She is relieved that everything has happened so suddenly; she hasn’t had the time to examine her own motives, otherwise her love story would have turned into an anthropological treatise about the survival strategies employed by Catholics in predominantly Islamic societies.
Dulhousie is a smart businessman; he can recognise ambition when he sees it, and although someone from French Colony getting a nurse’s job is not unusual, a trainee nurse coming out of the household of Choohra Joseph Bhatti, whom even other Choohras consider untouchable, is a sign that the next generation is ready to move on. Dulhousie has seen enough Bhattis in his life and, dear Lord, they shun upward mobility as if Yassoo had explicitly forbidden it. He has seen their stubbornness forged over generations, their fortitude like an infectious disease that catches them young and is their only companion right up to their deathbed. The ambitious ones might send their women to slave in the big houses, but otherwise they think that the government owes them a living, a meagre, below-the-gutter living, but still a living. And now, if they are managing to go to schools and colleges, they have already risen above the Bhatti mindset that enslaves them. If they are ready to dress better, if they want a tailored suit, they want better manners, they want better houses, they give more to the Church. For him, sewing fine dresses is not just a matter of earning an honest living but also keeping his Lord’s lambs in an optimistic mood; a community that dresses better will ultimately become a happier community. So when he sees people like Alice Bhatti walk into his shop, he doesn’t hold his nose, he doesn’t send her off to any of his half-dozen students bent over their Singers, he adjusts his glasses and greets her with a smile so bright it could light up the farther corners of French Colony.
As is his habit, Mr Dulhousie offers a short prayer before he starts to take her measurements. This is the first time Alice has been measured, and every part that Mr Dulhousie takes in with his faded measuring tape becomes more real, human, marriageable.
Alice’s body is one of those miracles of malnourishment, which has resulted in a thin, brittle bone structure with overgrown breasts. Dulhousie knows that she comes from the kind of household where starvation is passed off as fasting, where during every last week of the month dinner is bread soaked in water, where milk is taken without sugar and tea without milk, where meat is had when someone gets married or dies, where dhal and rice is a Sunday special and every fourth Sunday of the month is compulsory Lent. In these households, even empty stomachs gurgle Yassoo be praised.
With this dietary regime she has acquired a body that many girls of her age would kill for, or sometimes kill themselves while attempting to achieve. Her ribs can be counted through her shirt, her collarbones stick out like sharpened boomerangs, her ankles look like a display from an anatomy lab; but her breasts have somehow survived lack of proper nourishment, in fact seem to have thrived on the lack of a balanced diet, like Persian cantaloupes that only grow in the desert and die if it rains more than once every season. At the age of fourteen, she performed in an Easter play and at school afterwards had to stand in front of the cross to get her picture taken. An old nun quipped that she looked like a cross with tits. From then on, she has refused to go near a large cross.
Mr Dulhousie wraps the tape around her ribcage, making sure that only the tips of his fingers touch her body, and whispers, “By Lord’s grace many rich Christian ladies starve themselves to acquire this kind of figure. I remember your mother, I made her wedding suit too. Same size. I could just look up my old register and come up with the exact same dress.” He says this with a smile and then takes off his glasses and wipes a nonexistent tear from his eye. “How tragic that He took her from us in her youth. But our Lord shuts one door and opens another. At least you were able to finish your education with all that settlement money. I hear you were even living in the hostel. That is what our people need to do more. Get out more often, mingle, learn to live with people outside the Colony.”
Alice Bhatti doesn’t quite know how to deal with a neighbourhood tailor speculating on her family history. “Yes, He took her,” she mumbles.
Dulhousie gets busy with measuring her and whispers another compliment. Alice can only make out something about how it’s a privilege to have a natural figure like this.
Alice is painfully aware of this so-called privilege but has always found it a curse. Because people always stare. She is constantly pulling down the hem of her shirt to deflect their attention. What is she hoping to achieve? Does she really expect people to stop staring at her breasts and instead focus on the hem of her shirt? Or to be able to deflect their naked gaze to her fingers, fidgeting, pulling her shirt down nervously?
For work she chooses a loose shirt and then over that loose shirt covers her chest with a dupatta, makes sure that even the back of her neck is covered, ties her hair back, then makes sure that her shalwar covers her ankles. And only then does she set off for the Sacred.
Alice could probably have learned to ignore the stares, steeled herself against hungry eyes, managed to avoid the rubbernecks. She could have learned to live with the life lesson that men think that the best use of their eyes is to weigh a woman’s anatomy, but, as she embarks on her professional life, she has realised that people are not content just looking. Suddenly they want to touch her as if not sure what they have seen is real. She is aware of the fact that different rules apply outside French Colony: some people do not want to drink from the same glass that she has drunk from, others will not take a banana from the same bunch that she has taken a banana from. Their problem. She can live with being an untouchable, but she desperately hopes for the only privilege that comes with being one. That people won’t touch her without her explicit permission. But the same people who wouldn’t drink from a tap that she has touched have no problem casually poking their elbows into her breast or contorting their own bodies to rub against her heathen bottom.
They try to exploit her professional standing as well. When she started as a nurse she was quite easy with her hands, taking pulses, pressing flesh for invisible tumours, tracking down that evasive source of pain. On a field trip to Sargodha district she was stopped by elderly men again and again who wanted her to check their pulse. She obliged readily, her trained fingers lightly picking up their sturdy, peasant’s heartbeats; then she gave them the good news that they were in fine fettle. She even volunteered to look down their throats, tapped at their chests. One day she was standing beside a scenic well complete with a pair of shiny black bullocks taking weary but purposeful steps around it and little kids chasing chickens and goats when she took a stately grandfather’s wrist in her hand and closed her eyes for extra concentration. She opened her eyes to give him the good news about his robust heart when she noticed that Grandpa’s other hand had parted his dhoti and was tugging at a long, thin, flaccid penis. When she kicked the old man in his shins and started to walk away, she heard him mutter: “I’ll cut you up and throw the pieces in that well.”