Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Noor rests the gun on the ground and mumbles, “If you come back later, I could just give you someone’s X-ray with a foot fracture or something.”

“No, Inspector Malangi specifically asked for a thumb. Let’s not waste time. He has his children’s exams coming up.”

Noor takes a last look at Teddy’s hand around the electricity pole and notices that his forearm is hairless and has beads of perspiration running over it. It’s a bodybuilder’s forearm. Noor shuts his eyes, grips the muzzle firmly and swings the rifle with full force. The wood hits the pole and he hears a dull sound like a school bell announcing a break. The kites on the wires flap their wings and lift off. One of them shrieks as if to tell them to take their silly game somewhere else.

Teddy is relieved, but only for a fraction of a second, before he sees his thumb, alive and intact, a bit bloodless and white but still all there.

“I am the one who needs to shut his eyes. You need to aim. With your eyes open. Come on now,” Teddy says, shutting his eyes tight and gripping the pole with full force as if trying to uproot it.

It’s only when Noor hears the bone crunch against the metal and sees blood splattering on the posters that promise a thousand-year war to protect the honour of the mothers of the faithful, with Teddy screaming and dancing on one leg and shouting unspeakable filth about Noor’s own mother, that Noor realises that he should have administered a local anaesthetic. He has a cupboard full of that stuff in the supplies store.

Teddy doesn’t look back to thank him, doesn’t even remember to take the rifle back from him, but runs, cradling the remains of his thumb like a hunting dog dashing back to his master, carrying back the catch in triumph with the hope of a reward for a job well done.

If anybody had seen Noor the day he arrived at the gates of the Sacred, they wouldn’t believe that he was the same boy who now sat in the Chief Medical Officer’s room taking notes, acting all babu-like. He was only fourteen years old, pale and skinny as a stick, and nobody thought that he would be allowed into the building, especially as he had one arm around an old woman who wore cheap sunglasses and looked like someone who had just embarked on a career in panhandling. They wouldn’t believe he was the same boy who now helped out the law enforcers one moment, then went to sit in a meeting and take copious notes another. When he had arrived, he knew only two words of English. Excuse. Me. And those were the two words that gave him a new start in life.

The day Noor arrived at the gates of the Sacred, he had to hold up his trousers with one hand and put the other one around the shoulders of his mother Zainab, who, after years spent in the relative quiet of the Borstal, was getting a migraine from the traffic noise. The two words of English that he knew, he tried on everyone. This irritated people. They looked at him with contempt. Multilingual beggars were still beggars; even worse, they were beggars with pretensions. Nobody paid them any attention. Beggars were trying new tricks every day, pretending to be white-collar workers fallen on bad times, with a smattering of chaste Urdu to soften hearts that had hardened in the face of the bottomless greed of half-naked children and droopy, blind old women.

Nobody could have imagined then that by the time he was seventeen he would be practically running the Sacred. When he said farewell to his friends in the Borstal, it would not have crossed their minds that one day he would be sitting in the same room as senior doctors, decorated paramedics, double FRCS holders, taking notes for important job interviews. That he would be keeping records of admissions and discharges, donations and expenditures. Yet it was the same boy who, three years ago, had been standing outside the gate of the Sacred Heart, holding his mother’s hand, shifting from one foot to the other, reassuring her that he had got the right address, tugging his loose trousers, his farewell present from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, madam. He had repeated the words like a password that would grant him access to a world where people constantly excused each other. He was quite puzzled about the writing on the wall, which claimed that Dr Pereira, the man whose address he had been given when leaving the Borstal, was a dog. Why was a doctor a dog? Noor had thought he could read basic stuff, but he wasn’t sure any more. Maybe the words had different meaning beyond the walls of the Borstal.

Dr Pereira’s approaching car slowed down; he rolled down the window to shoo the beggars away, as he believed they brought the Sacred a bad name. Then he heard that sickly but clean-cut boy gently shepherding a woman shouting “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, madam,” to no one in particular. Dr Pereira could tell a well-mannered boy when he saw one, and the older woman holding his hand seemed to be in a lot of pain. Dr Pereira motioned them to get in the car. A beggar who excused himself before making his begging pitch was already making an effort to leave all that behind, Dr Pereira believed. A beggar with good manners deserved a chance to be asked a question or two.

Noor first settled his mother in the back seat, then climbed confidently into the front as if he had been waiting there for a lift. His confidence came from the fact that having spent his childhood behind the closed gates of the Borstal, he would have liked to barge through any door that opened for him. Walking into a room and behaving as if the room belonged to him was something that Noor had already learnt, at a time when other boys his age were only hanging from the windowsills looking in. He was sure that his secret code would work.

And now he sits in the room where Dr Pereira and his colleagues are arguing whether candidate Alice Bhatti has the strength of character to withstand the pressures of a busy public hospital. Noor might be sitting in a corner, but he is sitting on a chair. He will have to go and fetch tea in a while, but right now he is sitting on a chair taking notes, dutifully recording the minutes of the job interview. He knows that his words in the register will be the only record of this meeting. He leaves out Ortho Sir’s stories, Hina Alvi’s smile and Dr Pereira’s despair, and since he is not required to record what he does in his breaks, there will be no mention of his little encounter with Teddy Butt around an electricity pole. A record of a meeting is not everything that happens in a meeting; sometimes it’s better to leave things unwritten. Dr Pereira has encouraged him to make his own choices. Dr Pereira says that sacred texts as well as profane novels don’t record everything .

Like most things in life, the result of this job interview depends on many things. Some of these things have happened long before the interview. Noor had tried to advise Alice Bhatti about the potential problems in the interview. “Whatever you say, don’t get angry. And don’t mention Borstal.” And Alice Bhatti had shouted back in a mock-angry schoolteacher’s voice, “What Borstal, you little bastard?” Noor was scared for a moment, then he shouted back, “Good. Now try saying that with a smile.”

He is relieved that Alice has managed to control her free-floating anger in the interview and that her time spent in the Borstal hasn’t come up. It isn’t as if she stole from her patients or cheated in her exams. She only almost killed a famous surgeon and did time for it. Noor knows that Alice is the kind of person who’ll return a favour by saying fuck you too. He also knows that her fatal flaw is not her family background, but her total inability to say simple things like ‘excuse me’ and ‘thank you’.