Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

When this same group descended on Alice’s dorm, a place they had started calling ‘the kafir den’, armed with hockey sticks and a copy of the Quran and chanting slogans like ‘Another Push to the Crumbling Walls’ and ‘Who Belongs to Pakistan, Musalman, Musalman’, it was Alice Bhatti they faced. The other three Yassoo girls offered passive resistance, their eyes shut, knees trembling and Yassoo-save-our-souls-but-first-protect-our-mortal-bodies on their lips.

Alice Bhatti kicked the attackers in their shins, and bit a small chunk of flesh from a hand that tried to grab her throat.

Then she produced a bicycle chain and padlock — and nobody knew why she had a bicycle lock when she didn’t own a bicycle, didn’t even know how to ride one — and swung it in their faces. The attackers stepped back and called her a Yassoo slut and a Yahoodi spy. She countered by explaining to them that Yahoodis killed her Lord Yassoo so they should make up their minds about what exactly it was they were accusing her of. And then took a swing with the chain lock at one of the anti-poster campaigners trying to sneak up on her from behind.

Alice Bhatti learned an important lesson that day: her roommates might be good, God-fearing, stuck-up, churchgoing Catholics, but they were completely useless in a campus brawl. What use was your faith if it didn’t give you the strength and skills to break a few bones?

When they appeared in front of the college authorities for their disciplinary hearing, Alice felt that they were speaking for their fathers, or their father’s churchgoing friends, not for themselves. They tucked their ten-rupee plastic Jesus lockets in their bras, which puzzled Alice even more. Why wear it if you have to hide it? Did Yassoo ever say he wanted to be crucified on a hairpin and then hidden in your undergarments?

They were let off with a final warning. “Nurses might be doing God’s work, but they are not supposed to bring God into their work,” noted Dr Pereira in his warning letter, but Alice Bhatti carried on preaching Yassoo’s love on the streets of French Colony.

Her local diocese dismissed her as one of those born-again messiahs that French Colony produced every few years, who, more than anything else, needed a balanced diet and family life, or at least regular sex. Her prayers, although she prefered to call them offerings, were not for public consumption. Because she knew that the prayers didn’t tickle Yassoo or make his suffering any less. They were meant to elevate your own soul.

♦

For the next two and a half years, Alice became the lone soldier of Yassoo. She bought a bag full of plastic crosses and stuck one on the school noticeboard every day. She was spat at, expelled, readmitted, investigated, warned, warned again and told that she had already been given a final warning, but she battled on.

She was not even sure whether she was fighting her Lord Yassoo’s fight or just doing what she needed to do to survive in this bitch-eat-bitch world that was the Sacred Heart nursing school.

The bite you see on Alice Bhatti’s shoulder is not a love bite. It’s a bite. The moon-shaped scar that you see on her left cheek and which still glows when she gets angry is not the result of an accident in the kitchen. It’s a stray bullet that kissed her. It seemed the poster girls had poster brothers in other colleges who had guns. The bullet was meant for her throat or maybe her head, she was not sure. But she was sure that nobody would shoot at someone’s cheek. Even now when she drinks hot tea, she tastes hot metal in her mouth. She has a cut on her right eyebrow from the time when a lab door accidentally slammed in her face.

A cigarette burn mark on the side of her left breast is the only medal that she hasn’t collected in a battle. It’s the only evidence of a furtive love affair as short-lived as winter in this city. A chain-smoking doctor who professed to be the only communist on the faculty befriended her. He liked to cuddle before and after with a cigarette in his hand, and only put it aside for the exact duration of intercourse, which usually lasted as long as it takes a cigarette to burn itself in an ashtray. “Can you not smoke in bed?” she had said as they lay together after a brief session of vigorous lovemaking. The smell was making her nauseous, a mixture of humidity and sweat and the unfiltered K2s he liked to smoke to show solidarity with the workers of the world. “Why, why? Is this too cheap for you?” He tried to put the cigarette between her lips, she slapped his wrist, and the burning cigarette singed the left side of her breast.

Her twenty-seven-year-old body is a compact little war zone where competing warriors have trampled and left their marks. She has fought back often enough, with less calibrated viciousness maybe, definitely never with a firearm, but she has never accepted a wound without trying to give one back. And like all battle-hardened warriors she has managed to preserve her gift for the fight but forgotten why she became a fighter in the first place.

Her serene charcoal-grey eyes shield that gift; it’s the kind of serenity that only four years of fighting for Yassoo can bring, the kind of serenity that owes as much to her inner faith as it does to her twice-weekly fast. It can be forty-six degrees Centigrade with no electricity, or mild winter; nothing can distract her. She is an all-weather, all-terrain fighter.

It was during her fourth year in nursing school, when she thought she had reached a truce with the poster girls, as they all had their exams and three years’ worth of syllabus to catch up on, that she experienced the limitations of her devotion. Himself deserted her when she needed Him most.

As a sharp-eyed final-year student nurse she was in the operating theatre and watching closely as an octogenarian surgeon, famous for cutting open patients’ chests and then not stitching them back shut till he had counted his fees in cash, had a coughing fit and from behind his mask looked at Sister Alice as if it was her fault. A senior sister who was supposed to assist in the operation had called in sick at the last moment and they couldn’t find a replacement because the famous surgeon was known for treating nurses in the operating theatre like garbage bins in uniform. With a pair of tweezers he was holding a vein that he had just cut, and on which he was preparing to tie a knot, when through his insistent cough he beckoned Alice to take over. Alice Bhatti held the tweezers and stared at the vein, which looked like the work of the Lord, and for the first time in her professional life she felt exalted, felt His presence. She felt tall and humble at the same time. She was holding a life between the tips of the metal tweezers. She also felt that it could only be a power higher than her, a power that kept the life-and-death ledger that had handed her the scales, and now it was up to her to carry out His will. The words of Lord Yassoo, who resurrected the dead, flashed through her head only for a second; otherwise she was completely consumed by the task at hand. The surgeon’s cough was out of control and he left the operating theatre, giving Sister Alice the thumbs-up sign as he went. In that fraction of a second she forgot to do what medical professionals the world over learn within their first three months in surgical procedures training: that every third heartbeat you should let a drop of blood spill, you let the vein breathe. Sister Alice, spurred by her Lord’s approval, squeezed with the power of her faith till the vein couldn’t stand the flow of blood any more and burst in at least seventeen places simultaneously, swivelling like a lawn sprinkler going crazy.

Wheezing like an old car, the surgeon returned, mask in his gloved hand, and started taking off his gloves and shaking his head in mock despair. “What do they teach you here? Slaughterhouse skills?” Alice Bhatti was still holding the vein with the tweezers as if it was a baby snake, still not sure if the baby snake was dead or only feigning. “You can let it go now,” the surgeon said. “It’s not going to run away.”