Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

A brown dog, with one ear missing, paws covered in black mud, tries to lick Alice’s toes. Alice opens her eyes and doesn’t move her feet, but fixes it with a stare that says: not today. The dog moves a little bit further away and lies on its back with its muddy paws and smoky pink teats pointing to the sky.

Through the dusty leaves of the Old Doctor, the afternoon sun comes to Alice in dribs, like the rusting shower in Teddy’s Al-Aman apartment. Squinting her eyes, she follows the progress of a cow-shaped cloud and tries to count the moments before it will gobble up the sun. She is surrounded by patients waiting to be hospitalised, their families camped around them as if on a picnic that has gone on for too long. There are those who have been discharged and told to go home and pray, but who insist on sticking around, thinking that life owes them another chance, hoping for their black warrants to be revoked, or at least for the Old Doctor to perform an old-fashioned miracle. A man with an elephant’s foot smokes a cigarette solemnly, as if taking his medication. A wiry old TB patient, his face covered in a white mask fashioned out of his young wife’s white dupatta, curses him repeatedly. A sturdy old woman, whose only ailment seems to be poverty, comes and stands over Alice and demands money. Alice slips her hand into the pocket of her white coat and passes her a two-rupee note without looking up. “What will I buy with two rupees? You can’t even buy toffees with that. Give me Xanax, or at least Lexo.” Alice Bhatti raises her hand towards the old woman and asks her to return her money. The old woman puts the hand holding the money behind her back and gently shoves her toe into Alice’s ribcage. “Allah has blessed you with so much. Can’t you give me some Valium?” Alice Bhatti shoos her away and tries to concentrate on taking a nap, tries not to think about the red bubble in the baby’s nose, its curled toes moving and the horror on Sister Hina Alvi’s face. She doesn’t feel any fear for the moment. She shuts her eyes tight in an attempt to block out the sunlight, which is beating down now, piercing through the branches of the Old Doctor, penetrating her pupils. Then there is a whiff of cool breeze that seems to come from afar, the sun disappears, the temperature around her suddenly plummets and Alice Bhatti dozes off to a lush green valley where cows made of white wool float, politely discussing the side effects of various types of sleeping pills.

“Why are you perturbed, my child?” a soft caress of a voice says in her left ear. “It was I who raised the dead baby.” Alice Bhatti smiles to herself. First at the thought that she is hearing Himself speak. Secondly at the thought that if it is really Him talking to her, then shouldn’t He know her answer? She is not amused by the fact that He has chosen her lunch break to visit her. She doesn’t believe for a moment in this raising-the-dead nonsense. A trapped bubble in a blood vessel, a lung slow to start, a heart still in shock: there are probably a thousand prosaic, scientific explanations. It was no more His work than the Old Doctor’s. She knows what faith is; it’s the same old fear of death dressed in party clothes. And what kind of miracle is this anyway? He has raised the baby and taken the baby’s mother. What kind of universe does He run? An exchange mart? Where was Himself when she was on the run from Senior’s men, hiding in Charya Ward? Probably on His own lunch break. Or probably busy with this charya world that he has created?

Himself has visited her once before, when she was a first-year student at the Sacred Heart nursing school, and that visit had resulted in her being charged with ‘disorderly behaviour and causing grievous bodily harm’. She was madly in love with Him and constantly recited His words: The heart is eternally corrupt and ruined for eternity . It was not only her favourite prayer but her standard reply to most forms of greeting, and she started and ended her exam papers with this declaration.

Her love for Him made headlines for a few days; it was the lead story in the Catholic Courier — Sisters of Mercy Get No Mercy — and even the Pakistan Times gave it a few inches on the back page, under the headline: Stand-Off at Sacred Heart .

♦

Alice Bhatti was only eighteen and signed her name Alice J. Bhatti with the J crossed to look like a cross. Yes, she loved Yassoo. She knew she loved Yassoo because every time someone mentioned the name, every time she read the name, every time she heard a word that rhymed with Yassoo, she got hot flashes in her temples and her heart pounded with such ferocity that she had to shut her eyes and praise the Lord at the top of her voice. Sometimes when she was in a situation where she couldn’t raise her voice, when she couldn’t pronounce His name in public, she wanted to punch someone in the face. She didn’t just believe in the Holy Spirit, she possessed it and didn’t believe in sharing.

That was why when three other girls in her dorm chipped in to buy a Yassoo poster, she refused to contribute. “What is the difference between you and those girls who have Wham! posters on their walls? Did Yassoo ever say that He wants to be a fifty-rupee laminated piece of decoration on a wall? Paste him on your heart if you can.”

She had not always been like this. In fact, after He took her mother, for four years she had a running battle with Him during the Sunday services. She dressed in her best clothes and turned up for the service but without taking a shower; in fact sometimes she took out dirty clothes from the laundry basket and wore them to church. During the service she pretended to act like everyone else, but when others sang Crown Him with many crowns , she mouthed gibberish; when Reverend Philip gave his sermon, she told herself all the dirty jokes she had ever heard, and since she hadn’t heard very many dirty jokes, she just ended up making a long list of all the words she thought were dirty. When the congregation went on to sing Alas did my saviour bleed , she uttered poo, piss, Musla, Protestant, Goan; the last one was really difficult to carry when surrounded by a couple of hundred Sunday zealots glorifying their saviour’s bleeding, but so determined was Alice to express her defiance, to soil His house, to punish Him for taking her mother that she carried on recklessly.

But then one day He took her father as well, or everyone assumed that He had taken Joseph Bhatti, and taken him in the way that was His favourite way of taking the faithful from the sanitary profession. When everyone had given up on Joseph Bhatti, trapped in a sewer for ten hours, after they had already pulled out two of his colleagues whose lungs had collapsed with hydrogen sulphide, Alice prayed for forgiveness, prayed not to be left alone. She knocked on Reverend Philip’s door and confessed her Sunday-service sacrilege, He brought Joseph Bhatti back to life, and she returned to the flock. And like all those who return to the flock after going astray, she made it her mission to defend His name, to make up for all her little blasphemies.

There were some Musla girls on the Sacred campus who didn’t like posters of any kind, Wham! or Yassoo. In fact their hatred for posters was so absolute that in their very first term in the college they had petitioned against anatomical charts in classrooms. According to their petition, the posters were pornographic and against the decent behaviour prescribed not only by Islam but by every other faith as well. Their petition was denied on the grounds that the anatomical charts were the very foundation of the profession. Dr Pereira, the honorary principal of the Sacred Heart nursing school, put this in his note: “You cannot go to a school and then start campaigning against the alphabet.” He liked that last line so much that he had it typed in bold. The poster girls found other ways to carry out their mission. The reproductive organs from these charts began to disappear: ovaries were ripped out, black ink was thrown on mammary glands and penile depictions were mutilated.