Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Teddy is also determined to banish all competition, to protect this tender shoot of love against every kind of bad weather.

Teddy doesn’t really think that Noor is competition, but he looks at him and sizes him up: why is this boy always glued to Alice’s side? Teddy will have to talk to him soon.

Together what will they become? Alice Bhatti Butt? Alice Butt? Alice Teddy Butt?

There are people in his life who call him Teddy and there are people in his life who call him Butt Sahib. When someone addresses him as Teddy Butt Sahib, he knows that he’ll be asked to do something humiliating. Nobody has ever called Alice Bhatti anything but Alice, Sister Alice or — in private wards — Sister Bhatti. Mostly people call her ‘daughter’ or ‘sister’ and then do exactly what they would do with their own sisters and daughters: they treat her like a slave they bought at a clearance sale.

Noor might be only seventeen but he knows about love, what it entails: to see the beloved drink water, to see them open their eyes, to try and guess if they are asleep or awake, to try and guess what dream they are dreaming when they are asleep, to kiss somebody when they are sleeping, to feel their early-morning nausea, to feel scared when they are scared, to feel your ears get hot when they are embarrassed.

Noor is a man; he thinks he knows that Teddy can’t get out of that nine-second cycle. But what does Alice see in him? Does she like him because he rescued her from Charya Ward? But it was Noor who first warned her and then sent him in. Do you want to marry someone because they pulled a gun at you and professed their undying love? This whole business of love, he concludes, is a protection racket, like paying your weekly bhatta to your local hoodlum so that you are not mugged on your own street.

Noor knows all of this, but even when he sees them walk out of the Sacred gate hand in hand, he can’t imagine them feeling any of those things for each other. He can’t imagine reading their names together except maybe in a tragic news headline.

“Ihave a surprise for you,” Teddy Butt tells Alice fifteen minutes before she is about to finish her last shift before Ash Wednesday. Joseph Bhatti had placed a box of sweets in the kitchen this morning and she had found a rosary hanging from her doorknob. She likes it when Joseph Bhatti tries to play her mother; but she can’t stand it when he expects her to play her own mother. She doesn’t mind starving herself for the day, but what’s the point of singing There is no fees in the school of the crucified one along with a couple of hundred other people most of whom have never seen the inside of a school?

Teddy is dressed in starched white shalwar qameez and embroidered shoes and looks like he is going to attend someone’s engagement party. Alice Bhatti is not easily surprised. Teddy has been writing her lovesick notes that she suspects are copied from 100 Best Love Songs of the Past Twenty Years but she thinks he should get credit for trying. Any man who reaches for a book when he thinks about you is a man that you should think about. She has been giving him an occasional smile and Lexatonils and accepting small trinkets with a wry smile; they have reached a level of resigned intimacy.

“Surprise me,” she says, sounding bored and not believing for a moment that Teddy is capable of an original thought. Teddy Butt’s ideas of love are derived from any song that might be topping the charts at the time. His ideas about the logistics of love are learnt from the wildlife documentaries he watches on National Geographic, lions copulating by the lakeside and grasshoppers serenading other grasshoppers while licking morning dew off their wings. Sometimes he dreams of carrying Alice in his jaws like when a lioness transports her cub to a safe place.

Not another pink teddy bear, not another singing greetings card, not another bargain from the perfume bazaar, and definitely nothing from Gentlemen’s Squad’s lost and found stores, she secretly hopes. She suspects that he gets his gift ideas from the same shopping channel where he orders his protein supplements. But she also feels that she is his teacher and must not discourage him. He is learning. At least he is turning up to meet her without pretending to be sick. And without his Mauser.

She has been expecting to be asked for something. She is not sure what. Maybe she’ll be invited out for lunch in one of those Irani cafes where couples sit behind curtained booths. She has been apprehensive that she might be asked to go to the zoo to see the new pair of South African lion cubs that Teddy has been obsessing about. She doesn’t really know what her answer would be but she has been hoping that she’ll have an answer when she is asked. Now she is being asked.

“You have to shut your eyes first,” he says in a lilting voice, looking into her eyes. Either he has been mixing his Lexatonil with something else, or he is just sleepy with love. A black butterfly appears out of nowhere and does a little dance between their locked eyes before it flies away. Alice likes this swirl of black velvet so close to her face. She imagines herself submerged in a sea of black butterflies. She is intrigued. She shuts her eyes properly. And as soon as she does, she begins to yearn for a proper surprise. If she was dreading a cheap little trinket before, now suddenly she wants an oil-tanker-sized surprise. She wants a surprise so big and so heavy it could flatten her in the middle of the road. She wants a tied-to-a-rocket-and-launched-into-space kind of surprise. She wonders why she isn’t thinking of flowers and candy and why she suddenly yearns for large, heavy, speedy objects. It’s futile to predict what love will make of you, but sometimes it brings you things you never knew you wanted. One moment all you want is a warm shower, and the next you are offering your lover your chest to urinate on. “Yes, surprise me,” she whispers.

He takes her left hand and wraps it around the middle finger of his right hand and asks her to hold on to it.

She has checked his pulse before. She has dressed his mangled thumb, which initially looked like a dog had chewed it and spat it out. He has pretended to read her palm: Oh, the distance between your thumb and forefinger, that’s a sign of your compulsively generous nature. I have never seen such a generous hand. And this thumb, such willpower, leadership qualities, stubborn maybe. This is definitely a Gandhi hand. Always principles over pleasure. Now show me the other one . But never have they held hands without a tacitly agreed cover story. She feels as if she is holding a live little animal. She clutches it tightly.

“You’ll have to walk with me. Walk carefully,” Teddy says.

As she emerges from the A&E department, Alice catches a whiff of rotten fruit, and a familiar old woman’s voice jeers at her from a distance: “Look at you playing blind man while your patients are dying out here. I am dying out here. Give me something for the night. The nights are becoming longer.”

Alice Bhatti smiles with her eyes shut. It is the old legless junkie who goes around on a skateboard and is always threatening to start swallowing broken electric light bulbs. “Wash your arse once a week,” she shouts back. “That’s all you need. Nobody dies of lice.”

“Kafirs have all the fun in this country. This country was made for Muslims, and poor Muslims can’t even get any Valium around here,” the old woman shouts back at her.

Alice Bhatti walks on. She doesn’t walk very carefully. She doesn’t want a calibrated, mild kind of surprise. She wants to rush headlong towards her destiny and surprise it before it can surprise her.

In the hospital compound where patients with all kinds of impairments walk around with all kinds of supports — teenage boys taking piggyback rides on their old fathers’ backs, teenage girls carrying their mothers on improvised stretchers, the polio battalion steering their skateboards — Alice walking with her eyes shut, holding on to Teddy’s finger, is a very ordinary sight.