Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

“I don’t know how you do it, Teddy.”

Teddy Butt ignores the compliment. He needs to preserve all his communication skills for the job at hand. The Hilux takes off as soon as he climbs into the back. A huddled, shawl-wrapped figure in the corner stirs, and after great effort and clinking of chains, a face looks up. Teddy switches on his flashlight. He can usually tell the value of the target by looking at the weight of metal on them. This one seems pretty heavy. A chunky pair of handcuffs, a nylon string around his ankles; this arrangement is reinforced by a set of iron rods that join his handcuffs to iron rings around his knees. It’s unfathomable how this creature can stay in any human position for long: if he sits, his knees are around his shoulders, if he tries to lie down, the iron rods threaten to pierce his loins; he can’t even roll himself into a ball and lie on the floor of the Hilux. These arrangements are usually made for the kind of people who tend to jump out of speeding jail vans, or for the sort of prisoners whose friends and comrades ambush police vehicles or barge into courts with RPGs blazing or blow up bridges to take back their man.

Teddy removes the shawl from the prisoner’s face and holds his flashlight close to it. The face is boyish and covered in tears and snot. One eye is a reddish, swollen mound. The lower lip is broken, and behind it a couple of teeth have probably been knocked out. He whimpers like an animal that has been half slaughtered with a blunt knife and is now waiting for its soul to leave its body. He is in that sad state where a swift death seems like a reasonably better option.

Teddy takes a corner of the boy’s shawl and starts to clean up his face. The whimpering gets louder.

“We’ll take these off when we get to your mother’s place,” Teddy says in a casual voice, not reassuring, just explaining standard operating procedures.

The Hilux honks at a donkey cart with spinach piled high and the driver asleep stretched out on top. The donkey, used to early-morning speedy traffic, swerves and makes way for the Hilux. A streetlight flickers on a small signboard, the kind that have cropped up all over the city. It depicts a wooden coffin: Say your prayers before prayers are said for you .

When asked to do this duty, Teddy feels like one of those ancient fabulists he has heard about on National Geographic. When men still lived in caves, they sat around fires and told each other stories so that they could stay awake and not get devoured by wild beasts. Teddy feels he is doing the same thing, in a slightly different way: keeping them awake, comforting them, cajoling them through the night, making them feel alive till such a time when they are not alive and don’t need to hear any more stories to stay awake.

The boy raises his head with a great deal of difficulty, looks into Teddy’s eyes and sobs. “I know you are taking me away. I know you won’t bring me back.” Teddy gets up from his seat and sits beside the boy, putting his right arm around him. That is usually half the job, developing a physical bond with them, holding their hand, being their family. You just need to tell them a story, any story, preferably something unexpected. “I gave them all the names.” The boy’s sobs get louder. “Everything I know. They said if I gave them all the names, they’d send me to jail. But you are not taking me to jail.” He starts bawling like a child who has just realised that his favourite toy is broken beyond repair and he won’t be given a replacement.

Teddy gets them all the time. I didn’t do it. They made me do it. I was told I was doing it for my country. I was at home asleep. My uncle is a lawyer . He knows how to deal with them.

“I got married last week,” Teddy says. “Tonight was my first night with my wife. And here I am at four in the morning being dragged out to Buffer Zone.” He looks at the boy’s face to see if he is interested in his story. If the mention of Buffer Zone has brought back any memories. “I know what you are scared of,” he whispers in his ear. A whispered word of kindness in his trade can be as effective as pliers in a police investigator’s hands. “We both know that they do those things. But why would they drive so far out? Any open sewer in the city centre would do. Do you know why they have brought me with you? Because they don’t want your family to see their faces. See, I am not even in the police. Would they drag a policeman away from his new wife? I am just somebody they want to use so that your family doesn’t come after them. I am not saying you’ll live happily ever after. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, or when they take you out next time. They don’t always bring me with them. But you know, tonight we are all right.” Teddy shrugs his shoulders, challenging the boy to share his meagre optimism. He switches off his flashlight and whispers, “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust them. I would note down their names and remember their faces, their ranks. See the number on their belt buckles? That’s their ID number. I would drag them to court after this is over. If I were you, I would go and talk to the media, name names. I know a crime reporter, but you must not mention me. This is my livelihood, and now I have got a family to support. Did I tell you that I just got married?”

A truck with its lights on full beam speeds past them on the wrong side. Teddy catches a glimpse of skinned buffaloes hanging in the back on rows and rows of hooks, their heads intact, horns curled and eyes wide open. He moves forward to block the boy’s view. He doesn’t want him to see dead buffaloes hanging upside down at this hour of the night. Teddy doesn’t want the boy to get any hasty premonitions about what lies ahead.

“So I got married last week. Guess where the wedding took place? I can bet you’ll never be able to guess. Come on, three guesses. But who would have thought that I’d be spending the first night of my married life with you? My new wife definitely had no idea that I’d go to sleep with her but by the time she woke up I’d be with a pretty boy like you.” Teddy slaps the boy’s thigh and laughs. He notices that the boy is not whimpering any more. He is trying to say something. That is always a good sign. Teddy wants to encourage him. “You must be someone important? You must have really impressed someone. They wouldn’t put so much metal on a pickpocket. Are you married?”

“My name is not Abu Zar.” The boy’s voice is melodic, cultured, as if he has been taking singing lessons. “That was my friend’s name. I mean that was the name he took. My name is Afzal and my mother doesn’t live in Buffer Zone. None of my family lives in this city.”

For a few moments there is complete silence. They have entered an area of total darkness. They leave streetlights behind as they approach Buffer Zone. Teddy can hear not-Abu Zar breathing. Something pops in his nostrils like little crackers going off or a broken bone finding its lost home.

Confusion in such circumstances might seem tragic or tragicomic depending on what you find funny and what makes you sad, but it is a very useful tool in Teddy’s line of work. If they insist right to the end that they are somebody else, then they live in the hope that the confusion might be cleared up at the last moment. Even when you feel the barrel on the back of your neck, you can say to yourself that they are killing someone else, not you. You go down protesting and hoping to correct a mistake that someone made in an official file, which is better than going down weeping or even worse just going completely silent with fear.

The Hilux makes its inevitable stop fifty feet from a phone booth. On these nights Inspector Malangi behaves as if it’s him who is going to die, so he always wants to call his family first, wants to talk to his children.