♦
“This thumb is festering,” Alice Bhatti had said, without any reference to their earlier attempt at gunpoint romance. “How did you manage to break it in so many pieces?”
“Yes, Teddy,” Noor chimed in. “You shouldn’t go around putting your hand in dangerous places. What were you trying to do? Make mincemeat for Inspector Malangi?”
Alice Bhatti cleaned the wound with a cotton bud soaked in spirit. “You need a course of six antibiotic injections. Miss one and we’ll have to start all over again.”
It was at that moment that Noor realised that Alice had crossed the line that care providers are supposed to watch out for. It was the kind of moment that professionals are trained to take in their stride, and this was unprofessional behaviour of the most basic kind. You are supposed to manage pain, not share it. Cutting, disinfecting, injecting, stitching is all in a day’s work. But here, when Teddy lies with his face down on the stretcher, on this very shaky wheelie stretcher on which Alice and Noor have shared their Borstal memories, something shifts in Alice’s heart. Teddy’s hands flail helplessly in the air to stave off the needle. He clenches his hairless butt, his face contorts into a cartoonish grimace, his hands close into tight fists, this bundle of hard muscle tries to save himself from the tiny prick of pain; this is when Alice Bhatti feels that feeling that people call a tender moment, the feeling that you feel when a baby is about to fall off a bed and your instinctive reaction is to scoop it up in your arms. Sister Alice obviously doesn’t scoop Teddy into her arms, but she puts her hand on his shoulder, an instinctive, comforting touch, not a touch that promises copulation, or the kind of touch that hints at a lifetime together and healthy babies winning school prizes, but a casual touch that says, look that was all, that was all the pain I was going to cause you, look, it doesn’t hurt any more, does it?
But this small, spontaneous gesture is enough to convince Noor that Teddy is in love, and that his love has been accepted and reciprocated. Not only is he in love, but Alice Bhatti approves this love, accepts it with her hand on his shoulder, and believes that their hearts have been connected somehow in this moment through the needle injecting that fluid into his body which will protect him against all infections. Now their hearts must remain connected till the time one of the two stops beating.
Teddy is also determined to banish all competition, to protect this tender shoot of love against every kind of bad weather.
Teddy doesn’t really think that Noor is competition, but he looks at him and sizes him up: why is this boy always glued to Alice’s side? Teddy will have to talk to him soon.
Together what will they become? Alice Bhatti Butt? Alice Butt? Alice Teddy Butt?
There are people in his life who call him Teddy and there are people in his life who call him Butt Sahib. When someone addresses him as Teddy Butt Sahib, he knows that he’ll be asked to do something humiliating. Nobody has ever called Alice Bhatti anything but Alice, Sister Alice or – in private wards – Sister Bhatti. Mostly people call her ‘daughter’ or ‘sister’ and then do exactly what they would do with their own sisters and daughters: they treat her like a slave they bought at a clearance sale.
Noor might be only seventeen but he knows about love, what it entails: to see the beloved drink water, to see them open their eyes, to try and guess if they are asleep or awake, to try and guess what dream they are dreaming when they are asleep, to kiss somebody when they are sleeping, to feel their early-morning nausea, to feel scared when they are scared, to feel your ears get hot when they are embarrassed.
Noor is a man; he thinks he knows that Teddy can’t get out of that nine-second cycle. But what does Alice see in him? Does she like him because he rescued her from Charya Ward? But it was Noor who first warned her and then sent him in. Do you want to marry someone because they pulled a gun at you and professed their undying love? This whole business of love, he concludes, is a protection racket, like paying your weekly bhatta to your local hoodlum so that you are not mugged on your own street.
Noor knows all of this, but even when he sees them walk out of the Sacred gate hand in hand, he can’t imagine them feeling any of those things for each other. He can’t imagine reading their names together except maybe in a tragic news headline.
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Eleven
“I have a surprise for you,” Teddy Butt tells Alice fifteen minutes before she is about to finish her last shift before Ash Wednesday. Joseph Bhatti had placed a box of sweets in the kitchen this morning and she had found a rosary hanging from her doorknob. She likes it when Joseph Bhatti tries to play her mother; but she can’t stand it when he expects her to play her own mother. She doesn’t mind starving herself for the day, but what’s the point of singing There is no fees in the school of the crucified one along with a couple of hundred other people most of whom have never seen the inside of a school?
Teddy is dressed in starched white shalwar qameez and embroidered shoes and looks like he is going to attend someone’s engagement party. Alice Bhatti is not easily surprised. Teddy has been writing her lovesick notes that she suspects are copied from 100 Best Love Songs of the Past Twenty Years but she thinks he should get credit for trying. Any man who reaches for a book when he thinks about you is a man that you should think about. She has been giving him an occasional smile and Lexatonils and accepting small trinkets with a wry smile; they have reached a level of resigned intimacy.
“Surprise me,” she says, sounding bored and not believing for a moment that Teddy is capable of an original thought. Teddy Butt’s ideas of love are derived from any song that might be topping the charts at the time. His ideas about the logistics of love are learnt from the wildlife documentaries he watches on National Geographic, lions copulating by the lakeside and grasshoppers serenading other grasshoppers while licking morning dew off their wings. Sometimes he dreams of carrying Alice in his jaws like when a lioness transports her cub to a safe place.
Not another pink teddy bear, not another singing greetings card, not another bargain from the perfume bazaar, and definitely nothing from Gentlemen’s Squad’s lost and found stores, she secretly hopes. She suspects that he gets his gift ideas from the same shopping channel where he orders his protein supplements. But she also feels that she is his teacher and must not discourage him. He is learning. At least he is turning up to meet her without pretending to be sick. And without his Mauser.
She has been expecting to be asked for something. She is not sure what. Maybe she’ll be invited out for lunch in one of those Irani cafes where couples sit behind curtained booths. She has been apprehensive that she might be asked to go to the zoo to see the new pair of South African lion cubs that Teddy has been obsessing about. She doesn’t really know what her answer would be but she has been hoping that she’ll have an answer when she is asked. Now she is being asked.
“You have to shut your eyes first,” he says in a lilting voice, looking into her eyes. Either he has been mixing his Lexatonil with something else, or he is just sleepy with love. A black butterfly appears out of nowhere and does a little dance between their locked eyes before it flies away. Alice likes this swirl of black velvet so close to her face. She imagines herself submerged in a sea of black butterflies. She is intrigued. She shuts her eyes properly. And as soon as she does, she begins to yearn for a proper surprise. If she was dreading a cheap little trinket before, now suddenly she wants an oil-tanker-sized surprise. She wants a surprise so big and so heavy it could flatten her in the middle of the road. She wants a tied-to-a-rocket-and-launched-into-space kind of surprise. She wonders why she isn’t thinking of flowers and candy and why she suddenly yearns for large, heavy, speedy objects. It’s futile to predict what love will make of you, but sometimes it brings you things you never knew you wanted. One moment all you want is a warm shower, and the next you are offering your lover your chest to urinate on. “Yes, surprise me,” she whispers.
He takes her left hand and wraps it around the middle f
inger of his right hand and asks her to hold on to it.
She has checked his pulse before. She has dressed his mangled thumb, which initially looked like a dog had chewed it and spat it out. He has pretended to read her palm: Oh, the distance between your thumb and forefinger, that’s a sign of your compulsively generous nature. I have never seen such a generous hand. And this thumb, such willpower, leadership qualities, stubborn maybe. This is definitely a Gandhi hand. Always principles over pleasure. Now show me the other one. But never have they held hands without a tacitly agreed cover story. She feels as if she is holding a live little animal. She clutches it tightly.
“You’ll have to walk with me. Walk carefully,” Teddy says.
As she emerges from the A&E department, Alice catches a whiff of rotten fruit, and a familiar old woman’s voice jeers at her from a distance: “Look at you playing blind man while your patients are dying out here. I am dying out here. Give me something for the night. The nights are becoming longer.”
Alice Bhatti smiles with her eyes shut. It is the old legless junkie who goes around on a skateboard and is always threatening to start swallowing broken electric light bulbs. “Wash your arse once a week,” she shouts back. “That’s all you need. Nobody dies of lice.”
“Kafirs have all the fun in this country. This country was made for Muslims, and poor Muslims can’t even get any Valium around here,” the old woman shouts back at her.
Alice Bhatti walks on. She doesn’t walk very carefully. She doesn’t want a calibrated, mild kind of surprise. She wants to rush headlong towards her destiny and surprise it before it can surprise her.
In the hospital compound where patients with all kinds of impairments walk around with all kinds of supports – teenage boys taking piggyback rides on their old fathers’ backs, teenage girls carrying their mothers on improvised stretchers, the polio battalion steering their skateboards – Alice walking with her eyes shut, holding on to Teddy’s finger, is a very ordinary sight.
Teddy puts a stiff, shy hand on her back and helps her into a waiting autorickshaw. Alice doesn’t want to hear whatever it is that Teddy is whispering to the rickshaw driver. She wants their destination to be a surprise. She feels the tincture-disease-hunger smell receding as the rickshaw bumps and swerves its way through heavy traffic. It doesn’t occur to her to let go of Teddy’s finger; she squeezes it every time the rickshaw jumps over a speed breaker. She lets her body press into his every time the rickshaw takes a tight corner. She feels Teddy’s whole body stiffen, and tremble lightly at every turn. Alice feels she can go anywhere pressed against this hard, warm, trembling body draped in starched cotton.
The traffic thins, the rickshaw drives faster, the air becomes salty and moist. A fine shower occasionally sprays her face. The rickshaw stops. Teddy helps her out. She shivers slightly when he puts his hand on the small of her back to give her support.
She wishes for a lifetime of alighting from rickshaws with his hand on her back.
She knows that she is on a boat, a motorboat. She has never been on a boat before. Now she remembers where this surprise might have originated. During a random conversation with Teddy on a slow afternoon, she vaguely remembers telling him that she has never been on the sea. “Surely everybody has been to the sea. It’s right there,” he had said. “No, you fool, I have been to the beach but I have never been on a boat,” she had replied. “All those waves rocking you up and down. Must be fun.”
He has remembered something she mentioned to fill an awkward silence between them. She feels angry for a moment. What right does he have to act out her private little whims? Then a wave hits the boat and she finds herself holding on to his shoulder. Seawater sprays her face and she doesn’t have to worry about her stinging eyes. Seawater washes away her tears.
“Should we get married?” Teddy asks in a whisper, but she hears it clearly above the roar of the sea.
“Here?” she shouts.
“No. No.” He sounds reassuring, trying to clear up a minor misunderstanding. “There.” He points to the distant blurred shape of a giant boat, which seems to have emerged from the depths of the sea. “But you promised to keep your eyes shut.”
Whatever happens afterwards, actually happens in this moment. Alice Bhatti wanted a solid, feet-on-the-ground-type surprise. But after the ride on the motorboat, they climb a ladder, and when she opens her eyes, instead of the certitude of a carpeted road or the soft sand of a beach, she finds her feet unsteady on the stern of a bobbing submarine on the very moody waves of the Arabian Sea.
Who knows what she was really hoping for? Maybe a walk by the seaside, maybe a corn on the cob while watching a monkey do a gun salute, as the waves lapped around her ankles; what she ended up with was an impromptu marriage proposal followed by an impromptu wedding in the middle of the Arabian Sea.
She couldn’t have guessed it. The surprise was, well, a surprise.
The story of what happened between them on that submarine has many versions, mostly narrated by Alice. Teddy has only one version and he always sticks to it: I have friends in the police who know some people who know people in the Coastguards who work with people who work in submarines. They’re like a family. When she opened her eyes, Alice squealed with delight, but then she didn’t. They served biryani. She chose her own name. Aliya. No, it wasn’t pre-planned. Who can plan something like that? How come there was an imam to perform the nuptials on a submarine? That’s plain ignorance about naval matters. There is always an imam on every submarine. She gave her consent. It was she who said that she’d go back to her house in French Colony and move in with me in a few days. I could have waited for as long as it took her. It wasn’t as if I was in a hurry to jump into bed with her. A man thinks of a woman every nine seconds but he doesn’t marry them all.
If you are being asked to marry someone on a submarine that may or may not be operational, you probably can’t squeal for long. You have decisions to make, or maybe you have already made decisions by travelling this far.
They go down a narrow staircase. The dining cabin has a slim table with seats that you can only put half your arse on.
Alice would never mention squealing. But her versions would keep changing depending on who her audience was. She would never admit to converting and would always insist that religion was never mentioned. She would admit that she did say ‘yes’ thrice. She was not sure whether she said yes to the question about taking Teddy as her husband in exchange for a suspended dowry of thirty-two rupees, or if she said yes when in a moment of confusion someone started addressing her as Aliya. Her versions would vary. Sometimes she would recite half a Kalima, which would lead people to joke, in bad taste of course, that maybe she became half a Muslim. The only thing she would always remain consistent about was that there were dozens of sailors in white shalwar qameezes, all calling her bhabi, and that there were three seagulls in the sky squawking like old friends trying to put some sense into her head and stop the wedding.
People asked her: “What does a submarine look like from the inside? Where do they keep their torpedoes? Is it true that the junior sailors have to sleep standing up?” And she would always get irritated with them because she thought they were interested only in trivia. “It looked like a dead eel from the outside and inside smelled of sailors’ farts,” she would say.
What Teddy and Alice would never know was that the smell of Alice Bhatti’s jasmine bracelet lingered in the submarine for days. Sometimes there were heated discussions, once even a punch-up, about the exact colour of her lipstick. She was quite fair-skinned for a Christian, a midshipman insisted. There was the obvious gossip about how a police tout like Teddy Butt got lucky.
There was a consensus on one point, though: that Alice didn’t look or behave like a typical Christian lady, although she was the only Christian lady they would ever meet in their entire lives.
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Twelve
Alice Bhatti walks past the shop owned by Jesus Bhatti, who
sells cigarettes, milk and, when business is bad, pints of his own blood at the Sacred. Next to the shop is an empty shack from where the only entrepreneur in French Colony used to operate, stealing manhole covers and then selling them back to the Corporation. The open drain is clogged, its surface shimmering with all the plastic bags dumped in it. When Alice Bhatti was still a student, she used to mull over this question: if half the population of French Colony is responsible for clearing the garbage from the whole city, how come they can’t keep their own streets clean? Now she knows better and walks carefully trying to avoid the open sewers. She observes a gang of cats jumping the drain, playing a lazy game of catch.
Every married life in French Colony starts with a trip to the tailor’s shop, and this is where Alice Bhatti is going: to Dulhousie Tailoring, the only business in French Colony that has been around for forty years and also has a branch in Lahore and, according to the signboard outside the shop, now one in Toronto as well. She waits for a moment outside and through the frosted glass door surveys the inside, full of shadows hunched over sewing machines. The shop’s glass doors keep out the stench, or ‘the French perfume’ as outsiders call it. The aroma of steaming irons pressing Lawrencepur wool makes the customers feel rich, or at least tricks them into believing that they are not in French Colony any more. Senior Dulhousie has spent his life stitching cassocks for clergy, suits for churchgoing Catholic businessmen and wedding dresses for their daughters. Alice has never stepped inside the shop before, always aware that her father is as much of a Choohra in her own colony as he is outside it. By studying seven books in four years and marrying a semi-employed Musla, she is hoping to rise above the stench that is her daily bread. While in Borstal, she never missed her own home. She missed a home that she didn’t have as yet. She would hear the stories of other inmates who had tried to kill their husband or husband’s mistress or mistress’s husband and these stories always had at the centre a home: a hand pump, a stove, a charpoy or a little courtyard with a jasmine plant. Was that what she was yearning for, a home she could call her own?
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