Beggar's Feast Read online

  Sam walked right into the guide’s outstretched palm, which stiffened to hold him.

  “What is it?” Sam asked, pushing the arm down and holding it there, squeezing the guide at the wrist like B. used to in Pettah when a man owed him.

  “Madam is—” he started, his voice wavering as he tried to twist free.

  “I asked Madam, not you,” Sam said, squeezing harder.

  “Aiyo hurting!” the man whined, dropping to a crouch and studying the man’s dusty suit. “All I am asking is small donation for telling Madam about temple.”

  “She has no money.” His tone was as unclear to himself as it was to the guide and Alice.

  “But you must be keeping it for her, no?”

  “Mokatha? What do you mean, keeping it for her?”

  “You are Madam’s driver, no?”

  Sam’s hand fell and the guide fled through the archway, gone like a bat woken by a boy’s rock. Sam stepped up to Alice, who felt pressure again and looked down in the barred light and the skin wasn’t as black and the toes not as knobby and the nails cut back but it did not matter. It felt the same. It looked the same. This was his dirty foot-cloth. She looked up but was shocked by what she saw. His face was shattered like a child’s, very like her child’s, like their son’s when he was waiting for her to tell him what he already knew: that a promise had already been broken and all that remained was his having to hear it said. She could have cupped her husband’s face, but she did not. She held her own wrist instead, the gold bangles cave cool against her palms. Because what sort of man would have any cause to worry that his wife would call him her driver, to lower him so? Only the sort that could be so lowered.

  He was waiting for her to say otherwise, to tell him, even if it were a lie, that she had said nothing of the sort to the guide, and then life could resume. All she had to do was tell him, just shake her head no, even look down and nod to admit yes but she did not mean it, to allow that he was her driver. Anything. But Alice said nothing. She stared back, eye for eye, silent and cold and, to him, as fixed as the surrounding stone. Sam took her by the wrist and led her from the cave, squeezing as if he was trying to break her gold. The Sudugama people followed, their heads ringing with such a story to tell, desperate now to be discovered and dragged home, whatever punishment was worth what they had just witnessed, what they could now tell. But they never would. Within the hour, a few of their heels would be bloody too, and when they reached home, two days later, and heard the story of what had happened in Dambulla as it was being told in the village and were asked what they knew, they would say they knew nothing, they had been praying in the caves the whole time.

  When they were past the verandah Sam let her go and stalked ahead. He waved off the old malli who had immediately approached, his head cocked as if it had been wrenched ninety degrees, smiling sweetly, bearing Sam’s shoes like holy vessels. Sam looked and looked until he saw the guide and then broke into a dead run across the bright barren plain. Alice watched him while walking toward the pile where she had left her sandals, her wrist aching and stinging as if it had been crushed in some stone beehive. She watched him give chase while her mind made mad figure eights, trying to determine if she had enough time to find the flowered talipot in the town square and persuade Blue Piyal to take her, her alone, home to the village and there persuade her father and the rest of them to roll boulders onto the Kurunegala Road before he came back. No: boulders he’d split. They’d have to move the village entirely, or at least get the metal-benders and toddy tappers and temple elephants to suspend it high above the earth, between the tallest strongest trees at the village limits, and then when he walked into its shadow—

  Only he wouldn’t be walking he’d be still running as he was now, here at Dambulla, and he’d run up the trunk and along the elephant’s back and then along a bent tree until he reached the lifted village and he’d not stop until he was standing on the verandah, brushing the dirt from his shoulder, smoking, asking for tea. But she had to try anyway. She found her slippers just as he found the guide. She stayed barefoot, worrying the stitching while standing with the other templegoers who had gathered to watch her husband beat the guide into the ground, knocking him down and then stomping, one witness later suggested, like a bitten snake charmer. Stomping and stomping until the guide’s calls for mercy became gasping mouthed words and then spit and gurgles, and then Sam kicked him in the side until the body turned over, one lung collapsed, and then Sam kicked the gasping air from the other side and the body turned over once more and the legs weakly pushed out and pulled in, pushed out and pulled in, like he was a frog on a riverbank, a newborn on a pallet, and that was when the women near Alice began to whimper for someone to do something because it’s a sin even to kick a dog. And meanwhile Sam was still stomping and eventually he fell to the ground himself, his blood-slick heel slipping as it came down a last time upon the guide’s pulped mouth, now a useless bloodmeal.

  The crowd was nearly upon him when he stood and brushed off his trousers. Turning his heels dry in the dirt, Sam winced and nearly dropped again, one foot was so sore. Breathing hard, wiping sweat and tears and dirt from his eyes, he looked for his wife, worrying no wondering no more than wondering if she had seen. No one touched him as he limped through the crowd, but behind he could hear them, their seething plans for him. What they had just witnessed was the day’s words made flesh and blood: walking away, unpunished, was one of the world’s evil owners, a helpless worker’s blood on his hands, his feet, the sort they had heard tell of in the May Day speeches in the town square hours before, the sort they had chanted against while they were promised that if they united in demanding justice in their fields and factories and plantations, then one day such men would fall just as they all rose up. This could be one day.

  Sam walked on, seeing Alice rushing down the pathway. He could feel the crowd coming behind him. He would be trampled if he didn’t run. He wondered if the last feet upon him would belong to a slick fat crow, if it would hop onto his chest when there was nothing left to do but savour his burning eyes. Burning for what he had been forced to do. He ran.

  Standing in the shade beside the Morris, studying chevrons of afternoon light coming through the flower-headed talipot, suddenly Piyal saw a barefoot Sam running in a hobble past Alice running in her sari and behind them every angry man in Dambulla was chasing them, others in the town square joining the mob like metal shavings drawn to a dropped magnet. Sam reached the motorcar first, climbed in and closed his door and coughed, then exhaled, then called Piyal to get in and go now, as if he was done shopping and now they were leaving Cargill’s. She was still twenty steps away. She ran straight into his arms, Piyal’s arms, and after all these years she was so thin to actual touch, which made him even readier to— but that was when the crowd reached them. Piyal lost his cap as he bent to push her crying into the empty backseat because Sam had already climbed into the front and was grabbing at the gear-box. The car jerked away just as Piyal was knocked down, and looking up the last he saw was so many downstriking, hammering feet. Before a regiment arrived to disperse the demonstrators with truncheons and boots far harder than any heels, an hour later, one of the first to have kicked in the fallen rich man’s face admitted, to himself, that he didn’t remember seeing blue eyes on the fellow who had beaten a poor guide at the temple nearly to death, but by then enough sand had been kicked onto the bloodied, suited body lying beneath the talipot tree to make it any evil rich man’s, and the rest were already chanting that they could never be stopped now.

  Alice dragged at Sam’s arms to make him go back for Piyal and the wheel turned sharply as he wrenched free and only just swerved the car away from a tree and back onto the road, picking up speed. She was sobbing and beating her chest and cursing—him, them, her father, her village, him, this car, this marriage, Dambulla, a queen who had loved her king to death, him, them, her father, her village. Herself. Minutes later, she lunged forward again and Sam pushed her back with an elbow
and stopped just before another tree and there they sat in silence. The inevitable beggars came to the windows, as did a few strutting young men desperate to be helpful with engine trouble, their own girls watching and laughing like champions. Eventually they all left. The brush was dense and now it was later in the day and so the world seemed to have seeped into a black-and-green wash and was silent but for birdcalls and their own hard breathing.

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Turn this vehicle around and go back to Dambulla and—”

  “And what? The boy is dead … the poor boy’s dead,” Sam said into his chest, his voice suddenly, finally hoarse, and Alice sobbed to hear it and suddenly she felt wild joy—at least there was this much heart in him—and she was angry and mournful and cursed that this, this little had to be her joy.

  “If he is dead,” Alice said, her voice shaking, her words measured like kitchen water in a dry season, “it is on you.”

  “Mokatha?” Sam said, whipping around, his heart all pit again.

  “It is on you.”

  “How, when it was you who had to come to Dambulla and not just come but come dressed in your upcountry cobwebs? What happened started from there.”

  “No. What happened started the day you came to my village.” He made to say something. He made like he was about to get out of the car. But then nothing. “Why?” she pleaded. “Aiyo just tell me why did you come to my village? Why did you have to marry me?”

  “IT IS MY VILLAGE TOO!” he shouted, finally, feeling somehow ruined and burned free of future ruin for saying it, finally, to someone, to her, to walauwa people, but now he was staring down at the floorboards. Suddenly it was impossible to look her in the eye.

  “It will never be your village,” she said, now calm as a cup of milk. She’d heard no confession, no revelation, only a plea in vain. “And that is on you too.”

  “Get out.”

  Alice said nothing.

  “Get out,” he said, terrified that he was still staring down like this, as was old ways right before a high-born lady. Terrified and now raging that the fate-roped world was holding his head in place.

  She turned and looked through the dusty claw-cracked window at the road darkening with the late-day gloom of tall close trees. How long could she wait there? Could she hire a bullock cart to take her to Sudugama? Would the driver accept a bangle until they arrived and her father could pay? Would Sam have to give him the money to pay? Could she have the driver’s cart loaded with the almirah and the dresses and the bright broken toys and the rest of his bloody loveshine and then have a toddy tapper climb and drop a flare on the cart as it passed so that all her husband’s poison goods would vanish from the village in flames? And what if he saw and took her by the wrist and flung her on top of the bier? So be it. So be it. Her children had known their mother longer than she had, and there were still her father and her brother and Latha and a saved village for them and they didn’t need to know their black-heeled father any more than they already did. And so when he took her by one wrist, Alice decided, hoped, she would take him at the other and hold him until the flames ran across her body to his and so by the village crossroads all that would be left of Sam and Alice would be blackened bangles and burnt cuff-links. So be it. Only do it as you were born to do it.

  “You want me to get out of this vehicle?” Alice asked.

  “Yes. Get out.”

  “I will.”

  “Right.”

  “Now,” she said, arranging herself in the backseat with shaking hands, swallowing, “get out and open the door for me like my old driver did.”

  He pulled her, head first, into the front seat and then he wheeled the motorcar back onto the road. Picking up speed, it moved like a water snake because he was trying to reach over and open her door and she was kicking and slapping and asking and screaming that his mother used to wash him at the village tap too didn’t she and then finally the door flung open and Sam leaned against his own to brace himself as he kicked and kicked until there was only air and if he had turned to look he would have seen a tumbling whiteness flattening out upon the black ground like a wave at night, he would have seen her crashing to mist and nothing. If he had turned to look. But he did not. There was no time. The Morris slammed into a bullock cart, missing the bullock itself and catching the cart full on. The cart driver was pitched into the brush just as Sam cracked the windshield with his forehead. The car was steaming and hissing and buried in a pile of shattered clay pots and when he pushed the door open more pots fell and shattered and wiping blood he looked for butterflies but all Sam Kandy saw before he fell was a freed white beast by the roadside eating and shitting in a perfect universe.

  Beyond the red brick orchid house where Sam was to meet Lord Mountbatten, British fighter planes were on evening manoeuvres. He watched them make their bored and boastful contrails, a cloud scrawl of caterpillars and tightropes hanging across the blue fade of upcountry sky. Now and then he could hear their engine drone but otherwise, in the middle of the throbbing green gardens, the noise this late of day was birdsong and bug fury, laggard’s drilling and the Beethoven horns of staff cars en route to the new PX. Sam blew smoke at smoke as the last of the fighters descended, skimming along the treetops so thickly leaved they were more black than green, like an ink-bottle spilt on stationery. Like a nosebleed on a bed-sheet.

  His hip was throbbing. Soon he wouldn’t be just waiting but waiting in rain, the August rain of the grand procession days. Since coming from Colombo to the British command set up at Peradeniya, near Kandy town, Sam had daily made himself apparent at a firstfloor office loud with clacking, dinging, screeching typewriters and with laughing barrels of American military men making jokes and love to the girls. Each time he received only apologies from a staff man who explained, with baroque patience, that the Supreme Commander had not yet returned from his meetings in London. With further apologies, he was told yet again that nothing more could be said as to why he’d been summoned, only that a cable from the British command at Tripoli had described a task requiring certain skills and Mr. Kandy’s name had been raised and that only the Supreme Commander could reveal the rest, which he would, directly, it was promised, upon his return. Finally, Sam was reminded, over the lung-collapsing sound of American laughing, that by 1944 much of bottom-right Asia would be won or lost from exactly here, and so this was a very busy office indeed and a man could do his part by waiting to be told how he could do his part. By please waiting elsewhere. And so Sam paced through the Swiss Hotel’s dim and echoing corridors as if hour and minute and second hands would rise out of the floor itself and take him by the ankles if he didn’t stamp every one of them in place and so have at least that one victory while waiting for Lord Mountbatten.

  He kept visiting the office anyway, because he wasn’t about to go walking into Kandy town for a visit to the temple, and because the last time he’d been away from Colombo for more than a day and a night, leaving Curzon to run things by himself, he had lost so much. He came because he still had to visit the village before returning to the city, to learn how his son’s engagement tour had fared. And he came because of a Burgher girl with sea-green eyes, second desk from the door, a hacked-in-half almirah on blocks. Not since Mary Astrobe and five years a widower.

  After Dambulla, a three-cart procession had carried home the wrecked Morris and a sleeping Sam and Alice’s birdcage body. It was followed by a mad potter who emptied a sack of shards at the village crossroads when Robert refused to hear his claim. On the next auspicious day, Alice’s body was grand-burned upon the great green clearing. Among the mourners were those who had lately gone and come NOT FROM THE WORKER’S RALLY but as pilgrims from the cave temple. Heaving and collapsing, they grieved like palm trees in a monsoon, pulling their hair and tearing their shirts and going louder than the mourners hired in from the next village, louder even than Latha herself. Meanwhile Sam lay like a stone in a back room of the walauwa. Ten days later, he stirred. With the household
called into the room and watching, he began to spit out words like bits of glass. Robert stopped him with his free hand and while he was coughing into the other, Sam waited, wondering how far he’d get on his tingling legs before the metal-benders caught him and bent his heels into hammers to break apart his face. He’d been fever-dreaming since they’d laid him here. But when Robert stopped coughing he only motioned fierce Latha to bring George and Hyacinth forward to show respect to their father. The boy dropped milk toffee on Sam’s bed-sheet. The girl asked when Blue Piyal was coming back to the village. There were more bits of glass but Robert cut off his fellow widower to send the children out and ordered wretched Latha to bring in a good breakfast. Then Arthur nodded and Robert nodded and Sam was asleep before Latha returned with a plate of yesterday’s rice mashed with banana and gall.

  A dreamless week later, Sam was walking around the widower’s walauwa as if its walls would fall on him if he stopped. Robert, who’d already decided that he had to decide the black beast vehicle and road itself were the only bloody murderers this time, asked Sam what he thought should be done with the villagers who had gone to Dambulla. Sam asked what they’d said about it so far. Told that they would say nothing, Sam said having to stay in the village the rest of their lives would be punishment enough. Robert agreed. Sam said he had to return to the city and Robert proposed the children stay at the walauwa and that Sam would come when he could. Which, over four fat war years, he did, after first finding a new driver, a Trinco-born Tamil named Joseph, and getting himself a new vehicle, a 1938 Morris Eight, painted cricket ball red. Some in the village called it a darker shade.

  In recent months, Sam himself began to see bloodred when he came home. It was on sheets hanging from an RAF laundry line in the inner courtyard of the walauwa, where old Latha ordered the washerwoman to dry them because if they were taken down to the laundry rocks the villagers would start marriage talk about Hyacinth. But at fourteen his daughter was still a little girl whose father gave her dolls, who spent most of her days folded into her late mother’s almirah, waiting for nothing. The boy, though, was otherwise; the bled sheets were his, from nosebleeds he seemed to sleep through. Thick, hairy, all belly and jangle, George Kandy at fourteen was far hungrier, readier, understanding of hunger than his father had been at thirty. The year before, two seventeen-yearold girls had been bathing and only turned their backs and cinched their water cloths and stopped smiling to scream blue murder when one saw the other’s mother suddenly standing behind George, who had been watching them, one hand upon the man-sized boulder that marked the laneway to the village water-spout. After Robert and then Sam were informed, Robert had slapped his grandson for shaming the walauwa and Sam had come from Colombo with American cigarettes for the fathers of both bathers, cookware for the mothers, and a Meccano set to be divided between the brothers without care to match wheel for wheel or hooks with string. (The trading market for the pieces between the two houses, inevitably vicious, ended relations between the families. Both girls were then approached by older brothers who promised protection if they would only vamp past the walauwa to the water-spout one last time: fat George Kandy must have had stacks of Meccano sets in there, and meanwhile the rest of the world had three-wheeled cars and cranes that could carry nothing from nothing. The girls refused, having already been given Nestlé chocolate and also nylon stockings that were promptly, ravenously confiscated by their mothers, who would never wear them.)