Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

“I know you are related to her, you know where she is. Where are you people hiding her?” Teddy puts his pistol on the food trolley, picks up a stainless-steel automatic that looks like a high-end surgical instrument, moves the safety catch on it and puts it to Noor’s neck. Noor can’t figure out the logic of this. Is there a different gun for every question? What will Teddy ask when he picks up that thing that looks like a Kalashnikov’s nasty old uncle? And why am I being associated with the Bhatti clan?

“But I am not related to her,” he says in a startled voice, a slightly aggressive statement of what he thinks is a well-known fact. If a few months of sharing a cell, which you shared with twenty other people as well, makes you family, then he is probably related to a few hundred women who had ended up in the Borstal after stealing a Rado watch or fornicating with their neighbour or attempting to kill their husband.

“She herself told me,” says Teddy, shaking his head like someone who is sick of living in a world where people lie needlessly, where people just make up stuff to confuse other people.

“She tells many things to many people, it doesn’t mean — ” A sharp jab from the stainless-steel muzzle cuts his explanation short. His lower lip feels soggy and on fire at the same time, and a loose tooth almost pierces his philosophising tongue.

Zainab stirs in her sleep and Noor looks around and again counts three guns on the food trolley.

He has often thought of asking Zainab what people see in their dreams if they can’t see. Do you just hear voices? He can’t believe that he has never asked her. He decides that he must ask her tomorrow, then realises that people with guns to their head must make these kinds of pledges all the time.

“But you know I am a Musalman, masha’Allah,” says Noor and is surprised at what he has just said. He has never used this expression before. He has heard Dr Pereira say it quite frequently. It started as an attempt to make his older patients feel at home, but now it has become an integral part of his inventory of good manners. The Sacred has a severe shortage of doctors, there is no way of telling whether the medicines we use are real or fake, we can’t even get the janitors to turn up for work, but masha’Allah people still have confidence in us, seven thousand patients walk in through that gate every week .

Teddy looks puzzled. His gun-wielding hand goes limp, and for a few moments he looks like the same Teddy Noor has spent many afternoons with, trading tips about bodybuilding and debating why, if girls like bodybuilders in the movies, how come they don’t like them in real life? For a moment Noor feels that his denial backed up by his pride in being a Musalman has made Teddy reconsider his assumptions. But Teddy is not about to give up. He has spent enough time in the investigation centres to know that telling a Musalman from a not-Musalman is easy enough; it only involves pulling someone’s shalwar down, parting their dhoti or unzipping their pants.

Teddy Butt waves his gun towards Noor’s shalwar. “Show me. Prove it.”

Noor wants to shout out his defiance. No. No. It seems it doesn’t matter whether you are in that hellhole called Borstal or this hellhole called the Sacred. They like to play the same games. In the Borstal, every crime, real or imaginary, every mistake, accidental or deliberate, ended in a punishment that involved Noor taking off his shalwar.

Noor wants to tell Teddy that he doesn’t do it any more. Not in front of his mother. So what if she can’t see him naked. He is seventeen years old and she is his mother and he can see her . He was twelve and Zainab still insisted on changing his clothes with her own hands as it gave her a measure of his growing body, but the day he got his first erection he refused to let her change his clothes again. Now she reaches out sometimes and feels the fuzz on his face with the tips of her fingers and sighs.

He looks at Zainab, who has slipped back into deep sleep now, her mouth slightly open, a fly hovering over her nose. He wants to go and shoo it away.

He shakes his head in an emphatic no.

The jab that brings his left eyeball out of its socket is a gun slap, the side of the gun hits his temple, something pops and there is an intense pressure in his forehead as if his eyeball is straining to leave the socket behind. As he drops his shalwar, he has an intense desire to look in a mirror. His right eye is shedding tears, his left eyeball has popped out of its proper place. But he doesn’t feel pain any more. He just doesn’t want a shot fired here. That would not only wake Zainab but also really scare her. Loud bangs give her headaches that last for days.

Noor wants to move his hand to push his eyeball back in its socket but decides against it because that might remind Teddy that there is a trigger on this gun and probably a few dozen bullets in it, waiting for the slightest movement of his finger.

Noor starts to educate himself. Watch the finger on the trigger, forget about all the crap about the man behind the gun, all the nonsense about steady nerves; what he might say or how you might answer is all redundant. Because that slight movement of the finger can terminate the most persuasive argument in the world.

Teddy starts putting his guns in a bag like a plumber finishing his job. Then in a casual voice he asks Noor, “Do you love her?”

If somebody had asked this question during the day, without the presence of a gun, Noor would have laughed it off, he would have used the word ‘co-worker’, mentioned their camaraderie; he would have definitely invoked team spirit and family atmosphere. After all, he is Dr Pereira’s protege; he has learnt all the good manners and ultra-polite, pointless bullshit. He might even have said she was just like his elder sister. But now with an eyeball dangling out of its socket, his lip broken and a tooth lodged in his tongue, he knows that Teddy has asked the only relevant question: Noor knows that he loves her, whatever that means. It’s often said that love turns some people into martyrs and others into poets and philosophers. Obviously it turns many into downright liars and criminals.

“You are asking the wrong question,” he says calmly, as if he is taking the medical history of a stupid patient who doesn’t know what to ask his doctor. “What you should be asking is, does she love me?”

Teddy listens to him quietly, as if trying to decide whether what Noor has said might mean something else. “And last I saw her, she had a baby. A boy. Shouldn’t you be worried about that baby?”

“Baby?” says Teddy.

“A very cute baby. Everyone’s saying it’s a miracle. You guys need to communicate more.”

Teddy moves towards Zainab and pulls the pillow from under her head. Zainab sits upright for a moment looking straight ahead and then falls back on the bed and starts to snore. Noor has had enough; he lunges towards Teddy. But Teddy has drawn his pistol and moved its safety catch. He wraps the pillow around his left forearm and presses the gun into the pillow. For a moment he shuts his eyes and his face muscles clench in anticipation of pain, like a junkie a moment before the needle enters his flesh. The sound of the gunshot is strangely muffled, like someone coughing into a pillow. But suddenly the room is full of white little feathers flying everywhere. Some have blood on them.

“Should we give him a name? I hate it when people call him ‘dead baby’,” says Alice Bhatti, sitting in the passenger seat of Hina Alvi’s tiny car. Hina Alvi is an awkward driver. She doesn’t drive so much as she carries out a running feud with her car, banging her fist on the dashboard, changing gears abruptly and promising to teach it a lesson when it stalls. It’s strange to see her outside the Sacred. Suddenly she is in a world where she doesn’t have total control, where she cannot expect each one of her wishes to be carried out. Her face is softer, even her hair looks a bit limp and real. She drives hunched over the steering wheel, and curses every time a vehicle passes her on the wrong side.