The sweeper just has to go out and mention it to an ambulance driver whose wife has had three miscarriages, and the news start spreading like a riot, because once it starts, it finds its own momentum and travels through lapsed believers who have been waiting for a sign, and then it reaches the really needy ones who can’t afford to lose hope. Soon it isn’t just the dead babies who are getting a second chance at the Sacred. According to the rumours, there are miraculous cures for advanced diabetes, and pancreatic cancer heals itself if you manage to get past the OPD. Some obese people are seen hobbling around the courtyard hoping to burn all their fat overnight.
In the all-pervasive mood of hyper-optimism, people either don’t find out or choose to ignore two basic facts: the mother of the baby quietly passed away while Alice was praying to save the baby, and the miracle-maker is a lapsed soldier of Yassoo but still a Catholic, a woman, and a junior nurse. Although the Catholic Church had adopted a number of borderline pagan habits, falling into the local customs of burning incense at the mention of anything holy and covering every slab of marble that carried a saint’s name with garlands of marigold, it had never allowed a female member of its congregation any role that didn’t involve carrying a bowl of holy water, washing the dead or preparing the native cuisine for visiting clergy: Goan prawn curries for foreign bishops and aloo gosht for common priests from Punjab. The Catholic Church hears these rumours but ignores them, as for decades it ignored rumours about her father Joseph Bhatti’s ulcer cures.
Alice Bhatti is so busy that sometimes she forgets the little baby that she allegedly saved. Nobody turns up to claim the mother’s body and it gets the usual quiet burial after a seven-day wait. Alice Bhatti is living out of her bag. Sometimes it seems to her that the seven thousand patients in the hospital, hundreds crawling in the corridor, thousands more out in the compound using bricks as pillows, are feeling a bit better because they are in the hospital compound, only a few metres away from operating theatres, labs and drug dispensaries. But really they are here to seek the Bhatti cure. They have heard the tales about dead kids coming alive, the old no-hoper cancer patients going home on their own feet. They are here to seek her intervention. There are long queues whenever she is on shift.
Alice Bhatti knows that after the freak incident with the baby, the other so-called miracles are mostly the result of a non-literal implementation of the working nurse’s manual, sometimes applied with a bit of inspired improvisation, half a Prozac added there, an antibiotic deleted from another prescription, but mostly a generous helping of disinfectant, constantly boiling pots for syringes and needles across the hospital, fresh cotton and gauze, bleach in the sinks and bathrooms. Not that her fellow paramedics cared at the beginning. They were happy to get some positive press and gave her all the industrial-strength chemicals she wanted.
“What miracle?” In the beginning they would laugh when people started turning up. “Anyone getting out alive from this hospital? Yes, that is definitely a miracle.”
Sister Hina Alvi walks in with a new junior nurse in tow cradling the baby, whom everyone still refers to as the dead baby. The baby is covered in a new pink blanket, its head shaved, its cheeks already beginning to fill out. “How is our God’s little healer coping?” Hina Alvi is the only one who isn’t impressed. “I hope you haven’t begun to believe all this nonsense.”
Alice comes forward, takes the baby from the nurse’s hands and starts rocking it. “People will believe what they want to believe. I am only doing my job.”
Alice Bhatti means to sound modest, but her statement comes out as grand.
“Well I guess if they say it’s a miracle, we can’t mess with them. I don’t know what this world is coming to,” says Hina Alvi. “As a child I was taught that God is in everything. I thought that this concept was so simple that even someone like me could understand it. Now that I am getting old, they want me to literally see God in vegetables. For the last five years, every year there is an aubergine somewhere that, when you slice it, it has the word Allah running through it. I am sure if you slice it the other way you can see your own husband’s face and if you move it sideways you can read something obscene. There is always a cloud shaped like Muhammad. I know some people see Yassoo on a cross or his mother in a pretty dress in every seasonal fruit. Why do people need that kind of evidence? Isn’t there always a flood or an earthquake or a child run over by a speeding car driven by another child to remind us that God exists?”
Alice Bhatti is looking at the baby, not really paying much attention to Hina Alvi’s rant about miracles. “What have you heard?” she asks her, because she doesn’t really know what is going on in the outside world. She has let people kiss her hands but refused to let them touch her feet.
“I have heard all kinds of stupid things. I have heard that Alice appears at people’s bedsides in the middle of the night when she is not even on duty, when she is not even in the hospital, when she is probably fast asleep in her bed. I have heard that when she is on duty, bedpans disappear and reappear cleaned and polished. I have heard that IVs self-adjust, I have heard strangers turn up offering A-negative, free of cost. I have heard that Dr Pereira is thinking of starting his old band again. And making gospel music. All I want to say is, stop with the miracles and stick to your day job. This miracle business is strictly a seasonal thing. You have seen those ice-candy vendors who come out in July? Do you ever see them any other month of the year?”
Alice Bhatti has actually been yearning to go back to her boring job. Because she has already started getting returns; people who are cured one day come back the next day with a new malaise. She already knows that her miracles are turning out to be her curse, like a prophet who brings the dead back to life, and then those brought back complain that they’ve come back to the same old life. It is turning out to be like the time spent with her fellow inmates in the Borstal, whose loneliness she tried to cure with aspirins and long talks about the wonders of human anatomy and jokes about doctors. They always came back the next morning looking even more lost.
“Do you think you are doing God’s work?” Hina Alvi asks her. “Because I know that God’s work is done not through prayers and not through kissing hands. You have to get your hands dirty.”
The baby has gone to sleep. He feels weightless in Alice Bhatti’s arms. She presses him against her stomach.
“He makes us sick. He cures. I am only doing my duty.”
“Look, what you did there was OK, not your fault. These people will get bored very soon and find another messiah, somebody who cures their cancer but in the process also doubles their money. So the real miracle would be if we don’t leave this child to become rat food.”
“I was thinking of taking him home with me.” Alice Bhatti has been thinking about a baby, but not this baby, since she found out about her pregnancy. But in this moment it sounds like the right thing to say, and having said it, it seems like the right thing to do, the only thing to do.
“You were thinking of taking him home? Is that why you haven’t gone home for three nights? Is that why you have been sleeping in Noor’s bunk? Do you even have a home any more? Or have you somehow made your husband disappear? Now that would be a miracle.”
The baby stirs in his sleep and punches the air in slow motion with his tiny clenched fists. “You know what it has been like. It’s impossible to walk out of that gate,” says Alice.
“You can’t really just pick up a baby and take it home,” Hina Alvi is officious now, all procedures and paperwork. Alice Bhatti can see that she has given it some thought. “You need to apply, fill out forms, your husband needs to sign up.”
“Can you keep him for a few days? I mean, I’ll take him when all this is over.” Alice Bhatti is not sure if this is the right time to tell her that this baby has a sibling on the way.
“Me? Sure. If you want him to die of neglect. I can change nappies and vaccinate him but I wouldn’t know how to feed him. Actually, I wouldn’t even know how to pick him up in my
arms. So if you want to come with me, we can take him home.”
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Twenty-Six
Noor is having dinner with important men in a dream when he wakes up to find himself surrounded by four guns and Teddy Butt in a very bad mood. In his dream, the important men are wearing suits, they arrive in single file carrying briefcases, then sit and eat with silver cutlery, starched white napkins on their laps. Wearing a white coat and a surgeon’s cap, Noor himself sits at the head of the table carving a roast chicken the size of a small sheep. The important men are talking about important stuff. Although Noor can only pick out a few words, like mission statement, evaluation and holistic, because it is English they are speaking, he knows that they are talking about something important.
A boot hits Noor in his ribs and he looks at the man seated on his right, then to his left, as if not expecting such bad table manners from gentlemen of this calibre. When he opens his eyes, he sees three guns on a food trolley and the fourth one, a small black snub-nosed thing, in Teddy’s hand. Teddy holds it not from its grip but along his palm, like they do in those bullet-bending futuristic movies.
“Where is she?” Teddy asks in a shrill whisper. His boot is still tentatively prodding Noor’s side, as if the answer to his question might be hidden in his ribcage. Noor is used to Teddy’s untimely visits, mostly with requests for drugs that were banned years ago, but Teddy has never stopped by at this hour of the night, not with four guns, not when Zainab is fast asleep. Noor rubs his eyes, stifles a yawn and concludes that Teddy hasn’t dropped in at two in the morning for a casual chat. Zainab’s breathing rattles in the background, a local train, chugging away, starting and stopping, not bound to any timetable. The night creatures chirp outside. Number 44 groans and other patients cough and curse him in their sleep. It’s a chorus of the damned. Noor notices that Teddy has carefully drawn the curtain around Zainab’s bed and now they are in their own private little room.
♦
Earlier in the night, Teddy had also woken up after a dream. He had come home early from a five-day trip in the interior after not finding not-Abu Zar. He waited for Alice for a while. He stood in the window and thought that him being home would be a nice surprise for her when she came back from work. He went in the kitchen and rearranged the utensils; there was nothing to eat in the fridge. He thought maybe he should go out and get some vegetables and cook some food for her. But if she didn’t find him home on her arrival, then there would be no surprise for her, so he decided to hang around.
He went to the bedroom and noticed that her wardrobe door was half open. He looked into it, and there was nothing except a dark blue silk nightie that she wore in bed. He rummaged through the drawers and found nothing, no socks or panties. He opened his own side of the cupboard. None of his clothes or what remained of not-Abu Zar’s posters had been touched. Again he opened her side of the wardrobe. The blue nightie was the only evidence of the fact that he once had a wife. In the lower drawer he found a rolled-up poster. He took it out and unfolded it. It was a picture of Jesus Christ. He felt sudden panic, as if somebody had been hiding a stash of heroin in his apartment without his knowledge. He looked at His flowing hair, pink-hued eyes, lips slightly open, the halo around his head drawn in rainbow colours. He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then put the poster under the pillow and lay down on the bed, hoping it would calm his nerves. Why had she taken all her stuff? Where had she gone? The place where he could look was the Sacred. The only person he could ask was that lapdog of hers, Noor. But why had she left? And why had she left behind a poster of her prophet?
He drifted into sleep and saw a rain-soaked street, its drains bubbling, and a man who looked like Jesus Christ riding a bike through the knee-deep water, trailing a twenty-foot-long bamboo pole on the carrier. The man got off his bicycle, took his bamboo pole, bent over a manhole and pushed the pole back and forth in an attempt to unclog it. A few children ran past, splashing water on him and taunting him by shouting Yassoo Choohra, Yassoo Choohra. The man looked up at the children and smiled.
Teddy didn’t know how long he had slept for, but when he woke up, he saw his face resting on the poster that had slipped out from under the pillow. He found himself cheek to cheek with Yassoo, his mournful eyes staring at Teddy. He felt a wave of panic and rushed to the Sacred.
♦
“You are a snake in my sleeve, you son of a bitch.” Teddy rattles off insults with passion but without any sense of timing, mixing them up as they come along. He is doing something that he has seen other people do. Shut up. Noor wants to tell him to shut up, because not only does he have no idea what Teddy is talking about, but he is worried that Zainab will wake up. He gets up, pulling on his shalwar and thinking that he should somehow convince Teddy to step outside and then talk. He doesn’t get the chance to make any suggestions about a change of venue for their conversation. Teddy puts the gun to his head, presses it against his temple and asks: “Where is she?”
“Who?” Stifling a yawn, Noor says it in a voice that sounds like, I don’t like you barging in here like this, the visiting hours are long over, arms are not allowed on hospital premises without the written permission of the Chief Medical Officer. And why have you brought four guns anyway? Is there a loot sale on somewhere?
Teddy takes Noor’s right hand, puts the barrel of his pistol between his two fingers and twists them like those demented schoolteachers who think that by inserting and twisting a pencil between the fingers of a sleepy student they can make him recall the exact date of an obscure historical event. Noor’s face twists in a suppressed scream; he points to Zainab and waves his free hand, frantically trying to say Don’t wake her up. He brings his mouth closer to Teddy’s ear and whispers, “Alice is not on duty. I haven’t seen her all day.” Teddy looks satisfied with the answer. Noor is about to turn away when he gets an unexpected Junior-Mr-Faisalabad-powered punch in his stomach and doubles over. He sees Zainab smile in her sleep. He is in pain but can’t scream. He doesn’t want her to wake up and find her only son surrounded by so many guns and being thrashed by his old friend.
Zainab sits up in her bed, her eyes still closed, and starts to hum a song. In any other situation this would have amused Noor, he might have hummed along, and in the morning they both might have laughed at this, made jokes about an old woman who sings in her sleep. But Noor knows that Zainab is delirious. Her fever has probably shot up. He needs to take her temperature to find out. But Teddy is standing between him and Zainab, loading and unloading his other guns as if demonstrating them to a potential customer. A cat with one of its ears covered in a smudge of blood, which in turn is covered by a swarm of houseflies, shoots from under the bed, dashes into the corridor and looks back at them as if saying, Couldn’t you have found another place to play your little game?
“I know you are related to her, you know where she is. Where are you people hiding her?” Teddy puts his pistol on the food trolley, picks up a stainless-steel automatic that looks like a high-end surgical instrument, moves the safety catch on it and puts it to Noor’s neck. Noor can’t figure out the logic of this. Is there a different gun for every question? What will Teddy ask when he picks up that thing that looks like a Kalashnikov’s nasty old uncle? And why am I being associated with the Bhatti clan?
“But I am not related to her,” he says in a startled voice, a slightly aggressive statement of what he thinks is a well-known fact. If a few months of sharing a cell, which you shared with twenty other people as well, makes you family, then he is probably related to a few hundred women who had ended up in the Borstal after stealing a Rado watch or fornicating with their neighbour or attempting to kill their husband.
“She herself told me,” says Teddy, shaking his head like someone who is sick of living in a world where people lie needlessly, where people just make up stuff to confuse other people.
“She tells many things to many people, it doesn’t mean – ” A sharp jab from the stainle
ss-steel muzzle cuts his explanation short. His lower lip feels soggy and on fire at the same time, and a loose tooth almost pierces his philosophising tongue.
Zainab stirs in her sleep and Noor looks around and again counts three guns on the food trolley.
He has often thought of asking Zainab what people see in their dreams if they can’t see. Do you just hear voices? He can’t believe that he has never asked her. He decides that he must ask her tomorrow, then realises that people with guns to their head must make these kinds of pledges all the time.
“But you know I am a Musalman, masha’Allah,” says Noor and is surprised at what he has just said. He has never used this expression before. He has heard Dr Pereira say it quite frequently. It started as an attempt to make his older patients feel at home, but now it has become an integral part of his inventory of good manners. The Sacred has a severe shortage of doctors, there is no way of telling whether the medicines we use are real or fake, we can’t even get the janitors to turn up for work, but masha’Allah people still have confidence in us, seven thousand patients walk in through that gate every week.
Teddy looks puzzled. His gun-wielding hand goes limp, and for a few moments he looks like the same Teddy Noor has spent many afternoons with, trading tips about bodybuilding and debating why, if girls like bodybuilders in the movies, how come they don’t like them in real life? For a moment Noor feels that his denial backed up by his pride in being a Musalman has made Teddy reconsider his assumptions. But Teddy is not about to give up. He has spent enough time in the investigation centres to know that telling a Musalman from a not-Musalman is easy enough; it only involves pulling someone’s shalwar down, parting their dhoti or unzipping their pants.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 19