Beggar's Feast Page 17

  “No. It’s not them I mean, not the Kaffirs—”

  “Ethiopians.”

  “It’s not the prisoners who will do something in the village. It’s what the village will do to them.”

  “That’s your concern, Kandy, and all the more reason for you to take the keys or I shall have no choice but to leave instructions with the transport driver to give the keys to the first villager he meets. Are we understood? Are we understood?”

  They’d reached the prison-cage. The prisoners were still clinking, a golden glint playing about their black faces, their glum, padlocked mouths. He would not keep them and now there was nothing to be done but keep them. But he would not take them to Sudugama, at least not right away.

  “Right. How are they fed?”

  The warden waited, smiling tightly.

  “How are they fed, sir?”

  “Very good. Glad you remain a man of your word, Kandy. That’s the sort of thing we reward, as you well know.” He cleared his throat. “Now this will be the last that we, meaning you and I, ever discuss this matter. You will be contacted by another party regarding their next transfer, which is to occur when command deems conditions suitable. What remains is to sign here, Kandy.” The warden counter-signed and patted the document like a good boy’s head. It would be dropped in an oil barrel and burned minutes after the Ethiopians were taken from the warehouse. They were never here.

  “I have to speak with the transport driver. How are they fed, sir?”

  “You’ll find him in the depot on the south side of the warehouse. Ask for the man waiting to make the upcountry run. Here are your keys. The padlocks themselves, I understand, are new. The fellows were found already padlocked, but with Roman lock-and-key, which have been duly replaced with our own. Good day.”

  “As to my question, sir?”

  “You mean how these poor chaps are fed?” The warden flipped through his pages, found the answer, tapped it smartly, and looked up. Smiled. “As of now, Kandy, they are fed by you.”

  Sam heard Curzon’s voice while he was still on the stairs. The office door must have been open. Curzon was ordering someone out, it seemed, in vain. Sam wondered how a beggar had come this far into the building and also how much of Curzon’s English he would have understood. Curzon’s voice was sliding around, from highest-pitched pique to gutter-toned curse before pirouetting, screeching back up again. Sam couldn’t remember when last he’d heard him scale about and lose himself this way, this much.

  Over the years, Curzon had graduated from playing at a Ceylon Englishman to remembering nothing else, to insisting on it. By 1944 he had grown fine and fat as a spinning top; his wife, a fair-skinned Mount Lavinia Burgher, had taken to referring to her own family as natives; to dismissing dress-wearing women from prominent Colombo families as “zipper nonas”; and to pining with other fair Cinnamon Garden wives for the English goods of their girlhoods. She also complained, especially when Sam had disappeared those months only to return one day as if from a downstairs shave, with a scar on his forehead and no car and no wife, that the black harbour-work Curzon had been doing in the meantime was not what a man of his station was meant for. His was a name known throughout the Empire. He had two prefect-certain sons at Royal and a daughter who captained the hockey team at St. Bridget’s. He decided she was right: all he was ever meant to be was elsewhere than this. When he had made enough, they would close the Colombo house and take to hill country and find a good green estate. He had been stashing away errant export coupons for years. He would be a high-grown planter at Nuwara Eliya and she would become a plantation madam and they would have a trout stream and milking cows and he would never have to sight that salt-blue water again, save whenever it was that the war ended and the children left for Oxford, or Cambridge. In the meantime, there was money to be made. City warehouses were filling up smartly, goods waiting redistribution; more and more rubber tappers were needed from Cochin; a reliable letter-drop address in Singapore was asked for; a caravan-sized desk was wanted. And so Curzon kept his own daily appointments with titled men in the city, passing on untitled queries to Sam and otherwise confining himself to the Fort office, to reading and rereading damp planters’ memoirs until the heroic memories became his own, so that all that remained now was to shift triumphant and forget.

  When Sam reached the second floor he rested his hand on the newel post. A woman’s voice was answering Curzon’s. Sam passed into the office and she turned and Mountbatten was also a man of his word. When last he’d seen her, in the British office at the Swiss Hotel, her long ladyfingers had been playing sonatas on her Royal, her face calm and smooth and oval and fair, yes ivory; her eyes had been open and considering, her small round mouth about to say—but it had been a busy office with a war to win, etc. But here, now, having words with Curzon, her face was the colour of battered tusks; her brow was broken up with colliding fault lines, and her eyes, narrow as if spat at but now widening, were more cat than sea green. There was more than recognition in those eyes. Not surprise, more like mild outrage that he had left her waiting this long, like this, with him. She was a fine long body in an ankle-length dress, white with gathered and strewn dark flowers playing across it, the cloth flowing down from the waist. There was some kind of yellow smudge, there, but no matter. The cloth hung fine upon those sudden, slashing hips and rose to a sweeter rising. And her throat, blushing too, like a fine vase smudged.

  “Kandy,” Curzon began sternly.

  “Charlie,” Sam countered with an off-hand voice, finished with this.

  “Char-lie!” the woman repeated, suddenly bright as a morning bird, her hands on her hips, her eyes studying Sam’s studying hers.

  “What in God’s name, what is this?” stammered Curzon.

  “I already told him, sir,” she began, looking at Sam, her hand trying to cover that yellow smudge, “that I was sent!” Her pleading English was servant’s sing-song, but her mouth was red like flowers, like petals floating on milk. “I told him, sir, that I was sent to you as a—”

  “This, this, this young woman tells me she was sent here, to us, by no less than Lord Mountbatten himself!” Curzon smirked. “No doubt,” he continued, feeling suddenly winded, “she must have heard our name while you were up there. Chased off for God knows what and now she’s come to Colombo to con us instead. My God but do they think the war makes nodding asses of us all? Claims her name is Ivory but refuses to say her good name, which says enough. She informs me she is to be our new secretary, on Mountbatten’s orders no less!”

  “Sir please, I was sent to you as a special—”

  “Enough!” Curzon bellowed.

  “Sir please I was sent—”

  Sam held out his hand and she stopped speaking. He walked toward her. Eyes studying eyes, mouths pursed. He showed her to the door and as she crossed the threshold Sam whispered “Wait.”

  The door clicked shut. Sam turned. Curzon considered his partner’s set staring eyes, the set mouth. He knew at least this much after thirteen years of working beside Sam Kandy: what had just happened was part of a plan he did not yet know about. How much hill-country green, Charlie wondered, how high up, could he and his wife have if they left the city tomorrow?

  “That woman is not our new secretary,” Sam said.

  “I thought as much. Mountbatten!”

  “That is correct.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes. She is mine.”

  “Meet Madam Kandy.”

  The walauwa fell so quiet you could hear the new servant boy already running home, the sound of his bare feet like some bored fruit seller passing a mango back and forth between his palms. Meanwhile, in the front room, his hands cinching his sarong at the knee, Robert did not ask her to sit. He rocked and swallowed his coughing because if he tried to speak it would have been yelling and were it yelling it would not stop until his throat croaked out of his mouth onto the floor like a burnt frog leaping from a funeral pyre. He would not have it end this way. He would not
die for scandal in the front room of his father’s father’s father’s own hand-built house because his motorcar son-in-law had just gone and made a milk toffee love marriage. They were, Robert thought, supposed to be widowers both. And where was George? Where was George playing hell now? Was he in the back of the loud green monster that had followed Sam into the village? The village that was, and suddenly Robert felt his blood, he felt fierce about it, still his village?

  The Ralahami turned, staring back Latha, who was about to bring Hyacinth into the front room to greet her father, wearing a new white sari. The girl had crossed into womanhood in the month her father and her brother had been away. But Latha had heard Sam too and was already backing away, one hand covering her cursing mouth, the other covering and turning her young lady’s face. She was also, of course, craning, straining to see her, this sudden Madam Kandy, standing there beside him like the devil’s white shadow. A new woman in the walauwa. A woman that she, Latha, had not raised. Wearing a sun hat meant for true fair skin, a two-piece dress and shoes from anywhere but here, her hands on her hips, hips— this woman was more shined-up betel spittoon than temple jewel. If they, the husband and his new wife, if they stayed here more than an hour, Latha decided, she would keep Hyacinth in her bedroom for one hundred years.

  Meanwhile, the only noise in the world was that sweet mad patter: Lalson, as everyone called the new servant boy even though he was twenty-five, running home as he had been taught, his legs swinging in such close succession from his feet touching every stone step. One of the first lessons the boy’s father, Lal, had taught him before giving way, when his own coughing from years of reviving the lives of the Ralahami’s crushed cigarettes became too much, was that even if the Ralahami were calling for you with his head on fire, you still had to show respect. You had to touch every step, going up and going down. Before his son went to the walauwa in his place, Old Lal also told him to palm passed-over betel and half-smoked cigarettes; to take boxes brought from the city before the kitchen or the laundry woman could; to ask for tea first and then answer Latha when she asks what you just heard them say on the verandah; to mark where a toy or bauble sits and only take what hasn’t been touched between two Poya days; to bring the Ralahami tea and cigarettes whenever he coughs like this (here Old Lal demonstrated). Most importantly, to come home at least once a week to see your father, to bring him palmed cigarettes and betel and boxes for your mother, because having already deposited every family possession in one of Sam Kandy’s discards, even the onions, she had now almost covered every wall in the hut with the flattened richness of Cargill’s cardboard. And when you come home, to tell everything in the walauwa that’s been said, whispered, bought, brought, broken, taken, cooked, thrown, cried about, coughed at, and cursed. And, finally, never but come straight away if ever there’s birth death or marriage in the big house.

  And so the boy rushed from the walauwa to his father’s hut, passing the crowd gathered around the green army truck that had followed Sam into the village and was now parked at the village crossroads. A crowd so focused on the truck that none had noticed Sam’s latest ascent, ten minutes before, his hand at a bare fair elbow. A crowd which, whether from whole cloth or half truth, recalled memory or borrowed, had been made gloriously one in a sudden bout of divination, an asking and answering that was unto itself generative and affirming, sceptic and disputing, all of it only to make more of the same, to keep it going, the telling.

  What was in the truck?

  There was much in this question for men old since used to the rattle and vroom of Sam Kandy’s coming and going, men by now bored of believing that the rest of the world would inevitably emerge from the boot of Sam’s car. This was a sudden new roaring, a war-green monster with a black mouth in the back, which had stopped at an immediately auspicious hour on an immediately auspicious day in October 1944, beneath the water-print fade of an auspicious moon, and was now parked only a walk away from where they had all been born and married, would die and be burned to next life. It would be a sin for the back gate to swing down and what emerge?

  What?

  Inside were British soldiers, come to take the village boys to fight the Hitler war. No, inside were row on row of Japanese, them come to take Ceylon; the white driver was a dupe, a decoy. Yes! The Japanese had come to defeat the British at Peradeniya and knew that this was the place to start; they must have heard of the village’s famed Road Ordnance victory against the British, years before, from the new monk at the village temple, who had studied abroad, in Siam or was it Burma, which might as well have been Berlin or Japan. Who was no monk but yes a Japanese agent, a pilot!, his beggar’s bowl a flying cap, his scholar’s specs goggles, and inside the truck was a Japanese aeroplane, its wings folded up like a Vesak lantern. Aiyo no! Madness! It was so much simpler. Inside were a thousand field Tamils got down from Madras to take over the Ralahami’s paddy fields. In that much dark for that long, by now there could be two thousand field Tamils waiting to take over in the fields and take our huts and garden pepper and declare themselves upcountry since before the days of Sri Vikrama. No. All lies. There was only one reason Lalson had just run to his father’s hut. The walauwa must need Old Lal’s carrying help. Because inside the truck was George Kandy, returned from his latest engagement tour, now so fat his father needed an army truck to bring him home.

  “No. You’re all wrong.”

  The speaker this time was the village weaver, not the village weaver’s wife, who could go on like she was seven sisters, but the weaver himself. He could have heard something when he went to hang new cane tats across the walauwa windows the week before, after Hyacinth had crossed. And so for the first time in their glorious mongering, the crowd became a windstorm of threats and pleas each to all to be quiet so they could hear the latest certainty. Inside that truck, the weaver declared, were all the cooking pots and chocolates of Ceylon, all the paper dolls and aftershave the father could buy or steal, a collection that explained the latest absence; it took even Sam Kandy a month to get it all. And all of it was needed—not in Sudugama, but in Mahakeliya and Rambawewa, in Galagedera, Mawatagama, Barandara; in walauwas full of ruined daughters and sobbing mothers and outraged fathers from here halfway to Habarana. George’s engagement tour route. The invocation of known places, not more conjuring words like Berlin and aeroplane, was the modest champion, collapsing the wild fine rest of it.

  And so they neared the back of the truck, expecting to find cooking pots shining in the darkness. Two young men came forward, two of the three boys who, one vellum-sun morning in 1929, had chased a Morris Minor fireball down the lane. One of them dropped on all fours at the muddy bumper so the other could climb onto his back and look in, their having agreed in advance that the positions would reverse at the count of ten. But the first fellow didn’t get to peer past the count of five, which was when Old Lal and Lalson marched past. Without breaking stride Old Lal called into the crowd for the metal-benders to follow. Everyone did. And only when he saw the village stream toward the big house did the truck’s driver hop down and knock twice on its side for the prisoners’ handlers, two sons of a Pettah seamstress, to open the gate and, as instructed, let it drop without banging. While they got the Ethiopians down, the army driver smoked, shaking the key ring in his other hand, trying to remember which way down the crossroad Sam had said he would find the empty hut where they were to be deposited.

  Inside the otherwise silent walauwa, the sound of foot on stone was now much louder, was now like a lane of bored fruit sellers. Lalson was returning along the steps, following his father. Heavier and slower and behind them were the metal-benders. The rest of the village was gathered below, at the twin boulders, where they were frenzied with fresh fecund telling about why Old Lal had walked so straight and serious, why the metal-benders had been called along, what or better still who were they going to take from the walauwa and throw into the back of the army truck. Hearing their approach and beyond them a murmuring crowd, Sam knew it was time for t
he day’s next business. Taking Ivory at the waist, he turned her away from his stony father-in-law and idiot-smiling brother-in-law and walked out onto the verandah wondering, hoping, needing the whole village to be waiting there with clumps to throw. His suit would show all, would encourage more, he thought. And he did not worry about any man in a yellow hat. In fact, over the years, when no crocodile ever came for him, Sam decided it must have been a heat shimmer, a hot mad dream on his first wedding day. On this, his second, the only question was how to get the village yelling loud enough for when the army truck drove off. But he knew how.

  In the city, she had asked for the whitest cloth Sam could find for her wedding-day dress, and he had said nothing. The shoes and hat she picked out at Cargill’s, her dress copied from a creased catalogue print she had shown him ten minutes after Sam proposed marriage one evening in the office, two weeks after Charlie Curzon had left for the day never to return, and a long, respectful hour after Ivory had interrupted a dictation to say her parents were both dead and she had no other family on the island. And she had accepted, right away and without much excitement, more impatience, just the same way he had proposed. They exchanged toothy, congratulating smiles. Then pressing his hand into hers Ivory had shown Sam the design as if she’d had it in her palm all the two weeks and one hour they’d known each other. Sam had it made for her by a Pettah seamstress whose eyebrows showed she thought it was more than absurd: the jacket with its row of fish-eye buttons and plunging neck like some scoundrel man had split it open before it could be worn; a sharp-gathered waist; and then the skirt, too short by at least two hands from above the ankles. She wore it that dawn, to appear before the Registrar of Deaths and Marriages, who, unshaven, had married Sam and Ivory on the front step of his office without once looking up from his vow book.