Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

They put her on a bed that has no sheets, and the Molty Foam label on it has been slashed to reveal mud-brown sponge underneath. It looks like the skin of a diseased dog. They hover over her and whisper: “She knows how we live and how we die. She knows. She knows.” She sees one man hitting himself repeatedly on the chest with her stethoscope, another item of hospital property that she should have held on to.

“Don’t do that,” shouts the old man in the corner with his pants around his ankles, both hands covering his privates. Half his dentures are broken to accommodate a swollen tongue that stirs like a sleepy animal trying to wriggle out of a cage. “You’ll hurt yourself,” his voice booms in the room. “Do you want to hurt yourself? You are not allowed to hurt yourself. Hurting yourself is against the law.”

Alice Bhatti sees Teddy entering the room, his Junior Mr Faisalabad arms frozen to his sides, his eyes squinting. With the arms of his T-shirt ripped to show off his heavy shoulders, he looks like a window display in an expensive butcher’s shop. The thumb on his left hand is covered in a soiled bandage.

Here comes the chief charya, she thinks.

She has seen him hanging around A&E. She knows that he is some kind of pimp for the police and medico-legal. She has always ignored him. She thinks she knows who has sent him on this rescue mission.

“Leave her alone!” he shouts. It doesn’t come out as an order, though. It is more like a hoarse, tiny shriek, as if someone has stapled his vocal cords together. Alice Bhatti has read many stories about women being hacked and burnt or simply disappearing in the corridors of the Sacred, and now Sister Hina Alvi has told her that she should consider everything in this place normal. Alice has a feeling that although she can fight and cajole these twelve loonies, this towering hulk with a funny voice is going to be her real nemesis.

“She has been sent for us,” the man with the turquoise handkerchief shouts at Teddy. They all huddle behind her. “You can’t take her away. She’ll be sent back. You’ll see that she’ll come back for us.”

“Unauthorised personnel are not allowed in the ward,” Alice screams, as Teddy scoops her up. “I still need to give them lithium sulphate.” As she is carried out of the ward, cradled in Teddy’s arms, Alice Bhatti is still gripped by the fear of not having done the job she was assigned to do. She tries to scratch his eyes out. She kicks and screams, hitting him with clenched fists, then trying to claw his face. She spouts the kind of filth that has been heard in these corridors before but only from its residents, never from the medical staff. Teddy Butt walks unfazed, jerking his head left and right to avoid her punches; they look like a boy and his father in a mock boxing match. Through it all Teddy grimaces and whistles a happy song: We are one under this flag. We are one. We are one…

Teddy is surprised that she is so light, so bony. He has carried men before, but they are heavy, even the young ones. They also squirm a lot, always begging to be let go. He feels he can carry her and walk the earth. He feels she has been sent to cure his festering thumb. Maybe to cure all the other wounds he is likely to suffer in his career. But we need to put some flesh on those bones, he thinks. He wants to nurture her. He feels he has been allowed back into a school of happiness from which he was expelled a long time ago.

Noor goes to check on Zainab in the middle of a shift and finds a swarm of flies hovering around her face, two feasting on a little dribble in the corner of her mouth. He takes the hand fan from her side table and shoos them away. He soaks an old bandage in a bowl of spirit and wipes the area around Zainab’s lips, her chin, and her wrinkled neck. Her forehead is cold and her grey eyelashes that normally flutter during her sleep are absolutely still. He turns back after depositing the wipe in a dustbin to find that Zainab’s mouth is slightly open and one of the flies has returned and is sitting on her upper lip. He tries to flick it away without touching Zainab’s face, but the fly crawls into her mouth and Zainab’s lips close. Noor stands there panicking and wondering if he should squeeze her nostrils to force her lips open so that the fly can come out. Above the thin lips and wrinkled cheeks her nose is young, wide and shiny, as if transplanted as an afterthought. As Noor’s hand touches Zainab’s nose, her lips part and the fly comes spinning out. Zainab’s eyes open and the whites do a little dance, as if laughing at Noor and asking him, What were you thinking? Did you think that I was dead?

Noor covers her face with a piece of white gauze, sprays Finis around her bed and goes away, slightly embarrassed but elated at the same time. When she pulls a trick like that, he feels a childish joy and forgets about the three types of cancer racing to gobble up her vitals.

♦

“So what is it really like? What happens when people die?” Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says: Bbai, your blood will bring a revolution . Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood . Someone has added Insha’Allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bbai, the Blood Bank is in Block C .

“I have done shifts in the maternity ward. I think I have some idea. I think it’s exactly like childbirth.” Alice Bhatti removes her forearm from her face but doesn’t open her eyes. “It just starts and you push and push and then it leaves your body ruptured and exhausted and dead so you don’t really know if you are just exhausted or dead. You are surrounded by all these people who are saying all kinds of prayers, prayers to save their own lives, prayers to make it easy for you, prayers to get a nice little house for themselves in paradise while expecting you to push harder and harder. You Muslas have a prayer for everything. It’s like they are groping in the dark, hoping to get hold of something for you. It’s like you are in a race that you must finish. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose.”

Noor listens and watches Alice Bhatti’s arm, which is white and fleshy above the elbow and dark and scrawny below it. He wants to touch both parts to find out if they feel different.

“Why can’t they live a bit longer? I mean not for ever, nobody lives for ever, but if they are given the right medicines, if they are given the right diet, they should have a few more months at least.” Noor is looking away when he asks this. His query is genuine, he has thought about it for days, but he is thrown by the fact that Alice has taken off her bra along with her uniform.

Noor is feeling at home and horny at the same time, comfortable and confused. He used to wonder whether his body had been overtaken by the devil that Dr Pereira kept warning him about, whether this tingling in his loins was the work of the evil one. Now he knows it’s called growing up. Teddy has told him that if a man goes nine seconds without thinking about a woman, chances are that he is not really a man. Teddy claimed he saw it on TV.

“Even when you are eating or peeing?” a bewildered Noor had asked.

“I think they mean that you can think of a woman’s body parts, not the whole woman. Her mouth or her hair maybe,” said Teddy.

“Yes, I know what they mean. In fact nine seconds is too long a gap. I think about them all the time,” Noor had replied.