s palm in both her hands and starts to pray. She prays like she has never prayed before, like nobody has prayed before. It doesn’t matter if there is a God listening or not, it doesn’t matter if He is busy somewhere else trying to avert a war or working out the chemical make-up of a deadly new virus. She just conjures up her Lord Yassoo and gives it to Him. She holds Him by His throat till He can’t breathe, she hangs from His robe till He can’t take a step forward, she grabs His goblet of wine and flings it across the room, she heckles Him when he descends from the Mount of Olives and starts to give His sermon, she snatches the fish from His disciples and throws it back into Galilee. She sings Him lullabies when His mother goes outside the stable to look for firewood, but that doesn’t last very long. When He washes His disciples’ feet, she accuses him of being a deadbeat Lord leaving poor wretched girls to bring dead babies into this world; she actually starts cursing him in Punjabi when He starts to raise Lazarus. What she is doing is probably the opposite of a prayer. In the heat of her demented devotion, she even forgets to ask Him for anything. Exhausted, she puts her head on the baby’s stomach and listens to Lord Yassoo’s eternal silence, feels his glacial incompetence. She hears no flapping of wings, no thunder, no lightning, no chorus of hymns rising in the background. She hears a door creak behind her and she opens her teary eyes slowly. Before she can turn around, she sees a little blood bubble pop out of the dead baby’s left nostril, then the toes on his right foot start twitching, as if he is trying to walk in his death sleep.
Alice Bhatti gets up in panic, turns around and sees Sister Hina Alvi looming over her, her face white with some unknown fear. Alice Bhatti’s first thought is that she has done something monstrous, broken some fundamental rule in the Sacred, she has done something that she wasn’t supposed to do, that Sister Hina Alvi was never meant to see.
“You have to leave now.” Sister Hina Alvi doesn’t even look towards the baby. “There are people outside looking for you, Senior’s people. They were asking about your husband, but I am sure they are actually looking for you. I have sent them to the medico-legal’s office but I know they’ll be back. You’d better hurry up and leave through the back entrance.”
Alice Bhatti remembers the men in a uniform that is not the uniform of any institution she knows. She remembers their caged animals’ eyes. She remembers their banter about the jail showers. It’s only when she is hurrying out of the door that she hears the baby’s first cry, followed by a series of faint squeals, as if he is posing a series of questions. What happened? Wasn’t I supposed to be dead? Where are you going in such hurry? Who are you leaving me with? Can’t I come with you?
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Twenty-Three
Alice Bhatti reclines against the trunk of the Old Doctor, left hand covering her half-closed eyes, right arm flung aside, a lazy Buddha biding his time. Others might come here to be healed or find spiritual sustenance or firewood. Alice comes here to take a nap under its cool shade. Her head fits snugly in the wedge formed by gigantic roots that snake out of the earth; not very comfortable, but solid to lean against. Alice needs that solid thing to lean against in her life, but she needs it even more after the incident in the delivery room. She is surprised that even when she was slipping away from Senior’s men, clutching her pistol, she had been more worried about the baby than herself. That stubborn little baby has unsettled her. Not just the baby, but the people who now look at her as if she isn’t a diligent professional who occasionally goes beyond the call of her duty, but a messiah who has forsaken her right to a regular lunch break.
A brown dog, with one ear missing, paws covered in black mud, tries to lick Alice’s toes. Alice opens her eyes and doesn’t move her feet, but fixes it with a stare that says: not today. The dog moves a little bit further away and lies on its back with its muddy paws and smoky pink teats pointing to the sky.
Through the dusty leaves of the Old Doctor, the afternoon sun comes to Alice in dribs, like the rusting shower in Teddy’s Al-Aman apartment. Squinting her eyes, she follows the progress of a cow-shaped cloud and tries to count the moments before it will gobble up the sun. She is surrounded by patients waiting to be hospitalised, their families camped around them as if on a picnic that has gone on for too long. There are those who have been discharged and told to go home and pray, but who insist on sticking around, thinking that life owes them another chance, hoping for their black warrants to be revoked, or at least for the Old Doctor to perform an old-fashioned miracle. A man with an elephant’s foot smokes a cigarette solemnly, as if taking his medication. A wiry old TB patient, his face covered in a white mask fashioned out of his young wife’s white dupatta, curses him repeatedly. A sturdy old woman, whose only ailment seems to be poverty, comes and stands over Alice and demands money. Alice slips her hand into the pocket of her white coat and passes her a two-rupee note without looking up. “What will I buy with two rupees? You can’t even buy toffees with that. Give me Xanax, or at least Lexo.” Alice Bhatti raises her hand towards the old woman and asks her to return her money. The old woman puts the hand holding the money behind her back and gently shoves her toe into Alice’s ribcage. “Allah has blessed you with so much. Can’t you give me some Valium?” Alice Bhatti shoos her away and tries to concentrate on taking a nap, tries not to think about the red bubble in the baby’s nose, its curled toes moving and the horror on Sister Hina Alvi’s face. She doesn’t feel any fear for the moment. She shuts her eyes tight in an attempt to block out the sunlight, which is beating down now, piercing through the branches of the Old Doctor, penetrating her pupils. Then there is a whiff of cool breeze that seems to come from afar, the sun disappears, the temperature around her suddenly plummets and Alice Bhatti dozes off to a lush green valley where cows made of white wool float, politely discussing the side effects of various types of sleeping pills.
“Why are you perturbed, my child?” a soft caress of a voice says in her left ear. “It was I who raised the dead baby.” Alice Bhatti smiles to herself. First at the thought that she is hearing Himself speak. Secondly at the thought that if it is really Him talking to her, then shouldn’t He know her answer? She is not amused by the fact that He has chosen her lunch break to visit her. She doesn’t believe for a moment in this raising-the-dead nonsense. A trapped bubble in a blood vessel, a lung slow to start, a heart still in shock: there are probably a thousand prosaic, scientific explanations. It was no more His work than the Old Doctor’s. She knows what faith is; it’s the same old fear of death dressed in party clothes. And what kind of miracle is this anyway? He has raised the baby and taken the baby’s mother. What kind of universe does He run? An exchange mart? Where was Himself when she was on the run from Senior’s men, hiding in Charya Ward? Probably on His own lunch break. Or probably busy with this charya world that he has created?
Himself has visited her once before, when she was a first-year student at the Sacred Heart nursing
school, and that visit had resulted in her being charged with ‘disorderly behaviour and causing grievous bodily harm’. She was madly in love with Him and constantly recited His words: The heart is eternally corrupt and ruined for eternity. It was not only her favourite prayer but her standard reply to most forms of greeting, and she started and ended her exam papers with this declaration.
Her love for Him made headlines for a few days; it was the lead story in the Catholic Courier – Sisters of Mercy Get No Mercy – and even the Pakistan Times gave it a few inches on the back page, under the headline: Stand-Off at Sacred Heart.
♦
Alice Bhatti was only eighteen and signed her name Alice J. Bhatti with the J crossed to look like a cross. Yes, she loved Yassoo. She knew she loved Yassoo because every time someone mentioned the name, every time she read the name, every time she heard a word that rhymed with Yassoo, she got hot flashes in her temples and her heart pounded with such ferocity that she had to shut her eyes and praise the Lord at the top of her voice. Sometimes when she was in a situation where she couldn’t raise her voice, when she couldn’t pronounce His name in public, she wanted to punch someone in the face. She didn’t just believe in the Holy Spirit, she possessed it and didn’t believe in sharing.
That was why when three other girls in her dorm chipped in to buy a Yassoo poster, she refused to contribute. “What is the difference between you and those girls who have Wham! posters on their walls? Did Yassoo ever say that He wants to be a fifty-rupee laminated piece of decoration on a wall? Paste him on your heart if you can.”
She had not always been like this. In fact, after He took her mother, for four years she had a running battle with Him during the Sunday services. She dressed in her best clothes and turned up for the service but without taking a shower; in fact sometimes she took out dirty clothes from the laundry basket and wore them to church. During the service she pretended to act like everyone else, but when others sang Crown Him with many crowns, she mouthed gibberish; when Reverend Philip gave his sermon, she told herself all the dirty jokes she had ever heard, and since she hadn’t heard very many dirty jokes, she just ended up making a long list of all the words she thought were dirty. When the congregation went on to sing Alas did my saviour bleed, she uttered poo, piss, Musla, Protestant, Goan; the last one was really difficult to carry when surrounded by a couple of hundred Sunday zealots glorifying their saviour’s bleeding, but so determined was Alice to express her defiance, to soil His house, to punish Him for taking her mother that she carried on recklessly.
But then one day He took her father as well, or everyone assumed that He had taken Joseph Bhatti, and taken him in the way that was His favourite way of taking the faithful from the sanitary profession. When everyone had given up on Joseph Bhatti, trapped in a sewer for ten hours, after they had already pulled out two of his colleagues whose lungs had collapsed with hydrogen sulphide, Alice prayed for forgiveness, prayed not to be left alone. She knocked on Reverend Philip’s door and confessed her Sunday-service sacrilege, He brought Joseph Bhatti back to life, and she returned to the flock. And like all those who return to the flock after going astray, she made it her mission to defend His name, to make up for all her little blasphemies.
There were some Musla girls on the Sacred campus who didn’t like posters of any kind, Wham! or Yassoo. In fact their hatred for posters was so absolute that in their very first term in the college they had petitioned against anatomical charts in classrooms. According to their petition, the posters were pornographic and against the decent behaviour prescribed not only by Islam but by every other faith as well. Their petition was denied on the grounds that the anatomical charts were the very foundation of the profession. Dr Pereira, the honorary principal of the Sacred Heart nursing school, put this in his note: “You cannot go to a school and then start campaigning against the alphabet.” He liked that last line so much that he had it typed in bold. The poster girls found other ways to carry out their mission. The reproductive organs from these charts began to disappear: ovaries were ripped out, black ink was thrown on mammary glands and penile depictions were mutilated.
When this same group descended on Alice’s dorm, a place they had started calling ‘the kafir den’, armed with hockey sticks and a copy of the Quran and chanting slogans like ‘Another Push to the Crumbling Walls’ and ‘Who Belongs to Pakistan, Musalman, Musalman’, it was Alice Bhatti they faced. The other three Yassoo girls offered passive resistance, their eyes shut, knees trembling and Yassoo-save-our-souls-but-first-protect-our-mortal-bodies on their lips.
Alice Bhatti kicked the attackers in their shins, and bit a small chunk of flesh from a hand that tried to grab her throat.
Then she produced a bicycle chain and padlock – and nobody knew why she had a bicycle lock when she didn’t own a bicycle, didn’t even know how to ride one – and swung it in their faces. The attackers stepped back and called her a Yassoo slut and a Yahoodi spy. She countered by explaining to them that Yahoodis killed her Lord Yassoo so they should make up their minds about what exactly it was they were accusing her of. And then took a swing with the chain lock at one of the anti-poster campaigners trying to sneak up on her from behind.
Alice Bhatti learned an important lesson that day: her roommates might be good, God-fearing, stuck-up, churchgoing Catholics, but they were completely useless in a campus brawl. What use was your faith if it didn’t give you the strength and skills to break a few bones?
When they appeared in front of the college authorities for their disciplinary hearing, Alice felt that they were speaking for their fathers, or their father’s churchgoing friends, not for themselves. They tucked their ten-rupee plastic Jesus lockets in their bras, which puzzled Alice even more. Why wear it if you have to hide it? Did Yassoo ever say he wanted to be crucified on a hairpin and then hidden in your undergarments?
They were let off with a final warning. “Nurses might be doing God’s work, but they are not supposed to bring God into their work,” noted Dr Pereira in his warning letter, but Alice Bhatti carried on preaching Yassoo’s love on the streets of French Colony.
Her local diocese dismissed her as one of those born-again messiahs that French Colony produced every few years, who, more than anything else, needed a balanced diet and family life, or at least regular sex. Her prayers, although she prefered to call them offerings, were not for public consumption. Because she knew that the prayers didn’t tickle Yassoo or make his suffering any less. They were meant to elevate your own soul.
♦
For the next two and a half years, Alice became the lone soldier of Yassoo. She bought a bag full of plastic crosses and stuck one on the school noticeboard every day. She was spat at, expelled, readmitted, investigated, warned, warned again and told that she had already been given a final warning, but she battled on.
She was not even sure whether she was fighting her Lord Yassoo’s fight or just doing what she needed to do to survive in this bitch-eat-bitch world that was the Sacred Heart nursing school.
The bite you see on Alice Bhatti’s shoulder is not a love bite. It’s a bite. The moon-shaped scar that you see on her left cheek and which still glows when she gets angry is not the result of an accident in the kitchen. It’s a stray bullet that kissed her. It seemed the poster girls had poster brothers in other colleges who had guns. The bullet was meant for her throat or maybe her head, she was not sure. But she was sure that nobody would shoot at someone’s cheek. Even now when she drinks hot tea, she tastes hot metal in her mouth. She has a cut on her right eyebrow from the time when a lab door accidentally slammed in her face.
A cigarette burn mark on the side of her left breast is the only medal that she hasn’t collected in a battle. It’s the only evidence of a furtive love affair as short-lived as winter in this city. A chain-smoking doctor who professed to be the only communist on the faculty befriended her. He liked to cuddle before and after with a cigarette in his hand, and only put it aside for the exact duration of intercourse, which
usually lasted as long as it takes a cigarette to burn itself in an ashtray. “Can you not smoke in bed?” she had said as they lay together after a brief session of vigorous lovemaking. The smell was making her nauseous, a mixture of humidity and sweat and the unfiltered K2s he liked to smoke to show solidarity with the workers of the world. “Why, why? Is this too cheap for you?” He tried to put the cigarette between her lips, she slapped his wrist, and the burning cigarette singed the left side of her breast.
Her twenty-seven-year-old body is a compact little war zone where competing warriors have trampled and left their marks. She has fought back often enough, with less calibrated viciousness maybe, definitely never with a firearm, but she has never accepted a wound without trying to give one back. And like all battle-hardened warriors she has managed to preserve her gift for the fight but forgotten why she became a fighter in the first place.
Her serene charcoal-grey eyes shield that gift; it’s the kind of serenity that only four years of fighting for Yassoo can bring, the kind of serenity that owes as much to her inner faith as it does to her twice-weekly fast. It can be forty-six degrees Centigrade with no electricity, or mild winter; nothing can distract her. She is an all-weather, all-terrain fighter.
It was during her fourth year in nursing school, when she thought she had reached a truce with the poster girls, as they all had their exams and three years’ worth of syllabus to catch up on, that she experienced the limitations of her devotion. Himself deserted her when she needed Him most.
As a sharp-eyed final-year student nurse she was in the operating theatre and watching closely as an octogenarian surgeon, famous for cutting open patients’ chests and then not stitching them back shut till he had counted his fees in cash, had a coughing fit and from behind his mask looked at Sister Alice as if it was her fault. A senior sister who was supposed to assist in the operation had called in sick at the last moment and they couldn’t find a replacement because the famous surgeon was known for treating nurses in the operating theatre like garbage bins in uniform. With a pair of tweezers he was holding a vein that he had just cut, and on which he was preparing to tie a knot, when through his insistent cough he beckoned Alice to take over. Alice Bhatti held the tweezers and stared at the vein, which looked like the work of the Lord, and for the first time in her professional life she felt exalted, felt His presence. She felt tall and humble at the same time. She was holding a life between the tips of the metal tweezers. She also felt that it could only be a power higher than her, a power that kept the life-and-death ledger that had handed her the scales, and now it was up to her to carry out His will. The words of Lord Yassoo, who resurrected the dead, flashed through her head only for a second; otherwise she was completely consumed by the task at hand. The surgeon’s cough was out of control and he left the operating theatre, giving Sister Alice the thumbs-up sign as he went. In that fraction of a second she forgot to do what medical professionals the world over learn within their first three months in surgical procedures training: that every third heartbeat you should let a drop of blood spill, you let the vein breathe. Sister Alice, spurred by her Lord’s approval, squeezed with the power of her faith till the vein couldn’t stand the flow of blood any more and burst in at least seventeen places simultaneously, swivelling like a lawn sprinkler going crazy.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 17
