Fountainville

by Tishani Doshi

  It was not an unhappy childhood, although when I think back to it, all I can remember is waiting for it to be over. I relied greatly upon my imaginative powers for escape and everything might have been different if I’d had a quiet space of my own. But we shared our house with cats and roosters and giant cockroaches, and my father’s hogs in the backyard.

  We lived in my father’s parents’ house, which basically consisted of one large, cold room, with the kitchen fire in one corner and the television in the other. This is the room we lived, slept and ate in. All of us: my parents, grandparents, brothers, and me. Only my father’s brother, Uncle Manny, had the luxury of his own room – a tumbledown wooden shed erected against the main house. He was an opium addict, and, rather than consigning him to the dens, my grandmother allowed him to live with us, as long as he nursed his addictions in private. My father was keen to send him away because he worried about the influence on his boys. In fact, watching Uncle Manny slowly die, was what kept my brothers off the drugs.

  My mother’s best friend, Begum, lived next door, and I can’t say when exactly the feelings I had for her began to supersede those I had for my mother, but by the time I’d had my first menstruation at twelve, I’d already turned into something horrible with regards to my mother. She had been unable to guide me from childhood into the adult world, worn down from so much mothering and cleaning, I suppose, or perhaps because she was so stuck in her own life she was hardly in a position to advise me. She was always sending me over to Begum’s. Go borrow a cup of lentils, take this leg of lamb over, ask if she has any turnips in the garden...

  I saw Begum as a success in every instance where my mother had failed. Begum had remained youthful. She had married a powerful man called Kedar – a dark, rangy fellow known for smuggling and pimping, but slavish to Begum’s every need. They’d had the sense not to have children, so their house resembled more closely what I thought a house should look like – not a battlefield of soiled clothes and pots, but a vast realm of comfort and order with demarcated spaces for privacy and bedrooms with doors. Besides, Begum was the Lady of the Fountain, as her mother had been before. She had incalculable powers. In her house there were shelves of ointments and oils, unguents and potions, all carefully stocked and labelled, ready at hand for any calamity. Want to make your hair thicker – here – walnut oil and rose petals. Want to soften the force of those migraines – take this. She was generous in ways my mother couldn’t be. And she was beautiful. ‘Promise me,’ I used to say, ‘If you ever go away from here, you’ll take me with you.’

  Begum had an idea to go to the Mainland to learn about starting a business. ‘No one sees very far in this town, Luna,’ she was always saying, ‘They can’t see beyond their weekly wage and drink. I’m going to change all that.’

  When my brother Newton graduated from university (he was the first person in our family to study in the Mainland), my father decided we should all get on a bus and go to the Mainland for a week. I’d never seen my father looking so proud, standing a few inches taller, walking around with his hands in his pockets, telling everyone that his Newton was going to be an engineer. I had been promised a new dress and a trip to the zoo to see tigers and zebras and animals I’d only ever seen on television. All my life I’d wanted to leave Fountainville, so I was almost as surprised as everyone else when I pulled my father aside and told him I wouldn’t be going with them. ‘I just can’t do it,’ I said, ‘Don’t ask me to explain, I just can’t.’

  Begum later said it was a visitation. My father walked me over there, standing at the threshold to her house with his hat in his hands. ‘This child’s too stubborn for me, Begum,’ he said. He looked so old then – my hardworking father, like a small, bent tree at the top of a cliff.

  ‘Here,’ he said, slipping his wedding ring off his finger and putting it in my palms, ‘Keep this safe for me.’

  He fussed with his spectacles that he’d been talked into getting very recently, sliding them further up his nose. And then he touched my shoulder before turning to join my mother and brothers, who were standing around a pile of bags.

  That was my last image of them.

  A week later, when the men tried to pull what was left of the bus from the mountainside, they would not find the bodies of my family or any of the others who had been travelling back from the Mainland.

  A farmer, who had been bringing his cows home from pasture, was the only witness to what happened. ‘One minute I saw a bus moving along the hillside,’ he said, ‘the next, it was gone, just like that.’

  After the accident I learned to become invisible. I moved into Begum’s house while the town elders decided what should happen with my parents’ property and possessions. Begum said I had special gifts. She said God had perhaps had a plan when he didn’t give her any children of her own.

  III

  I was taught how to become invisible by Rafi, the keeper of the forest. Rafi lived alone in a hut at the periphery of the Northern Forest Ridge, past the terraced farmlands and brick houses, out past the thickets of mahogany and timber, into the deeper forest where leopards and bears and drug-traffickers roamed.

  Rafi was the ugliest man you ever saw – seven feet tall with one good leg and one gimpy leg, one good eye and one cloudy. No one knew where he came from or who his parents were. We all assumed he’d run away from the circus. Once a week he would come to Main Street to buy a litre of whisky from Xerxes, the bootlegger. You’d think he was a kind man, the way the animals followed him – dogs, cats, horses, cows – when they saw him, they followed, as if he were the Pied Piper. Except Rafi didn’t play a pipe, and he wasn’t leading them anywhere.

  A few weeks after I lost my family I saw Rafi sitting on the stoop of the Glory Hallelujah teahouse, rolling a smoke with those giant fingers of his. It was a magical autumn day, the sky so blue and clear, it made you forget you were in Fountainville. Forget about the gutters overflowing with garbage, and those silly housewives squatting on their haunches selling bits of turd-like vegetables dug up from their gardens. Trees were beginning to sport little skirts of red foliage around their waists and lichens at their feet, and everything everywhere was festooned in a glorious coppery light.

  It made you want to believe in something. At least, that’s what I was thinking, when I heard: THWACK THWACK THWACK.

  Rafi had made paddles of his fists and, for some reason I couldn’t immediately fathom, was swinging them sideways into the heads of three dogs. These weren’t Pomeranians, mind, they were sly, unforgiving hill mongrels who in a pack, could tear a person to bits. They were sitting at his feet like lambs, taking it: THWACK THWACK THWACK.

  ‘You,’ Rafi said, when he caught me staring, ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘You should be happy you don’t live in a civilised place,’ I shouted, ‘Someone could report you to the SPCA.’

  He snorted, mimicking me. ‘ES PEE SEE EY!’

  ‘That’s right. Those dogs aren’t doing anything to bother you. Why the hell are you smacking them in the head like that?’

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘if I treated you as kind as I treat these dogs, you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven.’

  At which point, I started bawling. Crying from the very bottom of my toes. It was a deluge – salt, snot, bodily fluids of which I didn’t know the names – dripping out of my eyes and nose and mouth. Twitching, blubbering, crazy-kind of crying.

  Since the accident I hadn’t been able to cry, no matter how hard Begum and Kedar tried to get it out of me. Not alone in bed at night, not during my walks, not in the many corners of my new house where I’d found my much-desired loneliness.

  I had hoped to be traumatised by ghosts – eleven of them. To hear my father’s footsteps following me, trying to catch me and ask, How could you save yourself, Luna, and not the others? My mother, thrashing around in Begum’s kitchen like a hurricane, saying, Happy? Happy you’re with your beloved Begum now that you killed us, you little bitch. But no such luck. It was
dead-deadening-deadest silence. The spirits of my family were either lost or did not think me worth haunting.

  The truth is I hadn’t had any inkling or prophecy, no matter what anyone believed. The reason I hadn’t gone to Newton’s graduation ceremony with the rest of my family was because I was ashamed. Isn’t a fourteen year old allowed to be unreasonable about her indignities? I didn’t want to travel in that beat-up bus with our beat-up peasant clothes and beat-up suitcases, to arrive in the Mainland only to be told: Hey Chinky, why don’t you make us some chop-suey?

  Newton had written about his difficulties in his letters home. He hadn’t held a thing back – all the dirty things those Mainlanders called him – his landlady, the taxi drivers, even some of the professors, who were so surprised about his mathematical abilities. Poor Newton survived all that, survived growing up in Fountainville and getting out, only to die falling down a hillside.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ Rafi said, reaching his big arm toward me. ‘Settle it down. Is this about the dogs, or something else?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Well, you better tell me about that something else then.’

  And so I began, as I too often do: telling my deepest secrets to a stranger.

  *

  ‘Walk with me,’ Rafi said, after I told him the whole story. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He led me all the way to the church, dragging his gimpy leg slowly up the hill. Those three dogs, dizzy-headed no doubt, followed us like a patrol.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ he said, pointing to what lay below.

  ‘I see Main Street and I see the tops of trees and a few billboards, and I see people coming out of the cinema, and I see Pastor Joseph snoozing in his chair.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said, ‘You don’t see much, do you?

  ‘You know why I hit those dogs?’ he added, curling his fists into paddles again. ‘I got love in one hand, and punishment in the other, because that’s the code of the universe. Fear and love. They go together.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I interrupted. ‘What about St Francis of Assisi? He didn’t go around walloping harmless creatures on the head.’

  ‘Francis of Assisi! You are a funny one. Do I look like a fucking saint to you?

  ‘Listen, girl, you know what your gift is? Not that you can divine the future, not that you can curse your enemies, none of that, because the truth is no one can do that. Your greatest gift is that you are utterly forgettable. If you learn to shut your trap, that is.

  ‘Do you think people look at you when you walk down the street? Sorry to break your heart, darling, but no, they don’t. You might as well be a cement wall. Do you think they look at me though? Oh, they do. They fix their wicked eyes upon me and think nothing of letting their gaze stay there, staring and staring. Do you think they wonder, How the hell did he get like that? Lame in one leg and blind in one eye and keeling over like a leaning tower. They do. That and worse. But you – piddling, nondescript girl. You’re lucky. You could go anywhere, see anything, and no one would even notice.

  ‘What you have is freedom. Hold on to it. And learn to use your goddamn eyes.’

  He left me up there on the hill. ‘I’ll be seeing you, missy,’ he said, waving a balled-up fist in the air jovially, while the dogs trotted behind him.

  I turned and walked back to the top of Main Street. I stood on the corner and stared at people passing by, hoping to catch someone’s eye. Not a chance. Their glances went above my head and across my shoulder and right through my belly. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

  I walked west – across into the forbidden zone of dens and brothels and saloons. I was terrified. As children we had been warned off this part of town by our parents. Later, as an adult, I didn’t need anyone to tell me that only a certain kind of woman ventured here. Everything seemed meaner, dirtier, without the slightest hope of redemption.

  There were things I’d never seen before: whores standing on balconies with their tits hanging out and half-dead men sucking on pipes. Beggars with stumps for arms and blackened buildings rotting in the howling sun. There was a smell of death that hung heavy and threatening, clinging to all the ramshackle buildings and souls that inhabited them. I walked and walked through it all waiting for someone to say, What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?

  But no one saw, no one spoke. Rafi was right. My face was my fortune.

  IV

  When Begum was a young girl she was so beautiful she was kidnapped by a drug-lord and forced to live in his jungle hideout for three weeks. His name was Haroon Sheriff, and he was one of the meanest men who ever inhabited the pages of Fountainville’s history. Long after he was killed, parents still warned their children about the dangers of talking to strangers. ‘Haroon Sheriff has ears and eyes everywhere,’ they said. ‘If you’re not careful he’s going to get you.’

  On the summer solstice of 1978, Haroon Sheriff sent three of his men to wait for Begum by the school gates. Begum was fourteen. She had thick black hair, which lay plaited like two coiled snakes on either side of her head, breasts like torpedoes, and skin as soft as a Chinese whisper. When she spoke people listened, not so much for what she was saying, but for the way her lips formed two pink cushions around the words she uttered. At least, this is how Kedar tells it; he was 18 at the time, and the head of a very long line of Begum’s admirers.

  Begum’s father was an important man in the town council. He was a greedy, unintelligent man with a fondness for fried food, so it was easy for Sheriff’s men to dress in police uniforms and fool her – tell her that her father had suffered a heart attack; that she must hurry-hurry with them. Begum – distraught, followed them into their jeep. When they drove past the hospital, out past the forest ridge and into the deeper jungle, she knew the worst was waiting for her.

  Soon after I went to live with Begum and Kedar she told me all about it. ‘I thought they were going to rape me, strangle me, leave my body out for the wolves. Do you know what they did instead, Luna? They prepared a bed for me with soft, cotton sheets; gave me a bucket of water to wash with; laid out a dress of blue and gold.

  ‘At six in the evening one of his men knocked and asked if I was ready. He led me blindfolded through a winding tunnel and after a while – I can’t say how long, I was made to sit and wait for Haroon Sheriff.

  ‘He was an ordinary man, Luna. I mean, he could have been anyone. When my blindfold was removed, I looked across the table, which was laid with fine plates and cutlery, dishes of rice and meat, mountains of fruit – and there, in front of me, was the most feared man of Fountainville. I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing to him – medium height, medium build, medium everything. The only notice­able thing about him was a small birthmark on his left cheek in the shape of a seashell. I’d expected an ogre. Instead – this man, with his neat hair and freshly shaven face, speaking in the most perfectly modulated voice. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry for what you had to go through. I hope you managed to rest a bit.’

  ‘He was completely insane, of course. Cuckoo! In his mind he was saving me from the wickedness of the world. He spoke of his love for me as something pure, undiluted. He would not test that love until I was ready. He did not touch me, Luna. In all the twenty-one days and nights I stayed in that jungle with him, he did not touch me. The only thing he asked for, and which I permitted, was for him to lay his head down in my lap to weep. He was such a sad man, filled with so much guilt and madness. Every night, after dinner, his men would leave the room, and Haroon Sheriff, Fountainville’s most dreaded dacoit, soaked my skirt with his tears. And I, in my weakest moments, stroked his head and forgave him.

  ‘If I hadn’t been rescued, who knows what might have happened? I might have even fallen in love with him. You read about it all the time in the papers – those horrors who keep little girls locked up in their basements, children who are treated worse than cattle and never allowed in the sun. And because they do
n’t know any better, or because you love the hand that feeds you even if it kills you, they begin to feel something like tenderness towards their captors. And I can understand why. Everything changes in those circumstances – what’s natural, what’s not. Something like gratitude begins to develop; the idea that you no longer have to worry about the world. All that is important is that someone is protecting you, feeding you, clothing you. Things fall away. It’s a strange kind of existence with no real markers of time. Days upon days. Nights upon nights.

  ‘Sometimes his men kept me blindfolded even when I was in my room, just so I wouldn’t be able to read magazines or paint pictures. I’d close my eyes and think about my lessons from school, which made little sense in that place. I’d think about my parents, my friends, but after a while even they faded into a dream world, and I was unsure whether it was I who was lost, or they. It could have gone on like that for a very long time. I never made any attempt to run because I knew it was useless. His goons would have caught me and taken away the few freedoms I was allowed.

  ‘I didn’t expect to be saved. We were so deep in the jungle, and no one had seen me leave. The hideout was surrounded by a thicket of trees. There were secret underground tunnels, vaults and pits – all reeking of bats. That final night, at dinner, I thought a bomb had dropped down on us from the sky. We were eating, and I still remember the taste of that country chicken on my tongue, when there was a scuffling sound, and a loud shot. Haroon’s head bounced backwards, then forwards again. His entire body flopped neatly into the dishes on the table, darkening the wood with his blood. I must have fainted, because when I opened my eyes, all I saw was Kedar standing in front of me with a shotgun in his hand. He had killed Haroon Sheriff with a single bullet to the head. And that was it for me. Love at first sight. Finished.’