Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

The relatives of the deceased had paid their surgery fees upfront to the famous surgeon. They paid a little bit more money to the police and a manslaughter case was registered against the Sacred. The famous surgeon paid half his surgery fees to a famous lawyer and got a pre-arrest bail. The police invited Alice Bhatti to the police station for an informal chat, to ascertain the facts of the case, as they told her. She was happy to be a witness against the surgeon, but after arriving in the police station, she found out that she was not a witness but the main accused. The Sacred nursing school had decided to get rid of its most troublesome student. Without any warning, she found herself in the police lock-up. Dr Pereira was told about it only after the case had been registered. A travesty of justice, he said to anyone who’d bother to listen. After much running around and convincing Reverend Philip to help by showing newspaper clippings from the Catholic Courier , which had described Alice as a ‘soldieress of Yassoo’, Dr Pereira got her shifted to a women-only police station. They beat her up there as well, but let her sleep for a few hours every night.

When Dr Pereira managed to get her out on bail, she headed straight for the famous surgeon’s clinic, told the receptionist that she owed him some money and barged in. Before the famous surgeon could shout or press a buzzer, she took a marble flowerpot from the windowsill and aimed for his head. He fainted at the first blow and thus was saved, suffering a broken nose and losing four front teeth from his imported Swiss dentures.

Dr Pereira had tried to fight the medical malpractice charges, but he couldn’t rally the community to contest the charge of ‘causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder’ when the victim was a famous surgeon. The lawyer Joseph Bhatti had brought to the court had never heard the term ‘medical malpractice’. That was why Alice Bhatti had to take her final exam from the Borstal and do her house job by improvising dyspepsia cures for the inmates.

♦

“The world is a lonely place, you’ll be lonely till you atone for your sins.” Sister Alice knows where Himself is coming from. She has spent a lifetime of Sundays hearing this gibberish about original sin and eternal salvation. You could not grow up in French Colony and not have God shoved down your throat, His presence as pervasive as the stench from the open sewers. Now she believes in Him like people believe in the weather; you have no control over it, you just have to deal with it. You can air-condition your house, plant a tree and maybe you’ll be better off. But there are always hurricanes, sand storms and earthquakes that can shatter the most elaborate protective fences.

“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” A shudder runs through her body. A hospital like the Sacred is probably not the best place to glorify blood and flesh, she thinks. The voice recedes and rays of sun again start to pierce Alice’s eyes. She calculates that her lunch break is probably over. She feels ravenous. She buys a bun kebab from the canteen and gulps it in big bites, ignoring the greedy eyes of two children who sit outside the canteen wearing shirts and no trousers. She promises herself she will visit the church on the coming Sunday. Just to say hullo to Him and request to be left alone. She decides that she’ll ask Sister Hina Alvi if she can keep that stubborn baby. Maybe she can name him Little Yassoo. Maybe that’ll please Him enough and He’ll leave her alone. Surely she can raise a little baby? Her husband may not come home very often, but she is married now.

Alice Bhatti doesn’t need to piss in a bottle and take it to the lab to find out that she is pregnant. She opens the fridge in the morning to take out milk for her tea and the smell of a single mango hits her in the pit of her stomach. She burps violently. She runs to the bathroom, clutching her stomach, then her hand moves to her throat in search of the convulsing muscle and she retches in the sink for about half a century. She looks at herself in the mirror, tears clouding her eyes. She is relieved that Teddy is not around. She is relieved despite the fact that Teddy hasn’t been around for three days. She washes her face and takes a small sip of water. The water tastes of rust.

She has been through this once before. She was nineteen, in her final year in the nursing school and in love with the communist doctor. She was spending too much time with him and as a result smelled constantly of love and cigarette smoke. But their actual lovemaking was so furtive and infrequent that despite all those classes on reproductive health, it never occurred to her that their sweaty moments together could lead to anything. Maybe at the back of her mind she was thinking that if you can’t have unprotected sex with someone who teaches you gynaecology, who can you have it with? She thought on it for a few days. A marriage and a pram and birthday hats did cross her mind, but when she got around to telling him, she did it without any emotion, like a patient describing the symptoms of common flu. “I missed my period,” she said, as if she had missed a bus that she really wanted to get on, but that it was OK, another one would come along soon. The communist doctor got excited. First he started to cry, then he chain-smoked for an hour and went through a list of baby names that included every possible combination from the names of the central executive committee of the Indian Communist Party at the time of Partition. Then he went out to get more cigarettes and didn’t return for nine days.

“My mother has a heart condition, I am not sure she can take it. For generations there has never been a single marriage outside our Shia clan, let alone a marriage into another religion.” He appeared to have aged in nine days. “My tears have run dry.” He kept rubbing his eyes. He seemed to have discovered that the only chains he couldn’t lose were those forged centuries ago in some Arab tribal feud. So startled was Alice by his histrionics that she found herself consoling him.

He brought her two misoprostols and made sure that she took them in front of him. Nothing happened. She got really bad diarrhoea. After she recovered, he managed to secure a Mifeprex injection from the hospital pharmacy. She suffered six hours of gruelling pain and felt as if glass was being ground in her lower abdomen. He stood above her and watched as she rolled the corner of the bedsheet around her hand, bit it with her teeth, tried to shove her fist into her throat, then gave up and started screaming. She screamed at him to stop staring at her. And when he shut his eyes, she shouted at him for being a coward. “Why are you standing there like that? Watching a monkey show? Do you think I want to see that face of yours?”

She swore off doctors with leftist tendencies and penetrative sex for the rest of her time at the nursing school.

♦

She has never talked babies with Teddy and now she knows why. It would have involved a discussion about names, how the child would be brought up, in what religion. Would it be circumcised or baptised or first circumcised then baptised? Would it be easier if it were a girl? She would have settled easily on some neutral name, no Joseph or Judith obviously, but something that would have worked for both of them, something neutral like Salamat or Saleem maybe. But who gives their firstborn a neutral name? Does she even like the sound of Saleem or Salamat? They remind her of those people in French Colony who give their children these names in the hope that they’ll pass as Muslas. As if there weren’t already enough Muslas who were called Saleem or Salamat and who were as poor as the poorest Choohra.