B005OWFTDW EBOK (16 page)

Alice Bhatti wants to tell him to go to the OPD in Charya Ward, that is where they deal in dreams. The whole place is a bad dream. But she knows that he wants to be her patient and Senior Sister Hina Alvi has taught her that when a patient walks in with intent you listen to them, even if you know they are making up their symptoms.

She can also see the outline of a muzzle in the crotch of his yellow Adidas trousers. He looks like a freak with two cocks.

‘What kind of dreams?’

Teddy has only ever had one dream, the one with a river and a kaftan-wearing God in it. The dream always ends badly as a drowning Teddy discovers that he can’t walk on water even in his dream. God stands at the edge of a silvery, completely walkable river and shakes His head in disappointment as if saying, it’s your dream, what do you expect me to do? But somehow bringing up God and His kaftan and His disapproval right now seems inappropriate. ‘I see a river in my dream.’ He conveniently leaves God out.

‘A river?’ Alice Bhatti taps the pen on the register without writing anything.

Teddy feels he is being told that his dream is not sick enough.

‘It’s a river of blood. Red.’

Sister Alice looks at him with interest. This Teddy boy might be a police tout but he has a poetic side to him, she thinks.

‘Any boats in that river of yours?’ she asks with an encouraging smile, as if urging him to go on sharing more of his dream with her, to go ahead and dream for her. Teddy accepts the challenge. ‘It has bodies floating in it and severed heads, bobbing up and down.’ He realizes that his dream doesn’t sound very romantic. ‘And some flowers also.’

‘Do you recognize any of these people in the river? In your dream, I mean.’ Teddy shuts his eyes as if trying hard to recognize a face from the river. Teddy was hoping that somehow his midnight yearning for Alice and his insomnia would walk hand in hand and form a rhyming, soaring declaration of love that would reverberate through the corridors of the hospital. Instead he is stuck with embellishing details for a bad dream.

‘I can’t really stop your dreams but I can give you something that will ensure that you sleep well. And if you sleep well then you might start having better dreams.’ She scribbles a prescription for Lexotanil then puts it aside. ‘Actually I might have one here. An hour before you sleep. Never on an empty stomach. And no warm milk at night. Sometimes indigestion can give you bad dreams.’

Sister Alice gives him a curt smile, turns round and goes back to counting her syringes. She does it with such studied concentration that it seems the health of the nation depends on getting this count right.

Teddy Butt stumbles into the OPD the following morning, bleary-eyed, moving slowly. Even his voice seems to be coming from underwater. There is a sleepy calm about him. Even the muzzle of the gun in his trousers seems flaccid. ‘I didn’t have any dreams. What did you give me? What did you mix in that pill?’ Teddy’s words are accusatory but his tone is grateful.

‘I didn’t mix anything. It was a Glaxo original, supposed to help you sleep. Do you want more?’ She reaches into her drawer and stops. She notices that he is wearing a little cross on a gold chain around his neck. She shows the slight, spontaneous irritation that natives feel when tourists try and dress up like them. ‘What’s that thing you are wearing?’

‘A chain.’ Teddy Butt says. ‘A friend from Dubai got it for me.’ The man whose neck Teddy snatched it from was indeed visiting from Dubai. One ear and the side of his face were blown off in an unfortunate accident during an interrogation. The man from Dubai had almost strangled Teddy with his handcuffs before Inspector Malangi put his Repeater near his left ear, shouted at Teddy, ‘Knee on the left,
bhai
. Your left, not mine,’ – and shot him. The chain with the cross was the reward Inspector Malangi gave him for keeping the man pinned down at that difficult moment. Teddy hadn’t killed the man; he was only holding him down. It was his job. If he hadn’t done it someone else would have. If he hadn’t done this job he would definitely have to do some other job. And who knows what he might be required to do in that new job? He runs his forefinger along his chain and presses the cross into his chest with the satisfaction of someone who is lucky enough not to get the worst job in the city. He had felt the man’s breath on his knee when he tried to bite him before getting shot.

For a moment Teddy wonders whether he can source a matching necklace for her.

‘It’s a cross, not jewellery. Why would a man want to wear jewellery anyway?’ She scribbles a prescription for Lexotanil on her pad and turns away.

Teddy Butt is flummoxed and walks away without answering, without asking anything. He goes to his room in Al Aman apartments and sleeps the whole day. He doesn’t have any dreams but after he wakes up and starts doing weights he watches a fascinating documentary about Komodo dragons who hypnotize their prey before going for the underside of their throat.

Teddy decides that he is going to tell Alice Bhatti everything but he will need her full attention. From what Teddy can tell, women are always distracted, trying to do too many things at the same time, always happy to go off on tangents; that’s why they make good nurses and politicians but not good chefs and truck drivers. He realizes that he can’t do it without his Mauser. He also realizes that he’ll have to wait for the coming Sunday when there is only skeleton staff on duty.

Teddy is one of those people who are only articulate when they talk about cricket. The rest of the time they rely on a combination of grunts, hand gestures and repeat the snippets of what other people have just said to them. He also has very little experience of sharing his feelings.

He has been a customer of women and occasionally their tormentor but never a lover. He believes that being a lover is something that falls somewhere between paying them and slapping them around. Twice he has come close to conceding love. Once he gave a fifty-rupee tip to a prostitute who looked fourteen but claimed to be twenty-two. Encouraged by his generosity she also demanded a poster of Imran Khan and that put him off. Teddy promised to get it but never went back because he thought Imran Khan was a failed batsman pretending to be a bowler. On another occasion he only pretended to take his turn with a thirty-two-year-old Bangladeshi prisoner after a small police contingent had shuffled out of the room. He only sat there and played with her hair while she sobbed and cursed in Bengali. The only word he could understand was Allah. He had walked out adjusting his fly, pretending to be exhausted and satisfied, even joking with the policemen: it was like fucking an oil spill.

But Teddy Butt can be very articulate, even poetic, with a Mauser in his hand, and after much thought this is what he decides to do. He tries practising in front of the full-length mirror in his room. ‘You live in my heart.’ With every word he jabs the Mauser in the air like an underprepared lawyer trying to impress a judge. The gun might send the wrong signal but Teddy is convinced that he will be able to explain himself. People always listen and try their best to understand when their life depends on listening properly.

Y
ou can’t go around in the Ortho Ward with that,’ Alice Bhatti has emerged carrying a bedpan in one hand and a discarded, blood-smeared bandage in the other and starts admonishing him while walking away from him. ‘Don’t waste your bullets, this hospital will kill them all anyway.’ Teddy feels the love of his life slipping from his hands, his plan falling apart at the very first hurdle. He grips the Mauser, stretches his arm and blocks her way.

Alice Bhatti looks confused for a moment and then irritated. ‘What do you want to rob me of? This piss tray?’

With the Mauser extended, Teddy finds his tongue. ‘I can’t live like this. This life is too much.’

‘Nobody can live like this.’ Alice Bhatti is attentive now and sympathetic. ‘If these cheap guns don’t kill you, those Boldabolic pills will. Get a job as a PT master. Or come to think of it, you could get a nurse’s diploma and work here. There is always work for a man nurse. There are parts of this place where even women doctors don’t go. Charya Ward for example hasn’t had a …’

Teddy doesn’t listen to the whole thing, the word PT master triggers off a childhood memory that he had completely forgotten – a very tall, very fat PT teacher holds him by his ears, swings him round and then hurls him on the ground and walks away laughing. The other children run around him in a circle and decide to change his nickname from ‘Nappy’ to ‘Yo-yo’. Teddy takes the gun to Alice Bhatti’s temple and snarls in his high-pitched, sing-song voice.

‘Give me one good reason why somebody wouldn’t shoot in this hospital? Why shouldn’t I shoot you right here and end all my troubles?’

‘Mine too,’ she wants to say but Teddy’s hand holding the Mauser is trembling and one thing Sister Alice doesn’t want in her life is a shoot-out in her workplace.

He orders Alice Bhatti to put her tray and bandages down, which she does. She has realized that Teddy is serious. Suicidal serious maybe, but he is the kind of suicidal serious who in the process of taking their own life would cause some grievous bodily harm to those around them.

Ortho Ward is unusually quiet at this time of day. No. 14, who is always shouting about an impending plague caused by computer screens is calm and only murmurs about the itch in his plastered leg. A ward boy enters the corridor carrying a water cooler on a wheelbarrow, and when he sees Alice and Teddy, he stops in his tracks. Embarrassed as if he has stumbled on to someone’s private property and found the owners in a compromising position, he backtracks, taking the wheelbarrow with him. Sister Alice doesn’t expect him to inform anyone.

‘What do you want, Mr Butt?’ Alice Bhatti tries to hide her fear behind a formal form of address. She has learned all the wrong things from Senior Sister Hina Alvi.

‘You live in my heart,’ Teddy Butt wants to say but only jabs the air with his Mauser, five times. In her limited experience with guns and madmen, Sister Alice Bhatti knows that when men are unable to talk you are in real trouble. She looks at him expectantly as if she has understood what his Mauser has just said, likes it and now wants to hear more.

Mixed-up couplets about her lips and hair, half-remembered speeches about a life together, names of their children, pledges of undying love, a story about the first time he saw her, what she wore, what she said, a half-sincere eulogy about her professionalism which he was sure she would appreciate, her shoulder blades, all these things rush through Teddy Butt’s head and then he realizes that he has already delivered his opening line by pulling out a gun.

Now, he can start anywhere.

Alice Bhatti thinks that she should not do Sunday shifts any more and instead should help her dad with his woodwork. If she lives to see another Sunday, that is.

She looks beyond Teddy, outside the corridor; on the top of the stairs a man sits facing the sun like an ancient king waiting to receive his subjects. His legs amputated just above the knees, he sits on the floor, wearing full-length trousers that sometimes balloon up in the wind. He has a stack of large X-rays next to him. He picks them up one by one, holds them against the sun and looks at them for a long time as if contemplating old family pictures.

Teddy Butt decides to start with her garbage bin. ‘I go through your garbage bin. I know everything about you. I see all the prayers you scribble on prescriptions. You never write your own name. But I can tell from the handwriting.’ He sobs violently and holds the Mauser with both hands to steady himself. The muzzle of his gun slides down a degree like an erection flashbacking to a sad memory. Sister Alice sees it as a sign from God. Bless Our Lord who descended from the heavens. God accepts her gratitude with godlike indifference. And Teddy straightens his gun. He seems to have found his groove and starts to speak in paragraphs as if delivering the manifesto of a new political party which wants to eradicate poverty and pollution during its first term in power.

‘The love that I feel for you is not the love I feel for any other human being. The world might think it’s the love of your flesh. I can understand this world and their thinking. I have wondered about this and thought long and hard and realized that this is a world full of sinners so I do understand what they think but I don’t think like that. When I think about you, do I think about these milk pots?’ He waves his Mauser across her chest. Alice looks at his gun and feels nauseous and wonders if the peace and quiet of this corridor is worth preserving. ‘I think of your eyes. I think of your eyes only.’

The octopus of fear that had clutched Sister Alice’s head begins to relax its tentacles.

In her heart of hearts, Alice, who has seen people die choking on their own food, and survive after falling from a sixth floor on to a paved road, knows that Teddy means every word of what he has said. And he isn’t finished yet.

‘I was standing outside the hospital hoping to catch a glimpse of you. It was a full Rajab moon. Then I looked up at the balcony of Ortho Ward and saw you empty a garbage bin. I saw your face for a moment and then you disappeared. Then I looked up again and saw that the moon had disappeared too. I rubbed my eyes, I shut them, I opened them again. I stood and kept looking up for forty-five minutes. People gathered around me, I held them from their collars, made them look towards the sky and kept asking them where the moon had gone. And they said what moon? We have seen no moon. Did you just escape from the Charya Ward? And then I knew that I couldn’t live without you.’

A thick March cloud has cloaked the sun outside. The perfect spring afternoon turns into its own wintry ghost. The man with the X-rays is trying to shoo away a kite, which, confused by the sudden change in light, thinks it’s dusk, and swoops down in a last desperate attempt to take something home.

The final bell rings in the neighbouring St Xavier’s Primary School and eighteen hundred children suddenly start talking to each other in urgent voices like house sparrows at dusk.