Fountainville

by Tishani Doshi

  The forest at night is a place of nightmare or dream. Spirits, if they roamed, would march about in a place like this. Without Rafi, I wouldn’t have dared it.

  On and on. The trees are like pencils, long and thin, black and sharp. Coming at me. Coming at me. I’m tired. There’s no use denying it. I want to sit down here and be done with it all. How long to keep going when the earth is calling, saying, rest your feet, come back to me?

  ‘Here,’ I say, stopping, leaning against Leo. ‘Let’s stop here for the night. I can’t go further.’

  Water-legs. Darkness.

  They tell me later I was burning up with fever. Delirious. Talking about the end of the world, and being imprisoned in a wall of stone. Where is he? I kept asking. Tell him I can’t breathe. These stones are killing me. And the fire. If he doesn’t come, they’ll burn me. Already they’re stacking up the logs. In another time, they would have called me witch. Now it’s harlot. Shall I just offer my neck?

  It used to be that a human head brought good fortune to the village.

  Take my tendons please, and end it. Let me close my eyes and fall. Just fall.

  VII

  Is this death then? Nothing like I expected it to be. No bright lights or running sepia footage, vignettes of my brief tumultuous life. No crushing against my lungs, no music. Nothing except this wide-open field with indigo birches studding the periphery like a row of soldiers.

  In the middle of the field there is a dog gnawing on a bone. Milly, is that you? Can it be? Milly, my greyhound, dead, fifteen years or more, chewing on a meaty bone.

  Is this childhood then? Am I returned to that difficult place after all this? I would rather be dying than falling backwards in time.

  Hello there, Earl? Are you still here? Are we still in the place we were yesterday?

  Everything is amiss. Countess, you have abandoned me, I’m sure.

  Earl – I hear loud shrieks in the forests of my dreams. I cannot say if I’m awake or asleep but I’m moving across the sky on a winged horse looking down over the most desolate place you ever saw.

  In one corner is childhood – Milly, Mama, Father. All chewing on bones. But I cannot stay with them. I’m traversing mountains, still on my winged horse, being separated from every familiar thing I know.

  Ahead of me is the most enormous cliff. In the middle of the cliff is a grey rock, and in that rock is a snake.

  Earl – it is a terrible snake, smooth-scaled and brown with ragged yellow bands along its body. It sleeps in fields and termite mounds, in rodent burrows and rice fields, amongst piles of brick and rubble. It moves through the world like a long pale-throated worm. But here it is terrifying – angry, provoked – raising its body, hissing, striking, opening its hood.

  A hood, Earl! A snake with an eye in its hood. And with this one eye, it watches the world.

  And who does this snake hold captive? A white lion. Purest of pure. Trapped between the snake and the long fall down the cliff. Every time the lion tries to move, the snake raises its body, spreads its hood, opens its eye, and hisses.

  If I could just kill the snake, cut its body in two, and free the lion – my life would be mine again. But I know no way of doing it. Can you lend me your sword, Earl? Can you help me? I cannot find my way out of these woods.

  There’s more, Earl. There’s a woman who’s going to be burned. A woman trapped in stone. She says she loves me, and I believe her. They’ll burn her alive if I don’t save her. They’re preparing a pyre in the forest, stacking logs of wood one on top of the other, fetching the fuel, the match. Every time I get close to her, she disappears. I cannot see her face. Only smoke. And the pipe is empty.

  Someone is walking home. I must follow.

  VIII

  When I come to, I see a high ceiling above. Around me, peeling walls with animal heads hung crookedly along them. I can feel the hard cold floor pushing through the thin mattress, pressing into the flesh of my back. Somewhere to the left, there’s a room where someone is making a droning noise along with a relentless knock knocking against a wooden door.

  It is a chieftain’s house. I can tell, because of the ceremonial altar at the entrance, and the wooden effigies that line the balustrade, which rings down grandly on the far side of the room. Not so long ago, human heads would have been strung like lanterns outside this house. Our people used to believe that a man’s soul resides in his head, that when you cut off a head, you receive the potency of its soul. But then the Baptists came and told us that man’s soul is everlasting. And no amount of head-chopping will bring you luck or rain or keep diseases away.

  Before a warrior could decapitate a victim, he had to ask their name.

  How civil.

  Luna. My name is Luna Anto.

  Take it then, and string it to your name. Borrow my spirit for your own. Kill my strength and become stronger.

  A man stands over me with milky eyes. His face is full of tattoos. He is old and bent and bare-chested. All over his arms, shoulders, face and ribs, there are tattoos of tigers and dragons. Around his neck, a single chain threaded with a line of brass heads.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’m Sabina’s father.’

  ‘Sabina?’

  ‘She came to make a baby in your clinic. Do you remember? My daughter. She’s the saviour of the house.’

  ‘Sabina, the proxy? What’s she to do with anything?’

  ‘She knows where he is,’ he says, pointing to my stomach. ‘Your baby’s father. It’s a terrible place. They’ve gone there now. I have a daughter there. Mala. She went crazy after her husband died. Sabina tried to bring her back, but Mala didn’t want to be saved.’

  I try to raise myself up on my elbows. Blood-rush. Gold flecks stinging the backs of my eyes. I remember now, months ago, a wasted woman appearing at the gates of the clinic. Sabina’s sister. The two of them on the bench exchanging whispers and money. And Owain, afterwards, asking to see those places.

  ‘Stay,’ the old chief says. ‘You stay here.’

  His voice is a low rustle. The sound of leaves scratching. Dead grass. I think of my father. His patience. ‘Please,’ I say, ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They’ll bring him back. They’ll beat him in the head if they need to, but they’ll bring him back.’

  ‘But where’s he been for six months? What kind of state is he in?’

  ‘You are the Lady’s daughter, isn’t that right? The Lady of the Fountain? If you have her magic, you’ll be able to heal them. It’s the only chance they have.’

  I stare into his weathered face. How much the world has changed for him. I cannot imagine the countless things he has witnessed, endured.

  ‘How do you know these things?’

  The old chief cracks a toothless smile. Years of tobacco-chewing have made his mouth an estuary of red rot.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he giggles. ‘I know too many things. Sabina, my daughter, she spies. She tells me everything. She loves Rafi. Rafi loves her.’

  *

  They enter like beggars – clothes ripped, hair matted, eyes running, smelling of something animal, something broken. Three of them. Owain, Mala, and a dark crippled reed of a man they call the Earl of Sadness, from whom they will not be separated. They don’t know us, barely register their new surroundings.

  ‘Countess,’ Owain keeps saying to Mala, ‘another pipe.’

  He is wearing my father’s ring. I can see it from where I lie.

  Pain in my back. Ankles swollen. I feel useless. ‘Owain,’ I say, ‘Owain, come here.’ But he doesn’t know who he is or where he is.

  ‘Please,’ he says, looking straight at me, recognising nothing. ‘Don’t ask me anything. I can’t betray her.’

  The knocking sound from the child’s room is overpowered by new commotion. Sabina is all efficiency, dragging in wood for the stove. Barely a word to me except for, Luna, stay, rest. Impossible to tell she’s had a baby two months ago, but for the puckered ring of fat around her middle.


  ‘Did it go okay?’ I ask, ‘the handover?’

  She grimaces. ‘Baby Hank is thriving. I have pictures from Mr and Mrs Mullins. I’ll show them to you later perhaps.’

  Rafi is out by the well hoisting water. I want to interrogate him about his love affair, the sly devil. But he knows I know, and he is heaving, bucket after bucket of water.

  There’s a symmetry to their industry. Three on three. Leo – in and out of the house with buckets. Sabina by the wood fire, heating cauldrons. Mala, Owain and the Earl, whispering on the floor.

  The old chief sits on a tree stump in the courtyard watching the proceedings like an eagle. Curled in his lap, a black cat, whose fur he tugs this way and that.

  ‘Papa,’ Sabina barks, ‘Rest-time now.’

  He pretends not to have heard, breaks a lump of tobacco in his palm, pops the ball into the back of his rotten mouth, and waits, defiantly.

  ‘Put on a shirt and go to sleep,’ she yells again, ‘and shut that child up. As if there wasn’t enough to do.’

  The old chief throws the cat off his lap and shoots a stream of red through his gums, making a pool of betel juice on the courtyard floor.

  ‘You shut up,’ he mutters, hitching up his shabby trousers and limping off in the direction of the child’s knocking.

  ‘It’s not the child’s fault,’ he says, as he passes me. ‘His mother was given the wrong medicines when he was inside her. It’s not his fault he’s wrong in the head.’

  ‘Okay, okay, just go,’ Sabina says.

  ‘Now,’ she says, steering Leo towards Owain. ‘Pick him up. Let’s start with the easy one.’

  ‘O,’ Leo says, stroking his shoulder. ‘O, it’s me!’

  Nothing.

  ‘Hey love, it’s me!’

  They look beautiful together. One blond the other dark. One expansive, the other, tender, contained.

  Rafi pats Leo on the back softly. ‘He doesn’t know you.’

  He hauls Owain up from under his arms and makes him stand.

  ‘Take off his clothes,’ Rafi tells Leo.

  I looked for it, of course I did. How could I not? Some glimmer of recognition between them.

  Surely the body remembers its old loves? And if one should press close against you, removing the very clothes from your skin, wouldn’t he carry his own special smell?

  Isn’t memory connected to those scents we hold within our bodies like pathways, tracts of land, territory. When I think of Owain, I think of rain, smashed flowers and leaves, damp rising from the mud, woodsmoke. Every time he held my hand, it was this. And when we lay together, holding each other on the sterile clinic beds the night Dr Willis set all this in motion, I curled into the bark of his body, and it was inside him. That smell – after the storm.

  And with Leo, were there different memories, different smells? Are some stronger than others? I watched them, telling myself if there was even the slightest spark of remembrance, if Owain looked at him a certain way, I’d.... what? Give them my baby? Allow them their happily ever after? I couldn’t do it. It went against any kind of sense. All those proxies I’d known, who had subjected their bodies to the prison of pregnancy, given up their babies without ever touching or seeing them. How did they tolerate it? It was as if all they’d been were temporary shelters. As if those nine months of pre-birth were nothing. How must it be to know that a child born from you is walking the world but doesn’t know you?

  I couldn’t give my baby up even if I didn’t love it yet. Even though I’d been prepared to drag it out of me.

  In any case, there was no need for grand gestures just yet.

  Owain doesn’t know Leo. He doesn’t know anyone. All he wants is a pipe.

  ‘Give me a pipe,’ he says. ‘Countess, please.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ coos Sabina. ‘We’ll give you one in a little while. Come with me first. Let me sit you down and wash you.’

  *

  When they have been bathed and groomed and made to look something human, we lay them down on mat­tres­ses at the back of the house and give them cups of milk laced with laudanum to still them a bit. They fall back on pillows, resolute in their togetherness.

  News is trickling in. It hasn’t been long, but the world already knows. In certain corners people are tak­ing to the streets with placards and kitchen knives. Leo tells us that our video has gone viral. Half a million hits in less than twenty-four hours. The govern­­ment has declared an emergency and a curfew has been imposed on the Borderlands. The army has taken over the checkposts and Marra has gone missing.

  I unpack Begum’s ointments. Heavy glass jars of buttery panaceas.

  A boy in a too-small checked shirt and torn shorts comes out to watch. He is eight or nine, barefoot, pale. He must be Mala’s boy, Mingus. He stands beside me, swaying frontwards and backwards on his splayed feet. There’s a wooden spoon in his hand that he waves as if it were a magic wand.

  ‘Is that for me?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘It’s mine. My friend.’

  It must be what he uses to knock against the bedroom door. That constant knock knocking – a secret language only he can understand.

  ‘You can watch, if you want,’ I say.

  I have different kinds of ointments, one for each of them. I begin with Owain, pick up his heels, cracked and dry. I move up his shins, so thin and bird-like. To the knobbly parts of his knees. Groin, navel, belly, nipples, throat, arms, eyelids, nostrils, ear lobes, lips, forehead. I turn him around and begin at his feet again. Sweeping and kneading upwards, to the wide desert of his back, his hair, the tender part of his neck, every inch of skin anointed.

  Mingus parks himself on the floor a little away from me, looking over every once in a while to see what I’m doing. I want to put socks on his feet, give him a proper shirt and trousers. He has beautiful fingers, solid and shiny as piano keys. He holds the kitchen spoon in those fingers tapping it this way and that, in a world of his own.

  ‘Mingus,’ I call out. ‘You want to help me?’

  He doesn’t hear. Or if he does, pretends to ignore me. Tip tap, tip tap.

  I wonder what it must be to have a child like this. I used to think that only the most optimistic people had children, or the most short-sighted. Anyone who actually thought it through logically would see it for what it was: a dissolution of individual spirit. You see the failings of the world around you and still you think, I will bring another soul into it, and it will be all right, they will thrive and blossom and make something of life.

  And then there’s love. Love changes your mind too.

  If I hadn’t met Owain I wouldn’t be here, in this condition. Love suspends disbelief. Love is what a child like Mingus could bring, although I don’t think Mala sees it that way, or Sabina. Only the old chief is mad about the boy.

  After his nap the chief emerges with a mug of sweet black tea for me and a banana for the boy.

  ‘You have to peel it, and break it into two halves,’ he says. ‘And no part of it can be brown. He’s very particular.’

  Mingus’s face creases into delight. He takes the peeled banana from his grandfather and jumps up, running towards his room in a strange giraffe-like gallop.

  ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to name your son?’ the chief asks. ‘You know you’re going to have a boy?’

  *

  I don’t know how many days I spent in the old chief’s house. A week? Two? You lose track of time. I remember my body growing further and further away from me, the continuous swell and press, having to lie down and rest between sessions with Mala, Earl and Owain.

  I remember sunny days in the courtyard and the contented hum of an overfull house. Our duties were divided according to our capabilities. Rafi brought in the wood and water. Sabina cooked. Leo washed the dishes and monitored the various twitches and chirrups of his gadgets, informing us of the latest developments. The old chief entertained us with his banjo. Despite having few teeth left, he still knew how to turn a song.


  Day by day Mingus shed some of his shyness. He was a funny boy. Sometimes his eyes would fill up with tears for no reason that I could understand. Other times he would chortle to himself as though an invisible pair of arms were tickling him. Often, while I was administering ointments, he’d come over with his wooden spoon, pretending to be a doctor and tap the patients on their knees. Boink, boink, boink, waiting for a reaction.

  Sometimes the world returns to us so imper­ceptibly, it’s difficult to locate the seams, the exact junctures where things begin to change.

  I can’t tell you when the ointments started to work their magic. I only know it began, not in the knees, but in the eyes. Owain would say later, that it was like a curtain slowly being drawn. An uncovering, a resuscitation.

  It took a while before he could say my name. The recognition fluttering, hiding, reappearing.

  One day he slid my father’s ring off his finger and pressed it in my palm. ‘You really should take this back. Thank you for letting me have it.’

  If I could have managed it, I would have got down on my knees to give praise to every God and spirit I knew. But I was well past the stage of such acro­batics, I just bellowed across the courtyard, ‘Rafi, it’s time.’

  *

  Throughout my childhood what I wanted most of all was to escape Fountainville and never return. Every fear I know began when I was a child, and it has taken years for me to confront and vanquish them.

  Begum tells a story of when I first came to live with her and Kedar, when to add to my staple woes of poverty and plainness, I thought I’d been signalled out to divine the future.

  I remember thinking that if I could get away from Fountainville, I’d be able to reinvent my past and become a different person. I tried running away several times, never having the courage to get very far. Once, I put a knapsack on my back and managed to get out as far as the Northern Forest Ridge – ten kilometres out of town, past where Rafi’s house stands in the forests of timber and mahogany.