Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

“All the good ones go to Dubai and Toronto.” Ortho Sir is mild now — and mean, having fully exposed the inherent inefficiency of the system. He has just received his Canadian visa and it has given him more confidence than those twenty-five years of setting bones in an operating theatre, even more than his two trips to Mecca. Spiritually, he always reminds his colleagues, he feels much more settled now; he quotes from the Hadith, which says something about knowledge and having to go to China. Nobody reminds him that Toronto is not in China. Not yet.

Senior Sister Hina Alvi looks at them with contempt, as if they have stepped over some invisible boundary of good taste, as if words like ‘procedure’, ‘vacancy’ and ‘candidate’ are vulgar and shouldn’t be used in front of ladies. She does all of this with a little twitch of her upper lip and a pat on her steel hair.

Senior Sister Hina Alvi has thirty-five years of bedside experience, she has worked through riots and massacres and saved the life of a foreign minister’s wife. She knows about these things. Alice Bhatti is always surprised how Senior Sister can get the world to obey her with the movement of an eyebrow.

Alice Bhatti first sits on the edge of the chair, feels dizzy, then fears that the chair might slip from under her and she will end up sprawled on the floor with her legs splayed in the air. She moves back in the chair, the chair squeaks and she puts the file in her lap, then picks it up and clasps it to her chest. Then realising that she is making a spectacle of herself, she puts it back in her lap and thrusts her hands under her thighs, to stop them from trembling.

“So are you Alice or are you Bhatti?” Sir Ortho believes that this country can only progress if people start spelling out their middle names, tucking in their shirts and paying his full fees in advance.

“Both. That is my name.” Alice Bhatti feels silly having to explain her name. There might be things in the application she has embellished, but her name is not one of them.

“I am surprised that you are trying to hide basic information. Your full name is Alice Joseph Bhatti. Are you ashamed of your father’s name? Now Bhatti is a respectable clan from Punjab and I am sure the Josephs are a respectable lot from wherever they are from. Let me tell you something: my father was a schoolteacher and went to teach in a school on his bicycle for thirty-five years. Same route. Same bicycle. Am I ashamed of him now? No, that bicycle is parked in my garage, along with my Camry. So that my kids can see it and learn. Do I hide it from the world? No.”

Dr Pereira’s administrative intervention comes in the form of a polite cough, the clearing of an already clear throat and his fingers playing a half-remembered jazz beat on the table. He was practising his drums with the Hawks Bay Kittens the night his father called him and before breathing his last handed him the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments. “The application form doesn’t have provision for middle names, and Bhattis are pretty much everywhere, in every religion, so if we can start the — ”

“So, Miss Alice Joseph Bhatti, why should we give you this job?” Ortho Sir asks her without looking up and starts scribbling furiously in his file. The bicycle-riding-schoolteacher’s son has come this far in life because he knows when to move on.

Senior Sister Hina Alvi looks at her with a beatific smile, as if already forgiving her for all the mistakes she’ll make in the rest of her brief and miraculous career. Dr Pereira sends her silent messages: Praise Our Lord Yassoo, now don’t let me down, child, not in front of these Muslas . Short, to-the-point interventionist prayers are Dr Pereira’s other management tool besides good manners.

This is simple. Alice Bhatti knows the answer. She has rehearsed it in front of the mirror. But now she needs water. Her heart beats in her parched throat. A strange croak comes out of her mouth, a voice that surprises her, the voice of a baby frog complaining about being too small for this world. She notices, for the first time in her life, that the lizard has four feet.

“I have qualifications…” She realises that she has forgotten the rest of her answer. She decides to carry on recklessly, like a pedestrian caught in the middle of a fast lane who decides that if they close their eyes and rush forward they will end up safe on the other side. It all comes out in a jumble. Accident assessment. Paediatric management. First-aid course: FA second division. Serving patients and humanity. Taking care of the sick and dying. Experience in TB ward before it was closed down. Personal setbacks. Difficult patient-and-doctor relationships. Maternity ward internship. Flexiworking.

Having spoken for one whole minute without fainting, Alice Bhatti takes a deep breath and realises that she has just blurted out everything she was supposed to say over the course of the entire interview.

An ambulance siren sings in the distance, and the ceiling fan suddenly picks up speed. Her dupatta flares in a gust of wind and the faces of the three people sitting in front of her blur into a crowd, a crowd that is headed for a pre-planned lynching somewhere else but decides to first warm up on a stray dog. The ambulance siren comes very close and Alice remembers a dream she had the previous night. She is in an ambulance, the ambulance is a ball of fire, it’s rushing away from the Sacred. She had been puzzled in her dream. An ambulance on fire she can understand. What was she doing in the ambulance? Why was her face covered in ice cubes? Why was the ambulance rushing away from the hospital?

“According to the modern principles of nursing and the patient-carer relationship…”

“Did you say you worked in Accidents?” Sir Ortho cuts her short, then pats the alien on his head. “Oh. Of course. Sure you worked in Accidents. Didn’t we have a little accident there? How could I forget?” Alice Bhatti cannot believe that Ortho Sir would remember her face. She remembers his face, though. She remembers a bucket and a mop and a river of blood on the floor. She remembers him tripping over her mop.

It seemed half the city had shot itself in the stomach and spilled its guts over the A&E floor during the shift that she worked as a replacement paramedic.

“Since when does mopping floors count as A and E experience?” Ortho Sir mime-mops a floor with his hands. “Pereira sahib, if today I work here as a sweeper and tomorrow turn up with an FRCS degree hanging around my neck, will you hire me as Head of Orthopaedics?”

Dr Pereira, a third-generation physician, shakes his head, not in denial but in despair. He is too polite to point out that not all Christians are sweepers. He also fears the retort: “But all sweepers are Christians.” If Alice Bhatti didn’t want this job so badly, if she hadn’t stretched the gap between her nursing-school years and her first house job to cover the fourteen months that she spent in the Borstal Jail for Women and Children, she could have told him what her mother had told many a man in her life: if I shove that mop up your arse, you will walk around like a peacock. Instead she ignores Ortho Sir and glances at the boy sitting in the corner, scribbling away, a peon pretending to be a poet, taking notes as if he is taking down minutes in a board meeting, as if he understands anything. As if he could write a straight sentence. She doesn’t really mind the scribbling — after all, that is his job — but she doesn’t want Noor to be here. Not today.

♦

Later, people will say that they shouldn’t have given her this job — any job — that they should have imposed strict patient-carer separation, that she should have stuck to her own and married in her own religion (there are obviously those who will say that she was not the marrying type to begin with), that she should not have carried that Gillette razor in her uniform pocket. Some will say that marriages made at sea always end up in disappointment, others will just mutter that there is something called modesty and will argue for a redesign of the paramedics’ uniform. Someone else will say that this hospital has been around for 107 years and its main purpose is to save lives, not suck cocks in VIP rooms. Tongues will wag and pens will do their moral forensics, but that will come much later.