Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

The court clerk announces the State vs Alice Bhatti: Alice Bhatti bazir bo . Alice walks into the dock with her head held high, handcuffs clinking, staring purposefully at the judge as if saying: you?

There, Joseph Bhatti tells himself with a certain pride. That’s my daughter. “Your daughter is very pretty,” whispers the lawyer in his ear. And then Joseph feels sad: that’s all his daughter is good at, looking pretty and bashing up octogenarian professionals. As if being beautiful gives her the right to behave badly. What kind of father feels pride at his daughter strutting around in a law court facing charges of disorderly behaviour and causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder?

Joseph Bhatti has himself faced such accusations most of his life. What kind of sweeper goes out and cleans the city on his days off? What kind of Christian never turns up for Sunday service? What kind of Bhatti goes around healing stomach ulcers by lighting candles and reciting Musla verses? When his back was straight and his opium intake regular and pure, he would thump his chest and say: “This kind of man. Joseph Bhatti Choohra. We were here before the Christians came, before the Muslas came. Even before the Hindus came. I am not just the son of this soil. I am the soil. Yes, I am Joseph Bhatti Choohra.”

It’s only when Alice Bhatti is about to be led away and S.M. Qadri whispers a long-winded explanation in his ear and proclaims that the law is the eternal whore for those who can pay for its upkeep that Joseph Bhatti realises that Alice has been found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

When the judge leaves his chair and everyone present in the court rises, Joseph Bhatti keeps sitting in petty defiance, keeps looking at Alice, hoping that she’ll look towards him, maybe wave a hand, acknowledge the fact that he came, that he brought a lawyer with him. Alice does turn around, but only to stare at the judge, then she spits on the floor of the court and rushes out, two fat policewomen trying to keep pace with her.

♦

Alice comes home four months early, not because of Reverend Philip’s intervention as people assumed, but because all women prisoners get their term reduced by four months when someone important dies. Joseph makes her an omelette and puts it in front of her as if she had gone for a sleepover at a friend’s house and has come back complaining of the bad food she was fed there.

“I found a baby in the main drain at the Ideal Housing Society,” he says, pushing a piece of cold toast towards her. Alice is not used to discussing his work with him. She is not used to talking about his work to anyone. In the Borstal her standard reply to any question about her father was: he works for the Municipal Corporation. And then she would ask them, “What does your father do? Doesn’t he work for the Corporation too?” As if not working for the Corporation was like being homeless.

“It was in a plastic shopping bag, just this big.” He stretches his palm, moves his other hand along his forearm, trying to get the size of the baby in the plastic shopping bag right. “Wasn’t much bigger than a kitten.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl. I think it’s a sign.”

Alice pushes her plate aside. She feels she is still in the Borstal, taking bullshit because she has to, but knowing when to stop. “Sign of what? I think it’s a sign that there is no place a woman can go and deliver a baby, that there is no place for her even when her water is breaking. It’s a sign that human life can be flushed down the toilet. It’s a sign that nobody gives a fuck about signs.” In her head she scolds herself: she shouldn’t have used the F-word. But in the Borstal you couldn’t speak a whole sentence without saying the F-word and hope to be heard.

Alice can’t fathom Joseph’s new love for signs, symbols, mixed-up theology picked from random sermons, because he had always maintained the swagger of a Choohra, an untouchable with attitude, not the demeanour of a washed, devout Sunday Catholic. When Dr Pereira, in his days of community work, tried to get him off the opium, he said, “If I am going to be called a bhangi all my life, I might as well have some bhang.” And after Dr Pereira left, he launched into a rant against him. “Look at him lecturing us; we are the children of this land, we have lived here for thousands of years and they are just Goan kachra that drifted here on the waves of the Arabian Sea. Now they’ll teach us how to be Yassoo’s children when they are embarrassed by the fact that we are supposed to be brothers in faith. They’ll teach us good manners. What are they? Our nannies? You know what they think? They think we are shit-cleaners. Yes, we are shit-cleaners, but what are they? Shit.”

Joseph Bhatti suddenly remembers that he is talking to Alice, his daughter who has just come home after fourteen months in the Borstal. He feels he should tell her about his life, give her some parental advice. “I did your Pereira Sahib’s house for a few weeks. To pay back for all the help that he gave us, all the petitions he filed. And they fed me in their Choohra dishes and then washed their hands as if I was spreading leprosy. They hovered around me at a distance thinking that if I touched something it would get contaminated. I’d rather clean up sewers. When I walk the streets, the streets belong to me. Have you noticed that when I walk the streets with my bamboo, they cross over to avoid my shadow? What are they scared of? Getting contaminated by their own refuse?”

“I don’t know about others, but Dr Pereira is a decent person. He was my only defence witness. He even bailed me out the first time.”

“I know, they are good at that. Dressing up and turning up for events. Courts. Meetings. Prayers. Funerals.” Alice Bhatti knows by now that when Joseph Bhatti says ‘they’, he doesn’t just mean Dr Pereira and his fellow doctors; he means anyone who has become a clerk in local government, or a receptionist at a foreign embassy, or a guest relations officer in a hotel; any woman who has set up a Montessori school in her living room, everyone who doesn’t work for the Corporation. And even in the Corporation, if you have risen to become a supervisor, you have joined them.

“And then they turn up at church on Sundays wearing their suits and their devotion, as if Yassoo is not the saviour of all mankind but an usher who has got their names on the guest list, who’ll escort them to the roped area in the VIP enclosure, as if he was born and died and was resurrected for the sole purpose that he can whisk them through the formalities and take them into paradise.”

Alice Bhatti starts collecting the plates and speaks without looking up. “I am applying for a job, at the Sacred. I need money to buy a uniform. I’ll return it to you when I get my first pay cheque.” She doesn’t expect a straight answer. She actually expects no answer. If he has the money he’ll leave it on the kitchen table; if he doesn’t, he won’t. He won’t talk about it. He is as likely to talk about money as she is likely to tell him how she dealt with her periods in the Borstal.

He gets up and starts to go out, then stops at the door and looks back. “Choohras were here before everything. Choohras were here before the Sacred was built, before Yassoo was resurrected, before Muslas came on their horses, even before Hindus decided they were too exalted to clean up their own shit. And when all of this is finished, Choohras will still be here.”

“Yes,” says Alice Bhatti, the fresh graduate from the Borstal. People can learn various crafts in jail: to pick pockets, to wield a knife, how to use your knee in a fight, to plant flowers in pots made out of cardboard or hook up with someone and hatch a plan to kidnap a film star, or to write poetry. Alice has learnt only one thing: to keep quiet and speak only when absolutely necessary. “Yes, when everything is finished, Choohras will still be here. And cockroaches too.”