Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Alice Bhatti can’t decide whether Noor is pulling her leg or trying to teach her things about the Sacred she doesn’t yet know.

“I am on duty, young Doctor Sahib. Sister Hina Alvi has briefed me all about it.”

“I don’t think Sister Hina Alvi expects you to actually go inside the ward,” Noor says in a grave voice, almost admonishing her. “Unless she wants to teach you a lesson. If I were you, I wouldn’t go there alone.” Alice Bhatti is suddenly irritated with this kid who is always acting like he owns the place. An errand boy will always be an errand boy even when he is pretending that the world revolves around him.

“I don’t sit around writing rubbish in notebooks all day. I deal with real patients.” She taps her clipboard. “And these people are not dead yet.”

She leaves the room, ignoring Noor’s feeble protests: “I mean you shouldn’t go there alone. I am saying take someone with you.”

“And who would that be?” She turns around and shouts at him before walking off.

On her way to Charya Ward, Alice notices a well-dressed woman holding an umbrella over a wheelie stretcher, covering her nose with her dupatta and looking into space as if pretending she is not in a corridor of the Sacred but in some fancy garden trying to spot migratory birds. She looks like a woman who might once have been rich, at least rich enough not to have ended up here, the kind of woman who is used to being served, the kind of woman who might have taught her servants to pour tea from the right and not from the left. The old man on the stretcher, with three plastic tubes of different colours coming out of his various orifices, is in a deep slumber. Under his cracked oxygen mask, a little froth is bubbling at his chapped lips. The woman is embarrassed to be here, and her shame seems to have marked an invisible circle around the stretcher; people walking in the corridor look at her umbrella, smell her disdain and step away.

Alice doesn’t notice the barrier that the woman has erected around herself and the person on the stretcher. She walks up to her. “Can I help?” she asks. “Why are you holding that umbrella?” The woman looks at her in horror, as if she had never expected to be spoken to in these corridors. Then Alice follows her gaze towards the ceiling and sees a wet patch that looks like a map of a country in transition. It drips a fat, milky water drop at regular intervals. “Ah, that,” Alice says. “Just the baby ward toilet overflowing. Nothing to worry about. I have already reported it.” She takes hold of the stretcher and starts to push it. “We can just move him.”

“No.” The woman screams, covers her mouth with her dupatta and then breaks into civilised little sobs. “Thanks. Don’t want him to wake up and see that we have brought him here. We are just taking him home. I can’t stand it here. This place smells of death.”

Alice shrugs her shoulders and walks on. This whole place, she thinks to herself, is a big Charya Ward. Then she remembers that Sister Hina Alvi has told her exactly the same thing. She smiles to herself and keeps walking.

As she nears Charya Ward, she realises that the usual smells — disinfectants, spirits, dried blood, stale food — have started to disappear. She can see potted plants, pots chipped and plants dead, and moss growing in the cracks on the walls. An arrow painted on the wall points towards the ward, with the words The Centre for Mental and Psychological Diseases written in English and Urdu. A half-faded notice under it reminds visitors not to give the inhabitants any cigarettes or drugs or food and to take responsibility for all their possessions. Alice Bhatti walks the walk of someone who thinks they can overcome their fear by taking measured steps. She passes through a swing door, the nursing station inside is empty and covered in dust. Not only have no medical staff been here in recent days, even the sweepers have stopped visiting. Someone has scrawled ‘I ♥ My Psychology’ on the dust-covered station. A side door stands half open. The room is damp and musty and it takes her a while to recognise the smell. It is the smell of a barbershop in summer. The Rexene-covered padding on the wall has been chewed up and scratched, and only occasional streaks of foam rubber remain, which makes it look like the walls have developed a skin rash. She sees what appears to be a bird’s nest in one corner and steps towards it. As she bends down to have a closer look, she recoils and rushes out of the room. She has seen some grotesque things in her life, but a nest the size of a football made of grey human hair with a live rat at its centre is not one of those things. The little rat, its red eyes ablaze with suspicion, scurries across the floor.

“This way, Sister.” A shaved head peers out of the double door. An old man puts a finger on his thin lips and beckons her. “Surprise them,” he whispers. “Reveal yourself.”

Alice Bhatti looks at her keys and tries to hide her nervousness behind a polite smile. She wields her clipboard like a shield, and gives the old man a benevolent nod, like heads of state bestow on ushers before moving on to guards of honour.

As the door swings open, they all stand in a line, a dozen of them, not in an orderly sort of line but in three files, with hands folded at crotches, heads bowed. They look at Alice and then look beyond her, and when they don’t see anyone following her, they disperse as if they had taken her for someone important and now, having realised that she is an ordinary nurse, all alone, feel disappointed but relieved.

“We knew you were coming. We were told.” A shrivelled old man goes into a corner, takes his pants off and starts shouting at the top of his voice: Dard aur, dawa aur, dard aur, dawa aur .

Another one goes over to him, slaps him and shouts, “No mother tongue here. Did you bring your mother with you? Then why are you complaining in your mother tongue?”

“They told us you’d come,” says a tall man with a bushy moustache and a turquoise handkerchief tied around his neck. “They told us three months ago, but now you have come. You are late. But you are here now.”

Then he goes down on his knees and prostrates himself in front of her as if he is in a mosque. Alice Bhatti has seen people do this in the Sacred’s open-air prayer area, and the gesture has always seemed a bit ridiculous to her. Raising your arse to the sky has never seemed to her the best way to express your devotion. But that is probably the best some people can do. There are those who walk on their knees in Nazareth. To each their own, she believes, not that you can talk about these things in public and hope to live. Even to express your bafflement is to invoke the wrath of God’s henchmen. She feels the man’s tongue licking at her toes, and tries to move back. The man grips her ankles and pulls. She flies into the air, the clipboard in her hand hits the ceiling. Her first thought is that if she doesn’t get that chart back, Sister Hina Alvi will be very very angry with her. Missing documents make Sister Hina Alvi angrier than patients defecating in the Sacred corridors. She should have held on to the clipboard, whatever else might have happened.

Alice feels she is airborne for a long time, and then she lands in the waiting arms of two men, who shout “Howzat!” like deranged cricketers.

They lift her up in the air. She feels exalted. And scared. “Lord. Yassoo. Yassoo. Save me.”

“Welcome,” they say. And she feels she is on a bed of hands and being carried by twelve men who seem to have emerged from various levels of hell. It’s like she is a part of some private celebration as they shout, “ Ya Alice! Ya Bhatti! ” A new arrival shouts, “Death to America,” but finds himself out of sync and falls into their rhythm, like casual marchers do at a protest. There is something drone-like but pacifying about their gibberish. There is comfort in knowing that these people actually need her help. Dawdling in the air, supported by twelve men, for a moment she feels like an animal from a species not yet discovered by scientists.