Alice in chains: Of candy chewing nurses, lustful teenagers and Mohammed Hanif

Journalist-cum-romance writer bares his soul at intimate book launch.

KARACHI:

His head crowned with a life-sized flaming heart embossed on the wall behind him and film-maker and friend Hasan Zaidi by his side, an awkward Mohammed Hanif geared up to face a room full of literature- and mango-lovers.

The pair lounged in a corner of the large room better known as The 2nd Floor on the intentionally ‘non-angrezi’ launch for Hanif’s book ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhatti’. The next one is scheduled at the National College of Arts, Lahore.

Zaidi introduced Hanif as someone who hated writing romance - a funny contradiction to the new love story’s plot about a girl with a troubled past. “Alice Bhatti is his way of getting over it.”

They were a jarring contrast, Hanif and Zaidi. While the host did his best to entertain the audience, Hanif looked like he would rather go out for a smoke, his eyes darting around as he tried to amuse himself.

Despite his bored body language and detached attitude, when he read a passage describing the main characters Alice and Teddy Butt, described through the eyes of a lusty 17-year-old boy, the audience was hooked.

Their heads swayed to the rhythm of Hanif’s croaky voice as he  described love as a runaway ‘chariya’ and Alice’s habit of sucking toffees during her break. Peels of laughter rippled through the room when he described how the boy’s attention was caught by a dog urinating while Alice and Teddy roamed around hand-in-hand, oblivious to what was happening around them.

Amidst gangrene, candy and cheetahs falling in love with squirrels - Hanif sat with his legs crossed - did not look at the audience when he was reading - just focused on the words in front of him as if reading aloud to himself.

After the reading, the audience relaxed - it was almost as if they had woken from a trance that had them staring at Hanif like a demi-god for 20 minutes. Now, having heard this very personal speech they had come to realise that he was just another awkward human being. Sure, it isn’t your average human being who speaks three different languages and writes his books in Urdu first then translates them into English. As the floor opened up for a question and answer session the first question asked was - why Alice? Tilting his head away from the light shining on his face, Hanif listed three very pertinent reasons, firstly he liked Alice in Wonderland. “Well, Alice is a fairly common Christian name in Punjab and I know a lot of Bhattis, sure some of them have made my life difficult,” he said with an awkward laugh. “In the beginning, I used another name, I don’t remember what it was but she (the character) was just not speaking to me and one day I just decided to call her Alice and it stuck.”

Hanif only writes out of curiosity and boredom. “If I knew what was going to happen I wouldn’t be interested”. When someone asked who he would cast as Alice and Sister Hina, he instantly replied that he would choose “a very pretty girl”.

As he spoke, the largely hipster audience gazed at him through their chunky glasses while old women in saris and white-haired men with cameras looked on. As a testament to his mature content, no one in the small but packed room was under 18 years old.

Alice, he explained was inspired by a nurse who looked after his mother while she was at the hospital nearly 20 years ago. “She used to come in and do her work, she was very pretty and looked tired and the image just stuck with me.”

Hanif felt his transition from his last literary venture was different from the latest was, in all seriousness, because he was getting old. “The last book, for me, was a political thriller,” he said frankly. “Well, at least I wrote it as one, but when I showed it to those high-browed publishers, they asked me if I had ever read a thriller - of course I hadn’t, so the book got published as a literary novel,” he said. “With this one, I just tried to write it as a literary writer.”

As the session wore on and talk moved to journalists, writers and conspiracy theories, Hanif began to chew his nails and rub his face. “We are such a hopeless lot, we believe everything, it’s like when a liar is lying - is he telling the truth?” Someone brought up his evident partiality to potentially problematic topics such the former martial law administrator and minorities. Hanif said that there were certain words he took an exception too - words such as minority. With a deep, wracking smoker’s laugh, he remarked that maybe he just had a uniform fetish and his next book would be about a firefighter.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th,  2011.