The octopus of fear that had clutched Alice Bhatti’s head begins to relax its tentacles.
In her heart of hearts, Alice, who has seen people die choking on their own food, and survive after falling from a sixth floor on to a paved road, knows that Teddy means every word of what he has said. And he isn’t finished yet.
“I was standing outside the hospital, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. It was a full Rajab moon. Then I looked up at the balcony of Ortho Ward and saw you empty a garbage bin. I saw your face for a moment and then you disappeared. Then I looked up again and saw that the moon had disappeared too. I rubbed my eyes, I shut them, I opened them again. I stood and kept looking up for forty-five minutes. People gathered around me. I held them by their throats and kept asking them, where has the moon gone? And they said, what moon? We have seen no moon. Did you just escape from Charya Ward? And then I knew that I can’t live without you.”
A thick March cloud has cloaked the sun outside. The perfect spring afternoon is suddenly its own wintry ghost. The man with the X-rays is trying to shoo away a kite, which, confused by the sudden change in light, thinks it is dusk and swoops down in a last desperate attempt to take something home. The legless man is fighting the kite with the X-rays of his missing legs.
The final bell rings in the neighbouring St Xavier’s primary school and eighteen hundred children suddenly start talking to each other in urgent voices like house sparrows at dusk.
Alice Bhatti bends down, picks up the piss tray from the floor and holds it in front of her chest. She speaks in measured tones. “I know your type,” she says. “That little gun doesn’t scare me. Your tears don’t fool me. You think that a woman, any woman who wears a uniform is just waiting for you to show up and she’ll take it off. I wish you had just walked in and had the guts to tell me you want me to take this off. We could have had a conversation about that. At the end of which I would have told you what I am telling you now: fuck off and never show me your face again.”
Teddy Butt flees before she is finished. He runs past the legless man taking a nap with his face covered with an X-ray, past the ambulance drivers dissecting the evening newspapers, past the hopeful junkies waiting for the hospital to accidentally dispense its bounty.
As he emerges out of the hospital he raises his arm in the air, and without thinking, without targeting anything, fires his Mauser.
The city stops moving for three days.
The bullet pierces the right shoulder of a truck driver who has just entered the city after a forty-eight-hour-long journey. His shoulder is almost leaning out of his driver’s window, his right hand drumming the door, his fingers holding a finely rolled joint, licked on the side with his tongue for extra smoothness, a ritual treat that he has prepared for the end of the journey. He is annoyed with his own shoulder; he looks at it with suspicion. His shoulder feels as if it has been stung by a bee that has travelled with him all the way from his village. His left hand grips the shoulder where it hurts and finds his shirt soaked in red gooey stuff. He jams the brake pedal to the floor. A rickshaw trying to dodge the swerving truck gets entangled in its double-mounted Goodyear tyres and is dragged along for a few yards. Five children, all between seven and nine, in their pristine blue and white St Xavier’s uniforms, become a writhing mess of fractured skulls, blood, crayons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lunchboxes. The truck comes to a halt after gently nudging a cart and overturning a pyramid of the season’s last guavas. A size-four shoe is stuck between two Goodyears.
School notebooks are looked at, pockets are searched for clues to the victims’ identity, the mob slowly gathers around the truck, petrol is extracted from the tank and sprinkled over its cargo of three tonnes of raw peanuts. Teddy with his broken heart and the truck driver with his bleeding shoulder both realise what is coming even before the mob has made up its mind; they first mingle in the crowd and then start walking in opposite directions.
A lonely fire engine will turn up an hour later but will be pelted with stones and sent away. The truck and its cargo will smoulder for two days.
In a house twenty miles away a phone rings. A grandmother rushes on to the street beating her chest and wailing. Two motorcycles kick-start simultaneously. Half a dozen jerrycans full of kerosene are hauled into a rickety Suzuki pick-up. A nineteen-year-old rummages under his pillow, cocks his TT pistol and runs on to the street screaming, promising to rape every Pathan mother in the land. A second-hand-tyre-shop owner tries to padlock his store, but the boys are already there with their iron bars and bicycle chains. A police mobile switches its emergency horn on and rushes towards the police commissioner’s house. A helicopter hovers over the beach as if defending the Arabian Sea against the burning rubber smell that is spreading through the city. An old colonel walking his dog in the Colonels’ Colony asks his dog to hurry up and do its business. A bank teller is shot dead for smiling. Finding the streets deserted, groups of kites and crows descend from their perches and chase wild dogs, who lift their faces to the sky and bark joyously. Five size-four coffins wait for three days as ambulance drivers are shot at and sent back to where they came from. Carcasses of burnt buses, rickshaws, paan shops and at least one KFC joint seem to have a calming effect on the city. Newspapers start predicting ‘Normalcy limping back to the city’, as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.
♦
During the three-day shutdown, eleven more are killed; two of them turn up shot and tied together in one gunnysack dumped on a rubbish heap. Three billion rupees’ worth of Suzukis, Toyotas and Hinopaks are burnt. During these days Alice Bhatti is actually not that busy. When people are killed while fixing their satellite dish on their roof, or their motorbike is torched while they are going to buy a litre of milk, they tend to forget about their various ailments; they learn to live without dialysis for their kidneys, home cures are found for minor injuries, prayers replace prescription drugs. Alice has time to sit down between her chores, time to take proper lunch and prayer breaks. Between cleaning gunshot wounds and mopping the A&E floor, Alice Bhatti has moments of calm, and finds herself thinking about that scared man with the Mauser, his mad story about the disappearing moon. She wonders if he is caught up in these riots, if he is still having those dreams. She wonders if she has been in one of his dreams.
On the fourth day a fisherman bicycles slowly through the rubble with a wicker basket brimming with his home-made fishing net. With his back to the city he dips his toe in the seawater, likes its cold-warm-cold feel, rolls up his trousers, and starts laying his net for the night.
Nine
Senior sister Hina Alvi doesn’t ask Alice Bhatti to take a seat, and looks at her as if she is seeing her for the first time, as if it has never occurred to her that this junior nurse is capable of doing anything that has not been explicitly ordered by her.
Hina Alvi’s hands move briskly, paan is rolled in fast forward, and instead of tucking it into the side of her mouth, she starts chewing it fiercely and speaks in a raspy, nervous voice. “Just because there is no police case, just because Qaz’s family haven’t launched a formal complaint, doesn’t mean they are going to forget about it,” she says. “In fact you should be more scared that they haven’t registered a case against you. It means they want to deal with it on their own. It means they want to deal with you on their own.”