Beggar's Feast Read online

  Six months later George tried again, this time using his own sister’s Duke and Duchess of Windsor paper doll collection. A girl had come to the back stairs of the walauwa with mending that her mother had done. George put aside the bundle and led her down to the stone sluice that ran the length of the walauwa, which in dry times was filled with brown coffee flowers and monkey droppings, dung beetles and once-bitten, too sour fruits. There, George offered her the dolls if she would press and hold her hand as he wanted her to. Latha came down looking for the girl. How dare she leave the Ralahami’s mending on dirt itself! She screamed to see George demonstrating his request and never fed him by hand again. And so again Sam had had to come from Colombo with more cigarettes and cookware, this time both for Latha and for the girl’s parents. He brought Bayko house blocks for this one’s brothers, and (because suddenly there were no nylons to be had anywhere upon the earth) he brought bars of white chocolate, which disappointed, looking like little more than lumpy milk. He also brought a new paper doll collection for Hyacinth and another for the nearly ruined girl, which was duly, ravenously mother-taken and forever after wiped and dusted.

  Father, grandfather, and uncle agreed that something had to be done with the boy before something really had to be done for a girl and her family. Colombo was decided against and the temple was decided against. There was nothing else but for George to be sent abroad for his schooling, only a long-term arrangement had to be arranged before he went. A car would be hired and Arthur and Robert would take the boy on a bride tour of surrounding villages. Sam would be notified when a suitable match had been found. In the meantime, Sam was to see about where in fact George could be sent for school in wartime, one of the things he could have been doing in Colombo these past few days instead of waiting around for Mountbatten.

  Enough. He had to go. But just before he abandoned the orchid house, Sam saw two men approaching in crisp tan uniform, their sleeves cuffed above the elbow, clearly Englishmen from their straight spines and murmuring mouths, their bougainvillea cheeks. The taller one was walking as if his body was itself a standard going before a reviewing stand. Mountbatten. Sam lit up and stretched, then arranged himself into the angly receiving pose he’d been lately using at the harbour with the wartime British. These last two years, officers had been coming to see him and Curzon at off-hours, with requests that they get down still more rubber tappers from Cochin, and also with assurances that their fulfillment of said requests— if accomplished without drawing undue attention to the rubber tappers’ arrivals from troublemaking Colombo labour men, who couldn’t meet the demand anyway—meant that once a week, back doors would be left open for them. And so came Sam Kandy’s first great wartime discovery, the stacked kingdom come that was the quartermaster’s dockside warehouse. His second, its perfect match: the allowance that the State Council had started giving all workers in the city for their sugar and flour and rice. But who spends free money on sugar and flour and more rice? What Sam did not sell to the thriving foreign-goods syndicates in Pettah and did not have to split with Curzon, he brought to the village and gave to Robert and Arthur and Hyacinth and to George, who, it seemed, had been giving it on his own terms.

  “Sir, may I present Mr. Sam Kandy, of Colombo harbour, a friend of our war efforts.”

  Sam straightened and bowed from the shoulders. He knew the British were worse than temple monks for waiting on ceremony, at least in the official hours. And this Englishman’s eyebrows were church-arched. The sort for whom there were only official hours.

  “Mr. Kandy, this is Lord Commander Mountbatten,” said the office man Sam had daily visited, who was smiling like he’d just won a bet by baking a cake in a helmet.

  Sam bowed again.

  “Kandy, is it?” Mountbatten asked, amused and curious, cutting and English.

  “Yes.” Knowing he’d only half answered. More than a minute passed in silence, the Englishmen’s smiles inexorably thinning. He knew what they were waiting for, that they would wait until Tojo himself was strolling through this garden if they had to, and Sam had to see about George and get back to Colombo.

  “Yes, sir. “Indeed,” Mountbatten continued, his lips returning. “May I enquire, was that your father’s name as well?”

  “No, it was not. Sir. My, my father—”

  “Of course. Well, I suppose no man is ever born Charlemagne, is he.”

  “May I enquire, sir, as to why I was asked to come here?”

  “Yes. Good English, incidentally. English that comes from dealing with Englishmen, I can tell, and not from just listening to them go on in an Oxford lecture hall. As to your question. First, let me say I understand that you have been the very portrait of patience while I have been detained in London. It’s exactly this virtue in you and your fellow islanders, and also your support in this our great shared cause, that disposes me all the more to Ceylon’s claim for greater rights from the Crown. And let me further say that while so much of Asia waits on our next endeavour, this matter between us, Kandy, is at the very top of things I must resolve. Let’s step into this flower-house.” Sam nodded and followed, leaving behind Mountbatten’s baker, who, glum faced, considered the sudden violet clouds.

  “I cannot tell you, Kandy, how many teas one has taken in London in just such perfume,” Mountbatten murmured, the air inside the steaming orchid house so blooming sweet.

  “It smells to me like an elephant hold, sir.”

  Mountbatten smiled. Were anyone else present he would have had the fellow thrashed for impertinence. “And you say that without having met any of the hostesses in question. Do you think any of these will object to our clearing the air a little?” He gestured at the orchids, took two cigars from a hip pocket, cut them, and tossed the stubs into the potted field. Wave upon wave of hard-pinning rain began to fall, like a company of snare drummers in need of more drilling.

  “Thank you, sir,” Sam said, slipping the cigar into his coat pocket and lighting a cigarette. “I will save this for an auspicious occasion.”

  “I should say this is an auspicious occasion, Kandy. It’s not every day a native businessman is given such an opportunity to help the effort.” Bloody wasted cigar. Mountbatten wondered if it’d be chopped up and sold at the Colombo bazaar. He was fairly certain, from recent inspection, that someone, whether one of the Americans or a native coolie, had been shaving curls of wood from his caravan desk, no doubt to sell on the relic market.

  Opportunity to help the effort. And earlier, Our great shared cause. There would be no money. But there had to be something. “As to the purpose of this meeting, sir.”

  “Yes. Well.” Mountbatten paused, considering the aspect of something, his eyes squinting in little pulses. “Are you familiar, Kandy, with our prisoner camp at Trincomalee?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it, sir. My driver—”

  “Oh is he? Very good. It is, by all accounts, a model operation. Italians. A few fancy themselves gardeners, it seems. They have been trading tomatoes for cigarettes with the guards, serenading the servant girls, that sort of thing. Docile as milking cows. And it’s my intention to keep them that way.” He took a letter from his other hip pocket and scanned it, his eyes pulsing again. “One of our ships is to dock at Colombo harbour shortly, in fact very shortly if the lanes remain clear. I understand that you know your way around the harbour, rather too well by most standards, perhaps, but this is a time of war. Would that ours was a world where every soldier was an English gentleman, but this is not the case of course and for victory to be at hand”—here he spoke louder, as if at a reviewing stand, the pouring rain applause—“sometimes we need fists, and sometimes we need firm handshakes, and sometimes, Kandy, we need dirty fingernails.”

  Sam brushed his jacket.

  “Good. The ship in question is the Neptune, a cruiser carrying New Zealand troops home from Tripoli and also, six ‘special case’ prisoners captured with other Italian forces when we took Tunis.” He cleared his throat. These weren’t his words. “
‘Who are to be disembarked in Ceylon and kept in extreme isolation and utmost secrecy until war’s end.’” Mountbatten slapped his leg with the letter. He had to win back Asia and they’d already sent him an American, that bantam cock Sitwell, as his second, and now they were sending him these fellows. Ethiopians. What could Rommel have been using them for? “They are coming, six of them, and I’m not about to have them disrupt our operation at Trincomalee. Now I understand that in addition to your being well-placed about Colombo harbour, Kandy, you’re well-placed in a village close to this command. How are you with a padlock and key?”

  “You, the British army, would like me to keep war prisoners for you?”

  “Special cases, remember. Only six. This is a rare opportunity to help the effort.”

  “Yes it is, sir.”

  “So we’re agreed—”

  “Sir, I have need of a secretary.”

  “Not one of our Wrens.”

  “No, I believe she’s a Burgher girl, sir. She works in your office.”

  “Second desk?”

  “Yes. And—”

  “Really? Really. And?”

  “It’s like this. I have a son, sir.”

  “Ah. Of course you do. Leave the particulars with my aide before you leave for Colombo. Good day and Godspeed, Kandy.” Mountbatten smiled at his pocket-watch. Half past gin. In Norfolk, in Delhi, here, at home, he thought, they always had sons.

  George Kandy craned his neck and stared into the spear-shaped branches crisscrossing above them. It was different with number eleven than it had been with the first ten: it was taking longer. The first, not counting the mender’s daughter by the sluice, was a Ralahami’s daughter from Maspota who bit his wrist when they started, leaving a welt like a zipper trail. With the second, the eldest daughter of the Ralahami of Mahakeliya, he pressed his forearms into the damp dirt on either side of her face, too far for her to touch when she began turning her head back and forth, eyes closed, lips opened, teeth clenched. The beads around her neck shook like a boy boasting with a sack of marbles. Was she thrashing or dreaming or reaching to kiss him? George decided to kiss numbers three, four, five, six, and seven to hold them in place. He kissed hard. Two tried to suck back their own lips, their fine-lined eyes bulging with sudden, real shock, as if this, a full mouth kiss, was the true outrage of what was being done to them. One of them kissed back with a hurried gulping mouth, a knowing mouth. She was a dark girl from Rambawewa whose father had explained over sweets and tea and betel and cigarettes that she was actually fair as milk. Such a devout girl, she had gone to temple at noon and not waited for the servant to bring the parasol because she wanted to make puja before the chief monk took his nap. A grandmother’s bridal portrait was shown; the girl was said to be her very picture and even though the photograph paper was blooming mould flowers, the fairness was indisputable, no? Robert and Arthur sipped their tea and considered the photograph and the sunlight upon the verandah, wondering why then every uncovered thing wasn’t teaplucker black. Fair as milk in a tar-pot. George also studied the photo and then glanced at the girl who had earlier entered the room, as every engagement prospect did, with her eyes fixed high and distant as if she alone could see the jewel spark atop some temple spire halfway across the island. George asked his grandfather to have his uncle ask her father if he could walk to temple too: if someone could show him the way.

  Almost always he’d asked to see the village temple; sometimes he asked to see the paddy. Whenever he was refused, George ate everything on every platter before him. One time he asked to play cricket with the girl’s brother and cousins. Never again. George was bowled on the second ball and said he was not allowed to field in his suit. He had to wait with the younger boys on one side of the wicket while on the other the prospective bride waited behind a group of girl-cousins loud like babbler birds. After that, he only asked to see whatever it was the girl’s father boasted about first: whether the thriving paddy or the temple’s shining new bell, the new audience room or parapet wall or dining hall, the village water tank that, in this miraculous thriving place, was only ever broken from having to hold too much.

  For the bridal parents, the boy’s request was a high offence to the way things had always been done, the way things were to be done, but why stop now? They had already agreed to receive a prospective groom from a village where the walauwa people were said to be pyre upon pyre of bloody and bad omens and the villagers themselves layabout tinder, a prospective groom who came calling in dark modern suit and loud modern shoes, whose family asked for no perches but only a stretched engagement because of the boy’s pending studies abroad, a prospective groom whose good name, Kandy, was a rogue’s open outrage against holiness and fate, whose father was said to be serving the British at Peradeniya and otherwise would have conducted this visit himself but instead left the highest duty a father owes his son to a throatless grandfather and bug-eyed uncle and sent them here in a motorcar that had gained and immediately ruled the village with its gleaming and roaring, surpassing the best of all possible dowries. All this had already been agreed to without even looking at the boy’s horoscope: not allowing a supervised walk this far into things would have been as high-born and backward as racing their motorcar with a garlanded bullock.

  And so the fathers ignored their wives burning beside them and would later try to argue What harm they were only children and meantime made a show of staring threats at their daughters before releasing them—threats to behave as unassailably as they’d been raised to behave; threats to behave just modern enough to seem right for someday riding in a motorcar. Fathers’ guilt became tyrants’ commands to the chosen escorts—older brothers, head servants, and, if necessary, unmarried, unmarriageable aunts. Commands that George eventually answered, after he and she and escort had walked out of walauwa hearing, after first asking for only five minutes alone so they could speak plainly, truly, to see what there could be between them. He’d ask while pulling something out of his father-stuffed pocket, something wonderfully heavy or miraculously cold or shiny or delicate. Meanwhile, the girl, who had been warned to say nothing while beyond her mother’s hearing, stared daggers in vain at the distracted escort as George dragged her into the never-so-dark trees.

  On the second drive, this one going south, they had started at Galagedera, whose walauwa family kept a tusker in a clearing. The Ralahami said the elephant was royal caste, just ask the mahout; in fact such stories he could tell of the days of the kings, when this fellow’s ancestors had carried princes to their weddings and to wars and then on to the water tanks of vanquished princes. Etc. George asked who could show him the way to the stall and he had the eighth on a bed of succulent leaves and dung flies while her older brother stood some hundred paces away, studying a stack of Japanese baseball cards. Ten minutes later, the three of them walked back to the walauwa. George and his dungy knees were in front, the brother was next, his head down, looking at the cards before he had to hide them. Coming up behind, stiff as a sudden old woman, the prospective bride called after her brother, demanding half of his stack—six for not telling that he’d made her go with the fat fellow and six for not telling what the fat fellow had just done to her. But before they could argue the terms someone else called after them— the mahout, smiling to be given the rest of the cards for his own forgetting. George watched and listened and could have helped. He had many more of the cards in his jacket pocket. His father had brought him a box full when he had come and told his grandfather and uncle that Japanese planes with sun-spotted wings had dropped bombs on Colombo and Negombo. George had wondered if they’d dropped these cards too. He had stacks at home; he had enough for the mahout and the brother and the girl who had even moved a little herself but she could always say it was the dung flies and sharp grass. But none of that mattered now—there were three more walauwas to visit before they turned home again.

  The ninth girl was tall and slender and said to be the fastest ever born in Mawatagama. He couldn’t get her down so h
e bulked her against a cinnamon tree. She kept pushing his face away with her bangle-wrapped forearm and so he didn’t kiss this one and afterwards she slipped down and sobbed once, then sprang and boxed him hard and ran through the brush onto the laneway home. George ran after her, slower by bulk and breathless from the shot but running still because now he owed her that much symmetry. The servant girl ran too, slower because she had concealed what George had given her in the waistband of her skirt and did not want to drop it, and when they reached the walauwa first, second, and third, the girl’s parents and Robert and Arthur were watching from the verandah, having come out at the noise of villagers who had cheered the girl on to victory. The mother was horrified. She sent the servant back to find any dropped bangles and earrings and called her daughter into the house, who was otherwise standing in front of her future father-in-law heaving like a laundry woman. She was taken by the ear to a back room and slapped past sobbing. Left there while George and Robert and Arthur accepted apologies and went, she fell asleep, and waking found the servant girl on her knees beside the cot, asking for forgiveness, and bargaining. Her hands were cupped to show the filigreed locket George had given her to wait on the laneway. Its inset picture was of two pale girls leaning head-to-head and smiling.