Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

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The boy goes through Inspector Malangi’s wallet carefully, as if he is interested in something besides the couple of thousand-rupee notes in it. Then it seems he has found what he was looking for. He turns his head towards the boy on the motorbike and nods. The boy pulls back his baseball cap and revs his bike in response. Inspector Malangi has seen this little exchange a million times before. It means, our job here is done, let’s get the hell out of here.

It’s only when the bullet pierces his neck that Inspector Malangi realises what that job was. He grips his neck with one hand and before pressing down on the accelerator looks out at the boy on the motorbike. In an instant he realises that the boy is not-Abu Zar. He has already put his gun back in his jacket and is not even looking towards him. The car lurches forward, Inspector Malangi slumps down on the steering wheel, the car swerves and hits the traffic signal at the precise moment it turns green, and blocks two traffic lanes behind it. An impatient horn sounds behind him. Another one honks. Soon it becomes a chorus of angry, protesting car horns. An ambulance is stuck in the traffic and its siren begins to wail. As he bleeds to a quick death, Inspector Malangi has the same thing on his mind as that on the lips of all the impatient drivers stuck behind his car: when will our nation learn some road manners?

Alice Bhatti waits till two a.m. for Teddy to return home, then calmly walks into the kitchen, picks up the plate of food that she had prepared for him and covered with a white paper napkin and chucks it in the garbage bin. She immediately regrets it. She feels guilty, like she always does when good food, any food for that matter, goes to waste. Yassoo’s flesh, she remembers Joseph Bhatti admonishing her. You are throwing away His flesh in the garbage bin, and although her father mostly used this line to force her to eat whatever concoction he had rustled up, whenever she sees food being thrown away, she feels Yassoo’s body is being soiled. And although she has drifted far away from Yassoo, the idea of throwing food away still repels her. She can often be seen taking leftover plates of hospital food outside in the compound and handing it over to those camped out under the Old Doctor. Now she is angry with herself because she has done something she strongly disapproves of. She is angry with Hina Alvi. Who takes marital advice from someone who was divorced thrice? She is angry at Teddy. She doesn’t mind him being away. Men should go away so that they can come back and then go away again. Their comings and goings make a home a home. She would like to know where he is, though, and when he is coming back. So that she doesn’t have to make food for him that goes to waste and then sit here and wonder whether spinach and potato curry really equals Yassoo’s flesh.

There is nothing unusual about his absence, but it galls her because for once she actually has things to tell him. She knows that when he does come back from work, he comes back in the early hours of the morning, sometimes with hair covered in sand and sometimes boots caked in mud. He is usually so exhausted it seems he has been wrestling with desert monsters. Or wading through marshes. On these days he usually returns on a big motorbike, the kind that traffic police sergeants drive, complete with a siren, but he has never talked about any work with traffic police. Or sometimes he returns in a fancy car with Emirates registration plates. One day he came home in a Bedford truck, full of refrigerator cartons. Someone usually comes and takes the vehicle away the next day. Alice always hoped that some day he’d offer to drop her to work, but he was always asleep when she left for work and the vehicle would be gone by the time she came back.

She goes to bed and sleeps fitfully, dreaming of a lone horse galloping on a motorway as a sixteen-wheeler trailer with a bright orange container on top speeds towards it. A fat mosquito trying to enter her ear startles her out of her dream. She feels nauseous with anxiety and goes to the bathroom and retches into the sink. She comes back to bed and a fluffed-up second pillow mocks her. She drags herself to the window and peers down at the spot where he parks his return vehicles. As she expected, the spot is empty, and two dogs are trying to eat each other’s faces. She can’t tell if they are fighting or trying to get to know each other better.

In a fit of resentment she decides to change and go to the Sacred. If he comes home now he’ll find her all dressed up to go to work. Ah, you are back. I was leaving for work . Or he’ll find her already gone. She puts in extra effort with her uniform, applies some mascara, and as the sky turns muddy, half promising a sunrise, she leaves Al-Aman. She leaves her bag open and clothes strewn around the room. She is not sure what this is meant to convey: that she has come back but may leave again, at short notice if she needs to. She also leaves her side of the bed unmade as some kind of protest against his absence.

In the bus, she is the only passenger in the women’s section, and the driver looks at her as if he understands the predicament of people like her who can’t sleep all night because they have to start early.

The driver puts on a tape, and what Joseph Bhatti used to call the Musla anthem starts to play. There is no music, just a bunch of men shouting at the top of their voices demanding to be teleported to Mecca.

It’s still dark when she reaches the Sacred. She can hear the medico-legal John Malick singing in his office. She goes straight to Zainab in the general ward and, as she had expected, finds Noor dozing in a chair next to his mother’s bed. His left eye is covered in a bandage. Zainab is barely breathing. Alice bends over to take her pulse, and as soon as she touches her wrist, Noor wakes up with a groan and then jumps out of his chair. “When did you come? Where have you been? That husband of yours has been looking for you.”

“He should have looked at home first. What happened to your eye?”

“First tell me what you have been telling Teddy.”

“What do you mean? I’ll have to meet him before I can tell him anything. Your eye looks in really bad shape.”

“You should have seen it without the bandage. I had a cartoon eyeball. He thinks there is something between us.”

“What does that mean?”

“He thinks we are lovers.”

Alice starts to laugh, and then can’t stop laughing. She can’t remember the last time she laughed like this. Noor puts his finger on his lips and signals towards Zainab. “But we are. We are,” she whispers. She feels that there is another Teddy that she has never known. Jealous Teddy. Going-around-trying-to-find-about-her-life Teddy. She likes this Teddy.

Where is Teddy?

There is only one place that she can go and look, and although she has the name of the outfit and some idea that it’s police work he does, she has no idea where this place is. Noor is the only person she can ask; he also has no clue, but goes away and comes back within five minutes with an address, the number of the bus that goes there and an offer to accompany her, but then he looks at Zainab and sits on her bedside. “It’s the seventh week,” he mutters.

“I’ll be back and we’ll give her a sponge bath. That’ll revive her,” says Alice.

The sensible little boy that he is, he doesn’t ask her why she wants to visit the G Squad offices so early in the morning. “I wouldn’t go in if I didn’t know anyone who works there. Someone you really know. The person who gave me the address told me, don’t think of going there, they eat little babies and don’t even burp, and it’s all legal.”

♦