Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Teddy puts a stiff, shy hand on her back and helps her into a waiting autorickshaw. Alice doesn’t want to hear whatever it is that Teddy is whispering to the rickshaw driver. She wants their destination to be a surprise. She feels the tincture-disease-hunger smell receding as the rickshaw bumps and swerves its way through heavy traffic. It doesn’t occur to her to let go of Teddy’s finger; she squeezes it every time the rickshaw jumps over a speed breaker. She lets her body press into his every time the rickshaw takes a tight corner. She feels Teddy’s whole body stiffen, and tremble lightly at every turn. Alice feels she can go anywhere pressed against this hard, warm, trembling body draped in starched cotton.

The traffic thins, the rickshaw drives faster, the air becomes salty and moist. A fine shower occasionally sprays her face. The rickshaw stops. Teddy helps her out. She shivers slightly when he puts his hand on the small of her back to give her support.

She wishes for a lifetime of alighting from rickshaws with his hand on her back.

She knows that she is on a boat, a motorboat. She has never been on a boat before. Now she remembers where this surprise might have originated. During a random conversation with Teddy on a slow afternoon, she vaguely remembers telling him that she has never been on the sea. “Surely everybody has been to the sea. It’s right there,” he had said. “No, you fool, I have been to the beach but I have never been on a boat,” she had replied. “All those waves rocking you up and down. Must be fun.”

He has remembered something she mentioned to fill an awkward silence between them. She feels angry for a moment. What right does he have to act out her private little whims? Then a wave hits the boat and she finds herself holding on to his shoulder. Seawater sprays her face and she doesn’t have to worry about her stinging eyes. Seawater washes away her tears.

“Should we get married?” Teddy asks in a whisper, but she hears it clearly above the roar of the sea.

“Here?” she shouts.

“No. No.” He sounds reassuring, trying to clear up a minor misunderstanding. “There.” He points to the distant blurred shape of a giant boat, which seems to have emerged from the depths of the sea. “But you promised to keep your eyes shut.”

Whatever happens afterwards, actually happens in this moment. Alice Bhatti wanted a solid, feet-on-the-ground-type surprise. But after the ride on the motorboat, they climb a ladder, and when she opens her eyes, instead of the certitude of a carpeted road or the soft sand of a beach, she finds her feet unsteady on the stern of a bobbing submarine on the very moody waves of the Arabian Sea.

Who knows what she was really hoping for? Maybe a walk by the seaside, maybe a corn on the cob while watching a monkey do a gun salute, as the waves lapped around her ankles; what she ended up with was an impromptu marriage proposal followed by an impromptu wedding in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

She couldn’t have guessed it. The surprise was, well, a surprise.

The story of what happened between them on that submarine has many versions, mostly narrated by Alice. Teddy has only one version and he always sticks to it: I have friends in the police who know some people who know people in the Coastguards who work with people who work in submarines. They’re like a family. When she opened her eyes, Alice squealed with delight, but then she didn’t. They served biryani. She chose her own name. Aliya. No, it wasn’t pre-planned. Who can plan something like that? How come there was an imam to perform the nuptials on a submarine? That’s plain ignorance about naval matters. There is always an imam on every submarine. She gave her consent. It was she who said that she’d go back to her house in French Colony and move in with me in a few days. I could have waited for as long as it took her. It wasn’t as if I was in a hurry to jump into bed with her. A man thinks of a woman every nine seconds but he doesn’t marry them all.

If you are being asked to marry someone on a submarine that may or may not be operational, you probably can’t squeal for long. You have decisions to make, or maybe you have already made decisions by travelling this far.

They go down a narrow staircase. The dining cabin has a slim table with seats that you can only put half your arse on.

Alice would never mention squealing. But her versions would keep changing depending on who her audience was. She would never admit to converting and would always insist that religion was never mentioned. She would admit that she did say ‘yes’ thrice. She was not sure whether she said yes to the question about taking Teddy as her husband in exchange for a suspended dowry of thirty-two rupees, or if she said yes when in a moment of confusion someone started addressing her as Aliya. Her versions would vary. Sometimes she would recite half a Kalima, which would lead people to joke, in bad taste of course, that maybe she became half a Muslim. The only thing she would always remain consistent about was that there were dozens of sailors in white shalwar qameezes, all calling her bhabi, and that there were three seagulls in the sky squawking like old friends trying to put some sense into her head and stop the wedding.

People asked her: “What does a submarine look like from the inside? Where do they keep their torpedoes? Is it true that the junior sailors have to sleep standing up?” And she would always get irritated with them because she thought they were interested only in trivia. “It looked like a dead eel from the outside and inside smelled of sailors’ farts,” she would say.

What Teddy and Alice would never know was that the smell of Alice Bhatti’s jasmine bracelet lingered in the submarine for days. Sometimes there were heated discussions, once even a punch-up, about the exact colour of her lipstick. She was quite fair-skinned for a Christian, a midshipman insisted. There was the obvious gossip about how a police tout like Teddy Butt got lucky.

There was a consensus on one point, though: that Alice didn’t look or behave like a typical Christian lady, although she was the only Christian lady they would ever meet in their entire lives.

Alice Bhatti walks past the shop owned by Jesus Bhatti, who sells cigarettes, milk and, when business is bad, pints of his own blood at the Sacred. Next to the shop is an empty shack from where the only entrepreneur in French Colony used to operate, stealing manhole covers and then selling them back to the Corporation. The open drain is clogged, its surface shimmering with all the plastic bags dumped in it. When Alice Bhatti was still a student, she used to mull over this question: if half the population of French Colony is responsible for clearing the garbage from the whole city, how come they can’t keep their own streets clean? Now she knows better and walks carefully trying to avoid the open sewers. She observes a gang of cats jumping the drain, playing a lazy game of catch.

Every married life in French Colony starts with a trip to the tailor’s shop, and this is where Alice Bhatti is going: to Dulhousie Tailoring, the only business in French Colony that has been around for forty years and also has a branch in Lahore and, according to the signboard outside the shop, now one in Toronto as well. She waits for a moment outside and through the frosted glass door surveys the inside, full of shadows hunched over sewing machines. The shop’s glass doors keep out the stench, or ‘the French perfume’ as outsiders call it. The aroma of steaming irons pressing Lawrencepur wool makes the customers feel rich, or at least tricks them into believing that they are not in French Colony any more. Senior Dulhousie has spent his life stitching cassocks for clergy, suits for churchgoing Catholic businessmen and wedding dresses for their daughters. Alice has never stepped inside the shop before, always aware that her father is as much of a Choohra in her own colony as he is outside it. By studying seven books in four years and marrying a semi-employed Musla, she is hoping to rise above the stench that is her daily bread. While in Borstal, she never missed her own home. She missed a home that she didn’t have as yet. She would hear the stories of other inmates who had tried to kill their husband or husband’s mistress or mistress’s husband and these stories always had at the centre a home: a hand pump, a stove, a charpoy or a little courtyard with a jasmine plant. Was that what she was yearning for, a home she could call her own?