*
The rescuing of Begum from the hideout of Haroon Sheriff, and the decimation of his men by Kedar and his gang, is a story that has acquired mythic proportions in this town. Whenever I hear it or tell it, new embellishments get added. Haroon Sheriff’s birthmark becomes a stain that covers his entire cheek; at the moment of his death he transforms into a raven and flies off into the woods; Kedar is supposed to have discovered Sheriff’s hideout with the help of a band of forest monkeys. But all this is speculation. What’s true is what I’ve just told you. Nothing more, nothing less. And that’s why Begum changed her life.
Begum was a big believer in fate. ‘My destiny waited for me, Luna,’ she told me. ‘My destiny was the greenhouse, and it waited for me to discover that there was something bigger than Kedar, or the fountain, or this town – something I had to find myself. When I think about that blindfold placed over my eyes when I was fourteen, I often think it’s the first time I actually learned to see. You know the role of blindness in our folk tales, Luna? Only in darkness can you begin to see light. After Kedar rescued me I started to think about new ways of seeing. For so many years I caught glimpses of what my destiny could be. I’d see it, as you see the dawn, through bleary eyes – almost catching it, but then succumbing to sleep, only to wake and find you’re no closer to it than you ever were. The only thing I desired in life was to discover that thing which would remove the blindfold forever. And it happened just as I thought it would – like a thunderclap; a single shot going off in the forest. The day I had the idea for the greenhouse – that moment, everything lifted. I could see clear and far ahead. My life’s purpose was no longer a mystery.’
*
There’s a photo of Begum and Kedar on their wedding day. He’s wearing a dark suit looking rather seriously at the camera – hair flattened evenly on both sides of his parting, smile in check. Begum looks dishevelled, not her most beautiful. Her wedding dress has fallen off one shoulder, exposing a mound of smooth round flesh. There’s confetti in her dark tousled hair. She looks as if she’s been running at a terrific speed because her cheeks are red, and the way she gazes at Kedar is already tinged with a kind of exhausted devotion. I wonder what she’s thinking in that photograph: how much in love she is, or how much longer it’s possible to love like this, or is this the real beginning of her life? It’s an iconic picture, capturing their truest selves – all their insecurities and triumphs. Nothing like my parent’s wedding photograph which seems a falsity; two imposters dragged in to act the role. They’re standing on the steps of the church with their arms interlocked as if they’re set to go off on a voyage. Childlessness suits them. Light, formless, young. I want to tell them – Wait, stay here in this moment, make it last a little longer! But their eyes are unafraid of the future. They’re looking at it with all the intensity and fervour that only the very young and innocent can have, believing everything will be well, that they will come through unscathed.
V
We keep twenty-four women in the greenhouse at a time. Each gets a bed, a side-table, linen and socks for the duration of their stay. The beds are lined up twelve on each side, and a mirror hangs on the south wall, just big enough for them to see their faces. Most women bring pictures of their family to stick above their beds. Some bring small statues of gods, crosses or lucky charms, which they lodge in the windowsill. In the adjacent common room there’s a flat-screen TV, which alternates between soap operas and news channels. All the women congregate here day and night, staring dumbly at the box like a row of watermelons, instead of working on Sudoku or embroidery – activities we recommend.
The only mandatory daily activities are the morning meditation session, which Begum leads, and the evening drink at the fountain. We suggest half an hour of gentle daily exercise – just a stroll in the garden or a slow meander around the lily pond, but it’s impossible to enforce this. We also offer computer lessons, but very few actually make use of them. They’re bored of course, and everything is strange to them – the environment, the changes they must undergo, their own bodies. Some of them are so young, often away from their families for the first time. So they mope about, forever texting their husbands about the hardship of it all.
Every one of them calculates what they will do with the money before they’ve got it. This is inevitable I suppose, but Begum and I try to foster a sense of sisterhood in the greenhouse, the idea that they’re working towards a greater good, and that money should not be their only motivation.
Communal living has its pitfalls, the worst being that people divide quickly into cliques. In the past we’ve had to deal with everything from petty arguments about who stole who’s soap to full-scale battles about personal honour. And given the rotating nature of the women we hire as proxies, we never know when problems will erupt. With all proxies, even those who are illiterate (and there’s a fair number of them), we make sure to cover the basics before they get here so they’re as prepared as they can possibly be.
*
FOUNTAINVILLE CLINIC GUIDELINES FOR PROXIES
All proxies must drink at the fountain once daily at 6pm.
Please pack comfortable clothing and bring something warm as evenings can get cool. There will be no occasion for dressing up.
Do not bring jewellery, watches or any items of value.
Do bring items that can help pass time: knitting, embroidery etc.
All personal items must fit into trunk under bed (3.5ft high, 4ft width).
Family members and guests are NOT allowed to visit.
TV, library, board games, playing cards, and all hygiene products will be provided.
Meals will be served thrice a day in the dining room. Breakfast 8am, Lunch 1pm, Dinner 7pm. Fruit and healthy snacks will be available all day. No outside food allowed.
Gambling, smoking, drinking and unauthorised drugs will not be tolerated.
No one may leave the compound under any circumstances without contacting Luna or Begum.
Any proxy found engaging in ganging up on, or bullying another proxy will be forced to terminate the contract and prevented from further engagement with the clinic.
No proxies are allowed to instigate personal relationships with clients. Anyone found breaching this code will be blacklisted and all contractual agreements will be nullified.
*
Our first proxy was a woman called Asmara, wife of the farmer Binoy Louis. She was built like a house with large flat hands and legs overrun by varicose veins. ‘Surely she’s too old?’ Begum whispered when Asmara walked in the front door.
‘I hear you pay five thousand,’ Asmara said. ‘I’ll take half that.’
Asmara was our beginning. A fearless, fat housewife who had clearly reached the ditch-water of her troubles. She didn’t complain once about having to spread her legs; about the injections or blood tests or probes. She just closed her eyes and relented like a patient cow. Because she was our first, and for a while, our only proxy, she told us everything. That her husband Binoy had worked his fields from four in the morning to six in the evening every day for fifteen years and still didn’t have a good shirt to show for church. That she was in love with a movie star and when her husband made love to her (which was rare these days), she asked him to flip her over like an omelette so she could better imagine the movie star. That she sometimes hated her children, God help her, but they were an ungrateful bunch of wretches. Only the middle one, her second son, gave her hope. He studied all night with the help of a torchlight and dissected frogs in school. Soon they would have to buy him a thick pair of spectacles and other boys would bully him, but what an intelligent fellow he was going to be.
‘How tiring it is to be poor,’ Asmara once told me, and in the very next breath, ‘So when are you going to have children, Luna? Or at least, find a man?’
I could only laugh. ‘Do I look like a sheep to you?’ I said. ‘When I open my mouth do you hear me say baa? Why do you think, especially when you tell me stories like this, tha
t I’m dying to go out and do what every foolish woman in this town has done?’
Asmara understood. She said I was right, of course, to take my freedom seriously. ‘But don’t become a bitter old woman, Luna. Make room for love, otherwise life can be so long.’
When Asmara finished her three stints at the clinic, Dr Willis put her on medication, after having ascertained that an underactive thyroid was the reason for her fatness. Overnight, Asmara shrank to half her size. Features that had been hiding for decades resurfaced like rosebuds. There was nothing to do about the flat hands and big potato nose but, thinned out, Asmara looked quite different. After all those years of carrying extra weight, it emerged that Asmara had a waist, which gave her body a certain elegance, and allowed her to move about with renewed litheness. All the women in town thought we were conducting age-defying experiments at the clinic.
‘How many fatties do you think have asked where they can sign up?’ grinned Asmara, when she came to visit. ‘I’ll be asking for my ten percent finder’s fee.’
Proxies who came after Asmara tried to foist their life stories upon me but I made it clear from the beginning that it wouldn’t increase our chances of friendship. It was not out of apathy that I did this, but for my own self-preservation. I knew that I would then be expected to return the favour and share my life stories with them, but that privilege was reserved for strange men who drifted into my life, like Rafi or Mr Knight.
*
I remember clearly when Mr Knight showed up on Begum’s porch that April day after the storm. He walked so quickly into the centre of my life, it’s difficult to think of a time when we didn’t know each other. The reason he came to Fountainville was because of Asmara. His friends back home, Cei and Cynon – our first gentlemen clients – had told him that if ever there was a woman to change your life, it was Asmara. Somehow it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine them all – Mr Cynon, Mr Cei and Mr Knight, sitting around a table in some foreign country where everything was cleaner, richer, more beautiful. A long table filled with food and drink, music playing in the background, and women with hair like golden trumpets sitting beside them.
Of course, it would be impossible to engage Asmara as she’d completed her time at the clinic, but I told Mr Knight we could find someone else. ‘And how are Mr Cynon and Cei doing?’ I asked.
‘Elated,’ he said. ‘Beyond elated. They tell me I can’t see the forest from the trees. To hear them describe it, nothing could be more geared to a man’s needs than this clinic of yours. They’ve mythologised it you see – everything is glowing, beautiful, bright, fantastic. But I have my reservations. In the end I just had to come see for myself.’
‘Indecision is never a good thing.’
‘It’s just not as simple as I think they’d like it to be. I mean there are basic things that still haven’t been thought through, and no one has any idea what the psychological impact is going to be on us all ten, twenty years down the line... it seems unnatural, somehow.’
‘Lots of things seem unnatural when they start out, but that doesn’t mean they’re not right. I don’t mean to try and persuade you in one direction or the other, but obviously I’m biased.’
As we walked up the path towards the greenhouse, Sabina – the self-appointed leader of our current group of proxies, walked out of the bath house in a nightgown and a towel on her head. I do not like Sabina – not because she’s pretty, but because she’s educated, and she lords her literacy over the other proxies instead of helping them. She comes from the neighbouring town of Somaville, from a chieftain family fallen on hard times. She arrived alone, as most of these women do, with no family or friend to escort her.
‘New client?’ she said, pausing to stare at Mr Knight.
‘Mr Knight is thinking of working with Chanu Rose,’ I said, even though I had no idea if Mr Knight even wanted to work with us.
‘Oh, Chanu Rose! That’s nice. Good luck, Mr Knight,’ Sabina said, walking away, her hips careening from side to side like a pendulum.
I noticed Mr Knight didn’t watch Sabina like other men did, which was understandable, proper. Everything about him was so neat and precise and continually pleasing to me.
‘Don’t be afraid, Mr Knight,’ I said, as we approached the door to the greenhouse. ‘Are you ready for your future?’
VI
A month after Mr Knight arrived in Fountainville a woman claiming to be Sabina’s sister showed up at the gates of the clinic. She was skinny and loud, and any beauty she might once have possessed had been sucked out of her by the pipe. She wanted money, she said. Their father was gambling, her child needed medicines.
‘You up and leave and now I have to be the bloody nurse,’ she screeched, hanging on to the gate like a banshee.
Rule six clearly prohibited family members from visiting, although Begum was known to relent in special cases. With Mr Knight, for instance, she had simply thrown out Rule 12.
‘He’s nice to have around,’ she said. ‘A little bit of testosterone can’t harm.’
And it was true. If we’d known that the presence of a man could rouse the proxies from their walrus-like state of indolence, we might have relaxed the no-male staff rule earlier. Most men of course, were not Mr Knight. They could always be relied upon to grope or inappropriately fondle a proxy regardless of the state she was in. As it was, cleavage that had been tucked away suddenly popped out on display. Rivalries between proxy groups were soothed with the trade of a few tubes of lipstick, and demands for a parlour girl to come in to thread eyebrows were universal.
‘You told us we wouldn’t need to dress up,’ the proxies complained. ‘We feel like dishrags when Mr Knight see us like this – lounging around in our nighties all day.’
Mr Knight had befriended all the proxies systematically, coaxing their histories out of them while giving very little of himself away. He was softest on Chanu Rose. He’d found out that no one in her family knew she was here except for her sister. Chanu had lied to her husband and told him she was going to the Mainland to get a degree in secretarial studies. If he found out what she was really doing he would surely kill her. She had a picture of her husband above her bed – a square-jawed, too-pleased-with-himself-looking man with a mean mouth and surprisingly soft, beautiful brown eyes. She cried most nights and none of the proxies comforted her.
For Chanu Rose’s twenty-fourth birthday Mr Knight decorated the entire greenhouse with streamers and balloons, and had Mitsy, the head cook, march in with a big chocolate cake singing Happy Birthday. I don’t think anyone had ever done anything like that for her before. She was bawling like a duck, of course. I swear she’d leave her husband if she could – the way she went on about Mr Knight this, Mr Knight that.
Begum was the bigger surprise though. She had become increasingly suspicious of outsiders ever since a damning article had been published in a foreign newspaper attacking the ethics of running a cloistered-style greenhouse such as ours, and accusing Begum of ‘antiquated gender politics’. The woman who wrote the article had posed as a potential client and spent a month in Fountainville collecting data. The reporter and Begum had spent several afternoons discussing the great feminists of the world, and Begum had been made to believe she was one of them. The betrayal had been devastating.
Given that Mr Knight still hadn’t declared his intentions, Begum was being remarkably open with him. They played chess in her office between appointments – a single game often lasting an entire week. Begum, always a sore loser, was almost as unbearable when she won. ‘Think harder, Mr Knight,’ she’d say, jabbing her finger in the air when she finally checkmated him. ‘You’re playing with a master.’
In reality, he had been the real master, slowly gaining her confidence by helping to reorganise the filing system at the clinic, and by giving her ideas to expand her business. When he discovered that she had a room full of jars and unguents to suit every kind of ailment in the world, and that these recipes had been handed down from one Lady of the Fou
ntain to the next, and that all the ingredients were handpicked from the local forests, he immediately set about branding, designing and packaging La Saˆgon de Fountainville – a health and beauty line to be sold in the finest boutiques.
Mr Knight was a taxonomist by profession, which he explained, had nothing to do with collecting taxes. He was a kind of biologist, whose job it was to make order of things – classifying species, naming them, putting them in hierarchy. I doubted it was his real job, or the job that sustained his lifestyle, as he appeared to be a gentleman of wealthy means, but it explained a good deal about the way he conducted himself, and his compulsive need for order.
‘You’re sitting on a gold mine,’ he told Begum. ‘If we can get this wellness line going you won’t need to do anything else. It’s exactly the sort of thing self-engrossed, fair-trade liberals like myself are interested in spending money on!’
‘Even men?’ Begum asked.
‘Absolutely. In fact, you could tailor it just for men, and it would still make you millions.’
I wasn’t jealous of their burgeoning friendship, although the same couldn’t be said for Kedar, who believed that Mr Knight was another undercover journalist – ‘a wolf dressed up as a fluffy sheep’.
Fountainville Page 3