Book Group 2

“Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” by Mohammed Hanif. 

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a tale of love, death, bigotry and violence. It deals with life in its raw form and deconstructs it. It is a love story of Alice Bhatti, a Catholic woman who has just been released from prison and finds a job as a junior nurse at the Sacred Heart Hospital, and Teddy Butt, the former Mr Faisalabad, who works as a part-time extra-legal enforcer for the Karachi police. But more to the point, Alice is the daughter of a part-time healer in the French Colony, Karachi's infamous Christian slum, and it seems she has, unhappily, inherited his part-time gift of healing, and the patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments need a miracle.

With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice begins to bring relief to the patients lining the hospital's corridors and camped outside its gates. But all is not miraculous. Alice is a Christian in an Islamic world, caught in the red tape of hospital bureaucracy, trapped by the class system, torn between her duty to her patients, her father and her husband Teddy, now an apprentice to the nefarious "Gentleman's Squad" of the Karachi police. He drags Alice into a situation so dangerous that perhaps not even a miracle will be able to save them.

The novel’s main Christian characters delineate the appalling conditions of their community through different lenses. Nevertheless, all being the victim of the same cesspool due to their faith. These characters deal with the societal difficulties according to their own understanding and experiences, wrestling for their fair share in Muslim majority surroundings.

Joseph Bhatti is a “choora” of French colony and the father of Alice Bhatti (the protagonist), he is a character through which Hanif exhibits the stigmatized Christian community. While Alice sometimes gets ashamed of her living conditions, Joseph Bhatti accepts everything wholeheartedly and even takes pride in being a choora despite the ill-treatment by the people around him. Numerous statements of Joseph Bhatti show the misery and discrimination that the Christian minorities have to face.

Alice is an impulsive and a rather savage kind of character who is confronted with corrupt and pervasive male characters throughout the novel. She has been harassed numerous times and presents a perfect picture of a male dominant society that consider women futile creatures.

Hanif has introduced many side characters who have a great influence on Alice. Some of them stand out, like Sister Hina Alvi, who is a senior nurse at the Sacred Heart Hospital. Her character seems to be quite complex. Her sudden confession about her faith comes as a surprise to the readers, proving the writing skill of the author. The interpretations of Hina Alvi’s character underlines the tough choices the minorities have to make.

Another character is Inspector Malangi. He is a corrupt police officer with 36 years of experience in the field as an Inspector. He is also the head of the G Squad (Gentleman Squad) and Teddy’s boss. His influence on Teddy is also Teddy’s doom.

As the novel starts off, the characters seem distant and rather two-dimensional but after a few pages one gets to know them through many unsettling yet humorous revelations. Hanif does not try to write how his characters feel, but instead strives to familiarise the inherently complex strain of human thought process from a safe distance, making it quite difficult for the reader to decide their feelings about these characters till the very end. As for the main character, Alice Bhatti- she is dark yet funny, arguably Hanif’s best creation. The uneasy humour can be very disturbing at times, but that is the point of the novel; to question, in a very disinterested way all that is against human values.

The portrayal of a three-day violence spree is one of the many exaggerated events that despite their nonsensical overtones, are apt descriptions of the insignificance of human life in society. Things like cruelty, life, death, love, violence and beauty, all spill into one mix of human emotions, in a world that resembles the “Charya” Ward where everything another is ‘normal’.

Hanif never tries to provide psychological insight into his characters. If he did, his novel would have been tragic and quite a dark and  heavy read. However, he uses his characters and narrative to expose an entire society in all its complexity and contradictions. He uses a vast range of sardonic literary motifs to highlight the hierarchical structure of our society and its inequities.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a confirmation of Mohammed Hanif's gifts of storytelling and of sharp social satire.

Our group rated the book 8.5/10

Nabila Ahmad