A volatile love in Karachi’s halwa

[1]

RS 499

Mohammed Hanif’s new book is not a hagiography and Alice Bhatti is not a saint. Not unless you believe in saints who swear, can be violent in defence of their religion, and their holy selves, may be even jailed for attempt to murder, and dabble in worldly pleasures of the heart and the flesh.
We meet Alice Bhatti when she’s waiting to be interviewed for the job of Replacement Junior Nurse, Grade 4, at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments.

With his light-footed description of Alice’s nervousness and trepidation at appearing before the “selection panel”, Hanif lulls you into ease with his dry humour, and a pithy remark here and there, to enjoy what you think is going to be a satire on life in Karachi, something quite different from his first book, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, woven around the plane crash that killed Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq.
Alice Bhatti, a Catholic choohra (closest synonym: dalit) living with her father Joseph Bhatti, a retired municipal sewage worker, in Karachi’s French Colony, is a former inmate of Borstal Jail where she was serving an 18-month prison sentence for attempted murder. And it is enough to say that Alice is not to be taken at face value. For all her butterflies-in-the-stomach introduction when being interviewed for the job, Hanif lets it drop that she has a criminal record and that she served time. She may initially seem to have grown a thick tongue and then suddenly speak nonstop for a whole minute when asked as to why she should be given the job, but she’d headstrong and tough as nails.
Next we meet Noor, a 17-year-old jack of all trades at the hospital, who works there in return for the care and treatment of his mother Zainab, who has multiple cancers. The name of the mother’s character is a throwback to a subplot in Hanif’s debut novel, in which she’s a blind gangrape victim who is to be stoned to death for adultery. Noor knows Alice from Borstal, where he was incarcerated as a 14-year-old, and he’s the one who advises her on how to go about the interview and, as we soon find out, has an extremely soft corner for Alice. Whether it is a temporal teenage crush or actual no-holds-barred love is something best left for the reader to discover. He is, nevertheless, instrumental in setting off the cataclysmic action that keeps pushing you towards something dark.
Alice meets Teddy Bhatti, a bodybuilder whose main occupation is being a police tout. He’s called in to deal with things the cops don’t want to get their hands dirty with. Teddy initially comes across as Moose from the Archie comics, all muscle and thick-headed, who takes Noor’s help to get out of sticky situations. And for all the violence that his “job” entails, he doesn’t have a penchant for it. He falls for Alice, expectedly, only to be rejected when he goes to profess his love for her, at his poetic best, something about the disappearing moon, armed with a Mauser with three bullets and a cover story that he’s ill. It’s an unusual parallel to draw, but the scene reminds one of the Bollywood film Chameli ki Shaadi, when the wrestler Anil Kapoor is trying to woo the four-time flunking, dim-witted schoolgirl played by Amrita Singh. But that’s where the similarities end.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti has a healthy dose of humour, with a dash of lime, even as the dormant unease between Muslims and Christians is omnipresent. You don’t even have to scratch the surface for it to show, it’s for all to see. It can cause trouble — like Alice’s episode at nursing school involving a bunch of Muslim girls — but not any big trouble in the book’s scheme of things. It’s something Karachi lives with, apparently.
Alice comes round when she’s taking firing lessons from Teddy. She starts carrying a gun after an “incident” in the VIP ward where she slashes the penis of a man who was trying to force her to perform fellatio at gunpoint. She certainly could’ve taught a thing or two to the NY hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo. Hanif cleverly reveals how heavily things are weighed against a woman. It’s evident in the way the truth behind Alice’s mother’s death is hushed up, and it is again
evident when Alice is subsequently suspended, a relatively light punishment, which also buys her time from the reprisal the rich and powerful “VIP ward” family may have in store for her.
While on punishment suspension from the hospital, Alice and Teddy get married, on a submarine, and really start getting to know each other. She realises that she doesn’t exactly like Teddy’s job, which she doesn’t know much about, and he has his own grouses.
To add to the melee, Teddy inadvertently lets a target escape which lands him in a precarious situation and Alice finds herself “performing” an ostensible miracle, which only adds to the pent-up steam threatening to explode. Alice takes refuge with a closet Christian and Teddy with his cop buddies, and both these actions set off a chain reaction heading for doom.
Hanif creates an ominous atmosphere where you know that what he has in store will shock you and you start to unfold the events in your head even before he reveals them to you. He’s not taking the suspense of the story away from you, he’s only telling you that wishful thinking doesn’t always result in things turning out the way you want them to.
So even as you’re tying up the loose ends, you’re hoping that Hanif would leave those threads be and not bring things to the logical conclusion that seems but inevitable.
Hanif isn’t given to commenting; he just describes things as a disinterested observer would, leaving you to deal with the horror of it. When Teddy goes running out of Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments after Alice rejects him, he randomly fires his pistol, unthinkingly of course, which hits a truck driver who in turn runs over five children on their way to school. The resulting violence in the city claims 11 more lives over the next three days. That’s life in Karachi for you, cut and dried, as Hanif presents it.