Our Lady of Alice Bhatti: Mohammed Hanif in conversation with Sarfraz Manzoor
A fascinating SALF event saw Karachi-based writer Mohammed Hanif in conversation with journalist Sarfraz Manzoor. They discussed inventing ‘new messed-up worlds’, women in public life, and people who don’t read. Nicole Tovstiga reports.
“Writing is difficult. You sit down in a corner and suffer and suffer until afterwards you realize that you do have a story to write.” Mohammed Hanif sits on a low sofa chair on a stage in the Commonwealth Club, Westminster. He puts down his glass. The audience leans forward, expectantly.
It is a first glimpse of the process behind Hanif’s second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti based in Karachi, Pakistan. On the author’s left is journalist and broadcaster Safraz Manzoor. “Did the Alice character come to you first?” he asks. “Yes,” replies Hanif, “she was there for about a year but she wasn’t called Alice then. She was always in a hospital room, and only after a year when her name became Alice did she start doing stuff.”
Alice, the novel’s main character, is a Christian nurse who falls into an unlikely relationship with Teddy, described as a type of man who stirs about contemporary Karachi. Teddy is the small-town boy who enters a city world that is male, sweaty, cruel, and ‘full of bad words’. This, then, is the novel’s backdrop against which Hanif is curious to explore how men perceive women and relate to them. The inner workings of male culture is a theme Hanif revisits, albeit not in a military setting as he did in his first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Men, he suggests, are not used to dealing with women in public life. This is particularly true as the female workforce in Pakistan increasingly enters public spaces.
Language and voice are another theme Hanif is keen to explore. “The language itself in the city has been tinged with violence,” he says. Bombs and shootings have become ‘light entertainment’ and every day without fail newspapers report on women who have been killed. Going back to Karachi after London (‘where people do not look at you oddly if you sit in a public space with pen and paper’) increased his awareness of the realities in Pakistan. With bits blowing up, it is quite distracting to try write a novel, he jokes. The writing process becomes a ‘taming of reality’ for him, in which fiction struggles to compete with reality.
Despite some serious cultural probing in the novel, Hanif’s wit and humour lurk alongside the somber. “I don’t think people who read are intrinsically better than people who do not,” he quips in the Q&A. The audience smiles, relaxes, and in the next few minutes asks a wide variety of questions. Enthusiasm permeates the room and a definite curiosity to discover more of the fiction and reality which Hanif seamlessly weaves together.
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