Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

March 19, 2012
Absurdity and chaos reign in rising Pakistani author Hanif’s rowdy fusion of social commentary and curiously bloody love story. Being female, Catholic, and untouchable makes nurse Alice Bhatti a minority three times over in Pakistan, where “most of life’s arguments settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.” Impudent, headstrong, and possibly gifted with her father’s healing touch, Alice has risen out of the Christian slum, no small feat when most Catholic untouchables are sweepers. At the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, Alice punishes those who would harm her, wielding a razor with the same nonchalance that the doctors wield stethoscopes; she dispatches one would-be rapist with blood-splattering ease. The perpetrators are often those who “wouldn’t drink from a tap that she has touched have no problem casually poking their elbows into her breast.” Her violence attracts Teddy Butt, a weightlifter and underling in the Karachi police, and soon Alice must navigate the surprising parameters of an inter-religious and inter-caste marriage. In this amusing novel, Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) renders the intricacies and limitations of Pakistan’s lowest rungs with humor and candor, allowing as little pity for his characters as they allow themselves. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates.

April 15, 2012
In Hanif's (A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008) second literary effort, Alice Bhatti lives in a land where "most of life's arguments...got settled by doing various things to a woman's body." Alice is a young nurse, a Christian, in Muslim Pakistan. Alice is a Choohra, an untouchable. Alice is also a graduate of Borstal Jail for Women and Children. That's because outspoken Alice made an easy target at the end of her nursing training when blame needed to be affixed for a botched operation. Sentence complete, with the help of sympathetic but ineffectual Dr. Jamus Pereira, Alice has secured a nursing position at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments near French Colony, Karachi's Christian slum. Outsider and renegade, openhearted and cynical, Alice is a strikingly memorable character. Willing to help teenaged Noor nurse his cancer-filled mother, Alice is equally willing to defend herself by razor-nicking the male member of the family of a privileged patient. Hanif's setting is spot on: Karachi as Karachi-Western-misperceived, squalor and discrimination perfectly logical alongside the "Gentlemen's Squad," an off-the-books police operation rough-riding through interrogations that produce dead witnesses. Alice is soon courted and married by Teddy Butt, a waxed-hairless, steroid-consuming body-builder and latent misogynist, who "provides valet parking for the angels of death" as the squad's combination errand boy and clean-up man. Much of the first two-thirds of the novel is focused on the artful setting and the deepening of character development, and then Alice, praying "in the heat of demented devotion," resuscitates an apparently stillborn boy. Alice is certain there are scientific reasons for the baby springing to life, but rumors of miracles soon fly around the hospital and out among the want-to-be-patients languishing under a courtyard tree called Old Doctor. It is there too that Alice rests to await her destiny. Laced with humor, often ribald and iconoclastic, this is an insightful tale of pain and love, a story of a quest for humanity and grace in a desperate, chaotic society.

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December 1, 2011

Having made a name for himself with the bitterly funny A Case of Exploding Mangoes, about the unexplained plane crash that killed the Pakistani dictator, General Zia, in 1988, Hanif returns with a story at once intimate and likely as biting as his debut. Just out of prison and Catholic in Karachi, which isn't easy, Alice Bhatti gets a job as a junior nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital--a last-resort public institution. There, she and off-and-on police goon Teddy Butt fall in love. A novel of hope in a dark world, relevant to us all.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012

Alice Bhatti has many strikes against her. She is an outspoken woman, an ex-convict, and a Christian in a Muslim society, born into a family of untouchables seen fit only to sweep the streets and unclog the sewers of Karachi, Pakistan. She rises above her station to become a nurse in a hospital serving the poor, but her life veers off course when she impulsively agrees to marry Teddy, a Muslim bodybuilder and violent thug who works as a shadow figure for the corrupt local police. Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) paints an oblique portrait of his tough heroine, built up largely of others' impressions of her. He manages to balance Alice's mostly secular worldview with the strains of religious and magical thinking swirling around her. VERDICT This is a difficult, affecting, and ambitious story, bleak yet imbued with humor, which serves as a powerful indictment of a society in which "most of life's arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman's body." [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/11.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.