Beggar's Feast Read online

  She would not mind such slowness for the women who had been sent for either, Alice’s aunties, the Ralahami’s elder sister and the younger, the bride-of-next-week as she was still known in the village. They lived with their fat smiling husbands and overfed sons and fat dowry daughters in Mahaiyawa, on what they thought was the far better side of Kandy town—you could tell from how they looked and looked around those rare times they visited. Who, upon their grand fussy arrival, would take over with Alice, just as they had at Alice’s birth, and at Alice’s wedding, and Latha would have to play along again, play like they knew better. And she would; she always did; she never but seemed to.

  “Latha! Latha aiyo, it’s coming again, hurting!”

  “Aney wait I am coming!” The broth splashing onto her hand, Latha rushed to the back bedroom, her bare feet pounding the bare floor.

  When she reached the room the pains had already passed and Alice’s head was turned to the side, her lips pursing air. Her many gold earrings, which she had insisted upon wearing for when he came, played back the morning light shining through the barred window. Latha could still remember boring the girl’s ears with a lime thorn and then curing the bleeding pinpricks with the cut lime. How many times had Latha swept from the corridor into this very room so someone would find Alice hiding in the almirah, the old almirah that had been junked behind the kitchen two days after the wedding, when another, a hotel almirah from the city, had been sent in its place.

  “Alice-girla, take this before they come again.”

  “Who is coming? When is he coming?”

  “Just take this will you.”

  “Medicines from Aiya?” She had been born a minute after him but always gave Arthur respect as the older brother. She eased herself up to her elbows and wiped the sweaty strands of hair from her brow. Latha wiped too, needlessly, and then cupped her face, a jewel-perfect face finer than any hand save a mother’s deserved to touch. She leaned in, as she had so many times, with words and a voice and a look meant to be kept between them, to keep them as Latha thought they were—themselves unto each other and then came father, brother, the rest of the world, husband.

  “Mad? You think I’d let Big London Doctor come near now?

  This is strength for when you need it. I put only a little garlic. Drink before they come again.”

  “Who’s coming? When is he coming? He has to come for this, no?” Alice Kandy had never known a married woman as anything other than a visiting aunty or a bowing villager but even such passing glances were enough to know that what was hers was not enough. Nine months of it and finally, now, there was no more smiling and excusing that his work in the city kept him so far away; no more ignoring the empty chair kept daily for him at table and the empty bed beside her own; no more pretending along with Latha and the smirking envying rest of them that the gifts he sent with his blue-eyed driver and his own weeks-apart day-and-night visits were the free and fine goods of a modern married woman. He had to come for this. She turned her head, looking past the first gift, her grand GOH almirah. Until the contractions came again Alice’s eyes stayed there, on the threshold that gave way to the morning-bright corridor empty of all husbands.

  He had to come for this. If he did not, Piyal would say something. Piyal decided this again and again as he drove from the upcountry to Colombo, the Morris’s lights catching nighttime walkers and wheeling bats and the quartz-coloured eyes of woken dogs and so many insects that more than once he’d had to pull to the side and wipe a translucent furze of crushed wings from the headlamps. He would say something even in the new Englishman’s hearing, because she had said she wanted him, Sam, near for when baby came. And so she had sent Piyal to bring him back. And he, Piyal, would bring her husband back or he would say something, even do something, if he did not come for this. Alice, Madam, she called him Blue Piyal. Nine months he’d been her husband’s driver. Her Blue Piyal. Seeing her every few weeks, he knew how many earrings she wore in each ear and the singing of her bangled wrists going and coming. He knew where, whether upon or below her growing belly, she kept her hand when she was tired or laughing or pained. He knew every glance and angled view that could be had while she sat in the back of the vehicle.

  Reaching Prince’s Building, where Sam had recently taken over Henry Paulet’s vacated office and apartment scheme, Piyal could hear them inside, talking. But Piyal knocked and entered anyway and for the first time in his adult life, he spoke first.

  “Sir, please, you must come.”

  Sam did not stand. His new Englishman turned in his chair.

  “What, Piyal? Is she waiting in the vehicle?”

  “Sir, please, you must come.”

  “Why must I come, Piyal? Is Madam in the vehicle?”

  “Sir, please.”

  “Piyal. Is. She. In. The. Vehicle.”

  “No, sir. She is in the village, and baby has started.”

  “I told you to tell Madam she was to come to Colombo when it was time.” Latha.

  “HA!” said the Englishman, Charles Curzon. “You told your wife to be driven here to have the baby? My God, on these roads! She’d give birth in the backseat after the first bump!”

  “Sir, please, Madam said you must come.”

  “Must come, is it?” the Englishman answered Piyal, looking at Sam, who said nothing. “Well then.” He cracked his knuckles. “Of course that’s the right thing to do. Shall we continue this conversation upon your return?”

  “Piyal,” said Sam, “tell me, did you drive through the night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That is very good of you. I will tell Madam when we reach the village. Would you like to sleep and then we’ll go?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Right. Good news. Baby is coming?”

  “Baby is coming, sir.”

  “Right. And so I must go.” Sam stood and smoothed his vest. He walked to the door. Piyal and the Englishman followed and Sam held it open and Piyal went first and Sam put his hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and Piyal turned just as Sam closed the door and set the chain and they were already talking again. And Piyal went to knock and knock it down but what if he did and then said and tried to do and all of it for her but he was sent off for trying and never saw her again?

  The next day, when they arrived at sundown in Sudugama, the boot crammed with toys and tins and dresses, Sam came to the room and waited for Latha to leave, who passed into the hallway with her arms full. Then he knelt beside Alice’s bed and touched her forehead and told her he would have come right away but the driver had fallen stone asleep, day before, at his office door. And Alice nodded with nothing behind it, too tired for grief or gratitude, too exhausted to care whether her husband had been beside her every moment since her own birth or come just now, decades later, the twins themselves grown and married and gone. A boy and also a girl; the boy was considerably larger. Leaving Alice asleep, Sam nodded to the sideways-smiling aunties in the front room, accepted handshakes from Robert and Arthur and gave out cigarettes and then asked Latha to see the babies. He counted them, their twenty fingers and twenty toes, and he left the next morning. He had to buy more toys, toys now for two, toys for twins, toys for boys, toys for girls. And so for years afterwards, Sam Kandy’s son and daughter would know him as the rest of the village did—as engine noise and parcel string, as a day’s flash of love and pinstripes.

  All morning and still no sign of him. For hours they’d been waiting to escort the infamous Bracegirdle to the harbour, to make sure he left on a ship bound for London. Sam was pacing around his desk, circling a letter from Alice asking that he come to the village straight away, warning that if he didn’t, all would be lost. Curzon was sitting at his, wondering what story Bracegirdle had used to get onto the island, how it compared. Bracegirdle: the blond Jesus of Ceylon’s plantation workers in 1936 and 1937: by April 1939, old news in Colombo. He was leaving now because he wanted to, and such was his court-supported right as he made clear to any editorialist or bus
conductor still willing to listen to him, but regardless, as one of the Governor’s men had informed Charles Curzon in asking him and his partner Sam Kandy to see to the details of departure, there was no need to take chances. May 1 was nearing and workers’ rallies were planned across the island. Dockworkers and teapluckers and villagers were expected to gather, having been told by outsiders who understood nothing that wasn’t written for them in some white man’s pamphlet that they were the exploited poor and not simply dockworkers and teapluckers and villagers. In the meantime there was no need for ten thousand coolies to decide they had to see Bracegirdle off or make him stay and either way have high cause to stop loading ships for the day, which did no good for anyone, Curzon and Kandy included.

  And so arrangements were made to ensure Bracegirdle’s farewell was quiet, full, and firm if necessary, the details of which Sam had seen to while Curzon booked the island’s “most famous” revolutionary a first-class berth on a London-bound ship. And if Bracegirdle took the complimentary ticket, Curzon would be newsboy pleased to tell the near world. And if Bracegirdle insisted on travelling below deck and brown, in keeping with his speechmaking, Curzon would happily arrange for that too, and keep the difference between firstclass and steerage for his troubles just as, years and lives and worlds earlier, he had pocketed the penny between what he paid for the last of the day’s late-edition city papers and the cut rate he then sold them for to the lovelies leaving the late ferries on Navy Pier.

  That was back in Chicago, 1903, when he was still a Jewish kid called Saul Kurtz and he shared a bed with two older brothers and had to plug his nose to use the toilet because his father and uncle were trying to make cheese in the bathtub like the Italians next door. His life, until that night the letters of the late-edition headline were so big and black even his old zayde could have read it. DAUGHTER OF CHICAGO TURNED QUEEN OF INDIA! And just below that, LEVI LEITER’S GIRL SHINES AT DELHI DERBY! The rest of the front page was a picture of a smiling white woman riding an elephant covered in a thousand bank building rugs, wearing a dress that looked like it was made of ten thousand peacocks. When he was only six, Saul had spent his whole life’s money at the World’s Fair on one such staring feather. That night, he was late coming home. He would not join a crowded trolley for fear it would be crushed; the beating would be worth it to have this wild shimmery looking glass. But his onion-fingers mother only mashed his cheeks for her pretty gift. Eternal days later, when finally he found it, pressed under her pillow, the feather was frayed and faded and many times cracked along the stem. Ten years later, studying a newspaper picture of a beautiful woman robed in peacock eyes, waving at thousands, he felt connected to Lady Curzon, Chicago-born, whose father’s name was Levi too.

  That last night on Navy Pier he sold all his papers save one, the front page of which he studied a day later in the slatted light of a boxcar rumbling through Indiana. He also thought about how an Englishman would pronounce Saul and by Ohio he was Charles and by New York he was Charles Curzon though he went by just Charlie when he took deck-painting work on a Calcutta-bound steamer. Given a free day in Cape Town, he joined two other boys and went into the city. They got sailor drunk in a downstairs one-room bar and upstairs lost their virginity, all three to the same coffee-coloured girl. One of the others, a groomsman’s son born Jim Cole in West Virginia but trying to play a touring scholar from Boston named Kolbe James, said this felt like home. Charlie and the third walked back but forgot which ship was theirs and thought this was fine and funny and by the time they were sober it was morning and their ship was gone. The third boy suddenly admitted he was from Towson, Maryland, and that before this had never been beyond the Inner Harbour. The last words between them were his thinking out loud that the upstairs coffee-coloured girl might have had a sister.

  After a week of mumbling along to the rosary at a Goan-run boarding house near the docks, Charlie was hired onto an Aden-bound steamer where, it was promised, every other ship in port would be going to India. Day one in Aden, so hot and dry his throat felt like a deck-plank, the rest of the seamen went off to the bazaar but he followed the ships’ officers and Englishmen and found a shop in the Crescent where he bought a chalk-white suit that he wore for the first time ten days later in Colombo, where he introduced himself to the tallest white man he could find as Lord and Lady Curzon’s nephew Charles. Immediately the Englishman stepped back and bowed like G-d had tapped him back and forth with his fingers. A Ceylon Englishman bowing to a cheese-maker’s son from Chicago! “No doubt you must be looking for Queen’s House, yes?” declared the Englishman. Charles clipped out a “Quite,” and for the rest of the day there were only introductions and apologies as nephew Charles explained that someone on the ship had stolen his bags and billfold and soon enough he saw there was no need to reach actual India.

  He fenced questions for two years about his Englishness— from homesick sceptics about the location of his family’s summer residences and the health of headmasters and rowing coaches; requests for clarification about positions played on the rugger field and cricket oval; inquiries after the state of certain famous gardens. In 1906 his world-beloved aunt died and to see his face no one, not even that bucket crab Leonard Woolf, had the temerity to ask anything more save whether he was going to England for the service. He was not. He gave a sombre single rose to each wife of the men he was trying to work for, work with, work. He roundly declared, “She died just as she lived,” and asked that thereafter a period of silence be respected. Before long he had secured a good position in the Harbourmaster’s Office. Two decades later, few of the Ceylon English still believed he was true Curzon. You couldn’t but assume he was an American after watching him eat at your table. It was decided he must have been a relation on the late Lady Curzon’s side, and no one could fault him for pretending otherwise. Besides, he never dared to marry into any proper English family but instead wed an Anglican Burgher girl from Mount Lavinia. Over the years he raised peacocks in his back garden and worked mostly around the harbour. In 1930 he was deputized to look into a shipping agent’s racket—short-loaded rice and missing dockworkers and mariners sold by who? Where? To whom? At what cut rates? Enough to get this whoever this fellow was a white man’s vehicle?

  Curzon found Sam Kandy by following the Morris to a greyed wood building beside the very jetty where he had arrived years before, where, without his even having to ask, the wan-faced Tamil who ran the barber-stall on the ground floor pointed upstairs with his straight-edge, then went back to his work. Before Curzon was halfway up the stairs, Sam appeared on the landing.

  “Is that your vehicle below?”

  “Your name?”

  “Let me ask yours.”

  “I am Sam Kandy.”

  “Ah. I see. I am Charles Curzon. Is that your vehicle below, Sam Kandy?”

  “Why you are asking?”

  “Because the law holds that no native may own a vehicle,” Curzon answered, expertly twitching his moustache. “If you claim this vehicle is yours, either it’s been stolen or paid for in ways that merit further investigation.”

  “It’s not mine, and it’s not stolen. You can ask my driver. He’s downstairs, taking his first shave. I ride at the pleasure of a business partner, an Englishman.”

  “Ah. I see. And that is why I am here. Just who, in these things you’ve been doing, Mr. Kandy, is your business partner?”

  “Shall we go inside?”

  “Yes fine, let’s go inside, where you’ll tell me his name. And perhaps thereafter you shall tell me yours as well, your real one. Because we’ve heard much about you around the harbour and many of us in the Harbourmaster’s Office would like to know who you actually are. At least if you were a Corea or a Carolis all this moneymaking of yours would make sense. But just what is a Sam Kandy? What is your real name, sir?”

  “What’s yours?”

  A year later, they were in open business together. They started a shipping agent’s firm and worked out of a free office Sam knew of, in
a named building in Fort. There they collected fees from ships’ representatives who were never but needful of known and strong and sea-worthy men. Sam’s old office near the harbour they kept too; there they collected fees from young men lining the staircase every morning, many fresh cut and shaved while they waited (and Sam got a piece of that too): village sons sent barefoot, their best sarongs cinched at the knee and only let down just before they went in to meet the shipping agent Mahatteya; and also runaways, stowaways, middle sons, and the plain bored, all money-paying needful for someone in a good suit to guarantee the captains of the world-showing ships that they were strong and sea-worthy. And so Sam and Charlie made greater and greater sums between the two of them as the 1930s world moved itself from village to city and across the deep waters—from port to port came city-sized ships groaning with Burmese rice and German cannon, Saudi wool and racehorses, Ceylon cinnamon, British cars and umbrellas and children’s tea-party sets, American cars, American cannon, crated jungle cats and sitting rooms, coca, cocoa, coke ovens, coconuts, carousel horses from Austria, Chinese tea and oranges, cosmopolitan rats and newborns, Leon Trotsky, rabbis and near-whole congregations from Riga and Kiev destined for Palestine or the Lower East Side, shaved-down Boreal forests, American salt and Kolkata salt and Gold Coast salt, Greco pillars and sacred statuary and stacked American chrome, diamonds and coffee from Angola, Rhodesian gold and copper, tobacco, hooch, rubber, Airedales travelling in thicker blankets than most passengers, burnished film canisters of Charlie Chan, Tarzan, and … Announcing … Garbo Talks!, brides from Alsace for the bachelors of Fond du Lac, with father notes pinned to their coats and mother jewellery pinned in their hair, Japanese invited to pick the coffee trees of São Paulo, the Stalin Pocket Library (International Publishers, NY), thousand-pound slabs of Carrara marble ordered from Mississippi with the last of the family money to mark the founder’s grave on an otherwise razed plantation, Gros Michel bananas from Colombia and the guns and bullets to protect them, typhoid, fewer and fewer player pianos, a Buddha for Wallace Stevens, Malay tin and tinned meat from Argentina, nuns, salt cod from Newfoundland for white rum from Trinidad, and also, whether carrying it all or counting it or counting on carrying it, whether fighting or sleeping or praying or trying out new names on each other while sitting around, every colour and kind of coughing hungry ready young man. The world was coming in and out of Colombo, and Sam and Charlie were making money both ways while the rest of the island, brown and white there was no difference here either, spent itself in ceremonial divination and judgment of bloodlines and birth-villages, lands held and families married into, local Anglican schools attended.