Beggar's Feast Read online

  With the engine cut, they could no longer pretend the chanting ahead of them was just strong wind in the trees. Hundreds of the others going to Dambulla for the May Day workers’ rally milled past. The greatest number were the village poor walking in the white they otherwise kept for temple days; there were also handfuls of teapluckers dressed their best from head to hennaed feet; and, fewer still, city labourers smoking beedis, dressed in nothing other than the scandal cloth of their daily toil, pied and grimed by blood and spit and sweaty dirty fingers, everything tattered and torn by too many things to recall and where was the money to patch or buy a new anything let alone to eat or feed? All of which was why they, why all of them, had come by train-top and airless bus to rally at Dambulla. Some stared in at Piyal and Sam and Alice as they passed, others made a show of not doing so, whether from fear it was their plantation boss or factory owner, or from pride that they were part of something this day that was more powerful than any man with a motorcar. There were, no doubt, also a few who were half staring to see if any of the stones they’d been throwing at the Morris since it had first passed them had done any damage.

  Alice sat up and smoothed her sari as she moved away from Sam to stare back, through the clawed glass, looking through its refracted violence for any of her villagers in the approaching crowd and wondering about what her husband had warned of before they had left the walauwa the night before. Just how many of those men would like to put their hands around her throat and shake free its gold? Sam leaned forward to tell Piyal to drive on. Sam leaned forward again and this time said Madam is fine and Madam said to drive on, and so they went.

  When they reached Dambulla, Sam told Piyal to park under the tallest tree they could find in the town square, a bushy-headed talipot in full flower. The first men to rush the car were three Englishmen, cricketers who had come to town that morning for a friendly by the lake. Their faces in the windows looked far past irritated that they’d lost a fine day for their innings—they looked like terrified, exhilarated children happy to be found alive in a sudden evil snow. But then they saw Sam and Alice in the backseat, and a blue-eyed driver in front. Whatever this revolt against reason and order and white man was, it had already begun. They fell away from the Morris and decided without debate that the only rightness remaining was to return to the grounds and wait out their fate in the well-stocked clubhouse. Provided it had yet to fall to native rot, they would wait there, fortified with gin and sandwiches and practice bats, for whatever came next.

  “You saw their faces,” said Sam. “Englishmen. And even they are afraid to be caught in this crowd. And still you want to get out of the vehicle and look for your villagers?”

  Alice said nothing and for the second time in his adult life Piyal spoke first.

  “Madam, please, Mahatteya is right. Please stay in the vehicle and let Mahatteya go.”

  “And Piyal will stay with you, won’t you Piyal,” Sam said to Alice. But he could tell nothing in her face at mention of the boy’s staying with her. Meanwhile, Piyal tried to catch Madam’s eye, to tell her with his staring that yes he would protect her from all of them if she stayed in the motorcar. More even. For years he had gone to bed sending the Mahatteya on a southbound train, just as Sam Kandy had once done to Henry Paulet’s other servants. And now, in Dambulla, after the Mahatteya got out Piyal would drive the Morris anywhere she wanted, whether back to the village or down to the city and the harbour and straight onto the jetty and hammering up one of the rusted wide ramps they banged into place when they were unloading buses from London or sending elephants to the American circus and the two of them would wait there until they heard new harbour birds and then drive down another ramp into another weather, into a whole other life where, he was certain, his blue eyes would get him a brown-eyed driver and a position in a bank and her her her.

  But Alice said nothing. Her face was all and only readiness to show Sam what she was willing to do herself, readiness born of her blood-rushing conviction that when she walked through this crowd it would give way as it ought to, and that soon they would be returning to the village with the shamefaced runaways trailing home behind the car. She only had to find them. She made for the door and Piyal jumped out to open it for her and Sam followed but Alice did not wait for him to go first. She walked right into the crowd, which was hot and hungry and bored, a terrible three things for a crowd to be.

  Sam made his way through the masses, trying to match Alice step for step, and failing. The others would give way no more than the span of her fine white shoulders and immediately close when she passed, before he could step into her forward wake. So much for revolution, he thought. Still, even following behind her, he was impressed, envious that she did not have to push through as he had had to everywhere he had come and gone. He was also certain they would find no one from Sudugama because they, the hundreds upon hundreds of gathered villagers, looked each and every one the same: the same round brown faces made darker by day upon day in the sun-beat fields, too dark to look or feel worthy of any greater life than another day in the same field unto death and the same for their children’s children; faces that seemed near-black as good dirt against the white clothes they had worn to come here, let alone against the whites of their eyes or their bent chipped teeth those rare times they looked back at you or spoke in your presence, because otherwise these were faces that had been made constant in their downward glances by year upon year of working those sun-beat fields, and by generations of respect for the rock-face logic of blood and stars and caste, a marrow respect for those who were born of the merit of past lives into lives set above their own, whose fields they had come into this latest life to work. And so they had been persuaded to come here to Dambulla, on May Day, leaving fallow their known world, to be told why such toil and such respect were history and headmen’s ongoing outrages against them, outrages to be rallied and chanted and marched against until stopped. And as one grand body they had been all day ready, even roaring in agreement. The courage that comes of hearing your voice as a thousand voices. And yet, when a fair-skinned walauwa lady wearing an old-time sari walks straight toward you and suddenly you’re only one person and she’s trying to catch your eye and know your face, you do what you were born to do: you break stride and drop your head and wait to the side until she passes and meanwhile you hope she has no cause to linger. And, when she’s walked on, you wonder who it was in the suit that shoved by after her, his black eyes staring like a crow following a squirrel he wants the world to know is already his.

  The Sudugama villagers saw her before she saw them. They were waiting their turn at a water tap where a local woman, supremely indifferent to the thirsty dusty marchers around her, was crouched on the smooth rock ledge that circled the stone-pillared spout, washing each of three naked little boys who were puffing their cheeks and chests to think that all of these people had come here to watch them take their day’s wash. When one of the people from Sudugama, a weaver, saw Alice coming, dressed as she was, he remembered the walking-to-temple stories his grandmother used to tell. He was certain this had to be the ghost in the high grass behind the walauwa, the ribbon-haired Hamine of many years before, who had disappeared on her eldest daughter’s wedding day some time after no one particular villager had poisoned her husband the old Ralahami because he had tried to send the village’s men to Road Ordnance duty. Of course, thought the weaver, the ghost was returned to life all these years later because now, finally, in coming here for this, the villagers were again killing the walauwa people. But then the weaver saw Sam’s dark shape walking behind her and knew it was Alice, and his ghosted, guilty imagination collapsed as he muttered “Amata siri.” Hearing him, the others looked up and saw her coming with the husband and cried “Apo!” and with the next breath every single one of them began to accuse and blame everyone else for tricking them into travelling here. They talked over each other, their road-dusty arms chopping the air to lend the right rhythm and threat to their louder and louder claims, all of whi
ch ruined the three little water-clowns’ washing-day performance, who whined to their mother who had before been amused by the crowd’s fighting but now broke squat to curse the whole lot for coming to her town and carrying on like this. How disrespectful! she scolded, especially so near the sacred cave temples and of course. Of course! Every one of them had the same story one breath later: they had only come from Sudugama to Dambulla on pilgrimage. May Day? What is May Day? Someone had offered them seats in a bus and they had accepted only because it meant they could go and come home faster than otherwise. Before Alice could reach the water tap they were already walking away, solemn to temple, rushing to the caves.

  The tap’s water was running clear and what she was wearing was so heavy, was meant for sitting and fanning, not for searching through blowing dust and thronged crowds and the high heat of midday. But she could not drink because there was no time Sam said, after ordering off the cursing local and her three boys and then taking a long splashing sip himself, slurping the water from his flat palm like any villager might, as if he was himself born to such low drinking. There was no time for her to drink as well, Sam repeated, now with a fine cold throat, his hand resting on the tap’s round stone cap like it was his prized pupil. And besides, how would it look for the Hamine to sip like a washerwoman?

  In silence they followed the rising pathway that ran along the base of the rock face until they reached the temple’s entryway, a long white verandah. The Sudugama people had long since passed inside, hands cupped full of frangipani bought beside the stall where they left their sandals in a pile like many others, each a tumbled pyramid of thin cracked leather. They went into the holy darkness complaining about the injustice of the flowers they were carrying, offerings they had purchased for far too much because their eyes were darting everywhere else in search of the bright catch of her gold bangles in broad daylight. How expensive, how wilted, how limp were the petals, like heat-sick children, and even in the shade of the temple’s verandah and the candles and ledge light of the caves you could tell the flowers were already browning. Bad omen bad omen bad omen. How much better—whiter, fuller, cheaper— were the temple flowers to be had back home! How much better if they were there now and had never heard of workers’ rights or been promised the future. But at least now when she found them, they would be in prayerful repose. If she found them: the caves were large and many and crowded with others in white, their palms also made into cups of bloomed once-white. If she found them: she had come with the husband and everyone knew he would never stay long enough for them to be found: since his wedding day he always looked ready to leave.

  Foul that Alice walked so slowly and that he had to go into a temple now, Sam paid a smiling malli to hold his socks and shoes— the man was in fact older than Sam but had from birth been barefoot and curved sharply along the spine, born to be helped and helpful. Handing them over, Sam made it clear that he was paying for his shoes and socks and for nothing else: Alice would have to leave her sandals in one of the piles of village sandals because she had come here to respect the old ways, the stinking piled-up old ways. Dambulla temple felt nothing like the grand temple at Kandy town where he had been dropped by his father that rain-joy ginger-toed morning years before, nor was it like the small white temple by the village. And still, walking barefoot along the pebbly passageway that led to the sacred caves, his feet cool and pricked by so many little stones, he would have turned and run from this blackness of memory and devotion. Monks, old and young and even one as young as he had been, nodded and smiled like cats as he passed, no doubt waiting for him to drop his wallet and wife’s gold in their beggar’s bowl.

  In the first cave, his heel crushed dropped flowers as he followed her in. His every necessary breath was a sweet full nausea of squished flowers, body sweat, lamp oil, Tiger Balm, oiled hair, and child’s mess. His eyes suffered more: everywhere in here were Buddhas awaiting his devotion: stone and gold, seated and reclining; one was a recumbent giant; fifty small ones were arrayed in gold; and hundreds upon hundreds were painted upon the smooth stone walls. In the second cave they were seated row on row in a fading field of saffron and cinnabar lotuses, their composed faces lit up by candles and oil lamps and revealed in their greatest number whenever clouds cleared and fuller sunlight filled an archway. Room to room Sam followed his wife, burning only more to face more and more of them. They had been here, like this, for centuries, fixed upon the walls, carved in stone and gold, unchanging, no trajectory, nothing to run from, nothing to run to, only summit. Master of the world. In the third cave, arcing bands of sunlight showed more than Buddhas. There were also frescoes of brave kings and handsome warriors whose devotions and victories won them places beside the holy men. Sam ignored the images of kings kneeling before monks, their hands full of flowers and gems. What caught him were paintings of great men shooting arrows at unseen enemies, riding white horses upon crimson fields, walking upon strewn white flowers beneath copper parasols, or sitting on jewelled chairs at the centre of a fixed and jewelled world of grateful wives and loyal children and loyal servants bearing lamps on staves and pitchers of water and baskets of grain and flowers, and meanwhile, to the side, mild elephants were waiting to move the world as was commanded. These were fixed constellations of men made immortal at the height of their trajectories. Assured, arrived, served. Storied. As he walked on after his crowded-in wife to still another room, his teeth grit, his hands opening and closing like a virgin assassin, Sam wondered if Alice was really looking for the villagers. Was she in truth leading him in and out of these places to show him what he could never be? To show him so much legend upon the walls, all these fixed, these jewelled, these jurying stars?

  He nearly knocked her down going into the last cave, he was walking so close behind. Not Sam, but a would-be guide. Alice had already ignored his mealy offers of a tour and then his mealier launch into explanations of whatever statuary or fresco she’d earlier passed, and she had ignored his questions as to her needs—cool drink, nicest fruit, a shaded escort from the temple to the town square whether by foot or carriage he could arrange anything to suit Madam’s needs—half because she was searching the worshippers for any face that, seeing hers, would go pop-eyed and blank and so be caught before it had time to look away, and half because such was the very world she had come here to maintain, a world where a woman like Alice did not speak to a man like this. Pretending not to hear was how to deal with such things when no buffer of servants was present, nor father nor brother nor old-enough son. When, most of all, there was no husband with the presence of mind if not birth to see, step in, and send the beggar off. Yes Sam had followed from cave to cave but he was always off to himself, presumably trying to find the villagers but really looking as he did whenever he went to temple in the village, swallowed and bitten, like every moving thing inside was a scorpion, like the temple itself was a belly. She had watched him staring at frescoes like he was ready to split the painted stones. And so in the meantime Alice could only ignore the guide, which only encouraged him and by now he was convinced that Madam was looking for something that, on this suddenly auspicious day, he was self-appointed to find for her.

  “Madam please if you please follow my arm to see most special statue of Lord Buddha or Madam if you please come this way Madam I shall show you most famous place where most famous queen died of thirst chained to window bars mourning the king and refusing to marry his brother.”

  She turned to see evidence of a wife, any wife, who so loved her husband. She followed the guide’s reed-thin arm as it pointed to the barred window and she followed him to it and took in enough of his hot fast wordmeal to hear tell of a thirsty queen hanging by her wrists against this very wall for love, for love. It was a fine story and the guide was honoured to have shared it with such a fine audience. Alice smiled tightly. And only then did his words slow, like rainwater still dripping from leaves the next morning. “Madam, please, whatever you think is best. In the village I have my wife’s mother and a lame brother
besides my own four children.”

  But look at her. She was wearing clothes meant for women whose lives were so high, so protected, so intact, there was never any need that required anything so common as money. As Alice searched the low cave for Sam, the guide placed his toes upon the already dirt-smudged hem of her sari, pressing down and curling forward, letting her know her place was now fixed.

  She looked down. In barred sunlight the bottom of her sari looked like trampled temple flowers. More than trampled: she saw the man’s foot firmly upon it, bare and flat, knob-toed, field black. Her skin crawled to see his toes curl into the old fine cloth, to see the toenails overgrown and white as her sari had been when they had set out in darkness from the village the night before. Nails so white as to look almost fine, shaming her sari, now some low-born devil’s foot-cloth.

  “Sam! SAM! Aiyo Sam please come—”

  The guide saw him coming before she did and, stepping forward, grandly gestured toward the archway out of respect for the worshippers who had stopped at Alice’s voice and were watching to see what would happen next—save about twenty who were now looking down down down, certain they had been discovered, waiting for him to come and grab them by their hair and tie them to his motorcar and drag them home.