In the beginning, there were pangs, I’ll admit, but those had more to do with my own reticence than Mr Knight being liberal with his charm. He insisted that I call him by his first name. Impossible, of course. The best I could do was call him Mr Owain.
It was Mr Owain who insisted we bring Sabina’s sister inside rather than leave her screaming at the gate. The sisters sat on the garden bench for an hour, talking softly, sometimes touching fingers, until an agreement was reached. A small bundle of notes were prised out from Sabina’s blouse and thrust into her sister’s hands.
‘Well, that’s her straight to the den,’ I said.
‘Will you take me to see those places?’ Mr Owain asked. ‘I think I need to see them to understand.’
I had already told him about the epidemic that affected our Borderlands – a pandemic, really. Drugs from the opium fields across the mountains came through here before making their way to the chemical labs in the Mainland. Kilos of heroin smuggled over in jute bags. Most of our young people didn’t bother with pipes. They shot up wherever they could – in toilets and bunkers, some of them as young as ten, most of them illiterate. They shared needles because they didn’t know better, and because they couldn’t always get hold of fresh ones. So there wasn’t just the problem of addiction but widespread HIV, which the Mainland and our own church refused to acknowledge. I had told him all about my Uncle Manny’s slow and sorry death, about a classmate who’d been raped by army men, about truckers and prostitution – basically everything I hated about this town, but he still wanted to see for himself.
‘Perhaps I could get involved, do something useful while I’m here being indecisive about other things?’
‘Why don’t you discuss it with Pastor Joseph?’
‘You can’t be serious,’ he said. ‘The man is still banging on about the sin of premarital sex. He thinks condoms have holes through which the Aids virus can pass. He doesn’t even allow the burial of drug addicts. He’s worse than the Pope!’
*
We waited till dusk and wrapped ourselves in heavy coats and balaclavas against the cold and the prying eyes. I took him past the cemetery, westward, where the tarred road gave way to a rickety wooden bridge, and on the other side, a narrow pitted mud track strewn with garbage. The houses here were sloping structures built haphazardly on bamboo stilts, leaning precariously over a sludge of river with thin columns of smoke spewing from their chimneys. Even the trees seemed diminished and wasted.
Moving through this part of town always felt to me like descending into the circles of hell – becoming more and more grotesque as you advanced. On the periphery, there were the houses of disrepute – gambling dens and whorehouses – sprinkled along the river’s edge so the honourable people could slip across this way and that. Further out were the so-called mad houses, which were really rudimentary homes for the dispossessed – children with disabilities who had been dumped there, the terminally sick, the old, the insane, the tortured and the lost. There were black flags on some of these houses. These were the marks of death: leprosy, cholera, TB, HIV. Still further, towards the dangerous borders at the foothills, and beyond, where the fields of poppies bloomed – were the dens. Desolate places: dark and fragrant all at once. Once you arrived there, it was difficult to make your way back.
‘It’s like the end of the world,’ Mr Owain said, pinching his nose with his fingers.
‘You’ll get used to it.’
The path was lit by a few street lamps. On a moonlit night you could negotiate your way easily, but we held torches to make sure not to step on one of the many stinking collapsed heaps along the way – animal or human, dead or dying – it was impossible to tell. I took Mr Owain into the oldest den in Fountainville – a two-storey structure, which was filled mostly with men, lying on their sides like derelicts – on cots and mats, some behind bamboo screens, others in full view, sucking on long bamboo pipes.
‘This looks like a scene from a hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘Really, it’s unbelievable.’
There were half-dressed skeletal women moving about filling the pipes. The proprietor – a fat, moustachioed gent, whose eyes had completely disappeared into the folds of his cheeks, sat with a whore on his lap, twitching his chubby fingers in the air for us to come over.
‘I have a better room upstairs,’ he said. ‘This is for the locals.’
‘Okay,’ Mr Owain said. ‘Let’s see it.’
‘You, Petal, you take them up.’
The whore sprang off the proprietor’s meaty thigh and led us to the top room, offering Mr Owain the range of her services along the way, which he politely declined.
‘You like them younger?’ she asked. ‘Girls? Boys? Tell me. We have it all.’
‘Just show us the room,’ I said.
She scowled. ‘Relax, little sister.’
The upstairs chamber had only five people in it. All of them men – one who vaguely resembled a doctor who’d gone missing a few years ago after a botched abortion. The others could have been Mainlanders who never made their way back. Each of the men had his own bed by the window. The air was less dense up here, the room brighter.
‘Their families pay every month,’ the whore said. ‘We look after them. Give them baths and food. Not that they care about that. We keep them away from the riff-raff. You want to try a pipe, Sir? I’ll make you the sweetest pipe you ever had.’
‘We should go,’ I said, pulling Mr Owain towards the stairway.
‘Come back and see me now,’ the whore smiled, pinching his bum.
*
Things changed afterwards. Before that excursion Mr Knight used to come to the clinic everyday. He watched soap operas with the proxies and learned to knit little pairs of socks. He played chess and helped the gardener harvest tomatoes. Now he spent more time on the west-side with the sole outreach programme operating in Fountainville. The House of Hope was run by a young couple – Binita and Matthew Samuel, who had both studied Economics and Development in the Mainland, and had returned home to make a difference. They had started a drop-in centre for HIV counselling and had initiated various grassroots campaigns for condom promotion and syringe exchange in the tobacco shops. They were forever organising Christian rock concerts in the hope of trying to get the pastor on their side. Mr Owain was their new shining star in this regard. Their hope was that he would be able to convince Pastor Joseph to use the church as a platform for activism.
I began visiting Mr Owain most evenings at the Sanity Boarding House for tea as this was the time the proxies were busiest with activities that didn’t require my attention. Mr Quintus, the owner of the SBH, reserved the corner table on the veranda for us. He threw a faded blue cloth over the table, which lent it an air of dilapidated elegance, and he made sure there was a steady supply of tea, fruit cake and banana fritters from the kitchen. He even allowed Mr Owain to keep his flask of whisky in plain sight, though the SBH wasn’t licensed to sell liquor. When I arrived, Mr Owain would be in his corner, scribbling in his notebooks.
‘What’s so great about Fountainville that you’re always writing about it?’
‘Everything,’ he’d say, beaming. ‘I write about what I hear and see, what I think and feel. If I don’t write, I forget. It’s the strangest place, Luna. Extraordinary. You don’t realise it.’
We had long discussions about how to bring change to the Borderlands. He was filled with that messianic do-gooding fervour that I would have found irritating with anyone else. He once made the mistake of saying how people here had so little yet they seemed much happier than anywhere else in the world.
‘Don’t romanticise things,’ I snapped. ‘Whatever you do, don’t do that. They talk of economic progress in the Mainland, but they don’t do anything for us. They want our men to fight in their army, our women to work in their restaurants and factories – cleaning up after them. For what? To be second-class citizens? We didn’t have running water here until Begum started this clinic. If Kedar hadn’t gone to
the Mainland to cut a deal with the Minister of Health and Family Welfare, we’d still be living in the dark ages. If we appear to be happy, it’s only because of some misguided idea that we must make do, and eventually there’ll be more to life than shit.
‘Oh, I feel better now,’ I laughed, looking at his startled reaction. ‘Better not get me started.’
Some days he seemed so far away I couldn’t tell if it was the troubles of Fountainville or something closer to his heart. To live here so many weeks, the only foreigner in town – looking at all the dirty, degrading things that had little chance of improving, it wasn’t an easy thing.
‘Don’t you miss home?’ I asked regularly, hoping to find out about a family, a lover, something that might be beckoning.
He admitted that the homesickness crept up from time to time so suddenly he could do nothing but stay in his room all day. ‘But if I went back I’d only think about all that I was missing here. It’s my limitation. I want to be in two places at once.’
People in town had begun to whisper about us but I didn’t care. Sitting with him every evening and watching the sun go down like a forest fire in the sky – those blood-red embers lighting up the thatch roofs of Fountainville, was a daily act of grace I’d come to rely upon.
Mr Owain sometimes reached for my hand across the table, and I’d give it to him, easily. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I hadn’t felt this returned to the world since I lost my family. It was as if I had a shot at goodness again. We both did.
VII
Begum had the idea for the greenhouse after watching a TV programme. This was five years after I’d been living with her and Kedar. I was nineteen then – still bone-thin and nondescript, despite Begum’s many beauty administrations. I remember her coming home one evening after visiting Papa Davy, who had just lost his wife to cancer, and who seemed to be dying of something terrible himself. Begum would go over a couple of times a day to give the old man something for the pain – morphine, usually. Sometimes she’d take me with her, and I’d stand in the corner, watching, while she held his gnarly hand, rubbing cream into his cuticles, cooing nonsense into his ear. Sometimes she just sat by his side in silence while the TV or radio played softly in the background. Begum always knew how to comfort a person.
One day she came home looking like she’d taken a hit of morphine herself. I’d never seen her like that before – eyes all glassy, slurring her words. I took hold of her hand and led her inside the house. Begum, having grown a little hefty in the thighs over the years, lowered herself quickly into a chair, giving her customary pleated maxi skirt a whoosh when she sat down. I brought her a glass of lemon water and asked what the matter was. She kept looking ahead at the open door of the house with this stunned look on her face as if she’d been shot in the stomach. Then she took my hand and squeezed my knuckles hard.
‘Luna,’ she said, ‘It’s finally going to happen.’
I couldn’t get it out of her, no matter how many glasses of lemon water I plied her with. She kept saying, ‘It’s here, it’s here,’ like one of those crazy fundamentalists at church. It took Kedar coming home to make sense of it.
Kedar kept odd hours owing to the irregular nature of his job. He was what you’d call a fixer – a man in the know with an ear to the town’s drug-dealers, hit-men, government officials, elders, pastor and policemen. His services ranged from the quotidian to the grotesque. If, for example, you wanted to start a bakery on Main Street, or a second-hand electronic goods store – Kedar would be the man to get you your license. If your demands were more complicated – say you wanted to take possession of a disputed property, Kedar could point you in the right direction. Needless to say card tables, pimping girls and dope all fell under his sway.
For a gangster Kedar smiled a lot. I used to be terrified of him as a child. He was so perfectly symmetrical – tall and sinewy, with wavy jet-black hair divided in a centre parting, and sideburns that were never allowed to run awry. Long before it became fashionable to sport muscles in Fountainville, Kedar used to stand in the yard in a wrestling singlet, lifting dumb-bells diligently until his biceps popped out like two hillocks. I was fascinated by Kedar’s biceps, not just because he massaged oil into them, making them glisten, but for the tattoos sprawled over the entire girth of them – a coiled serpent on the left bicep, and on the right, entwined around the stem of a rose, the letters B e g u m.
Kedar had the reputation of being a fair man. While he may have had a pinkie in every dirty dealing around town, he himself didn’t partake in any activities that could be injurious to his health. His habits were meticulous. He was the only adult I knew who didn’t drink or smoke or chew tobacco, and as a result, his pearly whites had remained untainted, alarming in their brightness. And while he may have been overly controlling with his own dental hygiene, he always kept boiled sweets in his pockets for children. Still, he terrified me.
I once saw him and Begum stood up against the side of their house. Her skirt was bunched up around her hips, and his trousers were down by his knees. He was pressing himself against her in the most hideous way. Begum’s blouse was unbuttoned all the way down to her navel, and he had one hand inside her brassiere, and the other, tugging at her hair like a wild animal. It was the look on Begum’s face that scared me most – the look he was making her have. It made me understand that no matter how soft Kedar was on Begum, he had a power over her like no other.
Understand: it wasn’t the visible act of sex that offended me. As I said earlier, we don’t flutter our lashes at that sort of thing in Fountainville. Our houses are nothing more than big barns, offering little privacy, so a child’s first experience of sex is often listening to her parents’ fumble around in one corner of the room. I was the last of my brood, but my parents still went at it fairly regularly. I knew the sounds of sex well, the surreptitious noises. My mother gasping underneath my father, tugging at him, pushing him off her at the crucial moment – a dubious method of family planning Pastor Joseph suggested to all couples. And I’d also had the pleasure of listening to my six brothers going through varying stages of adolescence in the dark. None of that had anything to do with what I saw Begum and Kedar doing up against the side of their house that summer evening.
Many years later, when I overcame my fear of Kedar, I asked him about his tattoos. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘The serpent is to remind me of desire and temptation, how they always come cloaked in disguises like a trickster, ready to set you on the path to ruination. Which is why I don’t whore or drink or smoke or chew tobacco. If a man keeps to his senses, he can’t blame nobody but himself for his misfortunes.
‘And this one,’ he said, stroking the letter B in his skin, ‘This one’s to remind me that no matter how difficult a place the world is, if you’re a lucky son-of-a-bitch, you might find love.’
Kedar had in his employ thirty young thugs who regularly went around bashing in people’s heads on his command. They walked around like miniature versions of him – dressed entirely in black, with tattoos on their beefy arms, and silver rings on their fingers. This small army kept control of law and order in Fountainville, leaving Kedar to pursue his philosophical and intellectual ambitions. On the bookshelf at home was a range of texts by stalwart, gloomy-looking, white-bearded men, and whenever there was respite from gangster-work, I’d see Kedar hunched over his desk with a pencil in hand, underlining passages, which he later transcribed into a notebook he called The Book of Inspired Ideas.
Kedar defined himself as a laissez-faire libertarian. He believed that freedom was the only value that was truly human. The principles of free will and free markets, and the freedom to secede from a country that was failing you, were integral to him. He was not a church-going man. He said he liked the stories well enough, but didn’t need to sit in a room full of braying idiots every Sunday to figure out what was wrong and what was right. I suppose somewhere in his head he’d reconciled the major contradiction between his actions and his philosophy. When I called him
out on that, and pointed out that terrorising people into a share of every business in town could hardly be classified as laissez-faire behaviour, he said, ‘Oh, they’re free to go about things another way. It might just be harder is all.’
One thing I’ll say in his defence – no matter how casual and flawed his rationale for living off the proceeds of other people’s failings (‘No one’s forcing them, Luna,’ was his standard refrain) – he had his limitations. On the subject of paedophilia, Kedar was militant. For decades there had been a dual racket of heroin and child-trafficking in the triangle towns of Somaville, Murro and Fountainville, of which we were the apex. But Fountainville had been declared a no-go zone as far as children were concerned. Anyone attempting to infiltrate or override Kedar’s authority on this matter would find themselves dead in a ditch with their manhood removed. ‘Castration alone, is too kind an act,’ he said, ‘for motherfuckers like them.’
Over the years I came to love Kedar almost as much as I did Begum. I took solace in the shade of their togetherness. Whenever I felt myself moving towards the despair that pulled at me, I felt them pulling from the opposite direction. I knew that the great sadness of their lives had been that they’d had no children of their own. Begum told me the problem lay with Kedar (too much weightlifting, she thought). I also knew that after I came to live with them, their sadness had worn itself down to a tiny nub of nothingness. In this way, we buoyed each other up until we forgot that we were once neighbours, that I once had a family that were now lost to me, that there used to be a baby-shaped hole in their life.
And so when Begum had the idea for the greenhouse, it was a revelation she wanted to share with the both of us. Kedar and I lifted her from the chair and dunked her in a trough of cold water, which seemed to have no effect on her because she kept repeating, ‘I saw, I saw.’ Finally, Kedar poured a finger of whisky in a glass and said, ‘I don’t care if you don’t want this woman, but you better drink it and tell us what the hell it is you saw.’
Fountainville Page 4