Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Teddy is one of those people who are only articulate when they talk about cricket. The rest of the time they rely on a combination of grunts, hand gestures and repeat snippets of what other people have just said to them. He also has very little experience of sharing his feelings.

He has been a customer of women and occasionally their tormentor, but never a lover. He believes that being a lover is something that falls somewhere between paying them and slapping them around. Twice he has come close to conceding love. Once he gave a fifty-rupee tip to a prostitute who looked fourteen but claimed to be twenty-two. Encouraged by his generosity, she also demanded a poster of Imran Khan, and that put him off. Teddy promised to get it but never went back because he had always believed that Imran Khan was a failed batsman masquerading as a bowler. On another occasion he only pretended to take his turn with a thirty-two-year-old Bangladeshi prisoner after a small police contingent had shuffled out of the room. He just sat with her and played with her hair while she sobbed and cursed in Bengali. The only word he could understand was Allah. He had walked out adjusting his fly, pretending to be exhausted and satisfied, even joking with the policemen: it was like fucking an oil spill.

But Teddy Butt can be very articulate, even poetic, with a Mauser in his hand, and after much thought this is what he decides to do. He tries practising in front of the full-length mirror in his room. “You live in my heart.” With every word he jabs the Mauser in the air, like an underprepared lawyer trying to impress a judge. He worries that his gun might send the wrong signal, but he is convinced that he will be able to explain himself. People always try their best to understand when their life depends on listening properly. He changes the dressing on his thumb as if preparing for a job interview.

♦

“You can’t go around the Ortho ward with that.” Alice Bhatti has emerged carrying a bedpan in one hand and a discarded, blood-smeared bandage in the other, and starts admonishing him while walking away from him. “Don’t waste your bullets, this hospital will kill them all anyway.” Teddy feels the love of his life slipping from his grasp, his plan falling apart at the very first hurdle. He grips the Mauser, stretches his arm and blocks her way.

Alice Bhatti looks confused for a moment and then irritated. “What do you want to rob me of? This piss tray?”

With the Mauser extended, Teddy finds his tongue. “I can’t live like this. This life is too much.”

“Nobody can live like this.” Alice Bhatti is attentive now and sympathetic. “If these cheap guns don’t kill you, those Boldabolic pills will. Get a job as a PT teacher. Or come to think of it, you could get a nurse’s diploma and work here. There is always work for a male nurse. There are parts of this place where even women doctors don’t go. Charya Ward for example hasn’t had a…”

Teddy doesn’t listen to the whole thing; the words ‘PT teacher’ trigger off a childhood memory that he had completely forgotten — a very tall, very fat PT teacher holds him by his ears, swings him around and then hurls him to the ground and walks away laughing. The other children run around him in a circle and decide to change his nickname from Nappy to Yo Yo. Teddy puts the gun to Alice Bhatti’s temple and snarls in his little girl’s sing-song voice, “Give me one good reason why somebody wouldn’t shoot in this hospital? Why shouldn’t I shoot you right here and end all my troubles?”

Mine too, she wants to say, but Teddy’s hand holding the Mauser is trembling, and one thing Alice Bhatti doesn’t want in her life is a shootout in her workplace.

He orders Alice to put her tray and bandages down, which she does. She has realised that Teddy is serious. Suicidal serious maybe, but he is the kind of suicidal serious who in the process of taking his own life could cause some grievous bodily harm to those around him.

Ortho ward is unusually quiet at this time of day. Number 14, who is always shouting about an impending plague caused by computer screens, is calm and only murmurs about the itch in his plastered leg. A ward boy enters the corridor carrying a water cooler on a wheelbarrow; he sees Alice and Teddy and stops in his tracks. Embarrassed, as if he has stumbled on to someone’s private property and found the owners in a compromising position, he backtracks, pulling the wheelbarrow with him. Alice doesn’t expect him to inform anyone.

“What do you want, Mr Butt?” Alice Bhatti tries to hide her fear behind a formal form of address. She has learnt all the wrong things from Senior Sister Hina Alvi.

You live in my heart, Teddy Butt wants to say, but only jabs the air with his Mauser, five times. In the Borstal Alice heard many stories about men in love brandishing guns, and in all of them when men are unable to talk you are in real trouble. She looks at him expectantly, as if she has understood what his Mauser has just said, likes it and now wants to hear more.

Mixed-up couplets about her lips and hair, half-remembered speeches about a life together, names of their children, pledges of undying love, a story about the first time he saw her, what she wore, what she said, a half-sincere eulogy about her professionalism that he was sure she would appreciate, her shoulder blades, all these things rush through Teddy Butt’s head, and then he realises that he has already delivered his opening line by pulling out a gun.

Now he can start anywhere.

Alice Bhatti thinks that she should not do Sunday shifts any more and instead help her dad with his woodwork. If she lives to see another Sunday, that is.

She looks beyond Teddy. At the top of the stairs, a man sits facing the sun like an ancient king waiting to receive his subjects. His legs amputated just above the knees, he sits on the floor, wearing full-length trousers that sometimes balloon up in the wind. He has a stack of large X-rays next to him. He picks them up one by one, holds them against the sun and looks at them for a long time, as if contemplating old family pictures.

Teddy Butt decides to start with her garbage bin. “I go through your garbage bin. I know everything about you. I see all the prayers you scribble on prescriptions. You never write your own name. But I can tell from the handwriting.” He sobs violently and holds the Mauser with both hands to steady himself. The muzzle of his gun slides down a degree, like an erection flashbacking to a sad memory. Alice sees it as a sign from God. Bless our Lord who art descended from the heavens . She is a tad too quick in her gratitude. God accepts it with godlike indifference. And Teddy straightens his gun. He seems to have found his groove and starts to speak in paragraphs, as if delivering the manifesto of a new political party that wants to eradicate poverty and pollution during its first term in power.

“The love that I feel for you is not the love I feel for any other human being. The world might think it’s the love of your flesh. I can understand this world and their thinking. I have wondered about this and thought long and hard and realised that this is a world full of sinners, so I do understand what they think but I don’t think like that. When I think about you, do I think about these milk jugs?” He waves his Mauser across her chest. Alice looks at his gun and feels nauseous and wonders if the peace and quiet of this corridor is worth preserving. “I think of your eyes. I think of your eyes only.”

The octopus of fear that had clutched Alice Bhatti’s head begins to relax its tentacles.

In her heart of hearts, Alice, who has seen people die choking on their own food, and survive after falling from a sixth floor on to a paved road, knows that Teddy means every word of what he has said. And he isn’t finished yet.