Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Mr MA LLB is sitting in his chair contemplating a full glass of milk.

“Stomach ulcers?” Joseph Bhatti asks without greeting him. “You have tried everything.”

The lawyer shakes his head mournfully. “I have tried everything. Allopathic, homeopathic, hakims, black magic type things even: white pigeon’s blood mixed with young lizard’s tail ash. Disgusting stuff. Probably illegal, too.”

Joseph Bhatti listens patiently, then pulls up a chair and sits down. “Milk. Yes, it works. For a little while maybe. But not everyone likes milk.”

The lawyer clutches the glass of milk as if about to throw it in Joseph Bhatti’s face, then gently pushes it aside. “The only thing that works. But only two hours. And it tastes like castor oil. Have you ever tasted castor oil? My mouth tastes of castor oil all day. I don’t know for what sins I am being punished. I spend half my life trying not to throw up.”

Joseph Bhatti notices a calendar on the wall behind the lawyer. The calendar has a camel silhouetted against a desert sunset and some Arabic calligraphy. Joseph Bhatti has heard from someone that there is not a single camel in the Musla book, and yet they can’t seem to get them out of their minds. What has Musla God got to do with camels? Why are they stuck on this ugly beast? What’s wrong with horses? What’s wrong with horses with wings? Hell, what’s wrong with trains? Why all this hooves and humps pornography? Do they really think their creator lives in a desert and travels on this ugly, vicious animal? There was a time in Joseph Bhatti’s life when he could have stood at a street corner and made a speech about camels, but these days you never know. Especially with people who like calendars with tastefully photographed camels.

He takes his glass tumbler, his candle and matchbox from his satchel and lines them up on the table, as if about to perform a little magic show for the lawyer.

The lawyer looks at the tools of his trade doubtfully and says, “Will it hurt?”

“Not if you get my daughter Alice Bhatti out on bail. She is appearing in Session Court Four this afternoon. Cooked-up charges of assaulting and causing grievous bodily harm. Try and stay still, it might tickle a bit.”

The table is cleared, the lawyer takes off his shirt and lies down. Joseph lights the candle, puts it in the lawyer’s navel, and stares at it and slowly counts to ten. Then he puts the glass jar on the candle, and as the flame goes out and the jar is filled with swirls of milky-white smoke, he shuts his eyes and starts to recite Sura Asar. By the declining day, man is in a state of loss…

The lawyer looks at him in panic, as if he has been conned into joining a dangerous cult. He is a street lawyer and he has seen all kinds of perverts in his business, but a Christian Choohra reciting the Holy Quran with the zeal of a novice mullah, he has never seen. He is not even sure if it’s legal.

♦

In a free market, it’s not always the best person who reaches the top, but if someone manages to, people find out. Stop anyone hunched over a blocked drain in this part of the city and ask them who is the best. They won’t name a company, or their uncle, or the chief janitor in the Municipal Corporation; they’ll say Joseph Bhatti of French Colony. Even in French Colony, not many are born with the instinct to smell a sewer and tell what’s blocking it. He is retired now, but they still call him when they can’t figure out what’s stuck in the bowels of a gutter. He still goes out during downpours and works voluntarily, because rains are rare in this part and they bring their own unique challenges. Suddenly you are not just making people’s lives easier, you are saving lives.

The kind of rains they get here would delight Noah.

Like in every other profession, Joseph Bhatti had risen to the top through passion, dedication and natural talent, all of which were very rare in his line of work. God needed prophets, he tells his co-workers, so that they could take care of your refuse, otherwise humanity would have drowned in it. But it’s not his deft touch with a blocked drain that impresses the church. Reverend Philip suspects him of being a closet Musla. What kind of Catholic goes around curing stomach ailments by reciting verses from the Quran and lighting candles?

French Colony has a history of producing not just sound sanitary professionals, but also idiot saints every few years. One day you are down in the gutters and smell like a leftover from some plague, and the next moment you are a healer and a prophet with people nailing jasmine garlands to your door. You’ve got a queue of people outside your shack who want you to heal their measles, you double people’s savings, predict the correct cricket scores and soon your reputation spreads to the outskirts of French Colony, which brings in the non-believers who are in financial or love trouble and an occasional flash car, and soon Father Philip starts inserting jibes in his sermon about sorcerers who are leading people away from Lord Yassoo’s path.

Joseph Bhatti has never made any claims. People only believe one thing about this man with a full head of shiny grey hair and a jet-black moustache: that he has a ninety per cent record of curing stomach ulcers by chanting some Musla prayers. Nothing more. Nothing less. He can’t secure you an Italian visa, he can’t bring your spurned lover back, he can’t make a venomous boss give you a bonus. He is hopeless when it comes to college exams, he has no advice for warring sisters-in-law or hopeless young men competing for the favours of the same whore. When people with any ailment that is not a stomach ulcer approach him he shakes his head, looks towards the sky and asks: “When was the last time it rained in this city?” And when they remind him that it was only last year he says: “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t order that rain to fall. I am not a magician, I am a Choohra. I just recite His words but I can’t hold Him to His words. To tell you the truth, I don’t even understand His words. I just light a candle and cover it with a glass jar and mumble His words. He is the one who cures.”

♦

When Joseph Bhatti sees Alice at her bail hearing in the session court, he sees something of himself in her. Alice Bhatti carries her handcuffs lightly, as if she is wearing glass bangles. She treats the policewomen as if they were her personal bodyguards, and she looks at the judge as if to say, how can a man so fat, so ugly, wearing such a dandruff-covered black robe sit in judgement on her?

Joseph Bhatti looks around the court to see if there are any acquaintances present for the hearing. Since the case doesn’t involve any claims of religious discrimination, any acts of blasphemy or disputed church lands, nobody from Lord’s Lawyers or any of the human rights organisations has showed up. Alice Bhatti avoids eye contact with him. He feels a twinge of failure, a bit like going to see an old sweeper friend only to find out that he has set up a laundry shop full of spotless white washing machines, put up a neon sign and hired other sweepers to sweep the floor. Or running into others who have tried to find an opening in the church food chain, donned robes and are on their way to becoming a bishop of somewhere or serving their Lord in some picturesque Italian village. He has seen the postcards they send, and it seems to him that maybe Yassoo wasn’t the eternal saviour of all mankind but a visa officer. People from the Bhatti clan have also caught the bug. He has seen their sons and daughters become cooks in four-star hotels, doctors, guitar players, even professors. He has seen them take on Musla names, move out of French Colony and become members of some other species. He has never shown any such ambition. “I am not proud of what I do. I am not ashamed of what I do. This is who I am,” he often told Alice when she started nursing school. He did save up for Alice, he did send her to school, but he never dreamed of an old age where he would sit at home and live off her income. And he definitely never dreamed of sitting in a court hearing his daughter being charged with attempted murder. Mostly he has been an absentee father, almost embarrassed to come home to a daughter who tries to behave like a son and — like all sons — falls short.