Alice Bhatti is not used to being addressed by her father. He makes toys for her, little birds from discarded wood usually, but he is not the kind of father who hugs his child or cuddles her to sleep, especially if the child in question is a twelve-year-old girl. But when Joseph Bhatti sees Alice sitting under the tap, furiously scrubbing a pot, trying to be her own mother, he comes to her and puts his hand on her shoulder and says the words that she has been hearing since they brought her mother home covered in a white sheet: “What can we do, my child? He took her.”
Before the funeral, it seemed they hadn’t merely covered her body but prepared her for export to some far-off country with strict packaging regulations. With two clean knots at both ends of the shimmering white shroud, she looked like a giant vegetable being sent to cold storage. Reverend Philip, who conducted the funeral service, seemed more excited than sombre and kept saying, He took her. In fact he was so excited that to Alice it seemed that Reverend Philip had given Him a hand when He was taking her. Or at least that He had consulted Father Philip before taking her.
“Our Lord took her away when she was in the prime of her youth; now she looks down upon us from the heavens and smiles upon us and her smile lights up our lives. She wasn’t ours to keep, she was Yassoo’s bride, and there she lives with Him in paradise, and this arrangement will last for eternity. But she left us a gift of life; she gave us the gift of Alice. Our hearts are filled with His blessings that He took her from us but in taking her from us He returned her to us for all eternity. Our hearts are full of memories of her and our memories are filled with her generous heart. But our hearts go out to our brother Joseph Bhatti who is still grieving.”
How did He take her from them?
Alice Bhatti’s mother died at work. At somebody’s house where she worked full time. She had quit her three part-time cleaning jobs at three different houses to get this one job because they wanted someone full time. This house was so big it could have housed all the three houses where she had previously worked. In fact the whole Bhatti household could fit under their travertine marble staircase, which needed to be washed and polished every day. It was on this staircase that she slipped and died. He took her. It’s entirely conceivable that if you are washing travertine marble with soapy water you can slip and crack your skull, you can die. When He wants to take you, He can make the marble staircase slippery. He can make you put more soap in water than required for travertine marble. He can make you trip over that bucket of soapy water you put on the stairs and forgot.
But it is not very likely that when you slip on that staircase you’ll also accidentally scratch yourself on your left breast with such violence that those who wash your body will see four parallel sharp gashes drawn with human nails. It’s also unlikely that during that fall on the staircase you’ll somehow manage to spill someone’s sperm on your thighs.
He took her.
There were rumours that Reverend Philip had accepted a gift of ten thousand rupees on Joseph Bhatti’s behalf to stop the autopsy and let the owners of the house with the staircase off the hook. But the truth is that even those who believed this rumour — or maybe even started this rumour — didn’t believe for a moment that the owners of the house with a marble staircase of that size would let any hook sink into them.
So yes. Maybe it was He who took her.
A gardener from the house with the marble staircase from where He took her turned up at the funeral service, and the way he behaved it was clear to everyone that he was a Musla and had never been to a Catholic service of any kind. Whenever Reverend Philip mentioned Mother of Alice’s name (which by the way was Margaret Bhatti, and many people heard her name uttered for the first and the last time at her funeral service), the gardener started to wail in an injured animal’s voice. And when everyone stood up to join the choir singing praises to the Lord who took her, he kept sitting with his hands covering his face and muttering something in Bengali. The congregation believed he was offering some Musla prayer, as they clearly heard him say the word Allah repeatedly.
After the service, over a pot of biryani that Reverend Philip had generously donated, the crying stranger at the funeral service was discussed in whispers. The person sitting on the gardener’s left, who was the only one who had spoken to the stranger and hence found out that he was a gardener from the house from where He took her, insisted that he had heard him saying ‘murder, murder, murder’ during the prayer. The person sitting on the right of the gardener accused the person sitting on the left of spreading vicious rumours and violating the sanctity of a post-funeral meal. He even offered to swear on the Holy Bible to prove that the stranger was actually saying ‘martyr, martyr, martyr’.
The stranger himself had left immediately after the funeral prayers, without attending the biryani feast. He was never heard from again.
“Mother of Alice.” Joseph Bhatti lowers the bird into Alice’s arms and says, “It’s not a hen. It’s a peacock.”
Alice Bhatti has never seen a peacock in her life, except in her year-one class book where P stood for Peacock or Pakistan. But this bird in her arms looks nothing like the one in the picture. It looks and smells like a piece of wet garbage. She holds it under the water tap, and as the mud starts to wash away, she sees crescent sheens of green and blue under it, the patterns of yellow and gold emerge slowly and as the soap washes away the mud, spots of red and brown complete the picture from her book. She uses her bar of Capri soap, which is reserved for their Sunday baths, and starts to scrub it. The peacock squirms in her hands, puffs up its wings and shudders violently, sending soapy water drops all around. Some goes into Alice’s eye, and she rubs it with the back of her hand, managing to get more soap into it. She is crying but Joseph Bhatti can’t tell. He goes into the corner with the stove and asks, “So what are you going to make for supper?”
This is how Alice becomes Mother of Alice, and she does not like it one bit. “Nothing,” she says. “Or do you want me to cook this?” She lets go of the bird, which stretches its wings, takes a short flight, then hops around the courtyard trying to find a place to hide.
♦
“What are you making?” Alice Bhatti asks her father, as if enquiring about dinner arrangements. Joseph Bhatti wraps his dhoti around his knees, sits down on the bed, picks up the bag as if checking its weight to guess how long she is going for, and seems satisfied with its light weight. “I have been working on a cross, with my own hands, but I can’t show it to anyone before I have finished it. I will send it to Italy. You’ll see. Everyone will see.”
“A cross? That’s what this world needs. Another cross.”
“Yes. The world needs this one. You know that our Lord Yassoo’s faith didn’t spread beyond Egypt until they learned to mass-produce wooden crosses,” he says, emphasising every word, as if trying to explain the Old Testament to high-school students. “What we need to do now is make our own, with our own hands. Stop this merchandising.”
“They are everywhere now,” says Alice Bhatti. “You can buy them really cheaply, in all materials, all shapes. I have seen some that double as telephones and alarm clocks. There are Chinese ones that can recite the Holy Bible in thirty-one languages.”
“You should have brought him with you,” says Joseph Bhatti. “I know that whoever he is, he is not a Choohra. I hear he is a Butt. Probably fair-skinned, traces his ancestry to Central Asia via Kashmir. But just because they became Muslas doesn’t mean that they are any better than us.”
“He is at work,” says Alice, picking up her bag. “He does night shifts, but I’ll bring him over soon.”