For a moment Inspector Malangi thinks that it’s ironic that he is being waylaid by boy robbers on the very day that he has quit the G Squad, hung up his uniform, returned his government-issue Beretta and started his life as a law-abiding civilian, the kind of harmless, responsible citizen they show in life-insurance advertisements. He looks at the lone traffic policeman standing on the roadside, cooling himself under the shade of a tree. Inspector Malangi realises that there’s nothing ironic about his situation. There are probably a few hundred people being held at gunpoint across the country right now; what is so special about him? Boy robbers can’t look at your face and tell that only two hours ago you were a feared cop, heading an elite police squad in the city. And isn’t that a relief, because if they knew who they had got at gunpoint, what ideas might they get in their young, hot heads?
♦
Inspector Malangi has spent his last afternoon at work tying up loose ends: two prisoners are transferred to judicial custody, another one is told to walk. He runs fearing a bullet in the back of his neck, but Inspector Malangi just stands there waiting for him to turn the corner, then returns to his office and starts clearing out his desk. He is going through his drawer when Teddy shows up looking lost, like a pet whose owner has suddenly decided to move house and has no plans to take him along. Inspector Malangi remembers that here is one more person who needs to be sorted. He can’t tell Teddy to just walk out, that he is free to go. Where will he go? Other members of the G Squad have their careers; they can take care of themselves. This boy needs his help. Teddy’s left arm is in a cast and perched in a sling around his neck. Inspector Malangi observes his plastered arm mournfully but doesn’t ask him how he got hurt. With his career over, all curiosity about human affairs has drained out of him. Who cares why people shoot each other or themselves. There is always a reason. A good reason. Or a bad reason.
Here is yet another man who is not sure any more if he is a man or not, Malangi thinks. A woman can do that to you, especially a woman you have loved. It is unpleasant to talk about these things, especially on your last working day, but Inspector Malangi feels he can’t just walk out of this life without passing on the knowledge he has acquired in thirty-six years of working and loving.
“Sit down,” he says, and then resumes clearing out his drawers and starts talking with his head buried in the desk. “Do you know what a woman in love is like? You probably knew it once but now can’t remember. Have you ever seen a mad filly? When a filly goes mad, there is not much you can do. The best rider can try and mount it and it’ll still kick up a storm. You can chain it to its bones but it’ll still run away in the middle of the night. That is a woman in love for you. What do you do when everything fails? They need to be put down. For their own good. There is no other way.” He produces a velvet pouch from the bottom drawer and begins to untie the shiny silver wire securing it.
Teddy’s arm in the cast has developed a really bad itch. He desperately wishes he could scratch it just once. He also wants to ask Inspector Malangi how he knows, about him and Alice, but then decides against it. You don’t ask the head of the G Squad about his sources. And then it occurs to Teddy that if a common ward boy in the Sacred knows, then probably the whole city knows.
“Yours is only a domestic situation. Things always blow up around the house. The gas cylinder, a leaky oven, a cupboard can fall, someone slips out of a window. It happens every day.”
“We are not living together any more,” says Teddy, his gaze fixed on the velvet pouch with expectant eyes, as if Inspector Malangi is about to produce a solution to his life’s problems, or at least give him an expensive watch as a farewell present. Inspector Malangi produces two solid gold bracelets from the pouch and caresses them gently, as if trying to remember the texture of the soft wrists these bracelets might once have adorned.
“Where is she now?” he says, stretching out his hand so that Teddy can see the bracelets closely. “Dead. Rage of youth. Is there a single day in my life that I don’t remember her? Yes, there are days when I actually don’t. But here,” he knocks his forehead with his knuckle, “she’s always here. And what was her punishment? A bullet in the head, two seconds of flashback and now she doesn’t even remember that she was the most beautiful woman that G Squad ever put handcuffs on. And what do I get? A lifetime of heartache, a career destroyed, children who keep failing in maths. A wife who keeps taunting me that I am not man enough for her. But you don’t have to suffer what I suffered. Let them share our suffering a little bit.”
Inspector Malangi pauses for a moment, not sure if Teddy is following him. “Come with me.” He puts the gold bracelets back in the pouch, ties the silver wire, takes out a bunch of keys and starts walking. Teddy follows him to the maal khana. Inspector Malangi flicks the light switch on; the storeroom is still semi-dark, full of shadows and strong, pungent smells.
“Let me show you something,” Inspector Malangi says, removing a bedsheet from a wooden coffin with a glass cover. In the dimly lit room Teddy can see a mummy, the kind they show in tourist advertisements for Egypt. The mummy has the rosy cheeks of a young mountain girl and the mournful eyes of an old woman who has seen all her offspring die in her lifetime. “It’s a fake, of course. Only seventy years old, but a true artist manufactured it in his backyard and then was trying to pass it off as booty from Balochistan, some minor pharaoh’s runaway cousin who ended up here. A British museum almost bought it.” He pulls the sheet back on the coffin. “Do you get my point? They are fakes even when they are dead. These women, I tell you, they continue to peddle these fantasies from their coffins. You can’t trust them even when their hearts stop beating.”
Teddy is not really sure what a fake Egyptian mummy has to do with him and Alice, but suddenly he feels an acute sense of loss. He feels he was promised an authenticated five-thousand-year-old love from the very depths of some pyramid. What he got was a fake from someone’s backyard in Balochistan.
“Take whatever you need,” Inspector Malangi tells Teddy, his hand sweeping the room. Teddy has been here before, but only to pick up a weapon that can’t be traced back to the G Squad. Standing in the shadow, he wonders what he could possibly do with two tonnes of hashish piled to the ceiling, or crates of DVDs or boxes of fake Indian currency or rocket launchers without any rockets.
“Do you love her?” Inspector Malangi asks in a neutral tone, as if asking Teddy what he had for breakfast.
Teddy thinks it’s a trick question and shuts his eyes. “This is something that I have been asking myself.”
“I think the very fact that you have been asking yourself this question – that’s your answer. And if you love her, you’ll never forget her. That’s the nature of love. If you love somebody you’ll remember them no matter what, even after you have screwed every whore of every nationality that washes up on these shores.”
Teddy nods in agreement. The smell of hashish is making him dizzy and he remembers Alice’s smooth chin nuzzling his neck.
“And don’t you want her to remember you? Let’s say you put a bullet through her, will she remember you after that? She won’t remember anything. She definitely won’t remember you. You are a young man, you have a lot of life ahead of you. Do you want to spend that life in oblivion, forgotten by the only person you loved and the only one you are guaranteed never to forget?”
“You are right, I was angry. I was very angry.” Teddy points to the cast on his arm. “But now I am not angry. I don’t want revenge, I only want justice. Fair is fair. I just want to make sure that if I can’t have her, then nobody should be able to have her. Is that not fair?”
“She has already been had,” Malangi interrupts him. “It’s better not to think about these things. It’ll only drive you crazy. Even saints don’t make babies without having a bit of fun first. Forget about that. Stop pitying yourself. Stop pitying her. Remember it’s about love. You need to give her something she’ll never forget. Never.” He points towards a glass cupboard with a double lock.
The label above the cupboard reads Hazardous Material. Inspector Malangi goes to the cupboard, unlocks it and stands next to it like a chemist showing off his life’s work.
He takes out a glass bottle, then puts it back and looks around for a piece of cloth. He wraps it around his hand and unscrews the bottle carefully. He pours a drop on to the wooden shelf in the cupboard. A hissing sound, smoke rises from the spot where the liquid drop fell and in an instant it burns a hole through an inch and a half of solid wood.
“Try this and she’ll always remember you. This is the only thing that’ll hurt as much as love hurts.”
Carefully they put the bottle in a small gunnysack and Inspector Malangi walks Teddy to the outer gate. “You also need work, because this place is going to the dogs. There is this old family, nice people, they need a driver cum bodyguard type person. Work is a bit boring but the money is good. They also have some business pending with your wife. They’ll protect you. You’ll get to see the world.” He leads him to a gleaming Surf surrounded by four guards in black uniform. There is no number on the registration plate, just some words in bold red. “Try it out. I hope you people get along,” says Inspector Malangi, introducing Teddy to the guards. “And keep that stuff away from your body, make sure it doesn’t spill. It’s as precious as gold.”
♦
The boy goes through Inspector Malangi’s wallet carefully, as if he is interested in something besides the couple of thousand-rupee notes in it. Then it seems he has found what he was looking for. He turns his head towards the boy on the motorbike and nods. The boy pulls back his baseball cap and revs his bike in response. Inspector Malangi has seen this little exchange a million times before. It means, our job here is done, let’s get the hell out of here.
It’s only when the bullet pierces his neck that Inspector Malangi realises what that job was. He grips his neck with one hand and before pressing down on the accelerator looks out at the boy on the motorbike. In an instant he realises that the boy is not-Abu Zar. He has already put his gun back in his jacket and is not even looking towards him. The car lurches forward, Inspector Malangi slumps down on the steering wheel, the car swerves and hits the traffic signal at the precise moment it turns green, and blocks two traffic lanes behind it. An impatient horn sounds behind him. Another one honks. Soon it becomes a chorus of angry, protesting car horns. An ambulance is stuck in the traffic and its siren begins to wail. As he bleeds to a quick death, Inspector Malangi has the same thing on his mind as that on the lips of all the impatient drivers stuck behind his car: when will our nation learn some road manners?
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Twenty-Nine
Alice Bhatti waits till two a.m. for Teddy to return home, then calmly walks into the kitchen, picks up the plate of food that she had prepared for him and covered with a white paper napkin and chucks it in the garbage bin. She immediately regrets it. She feels guilty, like she always does when good food, any food for that matter, goes to waste. Yassoo’s flesh, she remembers Joseph Bhatti admonishing her. You are throwing away His flesh in the garbage bin, and although her father mostly used this line to force her to eat whatever concoction he had rustled up, whenever she sees food being thrown away, she feels Yassoo’s body is being soiled. And although she has drifted far away from Yassoo, the idea of throwing food away still repels her. She can often be seen taking leftover plates of hospital food outside in the compound and handing it over to those camped out under the Old Doctor. Now she is angry with herself because she has done something she strongly disapproves of. She is angry with Hina Alvi. Who takes marital advice from someone who was divorced thrice? She is angry at Teddy. She doesn’t mind him being away. Men should go away so that they can come back and then go away again. Their comings and goings make a home a home. She would like to know where he is, though, and when he is coming back. So that she doesn’t have to make food for him that goes to waste and then sit here and wonder whether spinach and potato curry really equals Yassoo’s flesh.
There is nothing unusual about his absence, but it galls her because for once she actually has things to tell him. She knows that when he does come back from work, he comes back in the early hours of the morning, sometimes with hair covered in sand and sometimes boots caked in mud. He is usually so exhausted it seems he has been wrestling with desert monsters. Or wading through marshes. On these days he usually returns on a big motorbike, the kind that traffic police sergeants drive, complete with a siren, but he has never talked about any work with traffic police. Or sometimes he returns in a fancy car with Emirates registration plates. One day he came home in a Bedford truck, full of refrigerator cartons. Someone usually comes and takes the vehicle away the next day. Alice always hoped that some day he’d offer to drop her to work, but he was always asleep when she left for work and the vehicle would be gone by the time she came back.
She goes to bed and sleeps fitfully, dreaming of a lone horse galloping on a motorway as a sixteen-wheeler trailer with a bright orange container on top speeds towards it. A fat mosquito trying to enter her ear startles her out of her dream. She feels nauseous with anxiety and goes to the bathroom and retches into the sink. She comes back to bed and a fluffed-up second pillow mocks her. She drags herself to the window and peers down at the spot where he parks his return vehicles. As she expected, the spot is empty, and two dogs are trying to eat each other’s faces. She can’t tell if they are fighting or trying to get to know each other better.
In a fit of resentment she decides to change and go to the Sacred. If he comes home now he’ll find her all dressed up to go to work. Ah, you are back. I was leaving for work. Or he’ll find her already gone. She puts in extra effort with her uniform, applies some mascara, and as the sky turns muddy, half promising a sunrise, she leaves Al-Aman. She leaves her bag open and clothes strewn around the room. She is not sure what this is meant to convey: that she has come back but may leave again, at short notice if she needs to. She also leaves her side of the bed unmade as some kind of protest against his absence.
In the bus, she is the only passenger in the women’s section, and the driver looks at her as if he understands the predicament of people like her who can’t sleep all night because they have to start early.
The driver puts on a tape, and what Joseph Bhatti used to call the Musla anthem starts to play. There is no music, just a bunch of men shouting at the top of their voices demanding to be teleported to Mecca.
It’s still dark when she reaches the Sacred. She can hear the medico-legal John Malick singing in his office. She goes straight to Zainab in the general ward and, as she had expected, finds Noor dozing in a chair next to his mother’s bed. His left eye is covered in a bandage. Zainab is barely breathing. Alice bends over to take her pulse, and as soon as she touches her wrist, Noor wakes up with a groan and then jumps out of his chair. “When did you come? Where have you been? That husband of yours has been looking for you.”
“He should have looked at home first. What happened to your eye?”
“First tell me what you have been telling Teddy.”
“What do you mean? I’ll have to meet him before I can tell him anything. Your eye looks in really bad shape.”
“You should have seen it without the bandage. I had a cartoon eyeball. He thinks there is something between us.”
“What does that mean?”
“He thinks we are lovers.”
Alice starts to laugh, and then can’t stop laughing. She can’t remember the last time she laughed like this. Noor puts his finger on his lips and signals towards Zainab. “But we are. We are,” she whispers. She feels that there is another Teddy that she has never known. Jealous Teddy. Going-around-trying-to-find-about-her-life Teddy. She likes this Teddy.
Where is Teddy?
There is only one place that she can go and look, and although she has the name of the outfit and some idea that it’s police work he does, she has no idea where this place is. Noor is the only person she can ask; he also has no cl
ue, but goes away and comes back within five minutes with an address, the number of the bus that goes there and an offer to accompany her, but then he looks at Zainab and sits on her bedside. “It’s the seventh week,” he mutters.
“I’ll be back and we’ll give her a sponge bath. That’ll revive her,” says Alice.
The sensible little boy that he is, he doesn’t ask her why she wants to visit the G Squad offices so early in the morning. “I wouldn’t go in if I didn’t know anyone who works there. Someone you really know. The person who gave me the address told me, don’t think of going there, they eat little babies and don’t even burp, and it’s all legal.”
♦
Alice Bhatti stands outside the G Squad centre and tries to look purposeful. The centre is a series of interconnected townhouses; there is no sign saying G Squad, or anything else for that matter. She isn’t sure if she’ll find the Teddy she is looking for here. There are a couple of other women camped outside the centre. One has improvised a tent with a sheet and seems to be running a one-woman protest camp. Give Me My Son or Take Me In, says a placard reclining against a suitcase that she is using as a pillow. Across the road from the main gate a man wearing a police shirt and striped pyjama bottoms naps in his chair, one hand holding a walkie-talkie that crackles occasionally as if someone is barking incomprehensible orders to an invisible army. In the other hand he holds a rusted gun that hasn’t seen any action since it left the armoury in the previous millennium. Alice watches as his shoulder dips and the gun starts to slip out of his hand; he jerks and catches it, with his eyes still closed, then puts it in his lap. The metal gate is boot-polish black and a furlong long and it doesn’t seem it’ll open for anyone, The walls are topped with shards of broken glass and coils of razor wire. Searchlights mounted on the corners of the centre are still on, but the watchtower is empty. A teapot and two cups sit on a small table, probably meant to indicate, we have got many people to man this watchtower, some of them were just here, they have just had tea, they are still around, you still want to try something funny?
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 21