Beggar's Feast Read online

  “I must return to Madam.”

  But his feet were suddenly so heavy. And York Street itself, from here to the hotel, suddenly seemed too much for a man who’d been walking city streets like they were his own paddy banks since he was fourteen. Besides, from this side of the stall he could not see his hotel window at all: he could not be seen. He lit a cigarette.

  “Aiyo put that out will you! It’ll shrivel you before you can even get started. Would you like to try a little watercress in hot water instead?”

  “How’s that?” Sam asked.

  “If not watercress” —the rest of the words came fast—“I also have tea made from the bark of a kumbuk tree. Bitter but it rarely fails …”

  He went on, trying every sure-fire remedy and success story he knew. But Sam showed nothing to watercress or kumbuk, or to the tale of an Englishman who had taken five cups of a particular concoction and had five handsome sons to show for it, five crowns of gold. While the stall-keeper spun, Sam dropped cigarette after cigarette, crushed each like this was some victory and eventually he plucked a flower from the tree beside him but memory had him here too. It was wet to touch like a Malay Street shophouse flower hanging between humid bedroom bricks, and Sam started shredding its petals between his thumbnail and first finger, petals that were either a shocked or a tired out pink-red, now splotchy Sydney cheeks.

  “Ah, yes, I can also make shoeflower tea from those plants but that’s for the woman, for when you don’t want to marry her. It’s called, you see, a cleansing tea, Mahatteya. Worried lover-boys and mad fathers come for it at dawn. Just yesterday the son of one of our finest Tamil speechmakers came and took. But not something you need today.” The stall-keeper’s voice dropped. “Mahatteya, also, not here, but also, I have access to yellow oleander and to an even more potent one. What another of my English customers told me is called”—here he swallowed—“Gloriosa superba. The Glory Lily. Not an auspicious name, at least for the madam who takes any of it. Mahatteya, do you know about these flowers?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Of course not, and a bad omen even to mention on your wedding day. Now, if you don’t like to try watercress or kumbuk before you go upstairs, I have durian pulp, but don’t take it unless you can hold your breath like a pearl diver. Also cinnamon oil and rosewater for best-smelling breath and body. If it has been a long day of travelling for you and Madam, I recommend both. Also, look”—the stall-keeper reached out his opening hand—“for top-flight gents like you, tea made with Ceylon’s strongest cardamom seeds. These are taken from the very best spice merchant in all of Colombo, his family has been selling for centuries. Mahatteya, please, know it for yourself!”

  They were the right brown, but shrivelled. He breathed in just enough to remember the nature of such strength and smiled. Some poor Ismail, whether his former boss or his son or half-son, was still getting tricked or was by now tricking others by grinding fresh cardamom upon weak seeds too long out of their pods. He blew into the stall-keeper’s cupped palm. It made a dirty little windstorm. The stall-keeper dropped the cardamom and it clattered like a broken bridge of teeth.

  “Right,” said Sam. “Strongest.” He waited for the next thing to knock down. He wasn’t going upstairs yet.

  The stall-keeper seemed to drop to his knees but before Sam could peer over the counter the little man had come out the side entrance and rifled through a sack. Wordless, he returned to his stand, stepping back onto his fruit crate, and, staring at Sam eye to eye, showed him a long, straight knife. Right. Strongest. He sliced a copper onion in two. He tossed one half to the side and pulled free an intact ring from the other. He held it forward in the half-circle of his thumb and first finger like a squashed pearl. When in doubt for any and all wrongs and ills, take an onion, his mother said. When in doubt he’ll pay, show a knife, said his father.

  “Eye-slice of onion,” the stall-keeper declared. His tone was now flat as blade. “Take and eat and love your bride. Take a vial of rosewater too.”

  “And what will this do?” Sam scoffed.

  “This will do what you won’t otherwise do on your own.”

  Immediately, desperate happily, Sam tensed and clenched his teeth and made like a man about to tear down the nearest skyline. “You know I could—”

  “Aiyo Mahatteya, enough, please.” He made a face like someone was taking too long piercing one of his ears. “I have customers waiting. And your bride is waiting. You could take this and go, or leave this and go. I have only tried to help you and your madam this afternoon and see what I have for my efforts.” Still holding the onion slice in one hand, he showed the other, an empty palm below a shame-stained sleeve.

  “So you want money for me to eat a slice of onion?”

  “No, Mahatteya. I want money to forget that today, your wedding day, you had to eat a slice of onion.”

  He pulled open the almirah in vain. She came out of the electric-bright bathroom, where, bored far past tears, she had been staring at herself in the mirror, at the absurdity, the futility of her dress, of this going-away modern. He took her by the wrist. He led her past the bed, downstairs to the dining hall. They ate. He ate. She stared at the silverware. He ate her plate too. They went to another room and stood inside grand double doors watching English and Burgher couples glide and twirl to a music of lazy horns and drum patter, their eyes half-closed, their noses hooked to unseen wires hanging from the high ceiling. She put her hand on his shoulder and he turned looking ready as lizard if she asked him to dance but that was not it at all. Other than a little lime juice at Ambepussa, Alice had taken nothing since milk-rice before dawn and was about to fall down. Two stewards tried to help but he waved them off and took her upstairs and now there was nothing left but one bed. They lay beneath a fan going loud as a roosting tree, a starched white plain between them. She reached to touch his hair and then his cheek and Sam gripped the sheets with one hand and felt for the zipperhead with the other. Trying to split the dress open was better for his stomach churn than wondering whether onion could in fact banish memories of saffron folds and peppercorn, of ginger-root and swept butterflies. In the morning they took turns dressing behind the bathroom door. Neither spoke of the other’s crying. Nor did Alice ask, why so much rosewater and onion?

  For breakfast she ate two bowls of curd and even asked for part of his plate. They left the hotel and were driven to a photographer’s studio where they were placed in front of a dark curtain. Sam was given a top hat and leaned on a black umbrella and Alice was seated with a shawl around her shoulders and a white parasol open in one hand and here they were frozen and flashed in formal love. Afterwards Sam had the driver take him back to the hotel, and he went inside and then he went across the street with dining room cups and saucers and brought back their mid-morning tea. They drank like touring royals as they were driven through the city to the harbour, where he kept his office in a back room above a barber’s stall near the main jetty. Sam leaned forward and told the driver to take her back to the village. Upon Piyal’s returning the motorcar safe and fast, Sam said, he would pay for the boy’s first shave. He said this like it was the supreme prize of life and Piyal nodded thinking the drive itself was enough but he’d take the shave too. Sam turned to Alice like they were again perfect wedding-day strangers and said, “Expect me shortly and give my respect to your father.” And that was all. Her husband climbed out of the motorcar onto Wharf Road and in five fast steps became the rest of the city.

  Nine months later, no cries had come, as yet, from inside the walauwa; no labouring woman cries, no crying new baby, no mourning women. Alice’s father and her brother were waiting on the verandah. The servant was standing at the far side, studying a palm full of blown-down browned coffee blooms as if he had come upon flowers dropped from heaven itself. Later, for half a box of chocolates, he would tell Latha everything they said.

  “I won’t go in and see her, Appachchi,” Arthur insisted, “for the same reason why you refuse. Such things are not
done, at least if you follow the old ways.”

  “You are not to tell me about the old ways. No. And when it was my turn, when it was your mother, at least I listened from the hallway. I did not hide on the verandah like this—”

  “You mean hide in Colombo, no?”

  “—but that is not to be discussed now. Aiyo! What an omen to give your sister on this auspicious day! Wait. How do you mean, Colombo?”

  It was a full minute between them, a father-and-son silence. They were each in morning sarong cinched below their chests. Arthur’s was shock white and edged along its ironing creases with blue-grey dust; during his years abroad, where he had been sent by his father to become a doctor who would never have to return to this village, it had been folded and stacked in an almirah in his bedroom. Robert’s was also fine cloth and white, but it was patterned in faint diamonds and tea stains and cigarette holes, yellow and black, like burnt wedding rings. Robert was hunched at the shoulders from age and from the defeat of recent talk with his son, and also from the defeating prospect of another birthing day in the walauwa. Arthur was hunched from the coolness that could sometimes be early-morning upcountry air, a coolness that he had forgotten from his time in the heat and dirt that was cities, was Calcutta, where he had gone to London. The young man’s shoulders were also hunched from lying about medical college, from the knowledge that his father knew that he was lying about medical college and still would not relent in asking him to go see his twin sister in her first labour.

  Robert made a clicking noise from the back of his mouth upon realizing that when Arthur had said hide in Colombo, this was said against Sam, who was not here with his wife in labour but of course, as usual, away in the city. His driver, Piyal, had left in the middle of the night to bring him. Robert might have agreed with Arthur, but there was an order to things. He would first catch his twenty-one-year-old son at whatever badness it was that had brought him, unannounced, eyes everywhere but level, home. And then he might see about catching his nine-month son-in-law at whatever it was he should have been caught at—whether secret city rogue or just a bad husband who, since his wedding day, had visited the village with all the frequency and feeling of a green government agent: periodically and never but pained-looking. And like a good wife, Alice had played bitter daughter and said that her husband’s absences were not just because of his business in the city but also from shame, because his new father-in-law, her father, had never even tried to discover who threw the dirt at him on their wedding day. And Alice was, by old ways, right. Robert should have. But he had done nothing. The very point of marrying her off this way was to free himself from having to do such things. What is a water glass? What is poison?

  Not just himself. When his son graduated from the Buddhist boys’ college in Colombo but failed to win a Queen’s Scholarship to England, Robert had spent the family’s savings on his education abroad, and because by his own decree no doctor had lived in the village since his own father had fallen, his own son would not live here either, whether as doctor or Ralahami. As for the girl, he had married her off as he had. Let this city-Sam find and punish the man who threw the dirt. Let him contend with dry days and dead dirt and crops shrivelled and legions of old broken men waiting for nothing but more shrivel. Let him defend his house from the latest fish-stink moneybag and his low country chewing and his low offer. Let him chase off all the new charmers whistling through the upcountry these days, brown men in white suits speaking of the British Governors like they were brothers-in-law and batch-mates, sometimes wrapped above the waist in sarong and fine-jacketed and carrying on like the king’s men of old, their secret swords apparently ready to return the land to the glory days of Sri Vikrama’s Udarata. The politics, Robert and his villagers called those fellows. Salesmen and snake charmers all, introducing themselves as Congress one day and Legislative Council the next and National Assembly a week later and every tongue telling Robert that their coming to his village to seek his pledge of support was in fact their pledging their support and the support of the Crown or Congress or LC or National Assembly to him and his village. His son thought to shame him with talk of keeping to old ways as if, by 1930, old ways were anything but another slogan to be for or against in the Ceylon upcountry. Robert wanted none of it for him or his blood. And if his new son-in-law wanted justice, let him lash the dirt-throwing rogues to his motorcar and the nearest palm tree and ride. He lit another.

  “It is your place to go in and see about her state,” Robert said again, “because you are, for us, the London doctor.” Songbird and screech filled the morning air, and now, also, tapped ash, blown smoke. “You are the first doctor to come to the village in many, many years. I do not mean for your studies to be wasted here. I don’t! Where all the medicine these people want is things for cooling and mashed-up rubbish from the forest for aches and pains, and I know your studies are not yet complete, but you are already more of a doctor than betel payments and mortar mash and pouring oil in the nose, no? Aren’t you? Unless—”

  “Only in a place like this does the whole village have to find out whether or not the brother goes to see the sister when she—”

  “Aiyo! Only in a place like this, you say. And I can hear it in your voice, what this place must look like to you, now, from where you have been and what you have become. Ruined. You are ruined for this place.” And this was success, Robert thought. Shame made into freedom from the birth-village. But why, then, return, unless— “And that is why I cannot understand why you have returned like this, unless—”

  “I returned,” Arthur interrupted his father at the same point in Robert’s speculation as he had for nearly ten thousand such speculations since he had come home from Calcutta, where, until this last failing term, he had secretly been studying in the only medical college that would admit him while, through a series of go-betweens and confectioned letters, he’d allowed his father to believe he was, in fact, studying in London, “because this is my village. I am your son, the first-born and only son of the Ralahami, and this is my village. But then I receive your letter informing me that Alice has married a motorcar named Sam Kandy. The letter arrived in the middle of exams, and I blame it for what has happened. And so I have come to see about this, to make sure what’s mine is mine.”

  “And your exams? Your results?”

  “Daddy, may I have a cigarette?”

  “Arthur, why have you come home now? What have you done? What has happened?”

  “What have I ever done but what you have made me do? Did I ask to become an English doctor? Did I ever ask for anything but what’s mine by birth?”

  “I decide what is yours by birth. And what’s yours is your sister’s dowry money, what’s yours is the tuition and boat tickets and Parker pen it gave you. Now tell me your results and go see her in her time.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You won’t, or you can’t?”

  “I—can’t.”

  Now Robert knew for certain. He didn’t know how his son had pulled it off, the letters were always stamped from England, and Arthur seemed to have read the letters Robert had sent to the address he had given, Euston Square, London, but Robert knew. The boy must have come home on the last of the tuition money, he thought. He wondered where he’d spent the rest of it.

  “Son, putha, what colour are the lorries in London?”

  “I can’t.”

  Meanwhile, inside, Latha was about to pour out the broth when she thought she heard Alice calling from the back bedroom. She had started it cooking the evening before, and by morning it had boiled down by half. A full moon night, and between fits of sleeping until dawn Alice had been breathing Soo sa like Latha told her to. Soo sa But no, it was an outside noise, some songbird or other lonely at first light. Latha returned to the broth. Using one of the showy metal kitchen things the new husband had brought, Latha skimmed the pond-brown foam from the surface of the bubbling soup and smacked it on the ground outside the kitchen door, where a cat considered it until two do
gs barrelled in. Then she stretched a piece of muslin over the rim of the pot and drained the marrowy liquid into a cup that she would take in to the girl, whom she had raised from birth to bride and now birth. Alice was not lying in the same room as her mother had been, but still. Same house, same high round belly and otherwise branch thin. She would also weaken too much if the labour went too long. And so she would be made to drink this cup and would be made to drink more. Latha could also have asked Ralahami for a spoonful from his brandy bottle, which he kept in his room beside his English shaving kit and Portuguese aftershave—more things brought to the village in the vehicle. Latha had a joke with the washerwoman and with Lal, the Ralahami’s servant: soon the husband would run out of things to bring and then start fastening pieces of the city itself to the top of his vehicle and drive them to Sudugama. In time the joke passed down into the village itself, so that whenever the motorcar was heard from far off, never more than once a month, they watched from their dark doorways half expecting to welcome home at last their borrowed memories and shared notions and rumours and legends of the city itself: English horses the size of elephants; Chetty men with chests painted like jungle cats; windowpanes and saltwater waves.

  The brandy the husband brought a few months before would be fast-warming for the chills that would come between pushing, but Latha wanted him nowhere involved with Alice’s labour. Any him. When it came to babies born in this walauwa, Latha made no distinction between memory and omen. Even a man standing in the hallway was too much. At least the Ralahami seemed to accept this, she thought; he had been waiting on the verandah smoking and talking in low voice with Arthur since dawn. Later, for nothing more than some leftover sweets, she knew, Lal would tell her everything that was said between them. Meanwhile they had not come near the kitchen threshold even to ask for their own tea. Had she the choice, she would have sent the Ralahami and Arthur to fetch the husband from Colombo in the vehicle with Blue Piyal, as Latha and Alice had taken to calling the driver outside the boy’s hearing. But Alice had already sent the boy to bring the husband, who had sent the boy with the car from Colombo a few days before with instructions that when it was time, Alice should be driven down. He’d made arrangements for her to deliver at a city hospital, and if Alice thought it necessary, Latha could come too. Motorcar to city hospital and Latha could come too. Ha. Had she the choice, Latha would have given Blue Piyal a return route of her own devising, which the boy would have followed like a prayer, she knew, if only she said Alice wanted him to do it. A route that took father, brother and him, the husband, from Colombo to Galle to Hambantota, Hambantota to Batticaloa to Trinco, Trinco to Point Pedro to Puttalam, Puttalam to Kurunegala to the village. And by then, went Latha’s hoping, the men of the family would arrive at the walauwa to be greeted by Alice in her old age, Alice still living.