Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Rab Nawaz

After the phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess of ‘A Case of Explod­ing Man­goes’, M. Hanif is com­ing up with anoth­er very excit­ing nov­el titled ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhat­ti’. Accord­ing to M. Hanif it is a love sto­ry, where there’s also a mar­riage gone bad. But con­sid­er­ing the kind of writ­ing Hanif thrived on, it would not be total­ly cor­rect to say that it is just a love sto­ry. The sto­ry revolves around the mun­dane real­i­ties of Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty in Pak­istan; charged with the mys­te­ri­ous nar­ra­tions which in turn end up inter­twin­ing dif­fer­ent social set­tings in an illu­mi­nat­ing and com­pli­cat­ed mix of sce­nar­ios, pos­si­bil­i­ties and thrilling devel­op­ments of char­ac­ters.

M. Hanif worked as the head of the BBC Urdu in Lon­don and now resides in Karachi. “Being a jour­nal­ist many a time we come to a point when we know that the kind of infor­ma­tion we are seek­ing is just beyond our reach,” he said, adding that fic­tion gave him the lib­er­ty to imag­ine the truth behind the sto­ry. The sto­ry of Alice Bhat­ti is also based in one of the hos­pi­tals of Karachi where Alice works as a junior nurse. With­out any prop­er train­ing Alice proved to be a tremen­dous assis­tance for the patients. Dur­ing that employ­ment a weird romance starts build­ing between Alice and Ted­dy Butt, who is anoth­er patient in the hos­pi­tal and works in the ‘Gen­tle­man Squad’ of Karachi Police. With Teddy’s fur­ther ordeals in the pur­suit of a sus­pect, their romance starts tak­ing lots of turns and twists that Alice real­izes that her love is not going to be eter­nal­ized. But Alice with all the imag­i­na­tive pow­er of faith and deter­mi­na­tion con­tin­ues to extend the sto­ry and takes it to most excit­ing lev­els for the read­ers. Also the lev­el of eroti­cism in the nar­ra­tion, a rare feast in Pak­istani nov­els, pro­found­ly embed­ded in the plot makes it a plea­sur­able read­ing.

Being the pro­tag­o­nist, Alice is not a sim­ple char­ac­ter which has been stream­lined through her finan­cial and love prob­lems, rather Alice is an epi­cen­ter of a com­mu­ni­ty, an indi­vid­ual who por­trays all the mul­ti­ple facets of the soci­ety, their hopes, their long­ings for being iden­ti­fied and their strug­gle to attain some social sta­tus and recog­ni­tion. Unlike the polit­i­cal satire in his debut nov­el, Alice Bhat­ti deals with the sto­ry of a com­mu­ni­ty which has been mar­gin­al­ized in the name of reli­gion since the time of inde­pen­dence with a very unique per­spec­tive which does not seem an out­sider view through­out the nov­el. But still Hanif has not reduced the inten­si­ty of the satire and black humor in the sec­ond nov­el rather this time it is more touch­ing and live­ly by all the metic­u­lous skills earned writ­ing the Explod­ing Man­goes.