Alice goes out after Sister Hina Alvi, but then retraces her steps and stands in the doorway examining the list. It is blank except for the medication column. Everyone, it seems, is on a single dose of lithium sulphate 10mg. At least they treat them all equal, she thinks.
She stops by Noor’s station, where he is hunched over a register, scribbling away as usual. “Who are we dispatching today?” she asks. He looks up and gives her a busy smile. Whenever Alice sees Noor, she sees a boy in torn shorts trying to sell cigarette butts to women in the Borstal, then running back to Zainab with half a banana or a piece of toast with a little butter on it, and then them both sitting in a corner and going through a ‘no, you eat, I already ate’ routine.
“Psy ward,” says Alice Bhatti, fanning herself with the clipboard. “I think I am supposed to collect some lithium sulphate from you.”
“Don’t worry,” says Noor, burying his head in the ledger. “I’ll send it with a sweeper. We always do that. That’s no place for a decent woman like yourself.”
Alice Bhatti can’t decide whether Noor is pulling her leg or trying to teach her things about the Sacred she doesn’t yet know.
“I am on duty, young Doctor Sahib. Sister Hina Alvi has briefed me all about it.”
“I don’t think Sister Hina Alvi expects you to actually go inside the ward,” Noor says in a grave voice, almost admonishing her. “Unless she wants to teach you a lesson. If I were you, I wouldn’t go there alone.” Alice Bhatti is suddenly irritated with this kid who is always acting like he owns the place. An errand boy will always be an errand boy even when he is pretending that the world revolves around him.
“I don’t sit around writing rubbish in notebooks all day. I deal with real patients.” She taps her clipboard. “And these people are not dead yet.”
She leaves the room, ignoring Noor’s feeble protests: “I mean you shouldn’t go there alone. I am saying take someone with you.”
“And who would that be?” She turns around and shouts at him before walking off.
On her way to Charya Ward, Alice notices a well-dressed woman holding an umbrella over a wheelie stretcher, covering her nose with her dupatta and looking into space as if pretending she is not in a corridor of the Sacred but in some fancy garden trying to spot migratory birds. She looks like a woman who might once have been rich, at least rich enough not to have ended up here, the kind of woman who is used to being served, the kind of woman who might have taught her servants to pour tea from the right and not from the left. The old man on the stretcher, with three plastic tubes of different colours coming out of his various orifices, is in a deep slumber. Under his cracked oxygen mask, a little froth is bubbling at his chapped lips. The woman is embarrassed to be here, and her shame seems to have marked an invisible circle around the stretcher; people walking in the corridor look at her umbrella, smell her disdain and step away.
Alice doesn’t notice the barrier that the woman has erected around herself and the person on the stretcher. She walks up to her. “Can I help?” she asks. “Why are you holding that umbrella?” The woman looks at her in horror, as if she had never expected to be spoken to in these corridors. Then Alice follows her gaze towards the ceiling and sees a wet patch that looks like a map of a country in transition. It drips a fat, milky water drop at regular intervals. “Ah, that,” Alice says. “Just the baby ward toilet overflowing. Nothing to worry about. I have already reported it.” She takes hold of the stretcher and starts to push it. “We can just move him.”
“No.” The woman screams, covers her mouth with her dupatta and then breaks into civilised little sobs. “Thanks. Don’t want him to wake up and see that we have brought him here. We are just taking him home. I can’t stand it here. This place smells of death.”
Alice shrugs her shoulders and walks on. This whole place, she thinks to herself, is a big Charya Ward. Then she remembers that Sister Hina Alvi has told her exactly the same thing. She smiles to herself and keeps walking.
As she nears Charya Ward, she realises that the usual smells – disinfectants, spirits, dried blood, stale food – have started to disappear. She can see potted plants, pots chipped and plants dead, and moss growing in the cracks on the walls. An arrow painted on the wall points towards the ward, with the words The Centre for Mental and Psychological Diseases written in English and Urdu. A half-faded notice under it reminds visitors not to give the inhabitants any cigarettes or drugs or food and to take responsibility for all their possessions. Alice Bhatti walks the walk of someone who thinks they can overcome their fear by taking measured steps. She passes through a swing door, the nursing station inside is empty and covered in dust. Not only have no medical staff been here in recent days, even the sweepers have stopped visiting. Someone has scrawled ‘I ♥ My Psychology’ on the dust-covered station. A side door stands half open. The room is damp and musty and it takes her a while to recognise the smell. It is the smell of a barbershop in summer. The Rexene-covered padding on the wall has been chewed up and scratched, and only occasional streaks of foam rubber remain, which makes it look like the walls have developed a skin rash. She sees what appears to be a bird’s nest in one corner and steps towards it. As she bends down to have a closer look, she recoils and rushes out of the room. She has seen some grotesque things in her life, but a nest the size of a football made of grey human hair with a live rat at its centre is not one of those things. The little rat, its red eyes ablaze with suspicion, scurries across the floor.
“This way, Sister.” A shaved head peers out of the double door. An old man puts a finger on his thin lips and beckons her. “Surprise them,” he whispers. “Reveal yourself.”
Alice Bhatti looks at her keys and tries to hide her nervousness behind a polite smile. She wields her clipboard like a shield, and gives the old man a benevolent nod, like heads of state bestow on ushers before moving on to guards of honour.
As the door swings open, they all stand in a line, a dozen of them, not in an orderly sort of line but in three files, with hands folded at crotches, heads bowed. They look at Alice and then look beyond her, and when they don’t see anyone following her, they disperse as if they had taken her for someone important and now, having realised that she is an ordinary nurse, all alone, feel disappointed but relieved.
“We knew you were coming. We were told.” A shrivelled old man goes into a corner, takes his pants off and starts shouting at the top of his voice: Dard aur, dawa aur, dard aur, dawa aur.
Another one goes over to him, slaps him and shouts, “No mother tongue here. Did you bring your mother with you? Then why are you complaining in your mother tongue?”
“They told us you’d come,” says a tall man with a bushy moustache and a turquoise handkerchief tied around his neck. “They told us three months ago, but now you have come. You are late. But you are here now.”
Then he goes down on his knees and prostrates himself in front of her as if he is in a mosque. Alice Bhatti has seen people do this in the Sacred’s open-air prayer area, and the gesture has always seemed a bit ridiculous to her. Raising your arse to the sky has never seemed to her the best way to express your devotion. But that is probably the best some people can do. There are those who walk on their knees in Nazareth. To each their own, she believes, not that you can talk about these things in public and hope to live. Even to express your bafflement is to invoke the wrath of God’s henchmen. She feels the man’s tongue licking at her toes, and tries to move back. The man grips her ankles and pulls. She flies into the air, the clipboard in her hand hits the ceiling. Her first thought is that if she doesn’t get that chart back, Sister Hina Alvi will be very very angry with her. Missing documents make Sister Hina Alvi angrier than patients defecating in the Sacred corridors. She should have held on to the clipboard, whatever else might have happened.
Alice feels she is airborne for a long time, and then she lands in the waiting arms of two men, who shout “Howzat!” like deranged cricketers.
They lift her up in the air.
She feels exalted. And scared. “Lord. Yassoo. Yassoo. Save me.”
“Welcome,” they say. And she feels she is on a bed of hands and being carried by twelve men who seem to have emerged from various levels of hell. It’s like she is a part of some private celebration as they shout, “Ya Alice! Ya Bhatti!” A new arrival shouts, “Death to America,” but finds himself out of sync and falls into their rhythm, like casual marchers do at a protest. There is something drone-like but pacifying about their gibberish. There is comfort in knowing that these people actually need her help. Dawdling in the air, supported by twelve men, for a moment she feels like an animal from a species not yet discovered by scientists.
They put her on a bed that has no sheets, and the Molty Foam label on it has been slashed to reveal mud-brown sponge underneath. It looks like the skin of a diseased dog. They hover over her and whisper: “She knows how we live and how we die. She knows. She knows.” She sees one man hitting himself repeatedly on the chest with her stethoscope, another item of hospital property that she should have held on to.
“Don’t do that,” shouts the old man in the corner with his pants around his ankles, both hands covering his privates. Half his dentures are broken to accommodate a swollen tongue that stirs like a sleepy animal trying to wriggle out of a cage. “You’ll hurt yourself,” his voice booms in the room. “Do you want to hurt yourself? You are not allowed to hurt yourself. Hurting yourself is against the law.”
Alice Bhatti sees Teddy entering the room, his Junior Mr Faisalabad arms frozen to his sides, his eyes squinting. With the arms of his T-shirt ripped to show off his heavy shoulders, he looks like a window display in an expensive butcher’s shop. The thumb on his left hand is covered in a soiled bandage.
Here comes the chief charya, she thinks.
She has seen him hanging around A&E. She knows that he is some kind of pimp for the police and medico-legal. She has always ignored him. She thinks she knows who has sent him on this rescue mission.
“Leave her alone!” he shouts. It doesn’t come out as an order, though. It is more like a hoarse, tiny shriek, as if someone has stapled his vocal cords together. Alice Bhatti has read many stories about women being hacked and burnt or simply disappearing in the corridors of the Sacred, and now Sister Hina Alvi has told her that she should consider everything in this place normal. Alice has a feeling that although she can fight and cajole these twelve loonies, this towering hulk with a funny voice is going to be her real nemesis.
“She has been sent for us,” the man with the turquoise handkerchief shouts at Teddy. They all huddle behind her. “You can’t take her away. She’ll be sent back. You’ll see that she’ll come back for us.”
“Unauthorised personnel are not allowed in the ward,” Alice screams, as Teddy scoops her up. “I still need to give them lithium sulphate.” As she is carried out of the ward, cradled in Teddy’s arms, Alice Bhatti is still gripped by the fear of not having done the job she was assigned to do. She tries to scratch his eyes out. She kicks and screams, hitting him with clenched fists, then trying to claw his face. She spouts the kind of filth that has been heard in these corridors before but only from its residents, never from the medical staff. Teddy Butt walks unfazed, jerking his head left and right to avoid her punches; they look like a boy and his father in a mock boxing match. Through it all Teddy grimaces and whistles a happy song: We are one under this flag. We are one. We are one…
Teddy is surprised that she is so light, so bony. He has carried men before, but they are heavy, even the young ones. They also squirm a lot, always begging to be let go. He feels he can carry her and walk the earth. He feels she has been sent to cure his festering thumb. Maybe to cure all the other wounds he is likely to suffer in his career. But we need to put some flesh on those bones, he thinks. He wants to nurture her. He feels he has been allowed back into a school of happiness from which he was expelled a long time ago.
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Five
Noor goes to check on Zainab in the middle of a shift and finds a swarm of flies hovering around her face, two feasting on a little dribble in the corner of her mouth. He takes the hand fan from her side table and shoos them away. He soaks an old bandage in a bowl of spirit and wipes the area around Zainab’s lips, her chin, and her wrinkled neck. Her forehead is cold and her grey eyelashes that normally flutter during her sleep are absolutely still. He turns back after depositing the wipe in a dustbin to find that Zainab’s mouth is slightly open and one of the flies has returned and is sitting on her upper lip. He tries to flick it away without touching Zainab’s face, but the fly crawls into her mouth and Zainab’s lips close. Noor stands there panicking and wondering if he should squeeze her nostrils to force her lips open so that the fly can come out. Above the thin lips and wrinkled cheeks her nose is young, wide and shiny, as if transplanted as an afterthought. As Noor’s hand touches Zainab’s nose, her lips part and the fly comes spinning out. Zainab’s eyes open and the whites do a little dance, as if laughing at Noor and asking him, What were you thinking? Did you think that I was dead?
Noor covers her face with a piece of white gauze, sprays Finis around her bed and goes away, slightly embarrassed but elated at the same time. When she pulls a trick like that, he feels a childish joy and forgets about the three types of cancer racing to gobble up her vitals.
♦
“So what is it really like? What happens when people die?” Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says: Bbai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone has added Insha’Allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bbai, the Blood Bank is in Block C.
“I have done shifts in the maternity ward. I think I have some idea. I think it’s exactly like childbirth.” Alice Bhatti removes her forearm from her face but doesn’t open her eyes. “It just starts and you push and push and then it leaves your body ruptured and exhausted and dead so you don’t really know if you are just exhausted or dead. You are surrounded by all these people who are saying all kinds of prayers, prayers to save their own lives, prayers to make it easy for you, prayers to get a nice little house for themselves in paradise while expecting you to push harder and harder. You Muslas have a prayer for everything. It’s like they are groping in the dark, hoping to get hold of something for you. It’s like you are in a race that you must finish. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose.”
Noor listens and watches Alice Bhatti’s arm, which is white and fleshy above the elbow and dark and scrawny below it. He wants to touch both parts to find out if they feel different.
“Why can’t they live a bit longer? I mean not for ever, nobody lives for ever, but if they are given the right medicines, if they are given the right diet, they should have a few more months at least.” Noor is looking away when he asks this. His query is genuine, he has thought about it for days, but he is thrown by the fact that Alice has taken off her bra along with her uniform.
Noor is feeling at home and horny at the same time, comfortable and confused. He used to wonder whether his body had been overtaken by the devil that Dr Pereira kept warning him about, whether this tingling in his loins was the work of the evil one. Now he knows it’s called growing up. Teddy has told him that if a man goes nine seconds without thinking about a woman, chances are that he is not really a man. Teddy claimed he saw it on TV.
“Even when you are eating or peeing?” a bewildered Noor had asked.
“I think they mean that you can think of a woman’s body parts, not the whole woman. Her mouth or her hair maybe,” said Teddy.
“Yes, I know what they mean. In fact nine seconds is too long a gap. I think about them all the t
ime,” Noor had replied.
Alice turns towards him and props herself on her elbow. “Don’t be a child.” Her right breast rolls and falls over her left. In all the time that Noor has thought about them, he has never imagined her breasts cuddling themselves, like two abandoned puppies confusing each other for their mother.
“It’s different for different people,” she says, her expression that of an experienced surgeon trying to choose the right scalpel. “It’s a real fucker for TB patients. It’s like a fine silk shawl being dragged through a thorn bush. It leaves their soul in shreds.” The layer of Tibet talcum powder in her armpit is streaked with sweat. She stops twisting a lock of hair with her forefinger and puts the finger on Noor’s chest. She draws a careful circle. “Heart. People with heart problems are lucky. It just stops then tries to start again and then they are dead.” She falls backwards on the stretcher, her neck lolls back, her breasts shift into their original position.
To Noor she looks the opposite of death. For about nine seconds he doesn’t think of a woman or any of her body parts.
Now he sits beside her, and the wheelie stretcher under them sways and screeches as she turns over towards him again. Noor’s behind is pressed against the abandoned puppies.
“And when you find out that it’s about to happen, what do you do? What do you tell them?”
She shrugs her shoulders with her eyes closed. “I turn off the IV or oxygen or blood or whatever it is that they are on. Why waste it on someone who is already dead?”
“You never talk to them? Don’t you ask them about their last wish, note down their last words for their families?”
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 4