She is relieved that everything has happened so suddenly; she hasn’t had the time to examine her own motives, otherwise her love story would have turned into an anthropological treatise about the survival strategies employed by Catholics in predominantly Islamic societies.
Dulhousie is a smart businessman; he can recognise ambition when he sees it, and although someone from French Colony getting a nurse’s job is not unusual, a trainee nurse coming out of the household of Choohra Joseph Bhatti, whom even other Choohras consider untouchable, is a sign that the next generation is ready to move on. Dulhousie has seen enough Bhattis in his life and, dear Lord, they shun upward mobility as if Yassoo had explicitly forbidden it. He has seen their stubbornness forged over generations, their fortitude like an infectious disease that catches them young and is their only companion right up to their deathbed. The ambitious ones might send their women to slave in the big houses, but otherwise they think that the government owes them a living, a meagre, below-the-gutter living, but still a living. And now, if they are managing to go to schools and colleges, they have already risen above the Bhatti mindset that enslaves them. If they are ready to dress better, if they want a tailored suit, they want better manners, they want better houses, they give more to the Church. For him, sewing fine dresses is not just a matter of earning an honest living but also keeping his Lord’s lambs in an optimistic mood; a community that dresses better will ultimately become a happier community. So when he sees people like Alice Bhatti walk into his shop, he doesn’t hold his nose, he doesn’t send her off to any of his half-dozen students bent over their Singers, he adjusts his glasses and greets her with a smile so bright it could light up the farther corners of French Colony.
As is his habit, Mr Dulhousie offers a short prayer before he starts to take her measurements. This is the first time Alice has been measured, and every part that Mr Dulhousie takes in with his faded measuring tape becomes more real, human, marriageable.
Alice’s body is one of those miracles of malnourishment, which has resulted in a thin, brittle bone structure with overgrown breasts. Dulhousie knows that she comes from the kind of household where starvation is passed off as fasting, where during every last week of the month dinner is bread soaked in water, where milk is taken without sugar and tea without milk, where meat is had when someone gets married or dies, where dhal and rice is a Sunday special and every fourth Sunday of the month is compulsory Lent. In these households, even empty stomachs gurgle Yassoo be praised.
With this dietary regime she has acquired a body that many girls of her age would kill for, or sometimes kill themselves while attempting to achieve. Her ribs can be counted through her shirt, her collarbones stick out like sharpened boomerangs, her ankles look like a display from an anatomy lab; but her breasts have somehow survived lack of proper nourishment, in fact seem to have thrived on the lack of a balanced diet, like Persian cantaloupes that only grow in the desert and die if it rains more than once every season. At the age of fourteen, she performed in an Easter play and at school afterwards had to stand in front of the cross to get her picture taken. An old nun quipped that she looked like a cross with tits. From then on, she has refused to go near a large cross.
Mr Dulhousie wraps the tape around her ribcage, making sure that only the tips of his fingers touch her body, and whispers, “By Lord’s grace many rich Christian ladies starve themselves to acquire this kind of figure. I remember your mother, I made her wedding suit too. Same size. I could just look up my old register and come up with the exact same dress.” He says this with a smile and then takes off his glasses and wipes a nonexistent tear from his eye. “How tragic that He took her from us in her youth. But our Lord shuts one door and opens another. At least you were able to finish your education with all that settlement money. I hear you were even living in the hostel. That is what our people need to do more. Get out more often, mingle, learn to live with people outside the Colony.”
Alice Bhatti doesn’t quite know how to deal with a neighbourhood tailor speculating on her family history. “Yes, He took her,” she mumbles.
Dulhousie gets busy with measuring her and whispers another compliment. Alice can only make out something about how it’s a privilege to have a natural figure like this.
Alice is painfully aware of this so-called privilege but has always found it a curse. Because people always stare. She is constantly pulling down the hem of her shirt to deflect their attention. What is she hoping to achieve? Does she really expect people to stop staring at her breasts and instead focus on the hem of her shirt? Or to be able to deflect their naked gaze to her fingers, fidgeting, pulling her shirt down nervously?
For work she chooses a loose shirt and then over that loose shirt covers her chest with a dupatta, makes sure that even the back of her neck is covered, ties her hair back, then makes sure that her shalwar covers her ankles. And only then does she set off for the Sacred.
Alice could probably have learned to ignore the stares, steeled herself against hungry eyes, managed to avoid the rubbernecks. She could have learned to live with the life lesson that men think that the best use of their eyes is to weigh a woman’s anatomy, but, as she embarks on her professional life, she has realised that people are not content just looking. Suddenly they want to touch her as if not sure what they have seen is real. She is aware of the fact that different rules apply outside French Colony: some people do not want to drink from the same glass that she has drunk from, others will not take a banana from the same bunch that she has taken a banana from. Their problem. She can live with being an untouchable, but she desperately hopes for the only privilege that comes with being one. That people won’t touch her without her explicit permission. But the same people who wouldn’t drink from a tap that she has touched have no problem casually poking their elbows into her breast or contorting their own bodies to rub against her heathen bottom.
They try to exploit her professional standing as well. When she started as a nurse she was quite easy with her hands, taking pulses, pressing flesh for invisible tumours, tracking down that evasive source of pain. On a field trip to Sargodha district she was stopped by elderly men again and again who wanted her to check their pulse. She obliged readily, her trained fingers lightly picking up their sturdy, peasant’s heartbeats; then she gave them the good news that they were in fine fettle. She even volunteered to look down their throats, tapped at their chests. One day she was standing beside a scenic well complete with a pair of shiny black bullocks taking weary but purposeful steps around it and little kids chasing chickens and goats when she took a stately grandfather’s wrist in her hand and closed her eyes for extra concentration. She opened her eyes to give him the good news about his robust heart when she noticed that Grandpa’s other hand had parted his dhoti and was tugging at a long, thin, flaccid penis. When she kicked the old man in his shins and started to walk away, she heard him mutter: “I’ll cut you up and throw the pieces in that well.”
Now she has lived long enough to know that cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know except her.
Alice Bhatti is not interested in understanding the rules, but she also doesn’t want to be the kind of girl who attracts the wrong kind of attention and ends up in the wrong place. She doesn’t want to be the kind of girl who is groped on buses, poked in service kitchens, who cannot walk a block without giving people the idea that she should be travelling blindfolded in a car boot. She doesn’t want to be someone who walks around demanding to be hacked to bits and buried in a back garden.
During her house job she worked in Accidents and Emergencies for six months and there was not a single day – not a single day – when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling their
water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body. A woman was something you could get as loose change in a deal made on a street corner. Rarely, but very rarely, there was a woman who settled a score with the competition. Alice had met some in the Borstal who had bumped off their husbands, taken pride in what they had done, but still managed to look like widows in mourning. To her young mind, which had stayed away from newspapers and television which covered this sport with the same relish with which they covered every other sport, it seemed the city was full of serial killers. There was a murderer in every kitchen; sometimes there was a murderer even when there was no kitchen in the house, sometimes even when there was no house, no boundary wall, no roof. Even nomads living in improvised tents could catch the honour bug and settle a game of cards that had gone on for too long in the night by trading in a woman. And what she learned was that nobody was surprised; there were no police detectives sitting around matching clues, no parliamentary subcommittees discussing ways of saving this endangered species. It was as inevitable as the fact that it will not rain in March, as preordained as the rule that no matter how many speed restriction signs you put up, somebody, somewhere will manage to get run over by a motorised vehicle.
It’s understandable that Alice Bhatti thinks about these things. She looks at these battered bodies on the floor of the A&E and tries to figure out the rules of this sport. Like any logical, thinking person she has begun to believe that there must be a reason why these women get killed and not the other fifty-six million in the land. Their names might be on the list but they manage to get away. Some of them complain of a fate worse than death but Alice Bhatti has seen many of the fresh arrivals in A&E, and she knows that getting hacked at the hands of a father, lover, brother is definitely a fate worse than being run over, accidentally, by a truck driven by your own offspring.
Alice Bhatti has made her observations and thinks she has identified the type of woman who attracts the wrong kind of attention, who stumbles from one man who wants to slap her to another man who wants to chop off her nose to that final man, the last inevitable man, who wants to slash her throat.
And she doesn’t want to be that kind of woman.
She knows that a lot of the time these women are beautiful. Not ordinary beautiful but a strange kind of beauty that calls attention to itself. They could be wearing a hijab or covered in swathes of loose, man-repelling fabric and they would still draw attention to themselves. It is the kind of beauty that screams, “Look, I am here, look, I am sitting, now I am standing, these are my legs, I am walking on my legs, this is my neck, can you feel the ice-cold Pepsi going down my throat, here is my nose, do you think it will look better with a nose ring?” When they open their mouths they sound common enough, but their eyes look at the person they speak to with regal contempt: aren’t you sad you are not me? Aren’t you sad you can’t have me? Is your life worth living? I am leaving now, I have places to go, things to do, private things, intimate things, with other people, not with you. You can stay here and live your miserable life. You can keep looking as I walk on these legs and go away from you.
Of course you don’t have to be a head-turning beauty or possess a pair of eyes that taunt to end up on the A&E’s floor. Alice Bhatti has seen women so old, so haggard, so beaten by life that cutting them seems like a waste of time. But they do it anyway.
Alice Bhatti is not taking any chances. She doesn’t want to be that kind of woman.
She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences so that she is not misunderstood. She chooses her words carefully, and if someone addresses her in Punjabi, she answers in Urdu, because an exchange in her mother tongue might be considered a promise of intimacy. She uses English for medical terms only, because she feels if she uses a word of English in her conversation she might be considered a bit forward. When she walks she walks with slightly hurried steps, as if she has an important but innocent appointment to keep. She avoids eye contact, she looks slightly over people’s heads as if looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment. She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her legs might send the wrong signal. After all, this is not the kind of thing where you can leave your actions to subjective interpretations. She never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something.
♦
Mr Dulhousie is looking at her with a benign smile as she takes out crumpled hundred-rupee notes and puts them on the desk in front of him. She has also perfected no-touch transactions. If your fingers touch someone’s fingers, what might they make of it?
Before leaving the shop, she gives Dulhousie the only instruction that matters to her. “When you stitch the shirt, can you please make my privileges look a bit flat?”
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Thirteen
Teddy Butt’s G Squad family, having failed to arrange a proper wedding party for him, try to give him a proper wedding night, the kind they would have liked to have for themselves. Most of them come from upcountry, where their own wedding involved only a telegram from home saying apply for leave, send money, you are getting married on such and such day. So it’s understandable that they want to celebrate the first ever love marriage in G Squad in style. They raided the stolen property store in their own offices, haggled with some flower sellers, threatened to throw the owner of a bedware store into jail, and in a last generous bid to give Teddy a perfect start in his married life, picked the locks of a crockery warehouse.
When Teddy comes to fetch Alice from the Sacred, she has changed into her two-piece wedding dress stitched by Mr Dulhousie.
“Where is Madame Bhatti going?” Noor asks her.
“Somewhere nice, I hope,” she says.
♦
When Teddy, with Alice on his arm, enters his flat in Al-Aman apartments, he finds himself surrounded by strings of marigolds hanging from the ceiling. Alice notices that some of these strings are made of paper flowers. There are a few macrame ones too. On the wall in the living room, red ribbons are Scotch Taped to read Happy WeddingS.
Although Teddy isn’t an official member of the squad – no rank, no promotions, no pension plan – they take good care of him. In return, he acts as a crime-scene cleaner, comforter, errand boy, towel holder, cheerleader, doorstopper, gun-cleaner, replacement court witness, proxy prisoner, fourth card player, but more importantly a companion to people who have been caught but not yet killed, a companion for the passengers on their last journey.
“Soothing the doomed slut” is the nearest he has come to having a job description.
Teddy expected something from them for his wedding, maybe an invitation to use one of the safe houses for his honeymoon, or some trinkets, and he definitely expected some advice about life after marriage. He gets all of that and a house full of flowers. They have decided to give him a sizeable dowry. A dinner service for his grubby single-stove kitchen, half a dozen teacups with saucers, even a matching tea cosy, Chinese blankets with wild animal prints, silk bedsheets and a carton full of towels, marked For Export Only.
♦
After the ceremony on the submarine and before Alice arrived at his flat, they took him to a safe house for what they called a warm-up night. “We were looking for a virgin for this special occasion, but then Inspector Malangi reminded us that our bhabi is Yassoo’s follower, so we went looking for a Christian virgin. And you know what the pimp said? He said the last one was taken more than two thousand years ago.”
Malangi, being an elderly gentleman and the founder
of the squad, only smiled, while the others slapped their thighs and laughed out loud. Then they got busy with a game of cards that would decide their turn; it was understood that Teddy Butt being the bridegroom would obviously get to go first. They were models of good behaviour that night and the party broke up at four in the morning with a still unfinished quarter-bottle of Murree Millennium.
The only note of discord came when the Christian girl confessed after two drinks that she was actually a Hindu from Nepal. Malangi became sulky and threatened to set police dogs on her, then scolded his colleagues. “First I get away from one wife and three daughters, that is four women, just to be with my friends. And I end up with yet another woman who, like all other women, lies and cheats. Why didn’t I just stay home?”
The girl was businesslike with them, encouraging them to take their game of cards seriously, giving special attention to the bridegroom. And when she told them that she knew how to say fuck in eight languages, they all cracked up and insisted on repeating it after her in a chorus. The night ended with them shouting fok jou, na ma low, khahar kosse, chodhru, ma ki kir k.
And yes there was marital advice for him, if only as an afterthought. But it sounded sincere and urgent.
“No disrespect to our bhabi, your wife is just like our sister but these mushkis are very hot, so save yourself. You have worked hard on this body, she’ll suck all the juices from your bones.”
“Go easy, take breaks, come with us on little trips.”
“Come and take a boy from our lock-up occasionally. It keeps the balance in the universe.”
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 10