Alice Bhatti is looking at the baby, not really paying much attention to Hina Alvi’s rant about miracles. “What have you heard?” she asks her, because she doesn’t really know what is going on in the outside world. She has let people kiss her hands but refused to let them touch her feet.
“I have heard all kinds of stupid things. I have heard that Alice appears at people’s bedsides in the middle of the night when she is not even on duty, when she is not even in the hospital, when she is probably fast asleep in her bed. I have heard that when she is on duty, bedpans disappear and reappear cleaned and polished. I have heard that IVs self-adjust, I have heard strangers turn up offering A-negative, free of cost. I have heard that Dr Pereira is thinking of starting his old band again. And making gospel music. All I want to say is, stop with the miracles and stick to your day job. This miracle business is strictly a seasonal thing. You have seen those ice-candy vendors who come out in July? Do you ever see them any other month of the year?”
Alice Bhatti has actually been yearning to go back to her boring job. Because she has already started getting returns; people who are cured one day come back the next day with a new malaise. She already knows that her miracles are turning out to be her curse, like a prophet who brings the dead back to life, and then those brought back complain that they’ve come back to the same old life. It is turning out to be like the time spent with her fellow inmates in the Borstal, whose loneliness she tried to cure with aspirins and long talks about the wonders of human anatomy and jokes about doctors. They always came back the next morning looking even more lost.
“Do you think you are doing God’s work?” Hina Alvi asks her. “Because I know that God’s work is done not through prayers and not through kissing hands. You have to get your hands dirty.”
The baby has gone to sleep. He feels weightless in Alice Bhatti’s arms. She presses him against her stomach.
“He makes us sick. He cures. I am only doing my duty.”
“Look, what you did there was OK, not your fault. These people will get bored very soon and find another messiah, somebody who cures their cancer but in the process also doubles their money. So the real miracle would be if we don’t leave this child to become rat food.”
“I was thinking of taking him home with me.” Alice Bhatti has been thinking about a baby, but not this baby, since she found out about her pregnancy. But in this moment it sounds like the right thing to say, and having said it, it seems like the right thing to do, the only thing to do.
“You were thinking of taking him home? Is that why you haven’t gone home for three nights? Is that why you have been sleeping in Noor’s bunk? Do you even have a home any more? Or have you somehow made your husband disappear? Now that would be a miracle.”
The baby stirs in his sleep and punches the air in slow motion with his tiny clenched fists. “You know what it has been like. It’s impossible to walk out of that gate,” says Alice.
“You can’t really just pick up a baby and take it home,” Hina Alvi is officious now, all procedures and paperwork. Alice Bhatti can see that she has given it some thought. “You need to apply, fill out forms, your husband needs to sign up.”
“Can you keep him for a few days? I mean, I’ll take him when all this is over.” Alice Bhatti is not sure if this is the right time to tell her that this baby has a sibling on the way.
“Me? Sure. If you want him to die of neglect. I can change nappies and vaccinate him but I wouldn’t know how to feed him. Actually, I wouldn’t even know how to pick him up in my arms. So if you want to come with me, we can take him home.”
Twenty-Six
Noor is having dinner with important men in a dream when he wakes up to find himself surrounded by four guns and Teddy Butt in a very bad mood. In his dream, the important men are wearing suits, they arrive in single file carrying briefcases, then sit and eat with silver cutlery, starched white napkins on their laps. Wearing a white coat and a surgeon’s cap, Noor himself sits at the head of the table carving a roast chicken the size of a small sheep. The important men are talking about important stuff. Although Noor can only pick out a few words, like mission statement, evaluation and holistic, because it is English they are speaking, he knows that they are talking about something important.
A boot hits Noor in his ribs and he looks at the man seated on his right, then to his left, as if not expecting such bad table manners from gentlemen of this calibre. When he opens his eyes, he sees three guns on a food trolley and the fourth one, a small black snub-nosed thing, in Teddy’s hand. Teddy holds it not from its grip but along his palm, like they do in those bullet-bending futuristic movies.
“Where is she?” Teddy asks in a shrill whisper. His boot is still tentatively prodding Noor’s side, as if the answer to his question might be hidden in his ribcage. Noor is used to Teddy’s untimely visits, mostly with requests for drugs that were banned years ago, but Teddy has never stopped by at this hour of the night, not with four guns, not when Zainab is fast asleep. Noor rubs his eyes, stifles a yawn and concludes that Teddy hasn’t dropped in at two in the morning for a casual chat. Zainab’s breathing rattles in the background, a local train, chugging away, starting and stopping, not bound to any timetable. The night creatures chirp outside. Number 44 groans and other patients cough and curse him in their sleep. It’s a chorus of the damned. Noor notices that Teddy has carefully drawn the curtain around Zainab’s bed and now they are in their own private little room.
♦
Earlier in the night, Teddy had also woken up after a dream. He had come home early from a five-day trip in the interior after not finding not-Abu Zar. He waited for Alice for a while. He stood in the window and thought that him being home would be a nice surprise for her when she came back from work. He went in the kitchen and rearranged the utensils; there was nothing to eat in the fridge. He thought maybe he should go out and get some vegetables and cook some food for her. But if she didn’t find him home on her arrival, then there would be no surprise for her, so he decided to hang around.
He went to the bedroom and noticed that her wardrobe door was half open. He looked into it, and there was nothing except a dark blue silk nightie that she wore in bed. He rummaged through the drawers and found nothing, no socks or panties. He opened his own side of the cupboard. None of his clothes or what remained of not-Abu Zar’s posters had been touched. Again he opened her side of the wardrobe. The blue nightie was the only evidence of the fact that he once had a wife. In the lower drawer he found a rolled-up poster. He took it out and unfolded it. It was a picture of Jesus Christ. He felt sudden panic, as if somebody had been hiding a stash of heroin in his apartment without his knowledge. He looked at His flowing hair, pink-hued eyes, lips slightly open, the halo around his head drawn in rainbow colours. He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water, then put the poster under the pillow and lay down on the bed, hoping it would calm his nerves. Why had she taken all her stuff? Where had she gone? The place where he could look was the Sacred. The only person he could ask was that lapdog of hers, Noor. But why had she left? And why had she left behind a poster of her prophet?