In the bus, she is the only passenger in the women’s section, and the driver looks at her as if he understands the predicament of people like her who can’t sleep all night because they have to start early.
The driver puts on a tape, and what Joseph Bhatti used to call the Musla anthem starts to play. There is no music, just a bunch of men shouting at the top of their voices demanding to be teleported to Mecca.
It’s still dark when she reaches the Sacred. She can hear the medico-legal John Malick singing in his office. She goes straight to Zainab in the general ward and, as she had expected, finds Noor dozing in a chair next to his mother’s bed. His left eye is covered in a bandage. Zainab is barely breathing. Alice bends over to take her pulse, and as soon as she touches her wrist, Noor wakes up with a groan and then jumps out of his chair. “When did you come? Where have you been? That husband of yours has been looking for you.”
“He should have looked at home first. What happened to your eye?”
“First tell me what you have been telling Teddy.”
“What do you mean? I’ll have to meet him before I can tell him anything. Your eye looks in really bad shape.”
“You should have seen it without the bandage. I had a cartoon eyeball. He thinks there is something between us.”
“What does that mean?”
“He thinks we are lovers.”
Alice starts to laugh, and then can’t stop laughing. She can’t remember the last time she laughed like this. Noor puts his finger on his lips and signals towards Zainab. “But we are. We are,” she whispers. She feels that there is another Teddy that she has never known. Jealous Teddy. Going-around-trying-to-find-about-her-life Teddy. She likes this Teddy.
Where is Teddy?
There is only one place that she can go and look, and although she has the name of the outfit and some idea that it’s police work he does, she has no idea where this place is. Noor is the only person she can ask; he also has no clue, but goes away and comes back within five minutes with an address, the number of the bus that goes there and an offer to accompany her, but then he looks at Zainab and sits on her bedside. “It’s the seventh week,” he mutters.
“I’ll be back and we’ll give her a sponge bath. That’ll revive her,” says Alice.
The sensible little boy that he is, he doesn’t ask her why she wants to visit the G Squad offices so early in the morning. “I wouldn’t go in if I didn’t know anyone who works there. Someone you really know. The person who gave me the address told me, don’t think of going there, they eat little babies and don’t even burp, and it’s all legal.”
♦
Alice Bhatti stands outside the G Squad centre and tries to look purposeful. The centre is a series of interconnected townhouses; there is no sign saying G Squad, or anything else for that matter. She isn’t sure if she’ll find the Teddy she is looking for here. There are a couple of other women camped outside the centre. One has improvised a tent with a sheet and seems to be running a one-woman protest camp. Give Me My Son or Take Me In, says a placard reclining against a suitcase that she is using as a pillow. Across the road from the main gate a man wearing a police shirt and striped pyjama bottoms naps in his chair, one hand holding a walkie-talkie that crackles occasionally as if someone is barking incomprehensible orders to an invisible army. In the other hand he holds a rusted gun that hasn’t seen any action since it left the armoury in the previous millennium. Alice watches as his shoulder dips and the gun starts to slip out of his hand; he jerks and catches it, with his eyes still closed, then puts it in his lap. The metal gate is boot-polish black and a furlong long and it doesn’t seem it’ll open for anyone, The walls are topped with shards of broken glass and coils of razor wire. Searchlights mounted on the corners of the centre are still on, but the watchtower is empty. A teapot and two cups sit on a small table, probably meant to indicate, we have got many people to man this watchtower, some of them were just here, they have just had tea, they are still around, you still want to try something funny?
Alice Bhatti isn’t sure if she can actually knock at this impregnable door; she isn’t sure if someone will actually open it, and if somebody does open it what will she ask then? Do you have an officer called Teddy Butt who works here? I am his wife. Do you have a prisoner called Teddy Butt here? I am his wife. I am married to someone who doesn’t really work here but he does work for some people who work in this place.
She feels a cold shiver in her nape, the kind you feel when someone is following you secretly, when someone is staring at your back and doesn’t want you to know. She turns around and sees that the guard in police shirt and pyjamas has woken up. He is holding a small round mirror in one hand and clipping his moustache carefully with a tiny pair of scissors.
The gate opens and a Surf emerges and makes a slow turn in the other direction. For a moment Alice catches a glimpse of an arm in a cast, cradling a small gunnysack as if carrying something precious. And then she sees the familiar Devil of the Desert registration plate and starts walking towards the bus stop with quick steps.
She looks at the bus conductors, who yell and sing and hawk their destinations, thump the sides of their buses, scream at the drivers to change the music, address everyone according to their age as if it wasn’t a bustling bus station but a large family gathering. Alice looks at them with complaining eyes, blaming them for enticing her here in the first place and now not taking the routes she might have liked to take.
She turns into China Street and stops in front of the first shop, which displays dentures the size of a small sofa with bright pink gums and promises of painless extractions and ‘new, natural, artificial dentures while you wait’. An old Chinese man sucking on an ice candy comes out of the shop and bares his teeth. Alice Bhatti moves along quickly till she crosses a small square and enters what seems to be a medicine bazaar. She sees rows and rows of clinics with huge billboards announcing cures for an impossibly long list of sexual dysfunctions. A giant cut-out of a bodybuilder announcing physical and spiritual revival in a seven-day crash course hovers over a street corner; she feels a lump in her throat. Men scurrying in the street seem upset at her presence in this particular part of the city, as if she has caught them with their pants down; they cross to the other side of the road to avoid her. They look in the other direction, pretend she isn’t there. She finds it a bit uncanny. Her experience of walking in bazaars, travelling in buses, going to shops has taught her that whatever their status in life, whatever they are selling her, whatever they might need from her, they always have a reason to stare at her, size her up and then zero in on her breasts. They look upwards, downwards, they look sideways, they scratch their balls or pretend to be interested in what she is saying, but their gaze always returns to her breasts. Sometimes they thrust their hands in their pockets and count their coins with such concentration it seems they are saying their rosary. There was a teacher in her nursing school who would gaze at her chest unashamedly, then look towards the ceiling, put his forefinger in his ear and poke his ear in a circular fashion with such rigour that her ears hurt. She thought of telling him that if looking at her breasts caused him earache, he should probably try and not look.
It seems to her that the unspoken language that is used by men and women on the street to communicate doesn’t exist in this bazaar. She feels as embarrassed as the men do. It should probably be called I-was-born-with-a-small-one-but-I-have-been-saving-money street. She hurries along, passes a fast-food joint that promises authentic Arabic parathas, sees a billboard quoting Rumi’s couplet to sell steel-reinforced concrete. A sturdy man with a white beard showers her with prayers for healthy children at the top of his voice and stretches out his cap. His sincere efforts impress her, and she drops in a two-rupee coin and starts walking faster.