Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

“So he is the law’s little helper? What you are saying is that he is a police tout, does their dirty work for them. Rent-a-witness. Replacement prisoner. Beat up this little guy while I bugger his sister, that kind of part-time job. Look, I don’t know why I am going on about this. It’s none of my business. This is a free world. But you have to find your own freedom. And if you think you can find freedom by hitching yourself to someone like him, then good luck. Congratulations. I should be happy for you. But I am worried. I hope you are not doing it just to get a different name. A married Muslim nurse is not much better than a single Christian nurse. You just become a slave multiplied by two.”

Alice Bhatti appreciates Sister Hina Alvi’s concern. She is trying to be the mother Alice Bhatti doesn’t have, although she knows that Hina Alvi would hate to be described as anyone’s mother, let alone a grown-up married woman’s mother. But at least she cares, and more importantly she is not scared of showing that she cares.

“Thanks, Sister Alvi. I should probably have consulted you before jumping into it. But I myself was surprised. It all happened very suddenly. I have always thought I can live without a man. I always thought a proper job was all the security I needed. But that incident in the VIP room… that made me rethink.” Alice is startled at what she has just said. She hasn’t thought of this before. But now that she has uttered these words, she thinks that there might be some truth in it.

“Oh, OK.” It seems Sister Hina Alvi is having a moment of private regret that doesn’t last more than a moment. “And you didn’t even bother to go out of the Sacred gate to look for a husband,” she says. “You got hitched to the first piece of trash you came across.

“You probably realise that girls from my background are not really bombarded with proposals. In fact, he was the only one who showed any interest. I mean, there are those who show interest, but you know what kind of interest that is. At heart he is a decent person.”

Hina Alvi looks into Alice’s eyes as if trying to decide whether this conversation has already gone too far; she has given this silly girl an opening and now she won’t stop till she has told her whole life story.

“First love,” Hina Alvi says, “is like your first heart attack. Chances are that you’ll survive it, but you don’t outlive it. That first gasp for air is the beginning of the end. You have managed to breathe some air in, and you think you are all right. You might think it’s a matter of lifestyle, quit this, cut out red meat, walk, run, get a personal trainer, try shitting standing up, but… it’ll get you in the end.” Sister Hina Alvi sighs, and puts both her hands on the table.

“Look, I am not the right person to give anybody marital advice. I have been married thrice. And I am single now. I married the same man twice. Just to be sure. But the result was the same. In fact the second time it was worse. I didn’t even feel depressed like I used to the first time. I just felt bored. I did it for the same reason that everybody else does it: that you need someone to snuggle with, wake up next to, bring you yogurt when you have a bad stomach, that kind of thing. But I never really got any of that. It was I who ended up comforting them and waking up next to them and being their doctor. Maybe you’ll be luckier. But you don’t seem like the kind of girl who attracts luck.” She realises that she shouldn’t have said that last sentence, but she is not the type to take back her words.

“I think both partners need to understand that it’s always a compromise. If people give each other space…”

“Men don’t understand. Just remember that. They don’t.” Hina Alvi, it seems, has had enough of the wisdom of the newly-wed. “I mean, they might have a fine understanding of how a carburettor works or how a human brain is wired, but ask them to understand your sadness on a sunny afternoon and their brain starts doing push-ups. They want to physically lift your sadness and smash it to bits. God, sometimes they want to tie RDX to your sadness and put a timer on it. They think understanding means climbing up a mountain and disappearing into a cave. And that man, your compromise, it does seem that he was locked up in a cave for a very long time. Who knows, maybe you can teach him to live in this world.” Hina Alvi starts to open the box of sweets. “Congratulations. We all crave sugar sometimes, but you work in a hospital, you have seen those gangrened limbs. That was all sweet sugar once.”

The dogs tighten the circle around Teddy and then take turns barking at him, as if arguing about what to do with this man who stands in their middle, frozen, the only thing moving a tremulous circle of light emanating from his right hand. “What are you doing there?” he hears Inspector Malangi shout in the distance behind him. “Castrating stray dogs? We have a job to finish. Bring back the boy.” Teddy hasn’t even noticed how and when not-Abu Zar disappeared. For the moment he stands still and listens to the dogs.

♦

Teddy knows exactly what to do when confronted by a mad dog or dogs in a pack who behave in a mad fashion because of peer pressure. He learned his lesson when he was in class seven, on a sweltering June day when he had limped back home, a big gash on his right calf, blood streaming into his shoe, canine teeth marks on his hand. As he entered his home, his father, the PT teacher, started to bark at him, his big jowly cheeks expanding and contracting like fish gills. “You are running away from dogs, you sissy puss? You didn’t know there were dogs on this street? You never noticed that sometimes they challenge people? What was all that training for? A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.”

For Teddy’s father, everyone who was born after Partition was a sissy puss, because nobody quite met his criteria of not being a sissy puss: how much buffalo’s milk had they drunk? Had they ever been injured in a real bull race? Had they ever bicycled three hundred miles to watch a Shanta Apte film? Had they ever stolen a government horse? Hell, had they ever stolen anything? And no, electricity didn’t count; you were still a sissy puss.

PT teacher hooked his thumbs into the braces that held his khaki-coloured shorts around the girth of his belly, stared at Teddy and bared his teeth. “You are always supposed to be what?”

“Prepared,” Teddy murmured, and felt as if he had run away from a pack of mad dogs only to be confronted by the leader of that very pack.

PT teacher blamed Teddy for the attack. “It’s your fidgety self, the fear inside your Teddy heart that attracted the dogs to you. They can smell a faggot from miles away. Come with me. I’ll show you if the same dog dares to attack me. Hell, let’s see if that dog even raises its eyebrow. And you will think it’s because you are small and I am large. Now, if you have ever studied science, you’ll know that dogs can’t tell the difference between big and small. A dog doesn’t care about your size; a dog can smell your heart, read your thoughts. And your heart is nothing but a big blob of fear. Ask yourself. What are you afraid of? A dog can bite. So? You have got teeth too. A dog can jump, you can jump. But a dog can’t plan ahead, can’t formulate strategies. In short, a dog can’t prepare . But you can. You can also think, but your brain works like a woman’s brain: always worrying what will happen next, when will the roof fall? The roof will not fall. Or the roof will fall when the roof falls. Your sweaty hands and your shivering legs can’t stop the roof from falling.”