Alice Bhatti isn’t sure if she can actually knock at this impregnable door; she isn’t sure if someone will actually open it, and if somebody does open it what will she ask then? Do you have an officer called Teddy Butt who works here? I am his wife. Do you have a prisoner called Teddy Butt here? I am his wife. I am married to someone who doesn’t really work here but he does work for some people who work in this place.
She feels a cold shiver in her nape, the kind you feel when someone is following you secretly, when someone is staring at your back and doesn’t want you to know. She turns around and sees that the guard in police shirt and pyjamas has woken up. He is holding a small round mirror in one hand and clipping his moustache carefully with a tiny pair of scissors.
The gate opens and a Surf emerges and makes a slow turn in the other direction. For a moment Alice catches a glimpse of an arm in a cast, cradling a small gunnysack as if carrying something precious. And then she sees the familiar Devil of the Desert registration plate and starts walking towards the bus stop with quick steps.
She looks at the bus conductors, who yell and sing and hawk their destinations, thump the sides of their buses, scream at the drivers to change the music, address everyone according to their age as if it wasn’t a bustling bus station but a large family gathering. Alice looks at them with complaining eyes, blaming them for enticing her here in the first place and now not taking the routes she might have liked to take.
She turns into China Street and stops in front of the first shop, which displays dentures the size of a small sofa with bright pink gums and promises of painless extractions and ‘new, natural, artificial dentures while you wait’. An old Chinese man sucking on an ice candy comes out of the shop and bares his teeth. Alice Bhatti moves along quickly till she crosses a small square and enters what seems to be a medicine bazaar. She sees rows and rows of clinics with huge billboards announcing cures for an impossibly long list of sexual dysfunctions. A giant cut-out of a bodybuilder announcing physical and spiritual revival in a seven-day crash course hovers over a street corner; she feels a lump in her throat. Men scurrying in the street seem upset at her presence in this particular part of the city, as if she has caught them with their pants down; they cross to the other side of the road to avoid her. They look in the other direction, pretend she isn’t there. She finds it a bit uncanny. Her experience of walking in bazaars, travelling in buses, going to shops has taught her that whatever their status in life, whatever they are selling her, whatever they might need from her, they always have a reason to stare at her, size her up and then zero in on her breasts. They look upwards, downwards, they look sideways, they scratch their balls or pretend to be interested in what she is saying, but their gaze always returns to her breasts. Sometimes they thrust their hands in their pockets and count their coins with such concentration it seems they are saying their rosary. There was a teacher in her nursing school who would gaze at her chest unashamedly, then look towards the ceiling, put his forefinger in his ear and poke his ear in a circular fashion with such rigour that her ears hurt. She thought of telling him that if looking at her breasts caused him earache, he should probably try and not look.
It seems to her that the unspoken language that is used by men and women on the street to communicate doesn’t exist in this bazaar. She feels as embarrassed as the men do. It should probably be called I-was-born-with-a-small-one-but-I-have-been-saving-money street. She hurries along, passes a fast-food joint that promises authentic Arabic parathas, sees a billboard quoting Rumi’s couplet to sell steel-reinforced concrete. A sturdy man with a white beard showers her with prayers for healthy children at the top of his voice and stretches out his cap. His sincere efforts impress her, and she drops in a two-rupee coin and starts walking faster.
She tries to remember something about Teddy’s job, the name of his boss. If she could remember the name of that inspector with the walrus moustache, the one who patted her head and gave her a digital Quran in a velvet wrapper and said no modern home is complete without it. She wishes she could remember a title, work timings, pension plan, a salary, and she realises she doesn’t know any of these things. She remembers Teddy’s long days in the gym, evenings watching National Geographic, his nightmares when he mutters in his sleep and says: “We are going for a walk, we both need fresh air, don’t worry, don’t look back, they don’t like it when you look back.” And then wakes up and shudders and looks at her as if it’s all her fault.
She is familiar with the routine by now. At first there are hints at a one-on-one meeting with the new police chief, a lot of repeated ironing of clothes in anticipation. But after dressing up properly, he disappears in a Hilux that turns up to pick him up and returns him in the morning covered in dust, his hands bruised, as if he has been fighting wild dogs all night. He breaks his six raw eggs into a glass, gulps them down, makes a face as if he has just shot himself and then falls into bed. The first couple of times she removed his shoes and tried to unbuckle his trousers, but every time she touched him, he curled up into a ball and whimpered, as if the people in his dream were trying to break his bones.
But since he lost that boy and brought home his posters, he has hardly ever been home.
So who is this man Teddy Butt? She wanders through the markets as if she is hoping to find an answer advertised in a shop window and will get it after haggling it down to a reasonable price. She goes through Empress Market, where Pathans sell tomatoes and baby hawks in the same shop, women with bangles up to their elbows peddle pink chicks perched on baskets full of guaranteed desi eggs, a blind man brandishes money plants in used Chivas Regal bottles that don’t require earth to grow in, and a Burmese-looking man sells a plastic device that carves onions, carrots and turnips into roses. Why would anyone want an onion cut up like a rose? she wonders.
What kind of woman marries a man who cries over melting glaciers and comes back from his job with sand in his hair? She looks at a cage full of chickens trying to climb over each other as one of them is caught and its throat gets slit to the soundtrack of looped God-is-great playing on a cassette player.
She turns away and starts walking back towards the bus stop. The cackle of the caged chickens and the soundtrack of their death follows her for some distance. She catches a bus bound for the Sacred, as the conductor is giving a last thump on its side and shouting at the driver to move on. She knows that she should do all her waiting at the Sacred.
A motorcycle stops next to her bus. She thinks she recognises the boy but is not sure where she has seen him. She moves towards the window to get a better look when another boy wearing a long coat comes from behind and stands next to a car with his head in the window. The boy on the motorbike watches him impatiently, then looks up towards the sky, and she realises that it’s the boy on the poster. She tries to get off the bus in a hurry, the traffic signal turns green and the bus lurches forward but stops again. Alice watches the commotion at the traffic signal; around her a chorus of impatient horns is performing a crescendo.
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Thirty
Zainab’s mouth is agape, her eyes are open but Noor knows that she is gone. A fly sits on her lower lip, then goes inside her mouth and comes out. Noor doesn’t have the strength to shoo it away. His good eye is dry; the one under the bandage throbs as if his eyeball wants to spring out of its socket again.
♦
Soon after her arrival at the Borstal, Alice Bhatti gave Noor a plastic syringe to play with, without the needle of course. For months it was the only toy he had; he used it as a water pistol, pretend weapon and pen. He also injected many magical fluids in Zainab’s arm to cure her blindness. One day he caught a butterfly that had wandered in through the bars. It was a big one, and covered half of his palm. Its yellow and black tiger stripes glowed brightly. He had a brilliant idea. What if he made butterfly juice with it? He rolled the butterfly’s wings and inserted it into the cylinder. He imagined that when he squeezed it, he would get a liquid the colour
of gold with black stripes, and if he squirted that on to Zainab’s eyes, she would get her eyesight back. When he thrust the plastic plunger in the syringe, what he got was mud-brown goo. He never played with that syringe again.
♦
He pulls the sheet over Zainab’s face and walks out. He has always wondered how he would feel, what he would do, where he would go first. Now he knows. He needs to go to the medico-legals office to get a death certificate, then inform the mortuary and book the funeral bus. He isn’t really sure why he needs a death certificate, but he starts to walk down the steps leading to the compound with a clarity of purpose, knowing that it is the only thing he needs right now.
He sees Alice Bhatti under the Old Doctor and waves towards her. He doesn’t know why he is waving. Is he saying hullo to her? No, he is saying: Hullo, Alice, my mother is dead. But Alice is not looking at him; her eyes are fixed above his head, above the rooftop. Then he realises that all the other patients under the Old Doctor are also looking at the horizon. He turns around to follow their gaze and bumps into someone. He is curious to see the face of the man he has bumped into. The only thing he remembers is that the man’s arm is in a cast and he is carrying a small gunnysack.
♦
Teddy Butt barely manages to stop the bottle falling from his hand. “Are you blind?” He curses the boy who bumps into him and then rushes past without apologising. He can see Alice Bhatti under the Old Doctor. She stands in her white coat, oblivious to her surroundings, looking up into the sky. Teddy moves forward and stumbles again. This time, it’s the legless beggar woman on the skateboard who grabs his right leg. “God has blessed you with such a beautiful wife, buy me some Xanax. The nights are becoming longer.” As Teddy rummages through his pocket for some change, he wonders why everyone is looking up at the sky.
∨ Our Lady of Alice Bhatti ∧
Epilogue
An Open Letter to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints
The Vatican
From Joseph Bhatti
French Colony
Our Holy Mother appeared on the fourth of September last year above the roof of the Out Patient Department of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments after the gates of the hospital had been shut because it couldn’t take in any more patients. The residents and workers at the hospital didn’t recognise the Holy Virgin in the beginning as her face was covered in a veil and the infant she carried was making a ruckus. The onlookers were most fascinated by a beam of light that fell on the OPD and bathed it in a milky glow. It was the ward boy, a long-term resident of the Sacred, Noor, son of Zainab, who pointed out that the sky was clear and there was no moon. And then above the roof people saw a silver throne hovering, held aloft by a flock of peacocks on which sat a likeness of our Holy Mother.
And the likeness of our Holy Mother beckoned my only daughter Alice Joseph Bhatti to join her on the throne.
My daughter did not suffer the pain that her estranged husband meant to cause her by pouring half a litre of sulphuric acid on her angelic face. Instead she ascended to Heaven with our Holy Mother. The throne that had arrived to take her away was already there, that’s the reason none of the people surrounding her noticed her tormentor as he approached her unscrewing the acid bottle and professing his eternal love for her. They were all looking up at the horizon, fascinated by the spectacle of our Holy Mother on her throne.
As is common in such cases, people didn’t recognise the heavenly signs in the beginning and instead first focused on small unusual things, little discrepancies, minor malfunctions. An X-ray machine rolled through the corridors of the ortho ward, came to a stop on the edge of the stairs, then extended its mechanical arm and started whizzing as if it was being controlled by an invisible force and taking photographs for posterity. A patient with an oxygen mask in ICU ripped it out and stood up and started complaining that the smell of roses was making him dizzy. An IV drip in the general ward turned to milk. The skewed wooden cross at the entrance of the Sacred, which had not been repaired or painted in years in the hope that it would make people forget that the Sacred was a Catholic establishment, straightened itself and started to glow amber.
The first witnesses were the residents of Charya Ward. All twelve of them swore that they saw a likeness of Sister Alice Bhatti dressed like our Holy Mother in a blue headscarf, a halo around her head, ascending on a throne held aloft by a flock of peacocks. Their testimony was dismissed by the local Diocese Committee to Investigate the Miracle on the grounds that they all belonged to the Muslim faith and were long-term residents of the psychiatric ward. The very simple fact that they were a fractious bunch, and no two of them had ever agreed on anything, was ignored by the Committee. Also ignored was the historical precedent observed in the apparition of our Lady of Fatima, where the testimony of a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy was considered sufficient despite the well-known fact that thirteen-year-old boys, Muslim or not, dream of nothing but beautiful women and can conjure them up when none exist. The medico-legal officer Dr John Malick also witnessed the apparition and kneeled down and sang the praise of our Lord Yassoo and then of our Holy Mother. His testimony was deemed inadmissible on the grounds that, although born and raised a Catholic, he had official inquiries pending against him that accused him of being drunk on duty, accepting illegal bribes to issue fake injury certificates and running a private practice that dealt solely in written-to-order sick notes.
There were several witnesses who saw a flock of kites, their beaks upturned, flying sluggishly around the throne. They flew so gracefully, they seemed to mock the air that carried them. The Committee concluded immediately that a holy apparition accompanied by scavenging birds like kites must be either the work of the devil or a deliberate attempt to bring an already beleaguered Catholic Church into disrepute. Or at best, they said this was some Choohra folklore emanating from French Colony that was being projected as the work of the Holy Spirit.
Can anybody with an iota of common sense and a grain of love for our Holy Mother suggest that it’s my daughter Alice Bhatti’s fault that there were no doves or white pigeons, which the committee always expects to see at such occasions?
The same committee that took less than nine months to bestow sainthood on a Polish nun in our neighbouring country, despite overwhelming evidence from the local community that she was nothing but a stingy old witch who revelled in the suffering of dark-skinned, malnourished children, didn’t even bother to investigate the sublime acts associated with my daughter Alice Bhatti. There is justifiable anger in the Choohra community that this case was either never sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, or, if it was sent, then crucial evidence was misrepresented or deliberately misplaced.
The attitude of the National Diocese was not very different either. The same fathers who encourage the celebration of a man-made and very commonplace statue stuck in a cave that might or might not have shed some tears seventy-three years ago undermined Alice Bhatti’s case for sainthood by ignoring various other testimonies that bore witness to the miraculous and blessed nature of that evening.
Perhaps the Divine Will knows the working of the devious minds that trade in our Holy Mother’s name, turn God’s house into a centre for commerce of the souls and plot their next land grab or scheme to get more money out of the Vatican’s wealthy friends by portraying their native followers as illiterate wretches. How else can you explain that on the morning after that blessed night, out of a clear blue sky, without warning, without any thunder and not a cloud on the horizon, lightning struck the Old Doctor – a two-hundred-year-old peepul tree that had survived three hurricanes and generations of Sacred patients who chopped bits off it for firewood. Sister Alice Bhatti had taken many a serene lunch break under its shadow. Such was the impact of the lightning that the tree split into two, smoke emanated from it for days and never a leaf grew on it ever again.
Freak weather phenomenon was all the Committee had to say about it, as if it wasn’t a committee to validate the claims of a ho
ly apparition but a club of amateur meteorologists.
It’s self-evident that the Committee’s negative verdict was the result of the same prejudices that the local diocese has shown towards what they prefer to call lower castes. They claim to be Yassoo’s children, but at heart they remain devotees of the Hindu goddess Kali, always judging people by their ancestry rather than their devotion to our Lord Yassoo and what they do for Yassoo’s children.
It was asked in their meetings, although the Committee never put it on record, that if it really was our Holy Mother revealing herself, then why wouldn’t she reveal herself to a Catholic from a good churchgoing family and of good education, instead of a junior nurse of questionable character?
And they did make a big deal of her character.
The Committee was quick to pounce on the biographical details and reproduced a number of rumours, as the unfortunate expression goes here, as the gospel truth. They accused her of fornicating with a godless communist in her student days. In another example of their callous approach, they called her a penis-slasher and a Xanax thief. As a grieving father, I suffered the additional trauma of having to read these allegations. They said that she had walked out on her loving husband and was living in sin with another woman, a senior nurse, and that the two of them planned to raise a bastard child as husband and wife. It’s unfortunate because this filth presented as the Committee’s findings – mere rumours, unsubstantiated allegations and lewd innuendoes that are the fate of any working lady in this place – have become a matter of canonical record. Can we blame the poor fathers in our French Colony when they prefer not to send their girls to work?
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Page 22