Alice Bhatti starts rummaging through her handbag and counting her money again.
“How are you going to find the boy? There are millions of boys in this city. Let the police find him. It’s their job.”
Teddy, who is carefully adjusting the crease on his trousers, turns his head and stares at her steadily. “You don’t look yourself. What’s the matter? I ask you for some money and you start giving me advice about how to run my life?”
The decision is made for Alice as she looks at his cocked eyebrow, the utter incomprehension in his eyes. Then he makes it easier for her. “I think you should go to your father’s for a few days. I don’t think you can handle the pressure. I’ll come and get you when this is over.”
“How much money do you need?” Alice asks without looking up.
Twenty-Five
Alice Bhatti has learnt within one week that making miracles is hard work, as hard as being an underpaid junior nurse in an understaffed welfare hospital. She has brought all her clothes in a bag and is camping out at the hospital. She is living the life of an in-house messiah at the Sacred. Dr Pereira tries his best to deflect the rumours about miraculous cures in the hospital by putting up banners announcing a cleanliness week. When someone calls up to find out about the sudden plunge in the infant mortality rate in the maternity ward, he recounts the steps he has taken to improve the standards of hygiene and points to the banner announcing the cleanliness campaign.
Dr Pereira has never figured out how people find out about these things. Somebody whispers something in your ear, and before you can turn to them and ask how they know in the first place, the rumour has travelled around the city and somebody else is whispering a version of the original in your other ear. Here it was a sweeper who had been instructed by Sister Hina Alvi to make arrangements for the born dead on Bed 8. There is generally no rush with the dead babies, so the sweeper takes his cigarette break, goes to the storeroom, and on his way stops and talks to Noor about the comparative merits of various brands of powdered milk. By the time he returns with a white sheet and a small bar of soap, he sees that the baby’s feet are pedalling in the air and he is making a ruckus, as if trying to convince everyone that they have made a mistake. And then the sweeper sees that Sister Alice Bhatti is kneeling on the floor surrounded by bloodied cotton and piles of gauze. Her hands are folded in front of her chest and she is praying. The sweeper thinks he has no option but to go down on his knees and join her in prayer. He is not sure what exactly has happened; Hina Alvi declared a baby dead when the baby is all here, very much alive, crying his lungs out. The sweeper will tell everyone that he felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. In reality he reached that conclusion by using logic. When he is down on his knees, he realises that the dead baby come alive is a miracle, but there is this other person who has made the miracle possible. The sweeper has seen many odd things in this place: he has seen quintuplets being born, he has seen two doctors having a punch-up in the operating theatre over who forgot to take out a pair of scissors before stitching up the patient, but he has never felt any holy presence, only human negligence. Sister Alice kneeling in a puddle of blood, muttering a long prayer in Latin that the sweeper remembers faintly hearing in his childhood, is the presence. She exudes warmth, she is oblivious to her surroundings, the crying baby, the blood on the floor. The delivery room’s fluorescent light seems to bathe her in a holy glow.
The sweeper just has to go out and mention it to an ambulance driver whose wife has had three miscarriages, and the news start spreading like a riot, because once it starts, it finds its own momentum and travels through lapsed believers who have been waiting for a sign, and then it reaches the really needy ones who can’t afford to lose hope. Soon it isn’t just the dead babies who are getting a second chance at the Sacred. According to the rumours, there are miraculous cures for advanced diabetes, and pancreatic cancer heals itself if you manage to get past the OPD. Some obese people are seen hobbling around the courtyard hoping to burn all their fat overnight.
In the all-pervasive mood of hyper-optimism, people either don’t find out or choose to ignore two basic facts: the mother of the baby quietly passed away while Alice was praying to save the baby, and the miracle-maker is a lapsed soldier of Yassoo but still a Catholic, a woman, and a junior nurse. Although the Catholic Church had adopted a number of borderline pagan habits, falling into the local customs of burning incense at the mention of anything holy and covering every slab of marble that carried a saint’s name with garlands of marigold, it had never allowed a female member of its congregation any role that didn’t involve carrying a bowl of holy water, washing the dead or preparing the native cuisine for visiting clergy: Goan prawn curries for foreign bishops and aloo gosht for common priests from Punjab. The Catholic Church hears these rumours but ignores them, as for decades it ignored rumours about her father Joseph Bhatti’s ulcer cures.
Alice Bhatti is so busy that sometimes she forgets the little baby that she allegedly saved. Nobody turns up to claim the mother’s body and it gets the usual quiet burial after a seven-day wait. Alice Bhatti is living out of her bag. Sometimes it seems to her that the seven thousand patients in the hospital, hundreds crawling in the corridor, thousands more out in the compound using bricks as pillows, are feeling a bit better because they are in the hospital compound, only a few metres away from operating theatres, labs and drug dispensaries. But really they are here to seek the Bhatti cure. They have heard the tales about dead kids coming alive, the old no-hoper cancer patients going home on their own feet. They are here to seek her intervention. There are long queues whenever she is on shift.
Alice Bhatti knows that after the freak incident with the baby, the other so-called miracles are mostly the result of a non-literal implementation of the working nurse’s manual, sometimes applied with a bit of inspired improvisation, half a Prozac added there, an antibiotic deleted from another prescription, but mostly a generous helping of disinfectant, constantly boiling pots for syringes and needles across the hospital, fresh cotton and gauze, bleach in the sinks and bathrooms. Not that her fellow paramedics cared at the beginning. They were happy to get some positive press and gave her all the industrial-strength chemicals she wanted.
“What miracle?” In the beginning they would laugh when people started turning up. “Anyone getting out alive from this hospital? Yes, that is definitely a miracle.”
Sister Hina Alvi walks in with a new junior nurse in tow cradling the baby, whom everyone still refers to as the dead baby. The baby is covered in a new pink blanket, its head shaved, its cheeks already beginning to fill out. “How is our God’s little healer coping?” Hina Alvi is the only one who isn’t impressed. “I hope you haven’t begun to believe all this nonsense.”
Alice comes forward, takes the baby from the nurse’s hands and starts rocking it. “People will believe what they want to believe. I am only doing my job.”
Alice Bhatti means to sound modest, but her statement comes out as grand.
“Well I guess if they say it’s a miracle, we can’t mess with them. I don’t know what this world is coming to,” says Hina Alvi. “As a child I was taught that God is in everything. I thought that this concept was so simple that even someone like me could understand it. Now that I am getting old, they want me to literally see God in vegetables. For the last five years, every year there is an aubergine somewhere that, when you slice it, it has the word Allah running through it. I am sure if you slice it the other way you can see your own husband’s face and if you move it sideways you can read something obscene. There is always a cloud shaped like Muhammad. I know some people see Yassoo on a cross or his mother in a pretty dress in every seasonal fruit. Why do people need that kind of evidence? Isn’t there always a flood or an earthquake or a child run over by a speeding car driven by another child to remind us that God exists?”