Perhaps beginnings are meant to be disorientating sometimes. For many pages of Mohammed Hanif’s second novel I cannot get my bearings and start to worry that, far from finding my way into the dense narrative, I am becoming more and more lost.
I fret about what the problem might be. Is it overwritten? The earthiness of the description of downtown Karachi is glorious, but I begin to panic that if there are many more phrases such as ‘breasts like abandoned puppies’ I will get squeamish and miss the point.
There are pages and pages where nearly everything is throbbing or sweating or getting punched, eaten, licked, raped or shot to pieces. There are a lot of blood, guts and fleshy bits. I can barely think for the din of hungry stomachs rumbling. If this were a film, there would be long lingering shots of the beads of sweat on people’s upper lips, as well as sudden, apparently deeply significant close-ups of sweaty armpits.
And then Hanif hits you with this: during a discussion of death, one character tells another that dying from TB is like a fine silk shawl being dragged through a thorn bush. ‘It leaves their soul in shreds.’Later in the book, he repeats the metaphor, varies it slightly and, in the process, nails it: the soul leaving the body is like a fine silk shawl being dragged through a thorn bush.
From that point I am so gripped by what the book is trying to tell me that I cannot put it down. I am on a flight from Spain and I don’t notice when the plane lands at Gatwick. When they try to empty the plane I am glued to my seat, reading, lost, but in a good way.
Alice Bhatti has been in a borstal after a turbulent childhood and is now a junior nurse at the Sacred Heart hospital, where she meets and marries a patient called Teddy Butt, who works for a notorious police hit squad.
There are two strands to the story. As Alice is transfigured by a series of strange events into a sort of saint, her husband descends into the blackness of a terrible crime. The main action is set in the hospital for paupers, where cripples without legs whizz about on skateboards and people injure themselves to get in because it is better than starving on the streets. Life is cheap, people die needlessly.
At the centre of the novel is an extraordinary scene where Alice holds the tiny hand of a stillborn baby, who has been put in the arms of its teenage mother. The mother has passed out from the pain, but will wake up and, as the sister in charge says, learn her lesson. The world-weary
sister leaves, but Alice will not give up on the baby. Holding its hand, she rediscovers her childhood faith and starts to pray. In fact she doesn’t pray, she argues furiously with God. She gives Him a talking to about this ‘death before life’. She heckles His incompetence. What happens next makes everyone believe she is a miracle worker.
This is a wonderful book about faith. It doesn’t matter at all if a miracle happened, or something more mundane, or if Alice really is taken up to heaven in front of adoring crowds. The overwhelming idea is that people need to believe, and will believe, and nothing will stop them believing. Alice’s end is as confusing as the book’s beginning. But what is faith about, if not the confusion of beginnings and endings?
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