Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Teddy accompanies him to the phone booth. They climb over a pile of gravel and walk in silence like two sleepy night workers. He knows there is no point in bringing this up, but if he doesn’t bring it up now, he’ll have to think about it later. And this is not the kind of work he would like to take home. “This guy we have got is not Abu Zar, he is just the driver; not even a driver, he just borrowed his motorbike. The real Abu Zar is in Sweden.”

Malangi holds the door of the phone booth open and turns towards Teddy. “What do you think we should do? Raid Sweden? Our jurisdiction ends at that bridge over there. We can’t even pick up a common thief from Clifton. Do you want to know how many people lay dead in Garden East after he and his friend drove by? One night with your wife and you are teaching me law enforcement.” He sighs. “We all tend to go a bit soft. Look, Bakhtawar has her maths test today. Can I talk to her first?” Inspector Malangi shuts the door and starts dialling.

Far on the horizon, a cement factory exhales a cloud of milky smoke, and a faint red dawn struggles behind it.

“I’ll pick you up from school, my dear. Don’t forget to read the questions twice before you start answering them. Remember, read them twice, because you might miss something the first time.”

Alice visits her father in the morning to get her things. French Colony seems filthier than she had left it a couple of days before. The walls are covered with posters announcing a two-day-long Quantum Healing Festival to be led by a visiting preacher, Edward Qaiser from Oklahoma, who claims to sell the thing that Catholic evangelists all over the world seem to sell, the promise that the lame shall walk.

And when they can walk, Alice Bhatti wonders, where will they go? How about real miracles, like the drains shall remain unclogged? Or the hungry shall be fed? Or our beloved French Colony shall stop smelling like a sewer?

In his youth it had been suggested to Joseph Bhatti that he should start charging for his ulcer cures. “God gives me a gift and you want me to sell it?” he retorted. And then he would add, probably in jest, “And the gift I have is not even mine. It’s a gift from the Musla god. He probably mistook me for a potential Musla. You can’t sell what’s not yours. You don’t choose your neighbour and your neighbours don’t choose their own god. And you shouldn’t provoke your neighbour’s god.”

As she approaches her street, Alice Bhatti has a slight sense of trepidation. She feels no emotional pull, no sudden rush of childhood memories; she looks away when she sees a vaguely familiar face approaching. She is ashamed of the fact that she is embarrassed to call this place home. Before she went to the Borstal via nursing school, Alice had never really felt like a grown-up; she was always defined by her father, his profession, French Colony, Reverend Philip and his insistence on framing all life’s problems in wedding parables. In fact it was during her time in the Borstal that she first felt free. No mother to tell her to keep her hair tidy, no father to tell her to keep the tidy hair covered. Just a lot of women with bad teeth and memories that wouldn’t go away.

She finds the door to her house open, but there is no sign of Joseph Bhatti. Then she hears the sound of wood being chopped in the backyard. She starts taking out her clothes and putting them in a gym bag that she has brought from Al-Aman apartments. She takes her toothbrush, two lipsticks, a moisturiser and some imitation jewellery and puts them in a little vanity case. It’s only after she has placed her bag in the middle of the bed that she realises how little she’s taking from this home: twenty-seven years of life and she is taking with her a beggar’s dowry.

Joseph Bhatti appears in the doorway, wiping his brow. He is wearing a white vest and his dhoti is folded up and tucked above his knees. The grey hair on his chest is covered in fine sawdust. He is surprised to see Alice Bhatti but he doesn’t seem displeased.

“I see you are all packed up and ready to go. You could have waited for me to go first.”

Alice Bhatti has never figured out how a certain kind of man can manage to play victim and saviour in the same breath. He wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t come back for a couple of years, but now he is giving her that ‘see, I am being abandoned again’ look.

He thinks he was abandoned by Alice Bhatti’s mother. And who abandoned her mother in the first place?

♦

At the age of twelve, Alice Bhatti is not sure if her mother has just passed away, or has died in a tragic accident, or left this world to become Yassoo’s eternal bride. They keep telling her that He took her and she wants to ask why, but everyone is too busy cuddling her, patting her head, as if she hasn’t become an orphan but won a prize at school.

Three days after Alice Bhatti’s mother’s funeral, Joseph Bhatti goes back to work and comes back with a baby peacock, except that Alice can’t tell that it’s a peacock because it’s covered in black mud and is either fast asleep or dead. It smells of rotting fish.

“Look, Mother of Alice, what I found,” Joseph Bhatti shouts as he enters the house. He is startled for a moment when he realises that Mother of Alice is not home, she is in paradise with her new husband, Yassoo Masih. Alice stares back at him from beside the tap that is used to wash clothes and crockery as well as for Sunday showers. She is scrubbing a pan slowly, her mind still struggling to accept the fact that her mother is not coming back from work. She saw the coffin, walked behind it, joined in when they sang pity on the soul of thy handmaid , but her twelve-year-old brain still can’t comprehend concepts like everlasting salvation and the perils of the mortal life. So if Mother of Alice is never coming back, who will cook, who will do the dishes, who will wash her hair? is all she thinks. And then she picks up the dishes and sits under the tap. She doesn’t want her mother to find filthy dishes when she returns from her tryst with Yassoo.

Joseph Bhatti can’t remember how he addressed his wife before Alice was born. He called her nothing; just oye , or listen , or what’s for dinner? or did you hide my bottle? or here is my salary or sometimes when he returned from work with a salvaged object, look what I found . Now, standing in the doorway, cradling a bird dripping black filth, Joseph Bhatti is startled by his own voice and the lack of response to it. Nobody says: Father of Alice, you have brought home more kachra, you can’t stay away from garbage even when you are off duty.

They always referred to each other as Mother of Alice and Father of Alice, as if they had been waiting to become parents so they could abandon their old names. They always referred to his work as duty, as if his duty was not clearing up clogged sewers but directing the traffic or standing watch on a glacier to defend his country’s borders.

Joseph Bhatti stops in his tracks for a moment when he realises that he’ll never be called Father of Alice by anyone again, but then he continues as if Mother of Alice’s accidental little death should not get in the way of a sweet habit nurtured over twelve years.

Alice Bhatti is not used to being addressed by her father. He makes toys for her, little birds from discarded wood usually, but he is not the kind of father who hugs his child or cuddles her to sleep, especially if the child in question is a twelve-year-old girl. But when Joseph Bhatti sees Alice sitting under the tap, furiously scrubbing a pot, trying to be her own mother, he comes to her and puts his hand on her shoulder and says the words that she has been hearing since they brought her mother home covered in a white sheet: “What can we do, my child? He took her.”