Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

PT teacher starts to unbuckle his belt, hands trying to find the loop, lost in no man’s land between the abrupt descent of his belly and his rising thighs. Teddy goes into a corner and assumes the position, looking down at his shin where blood has begun to congeal in the shape of a dog taking a nap. Teddy hears howls of laughter. “See, I am trying to breathe here and my son thinks that I want to thrash him. Is that all I do in this house? Don’t I work all day to put food on the table? Who works hard all day to keep this roof over your head? But you and that mother of yours always pretend I am some kind of slave master holding you hostage.” Teddy turns around embarrassed, pain momentarily forgotten. PT teacher is sitting on the mat, his belly resting almost on his knees. “Come and take them out,” he says, and then mumbles his mantra: “The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.” Teddy kneels beside him and wriggles his hand into the left pocket of PT teacher’s shorts. His shorts are frayed but made of expensive cotton material. Butter jeans, he likes to call them; apparently the only factory that made them was burnt down during Partition.

PT teacher scratches his armpit, then opens another button on his shirt, licks his finger and starts caressing his nipple, which is swollen and seems to be on fire. With practised manoeuvres Teddy manages to hook the earrings into his forefingers and pulls them out of the pocket. Two gold circles studded with fake pearls. He puts them into the sweaty hand of PT teacher, who places them in front of him like a Hindu priest making an offering. Teddy’s mother appears as if in response to his offering, carrying a plate of food. She puts it in front of him and scoops up the earrings and starts to put them in her ears.

The ritual is repeated in reverse every morning. Before leaving home, PT teacher shouts for Teddy’s mother. Teddy’s mother comes scurrying in, puts the plate of breakfast in front of him and starts to remove her gold earrings, the only jewellery she owns, in fact the only thing she owns in the entire world, then puts them on PT teacher’s outstretched palm. PT teacher starts eating his breakfast after putting the earrings in his pocket.

The breakfast consists of a raw onion and stale bread from the previous night. PT teacher believes that onion is the elixir of life; it cleans the blood and keeps his vision clear. He can still read the newspaper without glasses and shoot a ball into the hoop from twenty yards. He never reads the newspaper, though. “An apple a day only keeps the doctor away,” he often lectures Teddy. “But an onion keeps the devil away. It keeps your blood clear and keeps the bad thoughts out.” The only bad thought that Teddy has ever had is about PT teacher collapsing and dying in front of the school assembly as five hundred boys in their white PT kits shout: “We are prepared.” Teddy has tried eating onions to purge himself of his bad thoughts, in the hope that PT teacher will pick him for the school band.

PT teacher has told his colleagues that during the Partition riots somebody cut off his mother’s ears to get her earrings, and he doesn’t want that to happen to his wife. His fellow teachers think that he is a mistrustful, stingy old bastard who believes that if he keeps his gold in his pocket when leaving home then his wife will not elope with anyone. There is a rumour that he did have another wife, who ran away with someone, taking all her jewellery. Others say that his wife eloped because he was spending all his time with the young members of his Scout troop. There is yet another rumour that at the time of Partition, as a teenager he went around cutting off refugee women’s ears to get hold of their earrings and now obviously doesn’t want that to happen to his wife. He can’t quite get it into his head that Partition happened more than half a century ago, at a time when the clip-on earring hadn’t been invented.

As the son of a PT teacher, Teddy sometimes expects special status at his school, a front-row place in the PT class, vice-captaincy of the football team, or at least to be allowed to ring the school bell once a week. But PT teacher also doubles as the Scout master and believes in the Baden-Powell principles, so Teddy must first deserve, then desire; he must prove that he practises the principles of fairness and equality and that every day he does at least one thing that should count as a service to the community. There are boys in PT teacher’s troops who get special gymnastic training, go on camping trips, spend after-school hours in his office learning to tie reef knots. Teddy is singled out to go and sit under a tree all by himself and practise drums with sticks and a pair of bricks. Under the shadow of this flag, we are one, we are one . He practises the same beat day after day in the hope that if he can prove his commitment, he’ll get a proper drum to practise on and then be chosen to play in the school’s marching band and maybe get the silver stick to lead it.

It’s on one of those after-school afternoons when Teddy is under the tree with his sticks beating a pair of bricks that the boy who is already the head Scout and the football captain and inter-school gymnastics champion emerges from PT teacher’s office with PT teacher’s arm around his shoulder and the band leader’s silver stick in his hand.

Teddy stopped eating onions after that day and let his bad thoughts run wild. After school he stayed back, went into the corner and smashed one brick over the other, all the while mumbling, Under the shadow of this flag we are one we are one . He didn’t stop till both the bricks were smashed into little pieces.

♦

Here, surrounded by six dogs with not-Abu Zar nowhere in sight, Teddy feels as if he is back under that tree, a mad drummer punishing a pair of bricks as someone else walks away with the prize.

Later, over breakfast at a roadside café, Inspector Malangi doesn’t touch his tea, but makes sure that Teddy eats properly. Teddy tries to push his plate away after one helping of omelette, but Malangi orders more toast, another omelette. Another cup of tea? Maybe a bit more sugar? Come on, eat all your eggs, you are newly married, you need the fuel.

It’s only when it’s time to leave and Teddy lays his flashlight and TT on the table that Inspector Malangi puts an arm around Teddy’s shoulders and takes him aside. “You have to find this boy if our family is to stay together. I’ll be asked questions. Thirty-six years of service…” He fingers the epaulette on his shoulder. “They will laugh at me that I fell for ‘Oh, I need to pee’. Even pickpockets know better tricks. And we are talking a high-value target here. I should have known. I didn’t believe that boy for a moment. I didn’t believe him when I had two hundred and forty volts running through his testicles. My only mistake — and let me emphasise that I don’t believe it’s a mistake yet — was that I trusted you.” Inspector Malangi walks him out, close to the edge of the road, not caring about the trucks that whizz past.

“I still feel maybe we should have looked a little bit longer in the bush. We could have set up a checkpoint on the Super Highway,” Teddy mumbles. His stomach full of eggs and toast, he suddenly feels very sleepy and yearns to be in his bed, under the blanket, with Alice. Inspector Malangi sighs and loosens his grip on his shoulder. The thought crosses Teddy’s mind that Inspector Malangi is planning to push him under one of the speeding vehicles.

“Of course there was no guarantee what else might be waiting for us in that bush. We couldn’t even tackle a bunch of mutts.”

Teddy shakes his head as if he agrees. But in his heart he still believes that he is only partially responsible for not-Abu Zar’s escape. What were the others doing? Where was the cordon? Why didn’t anyone turn on the searchlights when they heard the dogs bark? How did they let not-Abu Zar get away without firing a single shot?