He gets up and starts to go out, then stops at the door and looks back. “Choohras were here before everything. Choohras were here before the Sacred was built, before Yassoo was resurrected, before Muslas came on their horses, even before Hindus decided they were too exalted to clean up their own shit. And when all of this is finished, Choohras will still be here.”
“Yes,” says Alice Bhatti, the fresh graduate from the Borstal. People can learn various crafts in jaiclass="underline" to pick pockets, to wield a knife, how to use your knee in a fight, to plant flowers in pots made out of cardboard or hook up with someone and hatch a plan to kidnap a film star, or to write poetry. Alice has learnt only one thing: to keep quiet and speak only when absolutely necessary. “Yes, when everything is finished, Choohras will still be here. And cockroaches too.”
Seven
The out patients department corridor is cleared of motorbikes, bicycles and anything else with wheels; there are no food trolleys, wheelchairs, stretchers. Even mops and buckets are piled along the wall, as if the Sacred is closing down for the summer. A gleaming double-cabin Surf, so new it seems to have just rolled off a Toyota assembly line, is parked in the corridor. Those who saw it bump and screech its way up the staircase, negotiating the steep ramp meant for emergencies, are still whispering to each other in admiration and awe. “No, no, it’s not 3400cc, I bet it’s 4200cc. Yes, I know it’s a four-by-four but it didn’t even have to engage that to climb up.”
The number plate bears no numbers. In red lightning bolts it says Devil of the Desert. Everyone seems to understand what that means. Habitual sticklers for parking rules, especially grumpy ambulance drivers, approach it gingerly, planning to lecture the owners about parking etiquette. But at the back of the cabin, in the open half of the vehicle, are seated four men in uniform. It’s not the uniform of any state institution or a recognisable security agency, just black cotton shalwar suits and crimson berets with a random number of stripes on their shoulders. Their Kalashnikovs are pointed vaguely outward, the muzzles lazily tracking any passer-by, even when the gunmen are looking the other way. There is only one person in the front, a driver sporting the same uniform but with more stripes, one arm dangling outside, holding a revolver and flicking its safety catch off and on out of sheer boredom. He seems like the kind of person who, if bored for too long, could start a small massacre.
Patients milling about the ward are not scared by this little militia; they are resigned to the fact that someone has arrived with a shiny new object and obviously the owner has every right to protect his investment. They had seen the owner step out of the vehicle: Rolex, Ray-Bans, Bally, Montblanc; he walked like someone wearing a million rupees’ worth of accessories in a place where half a pint of O-positive costs two hundred rupees. It’s only the grumpy ambulance drivers who have a problem internalising the notion that it’s not just a vehicle with a whimsical number plate; it’s movable property. It can’t be parked just anywhere. They are missing the whole point. It needs to be protected, but it also provides protection. The vehicle occupies a space and then makes it its own, like a ferocious dog marking its territory.
♦
“Your bedside manner has really improved,” Sister Hina Alvi tells Alice that morning, unexpectedly tousling her hair and then withdrawing into her professional reserve. “But there is always room for improvement, so I am assigning you a room where you can really improve. VIP Two. Night shift. Don’t think you are doing me a favour. I am doing you a favour. Fatima Jinnah spent a night there.”
Alice feels a bit baffled, first at her own ignorance about the history of this place, then at the fact that this knowledge is not likely to help her in any way in performing her duties. She does wonder how Sister Hina Alvi gets all that time to read history books. Doesn’t she have a family to take care of? It must take her a couple of hours every day just to do that hair.
“Have you read her letters to her brother?” Sister Hina Alvi asks her and continues without waiting for an answer. “Did you know that Fatima was a dentist, a trained dentist? But she sacrificed her whole life for this country. And how do we remember her? As an old spinster. Someone gives you their whole life and what do you call them: mother of the nation. Now if her brother is the father of the nation, how can she be the mother of the nation? They could have called her sister of the nation, but no. Because then people might have mistaken her for a nurse, one of us. It’s a nation of perverts, I tell you.”
Alice agrees. Sister Hina Alvi might be a control freak, but at least she has a sense of history.
If the patient is so very important, what are they doing in the Sacred? Alice wonders. Why not Agha Khan Hospital, if they can’t go to Singapore or Bangalore, where hospitals are like holiday homes, complete with kitchens and swimming pools.
“She is old money.” Sister Hina Alvi looks at Alice in a now-what-would-you-know-about-that kind of way. Her voice conjures up polished wooden floors, walls full of commissioned portraits, family names adopted from central Asian villages and combination lockers stacked with cash and secrets. “Her father died here, her children were born here,” she says. “She is not one of those new importer-exporter types who boast about their grandfathers dying in Cromwell Hospital. She has roots. And those roots are here.”
Alice Bhatti has a vision of the Old Doctor in the courtyard, its trunk made up of gleaming Hilux metal, its branches twisted Kalashnikov barrels, little birds in black uniforms and dark sunglasses and oversized berets hopping on its branches. Sister Hina Alvi sees a smile spread on her face and reminds her.
“You are on death watch, not on a picnic.” She puts the glasses on the bridge of her nose and spreads the newspaper in front of her.
Life has taught Alice Bhatti that every little step forward in life is preceded by a ritual humiliation. Every little happiness asks for a down payment. Too many humiliations and a journey that goes in circles means that her fate is permanently in the red. She accepts that role. “I’ll do my best.”
“Her name is Begum Qazalbash, but she likes to be addressed as Qaz. Convent education, a very self-made lady in a family where even the sixth generation of men don’t have to do anything to make a living.” Sister Hina Alvi speaks without taking her eyes off the newspaper.
Alice Bhatti doesn’t pay particular attention to the Surfer or its number plate. She has seen enough nicknames, poetic flourishes, family titles, fictional cities and urban legends passing themselves off as vehicle licence plates. She is not amused by somebody’s high-school idea of looking important. Devil indeed, she thinks. Why don’t they pray to their Devil of the Desert for their Begum of Qaz.
As she enters the corridor that leads to VIP 2, she sees a little gathering of men, a small army wearing black shalwar suits, sitting amid a jumble of Kalashnikovs, eating a meal from stainless-steel plates. They are passing around a naan the size of a tablecloth and are in the midst of a passionate conversation about the comparative merits of the country’s best jails. Somebody suggests that Machh might be the most difficult to get out of but that it is the only one with running water in its bathrooms. “More showers than I have taken in my entire life.”
“What showers?” Another guard speaks through a mouthful of food. “You were probably jerking off your death-row friends. Didn’t they call you Helping Hands?” The Machh jail man giggles and slaps the joker with a piece of bread.