Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

She turns away and starts walking back towards the bus stop. The cackle of the caged chickens and the soundtrack of their death follows her for some distance. She catches a bus bound for the Sacred, as the conductor is giving a last thump on its side and shouting at the driver to move on. She knows that she should do all her waiting at the Sacred.

A motorcycle stops next to her bus. She thinks she recognises the boy but is not sure where she has seen him. She moves towards the window to get a better look when another boy wearing a long coat comes from behind and stands next to a car with his head in the window. The boy on the motorbike watches him impatiently, then looks up towards the sky, and she realises that it’s the boy on the poster. She tries to get off the bus in a hurry, the traffic signal turns green and the bus lurches forward but stops again. Alice watches the commotion at the traffic signal; around her a chorus of impatient horns is performing a crescendo.

Zainab’s mouth is agape, her eyes are open but Noor knows that she is gone. A fly sits on her lower lip, then goes inside her mouth and comes out. Noor doesn’t have the strength to shoo it away. His good eye is dry; the one under the bandage throbs as if his eyeball wants to spring out of its socket again.

♦

Soon after her arrival at the Borstal, Alice Bhatti gave Noor a plastic syringe to play with, without the needle of course. For months it was the only toy he had; he used it as a water pistol, pretend weapon and pen. He also injected many magical fluids in Zainab’s arm to cure her blindness. One day he caught a butterfly that had wandered in through the bars. It was a big one, and covered half of his palm. Its yellow and black tiger stripes glowed brightly. He had a brilliant idea. What if he made butterfly juice with it? He rolled the butterfly’s wings and inserted it into the cylinder. He imagined that when he squeezed it, he would get a liquid the colour of gold with black stripes, and if he squirted that on to Zainab’s eyes, she would get her eyesight back. When he thrust the plastic plunger in the syringe, what he got was mud-brown goo. He never played with that syringe again.

♦

He pulls the sheet over Zainab’s face and walks out. He has always wondered how he would feel, what he would do, where he would go first. Now he knows. He needs to go to the medico-legals office to get a death certificate, then inform the mortuary and book the funeral bus. He isn’t really sure why he needs a death certificate, but he starts to walk down the steps leading to the compound with a clarity of purpose, knowing that it is the only thing he needs right now.

He sees Alice Bhatti under the Old Doctor and waves towards her. He doesn’t know why he is waving. Is he saying hullo to her? No, he is saying: Hullo, Alice, my mother is dead. But Alice is not looking at him; her eyes are fixed above his head, above the rooftop. Then he realises that all the other patients under the Old Doctor are also looking at the horizon. He turns around to follow their gaze and bumps into someone. He is curious to see the face of the man he has bumped into. The only thing he remembers is that the man’s arm is in a cast and he is carrying a small gunnysack.

♦

Teddy Butt barely manages to stop the bottle falling from his hand. “Are you blind?” He curses the boy who bumps into him and then rushes past without apologising. He can see Alice Bhatti under the Old Doctor. She stands in her white coat, oblivious to her surroundings, looking up into the sky. Teddy moves forward and stumbles again. This time, it’s the legless beggar woman on the skateboard who grabs his right leg. “God has blessed you with such a beautiful wife, buy me some Xanax. The nights are becoming longer.” As Teddy rummages through his pocket for some change, he wonders why everyone is looking up at the sky.

An Open Letter to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints

The Vatican

From Joseph Bhatti

French Colony

Our Holy Mother appeared on the fourth of September last year above the roof of the Out Patient Department of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments after the gates of the hospital had been shut because it couldn’t take in any more patients. The residents and workers at the hospital didn’t recognise the Holy Virgin in the beginning as her face was covered in a veil and the infant she carried was making a ruckus. The onlookers were most fascinated by a beam of light that fell on the OPD and bathed it in a milky glow. It was the ward boy, a long-term resident of the Sacred, Noor, son of Zainab, who pointed out that the sky was clear and there was no moon. And then above the roof people saw a silver throne hovering, held aloft by a flock of peacocks on which sat a likeness of our Holy Mother.

And the likeness of our Holy Mother beckoned my only daughter Alice Joseph Bhatti to join her on the throne.

My daughter did not suffer the pain that her estranged husband meant to cause her by pouring half a litre of sulphuric acid on her angelic face. Instead she ascended to Heaven with our Holy Mother. The throne that had arrived to take her away was already there, that’s the reason none of the people surrounding her noticed her tormentor as he approached her unscrewing the acid bottle and professing his eternal love for her. They were all looking up at the horizon, fascinated by the spectacle of our Holy Mother on her throne.

As is common in such cases, people didn’t recognise the heavenly signs in the beginning and instead first focused on small unusual things, little discrepancies, minor malfunctions. An X-ray machine rolled through the corridors of the ortho ward, came to a stop on the edge of the stairs, then extended its mechanical arm and started whizzing as if it was being controlled by an invisible force and taking photographs for posterity. A patient with an oxygen mask in ICU ripped it out and stood up and started complaining that the smell of roses was making him dizzy. An IV drip in the general ward turned to milk. The skewed wooden cross at the entrance of the Sacred, which had not been repaired or painted in years in the hope that it would make people forget that the Sacred was a Catholic establishment, straightened itself and started to glow amber.

The first witnesses were the residents of Charya Ward. All twelve of them swore that they saw a likeness of Sister Alice Bhatti dressed like our Holy Mother in a blue headscarf, a halo around her head, ascending on a throne held aloft by a flock of peacocks. Their testimony was dismissed by the local Diocese Committee to Investigate the Miracle on the grounds that they all belonged to the Muslim faith and were long-term residents of the psychiatric ward. The very simple fact that they were a fractious bunch, and no two of them had ever agreed on anything, was ignored by the Committee. Also ignored was the historical precedent observed in the apparition of our Lady of Fatima, where the testimony of a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy was considered sufficient despite the well-known fact that thirteen-year-old boys, Muslim or not, dream of nothing but beautiful women and can conjure them up when none exist. The medico-legal officer Dr John Malick also witnessed the apparition and kneeled down and sang the praise of our Lord Yassoo and then of our Holy Mother. His testimony was deemed inadmissible on the grounds that, although born and raised a Catholic, he had official inquiries pending against him that accused him of being drunk on duty, accepting illegal bribes to issue fake injury certificates and running a private practice that dealt solely in written-to-order sick notes.

There were several witnesses who saw a flock of kites, their beaks upturned, flying sluggishly around the throne. They flew so gracefully, they seemed to mock the air that carried them. The Committee concluded immediately that a holy apparition accompanied by scavenging birds like kites must be either the work of the devil or a deliberate attempt to bring an already beleaguered Catholic Church into disrepute. Or at best, they said this was some Choohra folklore emanating from French Colony that was being projected as the work of the Holy Spirit.