Beggar's Feast Read online

  Number ten, a born-to-sob beauty from Barandara, had also right away refused, pulling back when George took her wrist, as if she already knew, and George wondered and liked wondering if perhaps he was becoming legend after only nine times, but thinking legend was nothing like its making. He pulled her wrist harder and the girl began crying for her chaperone-aunty to help, an aunty who, despite being fair, full cheeked, and well born herself, no man would marry because it was known in the village that she had been born with only one kidney. The aunty gave her niece the lacquered fan that George had gifted and told her not to cry, and that she should never mention this to anyone, and the girl sniffed, “Mention what, Kidney Aunty?” and her aunty told her never mind, only wait on the far side of the lane and pass the time by singing the pretty song they’d been practising before the visit. And then, for the first time, George Kandy was the one pulled into the trees. Meanwhile, in the walauwa, Robert asked the parents why the escort had been called Kidney Niece when she was told to walk with George and the daughter down the laneway. The hosts, hands wringing at the prospect of this burden lifted, smiled at Arthur and agreed with Robert that Thusitha, her true name, was very pretty. Robert pressed the question. After some crab-wise talking, the Ralahami said that it was his niece’s pet name, that it came from the shape of a birthmark, and further that her father the Ralahami’s younger brother was a rubber man in Malacca who had asked him to see about his daughter’s prospects. She was already twenty-plus. Arthur was more than thirty. The Ralahamis discussed their horoscopes, Arthur’s and Thusitha’s, until they could hear George stomping up the steps, the aunty and daughter following behind him singing sweetly like they were going to cry. Arthur watched her enter, marvelling at the prospect of a kidney shape born to be found and kissed. George asked for a cool drink and the girl asked to lie down and then Thusitha, who was George’s tenth, was introduced to Arthur, who would be her second.

  When it happened over number eleven, George wondered why it hadn’t happened before. More than one night a week in the walauwa, his nose bled while he slept. In the morning he would cover the bleed marks with pillows and blankets and toys—not because he was ashamed but because he was waiting. He was trying to fill a whole sheet with his noseblood because then they’d tell his father, who’d have to stay, for once, past the latest unwrapping. But taut over number eleven, the only daughter of the Ralahami of Ridigama, the pressure at the back of George’s neck from holding back the drip was taking more of his attention than the thing itself. The blood was dropping down his throat and he could taste it, hard and thick and sweet and unceasing, an iron tang like motorcars. George dropped his chin and down his nose the blood dripped and the girl screamed as it pattered onto her forehead and across her cheek and her neck, four dark red marks on a dark red rope. Now she looked like a child-bride playing with pottu but she had already been made otherwise than a child and he wouldn’t stop now because he was already going and even though she started calling for the brother, who came and so had to forfeit the chrome lighter shaped like a Mississippi steamboat that George had promised him. Or so George thought, in this way innocent about what it meant to give and take promises. The brother crashed through the brush and evaded a droopy sentry stand of palm trees to grab him off his sister, seething “What kind of moment was this?” He forced open George’s fist and took the lighter, smashed his nose, and smeared some of George’s blood on his own shirt to show he had been defending the family name. He dragged his screaming sister home, the lighter hot in his other hand, which uselessly threatened and waved off the absolutely feasting audience of villagers emerging suddenly and everywhere like flies on uncovered meat.

  Sam stood outside his son’s room, in light the colour of hasty tea, lamplight turned low to wake no one else. As if the whole walauwa wouldn’t be listening while he took George away. He’d sent in the driver, moments before, and now was waiting with remembering.

  “Sir,” whispered the driver, parting the bedroom curtain and coming into the hallway.

  “What is it, Joseph?”

  “Sir, I cannot make him come.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, he says he is waiting for you to take him.”

  But those first few nights of his temple life had been a rage of their own remembering, of the soothing his father had given him that early early morning when they’d left the hut and he’d been carried to a cart and they had gone from the village, of how he would have asked—but why would a son have to ask his father holding him as he was, proud and promising as he was—why no branch was broken as they passed the village boundary? Of course they were coming home.

  “Tell him I am waiting in the car and that we are going. We are going now. And tell him that if he does not come straight away”— Sam suddenly raised his voice—“tell him that for what he has done, believe it, I will leave him in this village and make it that he never leaves here again.”

  Father and son reached the rest-stop at Ambepussa in bright upcountry morning. They parked a short dash away from the crowd—fruit sellers and letter writers, club-footed beggarmen and spice-fingered ailment doctors, tour guides, marriage brokers, rickshaw men, coat-pocket gemologists, moneychangers—all of whom were already sweating just to stand around and call each other machang mali yakka until there was nothing left to smoke or chew. Who would only move, but move like lightning, a smiling mob of lighting, at a waving hand extended from a motorcar window. Sam almost extended his own, just to be able to wave them off when they came. Otherwise, there was nothing to do but begin, begin to be outraged. Not just by the boy’s shameful, dirty things, or by the treasure Sam had had to send to the father in Ridigama, or even by his being delayed a day on his way back to Colombo to pick up Mountbatten’s ivory and special cases. But, instead, begin to be outraged as the father: no more the outraged son.

  “Right. And so I am to believe you wear that suit I brought you to be engaged in as your sleeping clothes? Or was it that you heard me arrive the night before and listened to our talking and dressed like this for the morning? What do you think should be done for the girl? For her family? For your own? I should give your clothes to those beggars over there and strip you down to nothing. See how you’ll do in the world when you’re no one’s son with nothing.”

  Sam swallowed and wondered how long before the driver returned with water. His throat was so dry to talk like this, to spend like this. To spend like this, it seemed, in vain.

  “You turn and face me when I am speaking to you,” Sam commanded. “Turn. Turn and face your father or George I will turn you I promise that.” His last words came out low and harder than he had expected or thought possible with his own blood: low and hard like harbour-talking. And the boy did turn, right away, the whites of his eyes showing more than only fear to hear his father speak this way, to him.

  They drank the water the driver brought and then Sam laid two cigarettes across Joseph’s cupped palm and sent him off. A full glass of water and still Sam’s throat was drought dirt. And now, the boy was staring at him with heavy eyes and a clamped mouth, impassive, already victorious but for his eyebrows, which were softer, indecisive.

  “Your Siya and Arthur-uncle have told me what they were told by the girl’s father, but you will tell me yourself. If you want to do as men do, you must answer as men do.”

  George said nothing.

  “You will tell me before we go on to Colombo, to the harbour. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise?”

  “You don’t ask me otherwise. I am your father, and I will …”

  “Yes, Appachchi?”

  Sam was exhausted. He didn’t think he’d ever spoken so many such words. Family words, words that demanded of him a greater carry than any Pettah threat or harbour deal. Words with nothing behind them but everything that was his own.

  “I have enough cigarettes to keep the driver over there until he smokes his lips black. We will wait here until you tell.”

  “Ha.”

  �
�Mokatha?”

  “You will wait? Ha. You, who won’t even wait in the room for me to say thank you for all your shiny rubbish? You, who has never waited? Ammi used to say—”

  “You call what I have given you shiny rubbish?”

  “I never asked for it.”

  “Ah. Right. You never asked for the Dinky cars and you never asked for the new slingshot. You never asked for anything! Right? RIGHT, GEORGE? Shall I tell you what I never asked for?”

  “I think the only thing you ever asked for was a car accident.”

  Sam struck him across the cheek, his signet ring catching skin. He raised his hand for more if the boy dared to say her name again. But George buried his head in his lap, his hands covering his face, shaking. Sam turned to see if he could catch Joseph’s eye. And while he looked for his driver he had to listen to no man seated beside him but to a broken boy, sobbing. A poor boy. His. Beside him. His. A poor boy. He was too. But was he ever to be more? Sam’s lips pursed and blew, pursed and blew, louder and louder pursed and blew breaths of putha but before he could say dear son loud enough to be heard George sat up looking like some kind of madman, his nose all reddish-brown mud, tears streaking down his ring-welted cheeks. He was shaking, foaming, with laughter.

  “You never asked for a son, right? You never asked! BUT CAN YOU GUESS HOW MANY I’M GOING TO HAVE? CAN YOU GUESS?”

  The father never gave the son the victory of guessing how many. The son never gave the father the victory of asking where they were going, which became, after they reached Colombo harbour and George was shaved to skin and changed into a soldier’s uniform while Sam smoked a cigarette, where he was being sent. After a band of Italian POWs were taken off the ship—squinting, muttering prayers and curses and head-jerking challenges to anyone who held their eyes—George was taken on with a scrum of Indian troops. The gangplank was pulled up. Sam turned and went, removing George’s horoscope leaf from his coat pocket and tossing it into the harbour water, where it floated and faded unto nothing in a yellow foam that was bobbing and lapping with food wrappers and cigarette butts and, this morning, an unexpected litter of mottled pups.

  “No.”

  Gulls and revving transport trucks filled in the silence. And something else, too regular to be wind-made, too tinny to be animal. Made by someone. Not by something. Someone. How Sam hated English patience. Not even willing to begin a dispute until he said it, until he gave height and history and complexion their due. “No, sir.”

  “Yes, Kandy,” the harbour warden answered immediately. “Word was sent from Peradeniya that you have already agreed. They are yours now, until informed otherwise, as are these.” The harbour warden held out a rust-flaked ring dangling six bright keys, golden and impossibly small, as if to a doll-house prison.

  “No,” Sam said again. “No, sir.” He drove his hands into his trouser pockets and did not look again into the prison-cage, into their staring faces, their heads nodding to some unheard prayer or song syncopated by the clink of bright metal knocking on iron bars.

  “No discussion, Kandy. You have agreed, you have given your word to Commander Mountbatten himself. Am I not correct?”

  “Right. But these are not what I, what anyone would call ‘special case’ prisoners. I don’t know what these are, but they are not what I agreed to, sir.”

  “They are, I am informed, Ethiopians, who were turned over to us when we took Tunis from the Italians. Now, I shall certainly inform the quartermaster of how this business concludes between you, Kandy, and His Majesty’s war effort, in terms of taking and keeping. In terms of past and present and future taking and keeping, I should say.”

  The two men were speaking in a corner of a warehouse mostly blocked off from common view by newly stacked crates that had come off the same ship as the prisoners, some of them already blooming mould flowers and all of them addressed to the quartermaster of Colombo, who for years now had been turning his head, once a week, when Sam Kandy and his carters came before dawn for PX crates full of—really it did not matter. It could be all the chocolate and radios of America and still, now, it did not matter. None of it.

  The warden consulted his clipboard and tapped his finger six times. The triumph of official reality. “I have it right here, Kandy. This was signed and stamped at the site of first detention, Tunis, and signed and stamped at the dock of embarkation, Tripoli: ‘Six special case prisoners of war, to be detained in Ceylon until further notice, under best conditions as determined by SEAC authorities at destination.’ By Commander Mountbatten’s hand, yours are our best conditions, Kandy. Take the keys. I have transport already arranged. It departs for your village at noon. Now take the keys, man!”

  Sam walked off, breathing dust and brine and squinting in search of Italians. The warehouse’s doors were now open to the city on one end and to the dark water on the other. Yellow-white morning sun poured in through the unending particulate of men at work in a wartime warehouse. The bright smoke and endless whorls of sawdust and fannings made him near blind but he felt a sudden and great lift from his sudden, great resolve: that he would not. He would take every last one of the Italians instead, set them up in the walauwa itself if necessary. But he would not be a keeper of men like those others, men who could neither curse nor challenge nor keep quiet of their own resolve. He would not keep them, not that way. He would not.

  The warden sighed and followed. The coolies and perhaps even the stove-stomach quartermaster himself would now see him trailing after a native like he was some fussy shopkeeper trying to settle a bill. He did not like this kind of dealing with the locals. It was exposing. It lowered everyone. He would have almost kept the Ethiopians himself, but that would be a whole other kind of lowering. They’d been delivered the night before by men from a New Zealand cruiser, in a tarp-draped cage like some kind of circus attraction. The deckhands had grimaced as they pushed it, he’d thought from the toil of rough ship rope and brine-pocked trolley wheels kedging along the grit floor. But as the accompanying officer presented the transit document and the keys, the deckhands composed themselves solemn as pranking schoolboys to watch him, the harbour warden, remove the tarp and inspect the prisoners and make sure the count was right. He’d jumped back, dropping the clipboard and the key ring. The accompanying officer was already walking back to the ship. The deckhands departed shortly thereafter, having waited in vain to be asked what the prisoners ate. The warden was left by himself, on his haunches, his hands drumming the floor in search of civilization, watching them watch him feel around for his clipboard, pity and fear and puzzling wonder occupying the air between them as thickly as the cloud legions of electric-drunk bugs that swarmed every night when the overhead lamps were switched on to hum until dawn.

  “Kandy!”

  Sam turned from his vain listening for the lilt and gutter of Italian mutter and curse. The warden stopped with a stutter, righted himself, and immediately held the clipboard in front of Sam’s face like a tablet he was daring him to break.

  “Where are the others, sir?” Sam asked.

  “The others, you say. What others? Are six of those not enough for you?”

  “No. The other prisoners I watched come off a ship this morning. I will take—”

  “You will take and keep, Kandy, what His Majesty’s Government requires you to take and keep. The war effort does not proceed via your vantage. It’s barely proceeding via ours of late. Now keep your word, man.”

  “And otherwise, sir? Do you really think I will keep these fellows so I can take more mosquito nets and Horlicks candies from the PX?” This was not the man who lately had lied about his only son’s age to obtain a spot for him in a regiment of Indian soldiers transiting through Colombo to the Italian front. Holding here, against becoming the keeper of caged Ethiopians with padlocks driven through their lips, was everything, was not balancing or defeating or holding back but obliterating everything else.

  Meanwhile, the warden did what his schooling and blood told him to do: he smiled himse
lf deaf and blind to Sam’s counters and left.

  “No,” Sam called out after him. But the warden kept walking. Sam followed. “I did not agree to this when I met your Commander Mountbatten Sir. You cannot force me to take them. It’s not, it’s not right.” Sam spoke with vehemence, with the impatient innocence of sudden virtue. He was outraged, shocked, and also pleased that the rest of the world failed to see things the same way.

  “But I can. And I shall. You have already given your village’s name to the Commander’s aide, who in turn has given it to me. In two hours these fellows will be on a transport truck to”—here he flipped through his papers, victory assured by signed and sealed reality, his index finger scaling down script—“yes, Sudugama.”

  “No. I cannot, I cannot give my word for their safety, for what will happen to them in the village, what will be done.”

  “Good God, man, why have I been chasing you all morning trying to give you the keys? No one in your village will have any reason to fear.”