Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Their home cures only seem to have left her more dazed. She reaches into her past and tells him how her mother once beat up her father in the village square and her father laughed out loud at every blow as the whole village stood by and applauded.

If a woman can’t drag her man to the middle of the square and thrash him once in a while, the marriage is doomed, she advises Alice.

Dr Pereira throws the register at Noor. He actually slams it on the table, and then plays drums on it with his knuckles. He works himself into a rage in these situations, but today even his anger seems distracted. “Is this what I told you to do? Where is the truth? Where is the rhythm? I asked for a straightforward recording of the facts. Just a simple description of what goes on in this place. Who does what. I don’t want a misery list. All I am getting is a list of names, ailments, people admitted, discharged, expired. If somebody was to read this in a few years’ time, all they would learn is that there once was a hospital that had a lot of sick people suffering from every possible disease humankind has ever known. A child could have told you that. A hospital by definition is full of sick people. What about the others, the attendants, the workers?” He is basically asking Noor, how come I am not here? If there is all this toil and trouble, where is the saviour? Who runs this place?

He is not here to help Noor and Alice save Zainab. That cause, he knows, is doomed. He is doing this for posterity. “Some people work around here. Others just want to live in TV sitcoms.” He looks at their collection of herbs and books with handwritten titles, and shouts, “This is a hospital, not a Sunday hobby club for herbalists. If you want to practise your mumbo-jumbo medicine, go and do it somewhere else.” Then he looks at Noor and says, “I mean, get back to your real job.”

Dr Pereira’s impatience towards Alice Bhatti and Noor is that of a privileged person towards someone less fortunate, someone who has been granted an opportunity but is hell-bent on squandering it. Someone refusing to come out when the weather is nice. Someone insisting on wallowing in their own misfortunes when there is dancing on the street. Someone refusing to take part when history is being made. Dr Pereira is human enough to realise that Alice and Noor are not the authors of their own misfortunes, but he is not imaginative enough to recognise their desperate attempts to rewrite them.

Noor has spent enough time in the hospital to know what they really think: they think that Sister Alice grew up in a gutter and still carries that stench. They think that Noor was born in a jail and grew up in these corridors and carries that odour associated with people who are born into slavery. Noor doesn’t know yet what real misery looks like. He will know only once he sees an open grave, a gash in the earth and Zainab draped in six yards of white cotton washed in Zamzam water from Mecca.

“Something needs to change in this place,” says Dr Pereira, scribbling in the margins of Noor’s register. “Change is always good. Sister Hina Alvi tells me our maternity ward is a mess. Baby slaughterhouse, she calls it. That delivery room is a gambling den, she says. Everyone comes out a loser. You both are probably needed there. At least there are lives there that are worth saving.”

The first rains of his married life bring the first murderous thoughts Teddy has ever had. And these are not even related to his search for not-Abu Zar or his attempts to stay away from Inspector Malangi. His rage is domestic; he is not sure if it’s because of his wife or the weather.

Three days of torrential rains and the streets around Al-Aman turn into a swamp. Nobody can go out except little boys who have turned discarded tyres into their private pleasure boats and chase each other using cricket bats as oars. Teddy hasn’t left home for three days and increasingly feels like a trapped animal, rattling his cage, eyeing his fellow inmate with suspicion. Humidity crushes them like a fallen roof. The ceiling fan throws down hot gusts of wind like burning debris from a building on fire. Alice is lying on her back wearing just a shirt and no shalwar. What kind of woman goes around the house without her shalwar? He is not used to having Alice here during the day, and he is certain he’ll never get used to having Alice here without her shalwar during the day. He keeps thinking, shouldn’t she be at the Sacred? Aren’t people drowning or being roasted by faulty electric wires? Alice has been trying to tell him about some dead rich begum with the unlikely name of Qaz, and her unruly brats in the VIP room. Is there a rich begum in the world who doesn’t have unruly brats? What are you supposed to do in a VIP room if not behave badly? What is wrong with a Surf and bodyguards? He himself drives around in a Hilux with bodyguards. Does that make him a devil?

For the first few days, marriage smelled like lemony disinfectant and love-soaked bedsheets. Their comings and goings gave their lives a certain rhythm; little surprises in the pot on the stove, mock scolding about did you do your weight training today, and their hurried lovemaking on the doormat as Alice kept whispering, I am getting late for work.

Now, as Teddy is housebound and Alice goes around taking down curtains and washing them, clearing out kitchen cabinets and screaming every time she sees anything that looks like a cockroach, Teddy feels he is being throttled by the wet rag that Alice has just used to wipe the bathroom floor. Must be the weather, he tells himself. Then he notices that Alice has rearranged his weights according to their size. But in the wrong order. No, it’s not the weather. He wants to take that twenty-kilogram bumper plate and crush her head with it. He is alarmed at the visuals that accompany that thought in his mind and looks at Alice to see if she can tell what he has been thinking. She is sprawled on the sofa. Still no shalwar. Teddy lies down at her feet. They are like two beached crabs, disoriented, not sure which way they should crawl to get back to the ocean.

Teddy has never had any murderous thoughts before. In fact, he has almost no flair for physical violence. Those who have followed his career might think that he does it for a living, dashing from one atrocity to another, but no, he has only ever been what is called an accessory to murder, the clean-up guy, the one who keeps watch, the one who removes the wallet and ID cards and any other valuables from the body but has never aspired to the main job. He has always done it with a certain level of detachment. He has never had any personal motivation, so he has never felt angry, and hence there has never been any remorse, no nightmares about gagged men pleading in animal voices, no visions of slit throats and foreheads with bullet holes. Basically, he only provides valet parking for the angels of death. He has secretly planned that if he does get a full-time job offer from the G Squad, he’ll take it but later get himself transferred to Traffic, where you never have to touch anyone and people start stuffing your pockets as soon as you take out your challan book. Though now that not-Abu Zar seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, Teddy is not likely to be offered a proper police job. There is more chance of him being forced to take not-Abu Zar’s job, which would last about half a second. All he’ll have to do is to wait for a bullet in the head.

He thinks maybe he’ll branch out into personal training or private security. He knows that people run post-pregnancy-flat-stomach-in-three-weeks workouts and make more money than the sharpest member of the G Squad. He also knows that someone of his build can be sitting in the front seat of an air-conditioned Mercedes, holding doors open and waiting outside wedding parties where you get to eat the same food that the guests eat. But doing squats with young mothers or providing armed protection to rich kids has always seemed a bit effeminate to him. When he sees fitness instructors with their gym bags and second-hand Nike tights, or personal security guards with their cocked berets and Uzis slung off their shoulders, he sees nothing but glorified Filipino maids. He might as well start wearing a kimono and become a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Or are those Japanese?