Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Noor sees Alice and Teddy walking out of the Sacred, hand in hand, and starts to suspect that love is not just blind, it’s deaf and dumb and probably has an advanced case of Alzheimer’s; it’s unhinged. Look at them holding hands, whispering to each other, smiling, walking out of the hospital like they are leaving this world of pain behind for ever. Alice is pretending to have lost her eyesight, holding on to Teddy’s finger and walking with her eyes shut. She has probably lost her brains too. Noor has walked for too long holding Zainab’s hand to find anything remotely cute about anyone pretending to be blind. To have eyesight is to be blessed. Pretending to be blind when you have a perfect pair of eyes seems to him grotesque blasphemy. And to derive some kind of sexual pleasure from it is downright perverse. Noor wishes there was a government department where he could report this offence. Surely if there are laws against non-believers pretending to be Muslims, there should be a law against people with perfect eyes pretending to be blind.

Love, he concludes, is a runaway charya.

It started with a casual enquiry. Alice Bhatti came over when Noor was massaging Zainab’s feet, nudged him aside and started kneading her feet and ankles with expert fingers. “Where is that police tout friend of yours?” And when Noor looked at her quizzically, she pulled out what looked like a toy gun and pointed it towards Noor’s head. “Answer before I shoot,” she laughed and lowered the gun. “I need his help with this. I want to be able to shoot moving targets.”

“You definitely need help,” Noor sneered. “But I am not sure if my friend is the man. My friend doesn’t have a permanent address. But I’ll let him know when he shows up next.”

How can there be love between these two? Noor wonders. How can there be anything between these two? Noor knows that Alice likes sucking toffees in her breaks. He also knows that Teddy carries Accu-Chek in his front pocket to monitor his sugar level and can inject insulin while riding a motorbike. She is trying to bring order to a world full of sick people, administering IVs at two a.m., holding old women’s hands, pretending to be their daughter, reading the Kalima with them as they breathe their last. He rides high on entropy; he pees right under the sign where it says Look, a dog is pissing here . Sometimes when he sees an approaching beggar he puts his hand in his pocket, and as the beggar hovers around in anticipation he takes out a comb and starts to groom his hair. He waxes his body hair every week; she shaves her underarm hair only at Easter and Christmas, when she goes to church and wears a sleeveless dress. She looks left and right at least half a dozen times before crossing the road, sometimes walking half a mile to find a pedestrian bridge or a safe zebra crossing. He rides his motorbike at full speed on the wrong side of the road and expects traffic to part for him, and it usually does. He watches National Geographic Channel in his free time.

Alice has never had any free time.

It’s only when he sees them walking out of the Sacred compound holding hands and getting into an autorickshaw that Noor realises that he might have played a role in this fucked-up love story.

Noor had conveyed to Teddy the basic facts, in the most casual way.

“Junior Nurse Alice Bhatti has been looking for you,” he had said as he took the bandage off Teddy’s thumb. The multiple fractures had started to fester and it smelt of impending gangrene.

“Was she angry?” asked Teddy, biting his tongue; he seemed to be reliving a painful memory.

“She is always angry,” said Noor. “She was carrying a gun and she was asking about you.”

Noor knows the old saying about opposites attracting each other, but these two belong to different species. It’s like a cheetah falling for a squirrel or bats trying to chat up butterflies. Noor keeps his analogies to himself, doodles an occasional bat in the margins of his register and follows this unlikely love as it takes shape amidst the dying chaos of the Sacred Heart, which Ortho Sir has started calling Slutsville after hearing rumours about Alice and Teddy.

Noor sees them just before sunset behind the A&E building, Alice and Teddy’s right arms outstretched, Teddy’s chin resting almost on her shoulder, his hand steadying her hand as it aims the gun. Noor sees that their shadows overlay each other and stretch a long way, right up to the Sacred’s back wall. Noor thinks this is the saddest afternoon of his life.

In the last few days there have been other moments, little gestures that should have alerted him. Teddy curling his lips when he sees a patient talking to Alice in a loud voice, Teddy holding a door open for her for a second longer than he should, Teddy walking behind her and trying to fall in step with her, Teddy appearing at lunch breaks with fried fish wrapped in newspaper, Teddy pretending to read the newspaper, Teddy riding in the passenger seat of the police jeep rather than sitting in his designated place in the back. Noor has no idea whether Teddy is following a road map or has just woken up one day with ideas of self-improvement and coupledom. He knows not where this story is headed. Or maybe he has known all along but doesn’t want to believe it.

♦

“This thumb is festering,” Alice Bhatti had said, without any reference to their earlier attempt at gunpoint romance. “How did you manage to break it in so many pieces?”

“Yes, Teddy,” Noor chimed in. “You shouldn’t go around putting your hand in dangerous places. What were you trying to do? Make mincemeat for Inspector Malangi?”

Alice Bhatti cleaned the wound with a cotton bud soaked in spirit. “You need a course of six antibiotic injections. Miss one and we’ll have to start all over again.”

It was at that moment that Noor realised that Alice had crossed the line that care providers are supposed to watch out for. It was the kind of moment that professionals are trained to take in their stride, and this was unprofessional behaviour of the most basic kind. You are supposed to manage pain, not share it. Cutting, disinfecting, injecting, stitching is all in a day’s work. But here, when Teddy lies with his face down on the stretcher, on this very shaky wheelie stretcher on which Alice and Noor have shared their Borstal memories, something shifts in Alice’s heart. Teddy’s hands flail helplessly in the air to stave off the needle. He clenches his hairless butt, his face contorts into a cartoonish grimace, his hands close into tight fists, this bundle of hard muscle tries to save himself from the tiny prick of pain; this is when Alice Bhatti feels that feeling that people call a tender moment, the feeling that you feel when a baby is about to fall off a bed and your instinctive reaction is to scoop it up in your arms. Sister Alice obviously doesn’t scoop Teddy into her arms, but she puts her hand on his shoulder, an instinctive, comforting touch, not a touch that promises copulation, or the kind of touch that hints at a lifetime together and healthy babies winning school prizes, but a casual touch that says, look that was all, that was all the pain I was going to cause you, look, it doesn’t hurt any more, does it?

But this small, spontaneous gesture is enough to convince Noor that Teddy is in love, and that his love has been accepted and reciprocated. Not only is he in love, but Alice Bhatti approves this love, accepts it with her hand on his shoulder, and believes that their hearts have been connected somehow in this moment through the needle injecting that fluid into his body which will protect him against all infections. Now their hearts must remain connected till the time one of the two stops beating.