The backdrop is Karachi, a city caught in a deadly ethnic and religious crossfire, much like the protagonists of the book. Alice Bhatti, an "underpaid junior nurse in an understaffed welfare hospital", and Teddy Butt, body-builder and soon-for-hire. She's Christian, a Catholic who joins a squalid hospital teeming with drug addicts and survivors of bloody street battles. He's a Muslim who haunts the dark side of the city, befriending terrorists and crooks as part of his job with a shadowy paramilitary force. They make an unlikely pair; she treats victims of violence and society's rejects, the people he makes a living from. It's a volatile relationship but not the only one. There's Senior Sister Hina Alvi, the chief medical officer, Dr Jamus Periera, and Noor. Alice's fellow ex-inmate from juvenile prison, who now works at the hospital.
Alice Bhatti has just come out of prison and is looking for a second chance. She's hungry, tough, and full of fight, but being a Catholic choohra in Karachi means she also needs good luck. A lot of it. Alice's prayers are answered when she gets a job as junior nurse at the Sacred Heart Hospital, a squalid public hospital full of shoot-out victims and homeless drug addicts. There she meets Teddy Butt, a trigger happy, ex-body builder and a part-time goon for the police. The two could not be further apart and that's why they fall in love? Teddy with sudden violence, Alice in cautious hope. How will their unlikely romance end? In A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif tore into the corruption of the army and General Zia's dictatorship; in this novel he draws a dark and compelling portrait of Pakistan today where killers fall in love and lovers are forced to make impossible choices. Written with savage humour and in sizzling prose, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a tour de force from one of the most brilliant young writers today.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is the love story of Alice and Teddy and everyone else in their lives. Job interview pangs, Choohra pride, underage buggering in prison, botched surgeries, cops at a bachelor party, religious vehemence, National Geographic sequences, blowjobs at gunpoint, miracle babies, popping eyeballs - Mohammed Hanif is an ideal tour guide because he is so matter of fact about the view. He is much more interested in his own story. He is a magnificently cantankerous and courteous writer, with a cutting sense of metropolitan Karachi life, wizened with surprises of delicateness when facing the brutal scenery, and ready to swoop into our most sensitive territories at will.
