Mohammed Hanif makes you laugh even in the worst of situations
Find a place where murder, lust and senseless violence are a part of life. Where women are quite likely to end up dead, or abused, if they are not resigned to their fate or even for no particular reason. Where outside hospitals, people scribble, “Enter at your own peril.” A place that veers from one crisis to another. Where love is most likely to turn into an all-consuming obsession. Where people from different religions coexist, but are only barely tolerant of each other. In a place like this, put Mohammed Hanif. Not only will he bring out the grim reality of the place and the situation, he will also make you laugh, often more than once on every page, while doing so.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti — it’s an intriguing title that finds justification only towards the end of the book, just like Hanif’s first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes — is the story of Alice Bhatti, a Catholic choohra (placed at the very bottom in the oppressive caste system) whose father is a retired sewage worker with the municipal corporation. Through her and the events around her, this is also the story of the city called Karachi, a city by and large still unexplored by writers, placid on the thin surface but roiling with violent undercurrents.
Our first encounter with Alice is when she is waiting to be interviewed for the job of a replacement junior nurse (Grade 4) at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a home for shootout victims, for the beggars and the destitute, a place where any self-respecting Pakistani would be too embarrassed to be seen. Only the scum of the earth land here and that’s how they’re treated. Alice has worked in this hospital earlier, cleaning blood, gore and body parts off the floor, before she was sentenced for 18 months for attempted murder and sent to Borstal Jail.
At first Alice appears to be a nervous young girl from the most marginalised section of society, hoping against hope to be given a chance that could improve her lot. But just like the city to which she belongs, a violent temper lurks underneath. Unlike her janitor father who is also a part-time healer of ulcers, she doesn’t think much of his job and wants a better life. He tells her that “Choohras were here before everything”, before Jesus was resurrected, before Muslims came on their horses, “and when all is finished, Choohras will still be there.” “Yes,” she hits back, “when everything is finished, Choohras will still be there. And cockroaches too.” Alice — Hanif has said the character is inspired by a nurse he once saw in a hospital, beautiful but tired and yet diligently doing her duty — has quite an attitude, she swears in English, can recite the Kalima even though she’s Catholic and will not hesitate to attack a man the second time over with the razor in her pocket when he forces himself on her. The same Alice, when she’s rescued from the clutches for a dozen inmates of The Centre for Mental and Psychological Diseases (Charya Ward), will also kick and scream at her rescuer, Teddy Butt, because she hasn’t given those patients their dose of lithium sulphate.
Alice is an eccentric character and her eccentricities are sprung upon us throughout the book. Those who have read A Case of Exploding Mangoes might not entirely be surprised by these surprises, but Hanif brings them on with engaging quirkiness. That’s another point. It’s difficult not to keep thinking of A Case of Exploding Mangoes while reading Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. That dark comedy created around former Pakistan president Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship and the corruption in the army is a masterpiece, the shadow of which could lie on this book. But that will be unfair to the writer, to any writer for that matter. So the earlier we put the two books apart and approach them as the two separate literary works, the better.
Alice’s rescuer, Teddy, winner of the Junior Mr Faisalabad body-building competition and a dense, brawny chap, is another intriguing character. As a member of the Gentlemen’s Squad, an unofficial group of “like-minded police officers” that has reformed rapists, torturers, and sharpshooters as its crew, he fits into any role the cops want him to play, whether it is cleaning up the crime scene, getting his own thumb smashed when the police need proof that a crime has been committed or acting as court witness. It’s not surprising that the consequence of the love that blossoms between Alice and Teddy, and leads to a wedding on a submarine — shifty grounds those — should be disastrous right from the start. But the extent of that disaster is horrifying. Teddy, it turns out, can express himself best when he has a Mauser in his hand. So that’s what he does, bring the gun and a story of the disappearing moon to the hospital to propose to Alice. “Gunpoint poetry,” Hanif calls it.
Rejected initially, he runs out of the hospital and fires in the air. The bullet hits a truck driver who runs over five schoolchildren and a riot breaks out. “And the city stops moving for three days.” In less than two pages, one gets a chilling account of a personal tragedy escalating into a public crisis in a city that is always on edge. Here Hanif’s skill as a journalist stands out. He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of journalists who can describe the gory details, invest practically any situation with sardonic humour, take you into people’s heads and to a lesser degree into their hearts, speak of the Pakistan that he is witnessing today and, yet, do all this as a journalist should — as a dispassionate observer giving the information and then leaving it up to you to laugh, shake your head, ponder or recoil in shock and disgust. Nowhere does one get the sense that he laughing at the situation he has created or is living any of the emotions with his characters.
Insightful nuggets are liberally sprinkled with equal dispassion. Like, when Bhatti is on her first visit to Charya Ward, her superior, the paan-munching Sister Hina Alvi, tells her, “These boys in Charya Ward are suffering from what everyone suffers from: life.” As it turns out, almost every character, barring perhaps 17-year-old Noor who’s a jack-of-all-trades at the hospital and the sanest voice in the book, appears to belong to the Charya Ward in some way. Faith, too, plays its part in the book. Expected, given the title. But faith here isn’t about conflict, confrontation and suspicion between the two communities, Christian and Muslim, though those too find a place. It’s more about the characters’ relationship with their faith.
From Alice, the convict, to Alice, the “miracle-healer”, whose father wants the Vatican to declare her a saint, it’s quite a journey. At times, the threads are left hanging and one is left looking for a purpose in the narrative, but every seemingly-random situation eventually finds a reason to be. Is Alice a saint? Or is she a ghoul? Or is she a woman with a tormented past struggling for a saner present? Hanif, the writer who has said he finds writing tormenting and yet makes it appear effortless, leaves that for the reader to decide.
OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI
Author: Mohammed Hanif
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 256
Price: Rs 499
