Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Alice Bhatti stands outside the G Squad centre and tries to look purposeful. The centre is a series of interconnected townhouses; there is no sign saying G Squad, or anything else for that matter. She isn’t sure if she’ll find the Teddy she is looking for here. There are a couple of other women camped outside the centre. One has improvised a tent with a sheet and seems to be running a one-woman protest camp. Give Me My Son or Take Me In , says a placard reclining against a suitcase that she is using as a pillow. Across the road from the main gate a man wearing a police shirt and striped pyjama bottoms naps in his chair, one hand holding a walkie-talkie that crackles occasionally as if someone is barking incomprehensible orders to an invisible army. In the other hand he holds a rusted gun that hasn’t seen any action since it left the armoury in the previous millennium. Alice watches as his shoulder dips and the gun starts to slip out of his hand; he jerks and catches it, with his eyes still closed, then puts it in his lap. The metal gate is boot-polish black and a furlong long and it doesn’t seem it’ll open for anyone, The walls are topped with shards of broken glass and coils of razor wire. Searchlights mounted on the corners of the centre are still on, but the watchtower is empty. A teapot and two cups sit on a small table, probably meant to indicate, we have got many people to man this watchtower, some of them were just here, they have just had tea, they are still around, you still want to try something funny?

Alice Bhatti isn’t sure if she can actually knock at this impregnable door; she isn’t sure if someone will actually open it, and if somebody does open it what will she ask then? Do you have an officer called Teddy Butt who works here? I am his wife. Do you have a prisoner called Teddy Butt here? I am his wife. I am married to someone who doesn’t really work here but he does work for some people who work in this place .

She feels a cold shiver in her nape, the kind you feel when someone is following you secretly, when someone is staring at your back and doesn’t want you to know. She turns around and sees that the guard in police shirt and pyjamas has woken up. He is holding a small round mirror in one hand and clipping his moustache carefully with a tiny pair of scissors.

The gate opens and a Surf emerges and makes a slow turn in the other direction. For a moment Alice catches a glimpse of an arm in a cast, cradling a small gunnysack as if carrying something precious. And then she sees the familiar Devil of the Desert registration plate and starts walking towards the bus stop with quick steps.

She looks at the bus conductors, who yell and sing and hawk their destinations, thump the sides of their buses, scream at the drivers to change the music, address everyone according to their age as if it wasn’t a bustling bus station but a large family gathering. Alice looks at them with complaining eyes, blaming them for enticing her here in the first place and now not taking the routes she might have liked to take.

She turns into China Street and stops in front of the first shop, which displays dentures the size of a small sofa with bright pink gums and promises of painless extractions and ‘new, natural, artificial dentures while you wait’. An old Chinese man sucking on an ice candy comes out of the shop and bares his teeth. Alice Bhatti moves along quickly till she crosses a small square and enters what seems to be a medicine bazaar. She sees rows and rows of clinics with huge billboards announcing cures for an impossibly long list of sexual dysfunctions. A giant cut-out of a bodybuilder announcing physical and spiritual revival in a seven-day crash course hovers over a street corner; she feels a lump in her throat. Men scurrying in the street seem upset at her presence in this particular part of the city, as if she has caught them with their pants down; they cross to the other side of the road to avoid her. They look in the other direction, pretend she isn’t there. She finds it a bit uncanny. Her experience of walking in bazaars, travelling in buses, going to shops has taught her that whatever their status in life, whatever they are selling her, whatever they might need from her, they always have a reason to stare at her, size her up and then zero in on her breasts. They look upwards, downwards, they look sideways, they scratch their balls or pretend to be interested in what she is saying, but their gaze always returns to her breasts. Sometimes they thrust their hands in their pockets and count their coins with such concentration it seems they are saying their rosary. There was a teacher in her nursing school who would gaze at her chest unashamedly, then look towards the ceiling, put his forefinger in his ear and poke his ear in a circular fashion with such rigour that her ears hurt. She thought of telling him that if looking at her breasts caused him earache, he should probably try and not look.

It seems to her that the unspoken language that is used by men and women on the street to communicate doesn’t exist in this bazaar. She feels as embarrassed as the men do. It should probably be called I-was-born-with-a-small-one-but-I-have-been-saving-money street. She hurries along, passes a fast-food joint that promises authentic Arabic parathas, sees a billboard quoting Rumi’s couplet to sell steel-reinforced concrete. A sturdy man with a white beard showers her with prayers for healthy children at the top of his voice and stretches out his cap. His sincere efforts impress her, and she drops in a two-rupee coin and starts walking faster.

She tries to remember something about Teddy’s job, the name of his boss. If she could remember the name of that inspector with the walrus moustache, the one who patted her head and gave her a digital Quran in a velvet wrapper and said no modern home is complete without it. She wishes she could remember a title, work timings, pension plan, a salary, and she realises she doesn’t know any of these things. She remembers Teddy’s long days in the gym, evenings watching National Geographic, his nightmares when he mutters in his sleep and says: “We are going for a walk, we both need fresh air, don’t worry, don’t look back, they don’t like it when you look back.” And then wakes up and shudders and looks at her as if it’s all her fault.

She is familiar with the routine by now. At first there are hints at a one-on-one meeting with the new police chief, a lot of repeated ironing of clothes in anticipation. But after dressing up properly, he disappears in a Hilux that turns up to pick him up and returns him in the morning covered in dust, his hands bruised, as if he has been fighting wild dogs all night. He breaks his six raw eggs into a glass, gulps them down, makes a face as if he has just shot himself and then falls into bed. The first couple of times she removed his shoes and tried to unbuckle his trousers, but every time she touched him, he curled up into a ball and whimpered, as if the people in his dream were trying to break his bones.

But since he lost that boy and brought home his posters, he has hardly ever been home.

So who is this man Teddy Butt? She wanders through the markets as if she is hoping to find an answer advertised in a shop window and will get it after haggling it down to a reasonable price. She goes through Empress Market, where Pathans sell tomatoes and baby hawks in the same shop, women with bangles up to their elbows peddle pink chicks perched on baskets full of guaranteed desi eggs, a blind man brandishes money plants in used Chivas Regal bottles that don’t require earth to grow in, and a Burmese-looking man sells a plastic device that carves onions, carrots and turnips into roses. Why would anyone want an onion cut up like a rose? she wonders.

What kind of woman marries a man who cries over melting glaciers and comes back from his job with sand in his hair? She looks at a cage full of chickens trying to climb over each other as one of them is caught and its throat gets slit to the soundtrack of looped God-is-great playing on a cassette player.