Our Lady of Alice Bhatti [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

it's a shame the previous reviewer gave this book one star. there is fair bit of violence here, and sex too, which may not appeal to the exact stratum of society that especially needs to read it. while the vast majority of south asian literature tends to vacillate between depicting pakistan as a nostalgic space of diaspora or a geopolitical hotbed of fundamentalism, this novel does neither. it offers a portrait of contemporary urban pakistan that is complex, layered and entirely unsentimental. at times it is brutal, but the dark brutality rests on a kind of insight that should not be dismissed. a lot of pundits continue to ask why pakistan remains a country at crossroads sixty five years on. "our lady of alice bhatti" is a not book which specifically sets out to answer that question, but it does get at a certain kind of truth about it.

like mohsin hamid's "moth smoke," "our lady" unfolds as a modern crime noir. it's a tragedy about a woman who is punished not for what she has done but for who she is. her story emerges as an indictment against a society that remains handicapped not by it's polarization against the west as the nightly news would have us believe, but rather because of an internal class based system of misogyny that is condoned by a corrupt church-state system. the house itself is not in order, and the external pressures of the so called new great game have spun it out of control.

despite all this it would still be dismissive to categorize this novel as a timely political thriller, because i think it gets at something even deeper than the current state of affairs in pakistan. at it's heart it's a feminist novel. it's about how the bodies of women are being trampled, displaced and discarded in lieu of rational discourse. this war is not being waged by outlaw forces in turbans but by fathers, husbands and brothers who have acquiesced to a society of inequity. and it's happening because a country has turned in on itself. the daily human suffering that has come out of this cannibalization is what "our lady" is really about. combined with hanif's previous "a case of exploding mangoes," it's a must read.

Reading this novel felt to me somewhat like my movie experience with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" with that delightful, energetic Indian hotel manager--or mis-manager. Of course the novel takes place in Pakistan, not India. And Alice is certainly not like the hotel manager, but the author's narrative voice most certainly is. It is a wonderful voice.

This is a funny-sad novel written in the style of an Pakistani speaking English--by the way it is published in England's English, i.e., humour. Potential readers need to be aware that you may need to be patient getting into the syntax as well as the sytle, one in which the reader isn't always that certain what is happening when a new scene emerges, but then suddenly the reader has the ah-ha enlightenments.

The novel is set in Karachi's Christian slum, the French Colony, with Alice Bhatti, skinny from malnutrition except large in breats, is the delightful main character, "an underpaid junior nurse in an understaffed" [very, very understaffed] "welfare hospital, The Scared. The cast is wonderful including Alice's father, Joseph, who isn't really very wonderful at all--her mother died when Alice was young--but then emerges in a very unique and very surprising role at the end in the epilogue. (The reader will not easily forget the ending of this novel, an ending that gives meaning to the title.) Noor is a 17-year-old hospital worker who simultaneously is caring for his mother, dying of cancer, often the only way to swat away the pests that inhabit the unsanitary place. The not-so-skilled main doctor, Dr. Pereira, and the sardonic nurse supervising Alice, Sisster Hina Alvi. Alice, by the way, was, in the corrupted view of the administration of the nursing school where she was "trained" "its most troublesome student." Delightfully so for the reader.

"Sometimes it seems to her [Alice] that the seven thousand patients in the hospital, hundreds crawling in the corridor, thousands more out in the compound using bricks as pillows, are feeling a bit better because they are in the hospital compound, only a few metres away from operating theatres, labs and drug dispensaries." In other words his hospital is on the edge of the section of Karachi where the wealthy live and work and are cared for.

The novel is filled with back stories, sometimes told obliquely in unexpected places, giving the reader a sudden jolt of additional pleasure--or sadness.

Alice meets Teddy Butt, an underling policeman who waxes his body-builder being and is in charge of getting criminals to and from places including not-Abu Zar. (I will not explain the not-Abu because that is part of the fun of the novel if you like your fun to be on the flip side of tragic. And Teddy's boss is Inspector Malangi who has a rather, well, I won't tell, last day on the job, on the day he retires.
And then comes the epilogue. And I won't say more except that this is a really underrated novel by some of the reviewers here.

this novel will keep you laughing, but it will also teach your more about life for women in Pakistan than you might want to know. Most interesting is hanif's show the reader how Alice adapts to the severe constrictions of her life...some of them idiosyncratic and others cultural..right to the end. i mean the end.