Which brings us to the unsettling conclusion of the story. Owain saves Luned from the wall of stone with the help of a white lion, and returns to the Lady of the Fountain for what seems like a millisecond before the entire jamboree abandons the fountain and follows Owain back to King Arthur’s Court. After this happily ever after, there’s also the addendum tale of the Black Oppressor, who has imprisoned twenty-four (the recurring number) beautiful and sad ladies, all of them daughters of earls. Naturally, Owain gets the better of him, frees the ladies, and brings them to court as well!
I call it an unsettling conclusion because throughout the story I had a sense that the fountain was important, that it was worth protecting. The fountain was, in a way, the central character – mysterious, magical, rooting the myth to a particular landscape. People were killed and maimed because of this fountain. The Lady was famous because of this fountain. We never know exactly why it’s so special, but we know it is. So it is something of an anticlimax when the fountain is so unceremoniously renounced. Still, it gave me a beginning. I knew that in my version, the fountain’s keepers would remain loyal, that no amount of luring from distant lands could unsteady them.
*
Stories, for me, often begin with images. Images act as triggers to certain moods or situations, and can set the entire narrative arc in motion. What stayed with me from the original myth were the fountain, the character of Luned, and the image of twenty-four golden-haired maidens, who seemed quite content to be captive in a castle. These women were like extras in a movie, body-doubles. They existed only as a collective, never individually, their main occupation in life apparently, to embroider, sow, and impress their great beauty upon passing strangers.
During the time I was reading ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, I came across an article about the surrogacy business in India – a $2.3 billion industry fuelled by 350 fertility clinics, all relying on the services of poor, often illiterate women, who offered their ‘wombs for rent’ to mostly western clients. In America, where surrogacy is legal, the process can cost anywhere between $50,000-$100,000. In India, clinics charge between $15,000-$20,000, which includes the surrogate mother’s fees of approximately $5,000 for her efforts. One of the doctors interviewed said of the current situation, ‘When it comes to ethical conduct, it might as well be the Wild West. Forget laws... there are no rules.’
The article in question, ‘Inside India’s Rent-a-Womb Business’, was printed with a photograph of a group of women in a room, lounging around in nighties, sitting or sleeping on a row of metal beds. The room was bare except for a wall-fan, a sagging curtain, and a clock. For the entire duration of their pregnancy, these women would stay in this ‘cloistered’ residential facility. Here then, was my castle of twenty-four maidens.
There were other inspirations: A trip I made with Médecins Sans Frontières to Nagaland, in the Northeast of India, to report on their healthcare situation (in a word – terrifying); and the American television series, Deadwood, a western set in the late 1800s in South Dakota at the height of the Gold Rush.
Deadwood helped to provide an interesting ethical framework for my story. To liken the surrogacy business to the Wild West, as the doctor in the article suggested, meant looking at those age-old motivations of money and greed; and how when there’s an obscene amount of money to be made, various inelegant aspects of human behaviour are forced to the front. But Nagaland, a frontier land in its own right, offered most of the topographical and anthropological details for my imaginary town, Fountainville.
Nagaland is one of the most militarised zones in India with problems of drugs, arms and child trafficking. The tribes there used to be headhunters before being converted to Christianity by Baptists in the early1900s. Located in the tri-junction of India, China and Burma, Nagaland is not an easy place to get to. The mountains are stunning, and the surrounding forests are lush and filled with possible enchantments, but the roads are treacherous, sullied with potholes, hairpin bends and dizzying drops. Going to Nagaland was my experience of ‘the remote and uninhabited regions of the world.’
The town of Mon, where I stayed, has a Main Street very much like the one in Fountainville, with an Ambition Computer Centre and a Sanity Boarding Home. The civic hospital, where I spent most of my time, was best described by a local as a ‘glorified cowshed’, with no running water, erratic electricity, dirty pea-green walls, and rickety iron beds with crumbling foam mattresses. The local staff, including doctors and nurses, all constantly chewed betel – a Naga preoccupation. Most of the cases treated at the hospital were for gunshot wounds (often alcohol-fuelled and self-inflicted while hunting for birds), electric shocks and pregnancy deliveries (although they had no facilities for C-sections). The nearest big hospital was a ten-hour drive away. Compared to the sophisticated medical facilities found in mainland India, Nagaland was stuck in a time warp circa the age of Florence Nightingale.
When I began writing Fountainville I knew I didn’t want to write a story about a place that already existed. The original myth is so wonderfully unspecific in its geography that it allowed me the rare freedom of writing about anywhere. Certainly, Nagaland is present, as are echoes of the Wild West with the gambling saloons, opium dens and gun slinging, but it is the fountain and all its possibilities that really centre my story.
*
The great Indian poet and scholar AK Ramanujan had an interesting theory about time in myths. In male-centric myths, he wrote, the prince goes off on adventures and conquests, and this is how time is measured. But in female-centric myths, time is calculated between the interior and the exterior.
Some of the themes I was keen to explore in ‘The Lady of the Fountain’ were the idea of portents and signs, the Matryoshka effect of the story within the story within the story, visibility and invisibility, the body and sexuality, and the tensions between the insider and the outsider. Very early on I knew that my retelling of the myth would have to be female-centric, not least because the fountain is a fundamentally feminine symbol. Wells in all mythologies, but particularly Celtic wells, are receptacles of healing and fertility, the place where the natural and supernatural worlds connect. Inner-outer. They are sources of water, that most important of the elements – life giving, sacred.
I knew as well that I would have to give agency to the two main female characters – Luned and the Lady, or in my version, Luna and Begum. For agency, they would need to have strong voices and strong desires. To shift the story so decisively towards this inner-outer model meant greatly diminishing the swashbuckling ways of the knight, our hero, but I compensated him with an inner-outer experience of his own, I hope.
Retelling a myth can be a challenging experience. Retelling a myth that is not your own, doubly so. One of the privileges of writing fiction is that you are allowed to manipulate reality and imagination in order to fashion your own sense of the truth. I made several departures from ‘The Lady of the Fountain’ in order to restore a unity that I felt lacking in the original, which I hope will not be taken amiss. There were so many possible stories to tell. For a while I did not know whether I wanted to write about a lion escaped from a circus, or a wish-giving well in a French village during WWII. Like all stories thankfully, Fountainville proved to have a pioneering spirit of its own.
Tishani Doshi
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Carlo Pizzati, Michael Wiegers, Diane Paragas and Arpana Agarwal for early inspiration; DW Gibson at Ledig House for the usual; Scott Carney for his reportage on surrogacy; Marina Berdini at Médecins Sans Frontières for sending me to Nagaland; and Penny Thomas at Seren for asking.
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE
www.serenbooks.com
© Tishani Doshi 2013
ISBN 978-1-78172-110-0
The right of Tishani Doshi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs a
nd Patents Act, 1988.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Mathew Bevan
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
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