Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

“You can’t really just pick up a baby and take it home,” Hina Alvi is officious now, all procedures and paperwork. Alice Bhatti can see that she has given it some thought. “You need to apply, fill out forms, your husband needs to sign up.”

“Can you keep him for a few days? I mean, I’ll take him when all this is over.” Alice Bhatti is not sure if this is the right time to tell her that this baby has a sibling on the way.

“Me? Sure. If you want him to die of neglect. I can change nappies and vaccinate him but I wouldn’t know how to feed him. Actually, I wouldn’t even know how to pick him up in my arms. So if you want to come with me, we can take him home.”

Noor is having dinner with important men in a dream when he wakes up to find himself surrounded by four guns and Teddy Butt in a very bad mood. In his dream, the important men are wearing suits, they arrive in single file carrying briefcases, then sit and eat with silver cutlery, starched white napkins on their laps. Wearing a white coat and a surgeon’s cap, Noor himself sits at the head of the table carving a roast chicken the size of a small sheep. The important men are talking about important stuff. Although Noor can only pick out a few words, like mission statement, evaluation and holistic , because it is English they are speaking, he knows that they are talking about something important.

A boot hits Noor in his ribs and he looks at the man seated on his right, then to his left, as if not expecting such bad table manners from gentlemen of this calibre. When he opens his eyes, he sees three guns on a food trolley and the fourth one, a small black snub-nosed thing, in Teddy’s hand. Teddy holds it not from its grip but along his palm, like they do in those bullet-bending futuristic movies.

“Where is she?” Teddy asks in a shrill whisper. His boot is still tentatively prodding Noor’s side, as if the answer to his question might be hidden in his ribcage. Noor is used to Teddy’s untimely visits, mostly with requests for drugs that were banned years ago, but Teddy has never stopped by at this hour of the night, not with four guns, not when Zainab is fast asleep. Noor rubs his eyes, stifles a yawn and concludes that Teddy hasn’t dropped in at two in the morning for a casual chat. Zainab’s breathing rattles in the background, a local train, chugging away, starting and stopping, not bound to any timetable. The night creatures chirp outside. Number 44 groans and other patients cough and curse him in their sleep. It’s a chorus of the damned. Noor notices that Teddy has carefully drawn the curtain around Zainab’s bed and now they are in their own private little room.

♦

Earlier in the night, Teddy had also woken up after a dream. He had come home early from a five-day trip in the interior after not finding not-Abu Zar. He waited for Alice for a while. He stood in the window and thought that him being home would be a nice surprise for her when she came back from work. He went in the kitchen and rearranged the utensils; there was nothing to eat in the fridge. He thought maybe he should go out and get some vegetables and cook some food for her. But if she didn’t find him home on her arrival, then there would be no surprise for her, so he decided to hang around.

He went to the bedroom and noticed that her wardrobe door was half open. He looked into it, and there was nothing except a dark blue silk nightie that she wore in bed. He rummaged through the drawers and found nothing, no socks or panties. He opened his own side of the cupboard. None of his clothes or what remained of not-Abu Zar’s posters had been touched. Again he opened her side of the wardrobe. The blue nightie was the only evidence of the fact that he once had a wife. In the lower drawer he found a rolled-up poster. He took it out and unfolded it. It was a picture of Jesus Christ. He felt sudden panic, as if somebody had been hiding a stash of heroin in his apartment without his knowledge. He looked at His flowing hair, pink-hued eyes, lips slightly open, the halo around his head drawn in rainbow colours. He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then put the poster under the pillow and lay down on the bed, hoping it would calm his nerves. Why had she taken all her stuff? Where had she gone? The place where he could look was the Sacred. The only person he could ask was that lapdog of hers, Noor. But why had she left? And why had she left behind a poster of her prophet?

He drifted into sleep and saw a rain-soaked street, its drains bubbling, and a man who looked like Jesus Christ riding a bike through the knee-deep water, trailing a twenty-foot-long bamboo pole on the carrier. The man got off his bicycle, took his bamboo pole, bent over a manhole and pushed the pole back and forth in an attempt to unclog it. A few children ran past, splashing water on him and taunting him by shouting Yassoo Choohra, Yassoo Choohra. The man looked up at the children and smiled.

Teddy didn’t know how long he had slept for, but when he woke up, he saw his face resting on the poster that had slipped out from under the pillow. He found himself cheek to cheek with Yassoo, his mournful eyes staring at Teddy. He felt a wave of panic and rushed to the Sacred.

♦

“You are a snake in my sleeve, you son of a bitch.” Teddy rattles off insults with passion but without any sense of timing, mixing them up as they come along. He is doing something that he has seen other people do. Shut up . Noor wants to tell him to shut up, because not only does he have no idea what Teddy is talking about, but he is worried that Zainab will wake up. He gets up, pulling on his shalwar and thinking that he should somehow convince Teddy to step outside and then talk. He doesn’t get the chance to make any suggestions about a change of venue for their conversation. Teddy puts the gun to his head, presses it against his temple and asks: “Where is she?”

“Who?” Stifling a yawn, Noor says it in a voice that sounds like, I don’t like you barging in here like this, the visiting hours are long over, arms are not allowed on hospital premises without the written permission of the Chief Medical Officer. And why have you brought four guns anyway? Is there a loot sale on somewhere?

Teddy takes Noor’s right hand, puts the barrel of his pistol between his two fingers and twists them like those demented schoolteachers who think that by inserting and twisting a pencil between the fingers of a sleepy student they can make him recall the exact date of an obscure historical event. Noor’s face twists in a suppressed scream; he points to Zainab and waves his free hand, frantically trying to say Don’t wake her up . He brings his mouth closer to Teddy’s ear and whispers, “Alice is not on duty. I haven’t seen her all day.” Teddy looks satisfied with the answer. Noor is about to turn away when he gets an unexpected Junior-Mr-Faisalabad-powered punch in his stomach and doubles over. He sees Zainab smile in her sleep. He is in pain but can’t scream. He doesn’t want her to wake up and find her only son surrounded by so many guns and being thrashed by his old friend.

Zainab sits up in her bed, her eyes still closed, and starts to hum a song. In any other situation this would have amused Noor, he might have hummed along, and in the morning they both might have laughed at this, made jokes about an old woman who sings in her sleep. But Noor knows that Zainab is delirious. Her fever has probably shot up. He needs to take her temperature to find out. But Teddy is standing between him and Zainab, loading and unloading his other guns as if demonstrating them to a potential customer. A cat with one of its ears covered in a smudge of blood, which in turn is covered by a swarm of houseflies, shoots from under the bed, dashes into the corridor and looks back at them as if saying, Couldn’t you have found another place to play your little game?