Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

by Mohammed Hanif

  She opens her eyes and looks at Noor as if he has suggested a sexual act that she has never heard of.

  “Do you know how much I get paid in this hospital?”

  Noor feels ashamed of himself. He feels as if he has just accused her of not doing her duty properly.

  “It’s not as if they are going to write me into their will.” She sighs. “Sometimes I read the kalima, if they look the type or if they ask for it. Sometimes if they are in a stupor I read it anyway, because I know that if they could talk and believe that they were about to die, they would ask for it.”

  “You know the kalima?” Noor asks her. The fact that this Catholic girl who hates all Muslims and most of their Catholic cousins could be reciting the kalima to the almost dead depresses him.

  “Silly boy, there are lots of things that I know and you don’t. You’ll learn.”

  Alice turns onto her other side. Now Noor is back to back with her and he can feel her quivering spine. She lies still and waits. Noor knows she wants to be asked something. Sometimes she wants to tell him something. But she wants to be asked first.

  “You are hiding something from me,” Noor says. This has happened with Zainab too, lots of times. He has to guess and ask her the right question. Women talk differently. Boys tell anybody anything; in fact mostly they do things so that they can tell somebody. Even if people don’t want to hear. But women want to be asked. Properly. He has learnt that in the Borstal.

  Alice turns her face and looks at Noor, slightly startled, as if he has addressed her by another name.

  “I can look at someone’s face and tell.”

  “I can too.” Noor tries to cheer her up. “Ortho Sir would rather be an imam in Toronto and convert all Canadians. Dr Pereira wants to write a book about his life but is too shy and hopes someone else will write it. He actually thinks he is training me for the purpose. Sister Hina Alvi thinks she can run this country better than the Bhuttos. And who knows, she probably can. At least she knows when to keep her mouth shut.”

  Alice Bhatti is not interested in Noor’s talents. She needs to tell him something.

  “I can look at somebody’s face and tell how they are going to die.”

  “Easy if you have their medical records in front of you.” Noor has a strange feeling that he must not find out whatever it is that she is trying to tell him. Sometimes it’s good not to know things. “If a diabetic’s sugar level is point six plus and BP lower than one twenty, I can tell his relatives that he’ll collapse in the bathroom because of heart failure.”

  Alice Bhatti puts both her hands on the edge of the stretcher and bends down. Noor can see a layer of talcum powder between her breasts as well. He’s not thinking of women or their body parts. It doesn’t do anything for him. Suddenly he feels no desire. He feels like a child who is about to be told a secret about grown-ups that he doesn’t really want to know.

  “No. Not patients. People. Ordinary people on the streets. I just know. I look at their face and then I see their dead face and I know how they will die.”

  “Like your father? Didn’t Mr Bhatti cure people by reciting something? You showed me in the Borstal with a candle and a glass of water.”

  “Yes, he had only one trick. For stomach ulcers… but sadly not many people had stomach ulcers in French Colony. It’s a rich man’s disease.”

  “You could do better. You could start a business. Send us your photo and we’ll tell you how you are going to die. You could make lots of money. You can have your own Friday column in a newspaper. You can have your own segment on Telefun.”

  “I can’t tell from photos,” Alice Bhatti says. “I have seen hundreds of pictures of Yassoo all my life, but I still can’t tell how he died.”

  Noor makes a last effort to save himself from her knowledge of death. He removes himself from the stretcher, walks around it, stands in front of her and mimes a hammer hitting a nail into a cross. Streaks of sweat are now running across the talcum-powder patch. She seems tired of having seen so many dead faces.

  “I told you I can’t tell from photos. I can’t tell about babies and young boys, because they always die suddenly.”

  “Have you looked in the mirror?” Noor knows, has known all along, that this is the question he is supposed to ask. He knows that he could have asked about himself, but he has already been dismissed as a young boy, and young boys die suddenly, reason not important, and reasons can change at the last moment anyway.

  She stands up and crosses her arms over her chest and squeezes them as if trying to steel herself against this cruel world.

  “Yes, I look in the mirror. I don’t see anything.”

  Noor is relieved. He can’t imagine Alice Bhatti dead. With her flushed cheeks, and the scar on her chin glowing, she looks like everything that is not death. “Doctors can’t always heal themselves,” he says. “Your Yassoo couldn’t have resurrected himself. Moses couldn’t have baked all that manna by himself.” He could have gone on in his attempt to change the subject and narrate the world history of unintended consequences, but he looks at her pale face and stops.

  Her voice comes out different. Scared.

  “It’s not a miracle. It’s a bad dream. Actually I can see something in the mirror. But I don’t recognise it. It’s not me, it’s not even a human face. It’s a ghoul. I get frightened.”

  “Don’t be frightened of your own reflection. We all have bad moments in front of the mirror,” says Noor. “You should probably get married. I have heard that a good husband is the only cure for bad dreams. You know why? Because then you are sleeping with your bad dream.”

  ∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧

  Six

  The day Joseph Bhatti is required to go to court for his daughter’s bail hearing, he goes looking for a lawyer. He hasn’t got any money on him, but he has done his homework and brought his satchel that contains the tools of his craft. He stands outside the lawyer’s office and reads a hand-painted sign on a piece of cardboard. It seems the lawyer can’t afford to employ an assistant or even a signboard painter. The piece of cardboard on the door reads: S.M. Qadri, MA, LLB, civil, criminal, property, divorce, cut-price oath commissioner.

  Mr MA LLB is sitting in his chair contemplating a full glass of milk.

  “Stomach ulcers?” Joseph Bhatti asks without greeting him. “You have tried everything.”

  The lawyer shakes his head mournfully. “I have tried everything. Allopathic, homeopathic, hakims, black magic type things even: white pigeon’s blood mixed with young lizard’s tail ash. Disgusting stuff. Probably illegal, too.”

  Joseph Bhatti listens patiently, then pulls up a chair and sits down. “Milk. Yes, it works. For a little while maybe. But not everyone likes milk.”

  The lawyer clutches the glass of milk as if about to throw it in Joseph Bhatti’s face, then gently pushes it aside. “The only thing that works. But only two hours. And it tastes like castor oil. Have you ever tasted castor oil? My mouth tastes of castor oil all day. I don’t know for what sins I am being punished. I spend half my life trying not to throw up.”

  Joseph Bhatti notices a calendar on the wall behind the lawyer. The calendar has a camel silhouetted against a desert sunset and some Arabic calligraphy. Joseph Bhatti has heard from someone that there is not a single camel in the Musla book, and yet they can’t seem to get them out of their minds. What has Musla God got to do with camels? Why are they stuck on this ugly beast? What’s wrong with horses? What’s wrong with horses with wings? Hell, what’s wrong with trains? Why all this hooves and humps pornography? Do they really think their creator lives in a desert and travels on this ugly, vicious animal? There was a time in Joseph Bhatti’s life when he could have stood at a street corner and made a speech about camels, but these days you never know. Especially with people who like calendars with tastefully photographed camels.

  He takes his glass tumbler, his candle and matchbox from his satchel and lines them up on the table, as if about to perform a little magic show for
the lawyer.

  The lawyer looks at the tools of his trade doubtfully and says, “Will it hurt?”

  “Not if you get my daughter Alice Bhatti out on bail. She is appearing in Session Court Four this afternoon. Cooked-up charges of assaulting and causing grievous bodily harm. Try and stay still, it might tickle a bit.”

  The table is cleared, the lawyer takes off his shirt and lies down. Joseph lights the candle, puts it in the lawyer’s navel, and stares at it and slowly counts to ten. Then he puts the glass jar on the candle, and as the flame goes out and the jar is filled with swirls of milky-white smoke, he shuts his eyes and starts to recite Sura Asar. By the declining day, man is in a state of loss…

  The lawyer looks at him in panic, as if he has been conned into joining a dangerous cult. He is a street lawyer and he has seen all kinds of perverts in his business, but a Christian Choohra reciting the Holy Quran with the zeal of a novice mullah, he has never seen. He is not even sure if it’s legal.

  ♦

  In a free market, it’s not always the best person who reaches the top, but if someone manages to, people find out. Stop anyone hunched over a blocked drain in this part of the city and ask them who is the best. They won’t name a company, or their uncle, or the chief janitor in the Municipal Corporation; they’ll say Joseph Bhatti of French Colony. Even in French Colony, not many are born with the instinct to smell a sewer and tell what’s blocking it. He is retired now, but they still call him when they can’t figure out what’s stuck in the bowels of a gutter. He still goes out during downpours and works voluntarily, because rains are rare in this part and they bring their own unique challenges. Suddenly you are not just making people’s lives easier, you are saving lives.

  The kind of rains they get here would delight Noah.

  Like in every other profession, Joseph Bhatti had risen to the top through passion, dedication and natural talent, all of which were very rare in his line of work. God needed prophets, he tells his co-workers, so that they could take care of your refuse, otherwise humanity would have drowned in it. But it’s not his deft touch with a blocked drain that impresses the church. Reverend Philip suspects him of being a closet Musla. What kind of Catholic goes around curing stomach ailments by reciting verses from the Quran and lighting candles?

  French Colony has a history of producing not just sound sanitary professionals, but also idiot saints every few years. One day you are down in the gutters and smell like a leftover from some plague, and the next moment you are a healer and a prophet with people nailing jasmine garlands to your door. You’ve got a queue of people outside your shack who want you to heal their measles, you double people’s savings, predict the correct cricket scores and soon your reputation spreads to the outskirts of French Colony, which brings in the non-believers who are in financial or love trouble and an occasional flash car, and soon Father Philip starts inserting jibes in his sermon about sorcerers who are leading people away from Lord Yassoo’s path.

  Joseph Bhatti has never made any claims. People only believe one thing about this man with a full head of shiny grey hair and a jet-black moustache: that he has a ninety per cent record of curing stomach ulcers by chanting some Musla prayers. Nothing more. Nothing less. He can’t secure you an Italian visa, he can’t bring your spurned lover back, he can’t make a venomous boss give you a bonus. He is hopeless when it comes to college exams, he has no advice for warring sisters-in-law or hopeless young men competing for the favours of the same whore. When people with any ailment that is not a stomach ulcer approach him he shakes his head, looks towards the sky and asks: “When was the last time it rained in this city?” And when they remind him that it was only last year he says: “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t order that rain to fall. I am not a magician, I am a Choohra. I just recite His words but I can’t hold Him to His words. To tell you the truth, I don’t even understand His words. I just light a candle and cover it with a glass jar and mumble His words. He is the one who cures.”

  ♦

  When Joseph Bhatti sees Alice at her bail hearing in the session court, he sees something of himself in her. Alice Bhatti carries her handcuffs lightly, as if she is wearing glass bangles. She treats the policewomen as if they were her personal bodyguards, and she looks at the judge as if to say, how can a man so fat, so ugly, wearing such a dandruff-covered black robe sit in judgement on her?

  Joseph Bhatti looks around the court to see if there are any acquaintances present for the hearing. Since the case doesn’t involve any claims of religious discrimination, any acts of blasphemy or disputed church lands, nobody from Lord’s Lawyers or any of the human rights organisations has showed up. Alice Bhatti avoids eye contact with him. He feels a twinge of failure, a bit like going to see an old sweeper friend only to find out that he has set up a laundry shop full of spotless white washing machines, put up a neon sign and hired other sweepers to sweep the floor. Or running into others who have tried to find an opening in the church food chain, donned robes and are on their way to becoming a bishop of somewhere or serving their Lord in some picturesque Italian village. He has seen the postcards they send, and it seems to him that maybe Yassoo wasn’t the eternal saviour of all mankind but a visa officer. People from the Bhatti clan have also caught the bug. He has seen their sons and daughters become cooks in four-star hotels, doctors, guitar players, even professors. He has seen them take on Musla names, move out of French Colony and become members of some other species. He has never shown any such ambition. “I am not proud of what I do. I am not ashamed of what I do. This is who I am,” he often told Alice when she started nursing school. He did save up for Alice, he did send her to school, but he never dreamed of an old age where he would sit at home and live off her income. And he definitely never dreamed of sitting in a court hearing his daughter being charged with attempted murder. Mostly he has been an absentee father, almost embarrassed to come home to a daughter who tries to behave like a son and – like all sons – falls short.

  The court clerk announces the State vs Alice Bhatti: Alice Bhatti bazir bo. Alice walks into the dock with her head held high, handcuffs clinking, staring purposefully at the judge as if saying: you?

  There, Joseph Bhatti tells himself with a certain pride. That’s my daughter. “Your daughter is very pretty,” whispers the lawyer in his ear. And then Joseph feels sad: that’s all his daughter is good at, looking pretty and bashing up octogenarian professionals. As if being beautiful gives her the right to behave badly. What kind of father feels pride at his daughter strutting around in a law court facing charges of disorderly behaviour and causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder?

  Joseph Bhatti has himself faced such accusations most of his life. What kind of sweeper goes out and cleans the city on his days off? What kind of Christian never turns up for Sunday service? What kind of Bhatti goes around healing stomach ulcers by lighting candles and reciting Musla verses? When his back was straight and his opium intake regular and pure, he would thump his chest and say: “This kind of man. Joseph Bhatti Choohra. We were here before the Christians came, before the Muslas came. Even before the Hindus came. I am not just the son of this soil. I am the soil. Yes, I am Joseph Bhatti Choohra.”

  It’s only when Alice Bhatti is about to be led away and S.M. Qadri whispers a long-winded explanation in his ear and proclaims that the law is the eternal whore for those who can pay for its upkeep that Joseph Bhatti realises that Alice has been found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

  When the judge leaves his chair and everyone present in the court rises, Joseph Bhatti keeps sitting in petty defiance, keeps looking at Alice, hoping that she’ll look towards him, maybe wave a hand, acknowledge the fact that he came, that he brought a lawyer with him. Alice does turn around, but only to stare at the judge, then she spits on the floor of the court and rushes out, two fat policewomen trying to keep pace with her.

  ♦

  Alice comes home four months early, not because of Reverend Philip’s int
ervention as people assumed, but because all women prisoners get their term reduced by four months when someone important dies. Joseph makes her an omelette and puts it in front of her as if she had gone for a sleepover at a friend’s house and has come back complaining of the bad food she was fed there.

  “I found a baby in the main drain at the Ideal Housing Society,” he says, pushing a piece of cold toast towards her. Alice is not used to discussing his work with him. She is not used to talking about his work to anyone. In the Borstal her standard reply to any question about her father was: he works for the Municipal Corporation. And then she would ask them, “What does your father do? Doesn’t he work for the Corporation too?” As if not working for the Corporation was like being homeless.

  “It was in a plastic shopping bag, just this big.” He stretches his palm, moves his other hand along his forearm, trying to get the size of the baby in the plastic shopping bag right. “Wasn’t much bigger than a kitten.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. I think it’s a sign.”

  Alice pushes her plate aside. She feels she is still in the Borstal, taking bullshit because she has to, but knowing when to stop. “Sign of what? I think it’s a sign that there is no place a woman can go and deliver a baby, that there is no place for her even when her water is breaking. It’s a sign that human life can be flushed down the toilet. It’s a sign that nobody gives a fuck about signs.” In her head she scolds herself: she shouldn’t have used the F-word. But in the Borstal you couldn’t speak a whole sentence without saying the F-word and hope to be heard.

  Alice can’t fathom Joseph’s new love for signs, symbols, mixed-up theology picked from random sermons, because he had always maintained the swagger of a Choohra, an untouchable with attitude, not the demeanour of a washed, devout Sunday Catholic. When Dr Pereira, in his days of community work, tried to get him off the opium, he said, “If I am going to be called a bhangi all my life, I might as well have some bhang.” And after Dr Pereira left, he launched into a rant against him. “Look at him lecturing us; we are the children of this land, we have lived here for thousands of years and they are just Goan kachra that drifted here on the waves of the Arabian Sea. Now they’ll teach us how to be Yassoo’s children when they are embarrassed by the fact that we are supposed to be brothers in faith. They’ll teach us good manners. What are they? Our nannies? You know what they think? They think we are shit-cleaners. Yes, we are shit-cleaners, but what are they? Shit.”