Beggar's Feast Read online

  Lal and Lalson and the metal-benders met Sam and wife just before the three final steps to the verandah. Looking up, they watched them emerge from the noon-hour maw of the verandah. Everything about her was so white. The sun was white too, at least what was throbbing through the spear-leafed green and pouring down the lines of the walauwa’s staggered orange-red roof tiles in a blinding wash. It was as if, as it would be told in the toddy circle that night, she had been poured down beside him. Only much later, when descriptions of both the new wife and the army truck’s coming and going were exhausted, were the metal-benders asked what Sam had also looked like from so close. And they answered, being the first men of that long day, from meeting the truck at Pettah to outside the Registrar’s door to the rest-stop at Ambepussa to the walauwa, to notice that Sam Kandy had been wearing a full white suit. In fact he had chosen off-white because he did not think it would look so bad after they started throwing their dirt.

  But no one threw anything. The villagers staring up at them, at her, were shocked silent for a moment. But then they knew who and what kind of affront, how many affronts, this was. Meet Madam Kandy. Their answer to Sam presenting his new wife was total, was outraged, and it was loud and long enough to bring the Ralahami and his son from the shadows of the walauwa to stand on the high step behind Sam and Ivory, without coming forward any farther. It was also enough to annihilate the sound of the now-emptied transport truck leaving the village and turning onto the Kurunegala Road, where it was seen off by seven saffron-clad monks who had been watching it all from the other side of the road, three old ones frowning to appear solemn and four boys waving with mad longing to leave too.

  Fifteen hours later, Arthur felt Sam’s hand against his mouth. Thrashing his face back and forth to break free, he was pushed more firmly into his mattress and held there, trying now to bite enough fingers away to call for help.

  “Arthur!” Sam seethed, pulling away his sudden throbbing hand. Wanting to wheel around and knock him in the jaw with the key ring. But he was needed.

  “MOKATHA?”

  “Damn quiet will you!”

  “Mokatha?” Arthur squinted in the silver moonlight that came through the edges of the window tat above his bed. “Sam-aiya?” His brother-in-law had come to his bedroom in the middle of the night, the middle of his wedding night. More than that: his brother-in-law had come barefoot, in sarong.

  Bunching it between his legs, Sam took Arthur at the wrist and pulled him up and put an iron ring in his hand, its little keys falling between his fingers. Arthur quickened.

  “What are these for?” he whispered.

  “Come and see,” Sam said. He had already kept the Ethiopians longer than he had wanted, fifteen plotting days in back of B.’s old stall in Pettah, for which he had paid well the widow seamstress who occupied it now, and also paid her two sons to keep the prisoners dry and fed and no morning noon and night attraction for the city. He’d also paid the English transport driver to return to Pettah at dawn for the upcountry run and, before they left the city, to witness Sam’s second marriage, and finally to leave the key ring in a pile of dead timber beside his family’s old hut, where the prisoners were taken and left while the rest of the village was, earlier that day, distracted.

  “What is it?” Arthur asked.

  “Just come and see will you.” And then they could return to the city, he could return to the Oriental Grand. And if that tea-seller so much as looked across York Street as he walked his wife into the hotel, Sam would burn his stall down. Only he would do it the next morning. Because he had been aching certain for three weeks and a day now that no onions would be needed this time; that there would be nothing and no one to un-remember. All that remained was the return drive to Colombo, before which was this black of one night’s work.

  After Arthur changed into his oldest sarong, as instructed, they padded through the kitchen and down the steep back stairs of the walauwa. Arthur was to lead them where they were going, because Sam Kandy had to say he could not find it himself, the empty hut a few down from the village crossroads on the great green clearing side that no one had taken over since its old widower had disappeared years before. Sam said they had to reach the hut without anyone’s seeing them. Arthur agreed like this was a boy’s game and, having counted the keys on the ring Sam had given him, grinned at the idea of six vehicles waiting for him and his soon-to-be bride. He was amazed. He had only told Sam about his own engagement hours before, over boiled eggs and cuts of cold chatty roast that Sam had brought from the city in a plaid hamper. It was a wedding feast for the whole house, but no one else in the walauwa would eat, not Robert who remained in his room for the day, not Hyacinth in hers with Latha soothing her and staring daggers at the curtained threshold, and certainly not Ivory, who had been left by her new husband in the farthest back bedroom, where for hours she sat rigid upon the bed, waiting with cigarettes and a water glass and with worrying her buttons and blaming this devil place for the creases and smudges on her wedding dress. They had been married since dawn. He had never mentioned a daughter either.

  Dogs barked as Sam and Arthur neared the hut, but it was not a mad warning of rogues, it was a warning to them. Meanwhile, anyone watching their progress would have seen only the bent-over shapes of two village husbands in old sarongs, midnight drunks sneaking about for more pot arrack.

  “Magee Amma!” Arthur breathed when they went inside and Sam lit a match. What little furniture had been there was long since stolen, and the old home smells were gone from years of vermin and mould. The prisoners, shirtless but wearing once-white sarongs and seated on the dirt bare ground, looked up. They were sleepy, bored. So many had already entered the hut and looked at them that day.

  “I cannot, what am I, what are these—”

  “No. You already have agreed, Arthur. See who is holding the key ring.”

  “But—”

  “No. You are a man of your word and you are soon to rule this village, isn’t it?”

  “But where can I keep them? What are they, yakkas? Aiyo, how to feed?”

  “I am told they can eat and drink with their mouths like that and that they like fruits. They are called Ethiopians.”

  “Aiya … what did you do with George?”

  “He has gone abroad.”

  “London?” He said the word like a bug had landed on his tongue.

  “Yes, George has gone abroad like you did.”

  “But even if I take them to the old cave behind the walauwa you know the village will find out. Appachchi will find out. Aiyo, my new bride will find out! You cannot leave them here. What kind of man! Your daughter is here!”

  “What colour do you want?”

  “You say they are called Ethiopians. I say you are a yakka.”

  “What colour?”

  “You are the devil’s own son.”

  “What colour?”

  “Or is George the son?”

  “Arthur, what colour motorcar? Decide. Then you can send it to bring your bride home. Decide.”

  “I like black,” Arthur muttered, defeated at motorcar and now wondering which men in the village he could trust to help him bring them to the village founder’s cave, how many cigarettes he’d have to give for their silence. Sam slipped out of the hut while Arthur was doing the figures, neither of them knowing how many villages within a day’s walk would have already heard of Sudugama’s man-eaters one day later, when Sam was long since gone to the city, to the rising, the slashing, all of it.

  He was one year married before he had to admit what had been breathless blank and collapsing true from their first night together: he had been so very wrong about why he had to marry as he did, where he did, the first time. In 1929 Sam had thought it was the birth-village. A boy’s idea. He had been thirty and he had gone home to triumph with a boy’s idea. Now forty-six, he had lived this past year, the whole of 1945, at the Grand Oriental. On their second night in the hotel she’d told him that so long as they remained there, they rem
ained in honeymoon, and then she pressed her heat and cradle bone again against him lying there breathless blank and collapsed, and eyes closed murmuring Sam had agreed. And this past year he had daily worked and waited for it, had nightly sought in curtained darkness, was discovered, was each and every time gloriously defeated by what he now knew was the world’s true first best where. Which was his now, which had made the rest of what Sam Kandy had and did and went after mere adjunct to its ongoing possession.

  Ivory laughed at his wonder noises afterwards, when he lay beside her like a starfish and she was propped up on her elbows, her back pressed against a dark wooden headboard shaped like a great headless bird ascending. She liked to remind him that he had been married before and had a daughter and so obviously must have had some idea, no? Her face never showing any colour no matter how thrashing things had been moments before, she would make him tell again of his one night with Alice. She never tired of it. Yes she had her Mills & Boon books but she liked the Alice story more. She liked how she could make him show her their wedding night, how Sam and the first wife had lain like boards beside each other in the honeymoon bed and how, after some time had passed, one board had turned over onto the other and waited there, then slipped off.

  Never once were things the other way. Never once did Sam ask how from the very first she could do it all so well, the guiding, the commanding, the soothing. These were, among other things, taken as given. Those other things: her name, her family, her birth-village. How she came to work for the British at Peradeniya if not how she left. Why she had asked that the wedding-white canopy be removed from the bed when the boys came in to turn down the sheets that first night, why she never wanted to see the hooked-nose couples dancing in the ballroom after dinner, and why always first the chamberpot. She only liked to tell of how she had had to come to Colombo. There had been confusion at the rail platform in Kandy town, about her papers. She was supposed to have travelled to Colombo in the car reserved for office natives in His Majesty’s employ but was sent in error to a fully native car. Only then did her face flush and her brow break, propped up beside him in the bed and telling of having to sit so close to so much village life for so many hours, the open windows blowing bugs and hot country into the still air that was itself bloated from all those packets of home cooking, and from the crying babies and sleepy children asking for more sweets, the humid woodsmell of their handicrafts and their garden spices to sell in the city without need of any crooked nephew go-betweens, and also with incense, foot sweat, cooking oil and coconut oil, underneath which was the rust and blah of coughing old men. She parroted how the woman seated beside her had complained through hours of her husband’s sleeping that Ivory was so thin the first time she turned a corner in the city she would vanish without so much as a letter home, just as her own daughter had vanished, which was why she and her husband, who coughed rust at his mention, were now going to Colombo. The woman insisted on sharing her food because Ivory seemed to have brought nothing and then she leaned over and actually fed her from the bright wet mess of rice and curry opened on her lap. This Ivory had to show him, every time. Her long fingers pulsing air, she shoved and shoved a mouthful of nothing down Sam’s mouth, the motion shocking and jerky and when every time he turned his face to the side her fingers followed, reaching into his mouth like some fat dancing spider. Her cat-green eyes wide with both achieved and expected outrage, she needed him to turn away, to resist just as she had, just as anyone would, and yet the old woman had persisted in trying to feed her, which was why there had been that yellow stain on Ivory’s dress the first day she had come to the office. A clump of jak fruit curry slipped from her fingers and both had looked down and the husband leaned over and inspected and only then did the woman stop and turn away and speak not one word more the rest of the journey, as if only then did she realize that Ivory was wearing a dress no village daughter could wear, that Ivory was riding in a car never meant for her. She told him she would never forget that train. She seemed to have no memory of herself otherwise.

  But she could be gluttonous for his.

  When she wanted it, she would sidle down from her elbows and reach for him with her legs, play him slowly with a foot. Ask him to tell. And so was rubbed away Sam’s resolve that he would have only a forward life. For once, when asked, Sam told truly of his past. Of course never of his crow’s past and temple squirrel past and not much about Alice save bed boards and never once, not so much as a breath about George, but he told her some nights of B. and B.’s stories and of the butterfly-stall if not of B.’s mutton or the Malay girl with the raven hair. He told her Ismail’s stories and of the elephant hold to Sydney, its sweet black pungency, and of ball throwing about the harbour and of his shining silver Astrobe life high above the city. He told of Pocket Ma and of pig-trading for Hindu workmen in Singapore and of returning to do the same and more in Colombo but never of Dambulla and whenever she wanted to hear of it— either she intently did or seething did not—he told of Sudugama’s two-faced ways and of Curzon’s, about which they often laughed together, triumphantly, and he told of Mountbatten and one night showed her the cigar and she smoked it like a fat customs agent and Sam knew this was not her first. Eventually, he even told her about the Ethiopians who for the past year had been kept by Arthur in Sudugama, hidden in the village founder’s cave in the high grass hills behind the walauwa, though she refused to believe her wedding day had gone off with cannibal savages so close behind her bridal train and she liked to declare they would be at home in that bloody old house and village and Sam had agreed because touching her hip he was ready and this was noted and then she gave him whatever sweet or cold and tough fried pastry was nearest and sent him from the bed to the chamberpot and when he returned and was ready she would make him tell one more thing, of his one night with Alice, show again how they had lain like boards and there, holding his breath, Sam waited without moving until she moved, until Ivory rolled on and began another sweet hammering rush to oblivion.

  He got fat. She encouraged him to sweets and rich meats when they went to breakfast and to dinner downstairs—kidneys on toast, meat kedgeree, mutton with beans; battered mutton in a brown sauce, frikkadels, piquant steak, and on Fridays fried fish in Sauce Robert, all of which she ordered for him. After meals Sam ate meringues and trifles and pastry horns filled with whipped cream and jams, platefuls of fondant creams as if he was some Circuit-working Englishman’s bored sow wife. He was certain the waiters must have joked about it in the kitchen. But where were they in the middle of the night? Herself, she only took tea, or tea with a breakfastcup of egg and milk soup in the morning; in the evening it was more soup, sometimes a plain omelette, and once a week she asked for Angels on Horseback: she would eat all twelve oysters and always need more slices of lime and she would leave the briny fried bread for him.

  Midday in the city, ravenous as he had never been before, Sam began to queue at roadside stalls near the harbour, or in the backstreets of Fort, waiting in his suit for packets of rice and curry behind beedi-smoking carters and tar-black dockworkers and rail-thin village boys themselves trying to stand around like city men while, as he knew well, they were secret hopeful that this latest food-stall might sell something that tasted anything of home. Sam obviously did not join the eating rows in the shade but he could not be seen ordering a lunch boy to bring such a packet into Prince’s Building or even to his harbour office. And so he had to take his common rice and curry in open air while trying to keep it to himself, like a dog frantic at finding a pile of hot good fortune in the street. He ate crouched down and turned in, facing whatever sudden free space he could find in the midday heat of the weekday city, whether against the cracked wall of an English church or in the phantom entryway of a building half-built or half-demolished or in the fickle shade of the broken mossy seawalls and bird-marked monuments of Ceylon’s old gone conquerors.

  As requested, he brought sweet fritters and fried combs and short-eats to the hotel in the afternoons. The phono
graph would be playing fast blaring American music and she would take the food out of its oily vellum packets and arrange it all on a plate spirited from downstairs, dipping her finger in the fritter syrup or nibbling off the ridge of a fish patty while he closed the curtains and took off his jacket and shirt and hung them in the almirah without ever looking in. When he turned around in trouser and banyan she would present the cold shining crud and he would stand there silently in the middle of their room, eating until he could eat no more, breathing loudly with the effort, his forehead beaded with sweat, and when he was finished he went to the chamberpot and then washed his hands and face and neck and returned to her naked save an abused facecloth. And then they could begin.

  She said she liked it, the new roundness of his belly. She would inspect it some nights, pat it and say she felt like a king building a private little temple on his body, her lush grounds. He tried to turn over or say otherwise; he could have taken her wrist and bent it back, snapped it off even and then slapped her smiling blaspheming mouth with her own hand for making of his own body a sacrilege she could never know. But she would keep patting, looking and waiting for him to do whatever it was he wanted to do, saying nothing but the way she looked at him, breathing fast as he began to breathe fast she was daring him to see what he could do, wanted to do, if he could do it. But then she would look down, past her stupa, and smile with victory and rolling on whisper all that remained now was to find the jewel for the spire.

  Sam would have made of their room world enough, world enough would have been their bed, or whatever part of it was in use when they were joined, but every month came a bill, and even though she never left the hotel she liked the seamstress to come from Pettah every few weeks with good bolts and needle and thread. Meanwhile, Sam was using the Pettah stall again. Now, October 1945, the world was still needful but in reverse. The war against Japan had suddenly finished. Around the harbour, two months after the August bombs, he heard men, local men, still speaking of what had happened, their opinions, sympathies, pride diverging. Sam liked the British response more than all this betel talk: now was no time to worry over what had happened. Now was time to move on to what was next: offices to shut and so much to rubbish—tropic-ruined desks and paper and books, cabinets, lamps and chairs, potted meats and untouched jars of Christmas-sent jam.