Beggar's Feast Read online

  But what would he call himself in the city? Malli had been enough to get from the temple gate to the city outskirts, but he did not want a new life as just another sweet little brother, just another weary smiling street-side boy born to be helpful, waiting to be helped. He had been called Ranjith at home, but no one had called him that since he had been sent to the temple, where he was formally Samanera and less formally, in the empty audience hall those dead afternoons, Squirrel. Shortly before his departure, the other boys had learned of Sadhu’s pet name for him. They had used it without mercy. His teacher had told him that he would get a new name upon becoming a full monk. He would be a Sadhu then too, and his priestly surname would be the name of his birth-village. But he would never be a full monk, and he could think of no cause to honour Sudugama, and so when he was asked his name by the Colombo nephew who received the dowry furniture, he just said “Sam.”

  “And what’s your father’s good name?”

  “My father doesn’t have one.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He’s not good enough.”

  “You would disrespect your father to a complete stranger! Who is this tamarind mouth you have working in the back here?” The nephew called over the driver, who had been happy to drink a lime-juice and let Sam unload the furniture.

  “He’s not mine. Malli only wanted a ride to Colombo.”

  “What village are you from?” the nephew asked him.

  “I’m here now.”

  “So why have you come?”

  Sam jumped off the cart, head down, carrying the furniture into the stall.

  “Stop this or I’ll give you a thrashing. I have no money for you.”

  “I only want a little space.”

  “This is Colombo. There is no space.”

  “I’ll help you in your work.”

  “And what’s my work?”

  “The driver says you’re to sell this furniture for your family.”

  “And you think that’s my work?” The back half of the nephew’s stall was dark. He sounded amused by his own question.

  “I don’t care what you do for your work.”

  “Good. This is Colombo.”

  Those daughters waiting on dowry money must have died spinsters. Nothing was ever sent back to the village. The nephew, who was named Badula and went by B., sold off whatever he didn’t keep for himself. B. was a street hustler businessman whose every decision was made to get more money and more mutton, as he called it. He was five or six years older, his every way and feature curved and narrow like the husk of a coconut flower, and they were more than once mistaken for brothers after Sam began trailing him around the glorious cutthroat bedlam that was Pettah. Sam Kandy’s education into the world began in those bright and steamy knife-edge streets, where everyone with something to sell was the last honest man in Colombo, where the rest of the city went by tram and rickshaw to look and take what they would and escape home hoping they had not been taken for too much. Pettah stank and gleamed with spices and gold, with fruit money flesh. B. had a finger in anything he could pry open or plug. He borrowed, he lent, he fenced. He immediately liked the look and feel of Sam standing behind him as he conducted his business and so took him everywhere. More, he liked the audience the boy gave him those nights it was only the two of them in the stall, alone with its few moulding and stained pieces of once fine furniture and the mad piles of rusting kettles and crudescent frying pans that were B.’s outward concern. On such nights, B. rose and fell with remembering while they fell asleep on the dank floor. He recounted his sad life in the village as the loyal, wronged son who had had no choice but to leave. It was the same morality play every time, and it was too familiar from the first. When I was a boy, I thought my father

  B.’s second story, his heroic flight, was Sam’s reward for suffering the first. He left his village, near Dambulla, and made his way northeast to Trincomalee, where he eventually found work carrying crates of tea onto British ships. The older boys already on the job tried to scare him away. They told him about a Frenchman’s ghost that had haunted the docks since before even the Dutch had come. Sometimes, they said, this bloodied sailor would sway to the sad music of two drowning sisters calling for help in vain, Tamil girls who had kept him back from his departing ship for a dance lesson, none of them knowing that their brothers were watching. But B. kept carrying the crates. One day, a few months into it, he walked up a gangplank and unloaded but this time kept walking forward, an endless banner of sea blue and blue sky stretching before him. He turned at the first quiet corner and tripped over two fellow stowaways. He suggested they move deeper into the ship. One boy whispered back that he was trying to trick them and the other motioned for him to go. Ten minutes later he heard them begging for mercy as they were thrown off. He was himself sent off at Galle, his arms bent back so far he swore his elbows actually touched for a moment.

  B. spent a year in that southern city. At the rail station, he fought others as hungry and ready as he was to carry trunks for white people; on starched Sunday mornings he waited outside their fortress churches with a dirty snappy monkey that their children begged money from their fathers to play with; for two days he worked for a buffalo farmer with two pretty daughters; eventually, he ran messages for a blind Moor and his seven miserable sons. They lived and worked along Havelock Street and they always made him shake loose his clothing and curl his tongue before leaving their stalls, even the blind one did.

  The next time he tried for that infinite banner of sea blue and blue sky, he was pushed down the gangplank at Colombo harbour. An old uncle helped him to his feet and said that if he tried again, he’d meet the gangplank in Negombo, or Jaffna town, then it would be Trincomalee, then Batticaloa, next Matara, then Galle, and back to Colombo. For years, the uncle whispered, the British had been sailing ships around Ceylon just so boys like them would never see the far white rim of the deep blue water. B. asked the old man how long he’d been trying and he grinned to show the number of teeth he’d had knocked out. And so B. went into the city. Two years later, once he’d taken over a kitchen-goods stall in Pettah under circumstances he never clarified, B. sent word and a biscuit tin to the village: He was presently in Colombo, where he had made a name for himself and could take care of anything.

  “Including furniture,” said Sam.

  “That’s right. Of course, you know how furniture lets me take care of my other business!”

  “Other business? I thought you called it mutton.”

  “What Sam, didn’t you see the one that came last night? Sha! She was soft as lamb.”

  Most days they moved around Pettah, hopping piles of bullock dung along the Saunders Place Road and making mad mirror faces at the beaming children riding inside the trams buzzing down Main Street. B. invited any woman who held his glance to come to his stall. He’d tell them to forget Don Carolis and his timber shed: if they visited B. they would see furniture that had once belonged to the Queen of England herself. The kind of women who came on such terms were also the kind of women who didn’t mind that a fourteen-year-old boy was lying a few feet away. Early the next morning, after they made B. his tea, the women slipped past Sam looking sunken and sad and also ridiculous—they took dented kettles and rusted hopper pans with them to avoid scandalizing the indifferent street. When Sam officially woke up, B. would sometimes show him how he’d used the furniture the night before, how he’d propped the girl onto the peeling top of a child’s dresser or had her hold a washstand’s towel rack and lift her blossomy bottom. B. detailed his nightly victories out of boastful charity; he said he knew Sam could only hear, never see. But what Sam could hear was enough. He learned that chairs creaked and sometimes cracked while dresser drawers scraped and eventually shook; he learned that a woman gives a different cry at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, and, sometimes, a while afterwards, when the only other noise is a sleeping man’s innocent sawing. One night B. came over to him with a slip of a Malay girl who had hair that f
ell past her buttocks in a raven sheaf. B. yawned that he was too tired for a second go but Sam could have a try. The girl jiggered her eyebrows in the carried light of a bottle lamp and he felt something stir but then he felt tight and scalloped around his abdomen and the rest of him felt squeezed and knocked about and so wordless he turned over to their laughing. He fell asleep, eventually, to the girl crying, trying to annihilate memory itself.

  Sam decided mutton could wait, but not money. After a year of apprenticeship, he only wanted his mentor to loan him a little so he could lend out himself. And if not a loan to start making and collecting his own, then why not give over one of the yellow-brown stone chains B. was always rubbing in his pockets? Each, as Sam discovered while listening to him conduct his business, had been given to B. by one of his many dead mothers, who had begged him on their assorted deathbeds to sell it to a good man so that any number of poor daughters could be cured buried or married. But the more successful B. became, the more Sam heard promises that he’d get his chance, and in the meantime the more devoted, grateful, and servile he was expected to be: happy to fetch packets for B.’s lunch, proud to be B.’s bucket man.

  B.’s stall lost the back quarter of its roof to the southwest monsoon season of 1914 and Sam found a briny stretch of fine green netting blown off some purpose on some ship in Colombo harbour. They hung it across the rough open square that was otherwise gaping daylight. B. said that once Sam found a piece of metal sheeting to hammer into place, he could sell the green netting to whomever he pleased and keep the profits for himself. And so on a hot dead-air day, soon after the monsoon, Sam went squelching through Pettah’s junk-bloated alleyways. He could find nothing to fit B.’s roof. His wasn’t the only stall the storms had battered. All he came upon were drowned cats until he met a round man squatting in a waterlogged sarong, crowded in by a knee-high metropolis of pottery jugs. His hands were pattering and smacking across the tops of the jugs with the speed sweat and purpose of a tom-tom beater. Tho tho tho tha tho Sam began to make a wide arc around some kind of madman.

  “Malli, help! They’re escaping!”

  “What are escaping?”

  “Aiyo, all of my beauties are leaving me! Just come see will you!”

  Sam swung around, expecting thugs. Such set-ups were commonplace in the backstreets of the market, but they usually involved found gold or waiting flesh. Here seemed neither.

  “Malli! Pleasewillyoucomehelpme.”

  Bright colours began catching his eye. Moments later he was happier than he could remember, squatting beside the man, his hands also drumming against the escaping butterflies.

  “Not so hard, please. See look, you’ve just crushed that Black Rajah.”

  “Uncle, what are you doing?”

  “You mean to ask what have I been doing, by myself, since morning? Trying to keep something back of my last six months’ patience.” Tho tha drummed a tired hand in vain. “Aiyo! that was a Blue Mormon that just flew off, no?”

  Sam kept drumming while the man, who was called Mahesh, stood and stretched, suddenly indifferent to the bright fleeing papers. Finally here was someone in the city who would listen! An Englishman had been walking in the green behind Mahesh’s hut one day, a village down south, some six months earlier. He kept squatting, and Mahesh’s mother-in-law had sent him out to see if the man might take gingelly oil to help things along. Mahesh discovered that the man was only crouching to look at butterflies. Standing up, the Englishman declared he’d buy as many living specimens as Mahesh could bring to Colombo harbour six months hence. Mahesh only exaggerated a little in retelling the story to his wife and her mother and soon the entire family was at work upon the village green, ignoring taunts about madness from neighbours while hunting butterflies for half-sovereigns. Only no one told Mahesh how far north the Yala monsoon could reach. He came to Colombo at season’s cusp. The Englishmen in the city all looked the same, and none had any notion of paying money for any bloody bow-tie bugs. The bullock cart driver left him and his crates at Pettah. A potter saw and took pity and told him to wait out the monsoon season and then find his Englishman. The potter said Mahesh could even stay in his shop if he had no relations in the city. He would anyway give him enough jugs, at best price, to keep the butterflies safe from the coming rains.

  “And you believed this and gave him the rest of your money and now he’s sent you back to the street,” Sam predicted, feeling streetwise and worldly.

  “Malli, what to do? I only know to catch butterflies, not to keep them. Of course now I see I was played the fool. Aiyo half the butterflies died during the rains. I’m telling you, right now, I’d trade the rest for a good blade. If I had a good blade,” he said through clenched teeth, “then that potter would know, I promise you that!”

  “Truth? You mean you would—”

  “Malli, can you blame a man for anything he does in this buzzard’s city?”

  Sam put his head down and drummed on.

  Tho tho tho tho tha

  After shifting Mahesh’s stock into a clay pot apiece, the two of them came to the stall, where Sam asked B. to let him barter for the butterflies. Wordless, B. disappeared into a corner and returned dragging an oak chair by its lion paws. He grandly arranged himself to watch Sam conduct his business, a yawning bored king bemused by his own generosity.

  Meanwhile, Mahesh was happy to forsake his muttering for a knife when he saw B.’s piles of kettles and pans. He marvelled at the picture of himself returning to the village, his back made into a shiny metal shell of shiny city things. Sam could tell. He would have been thinking the same, had he a village and family worth the thought. Instead he observed to Mahesh how good it would be, getting down from the cart in front of his house, Colombo-returned with the finest and latest Pettah goods for every woman in his family. Sam said he’d even help Mahesh wipe off the sludge of other people’s cooking. And before he left Colombo swearing never to return, Mahesh helped Sam stretch the green mesh netting tight across the stall’s monsoon hole to let in light enough to keep the butterflies confined and lively. The leftover mesh was cut and doubled to make a curtain that closed off enough space for four people. B. told Sam to send in six at a time. And so he began to keep a butterfly hall in the back of B.’s stall, making money from city people who had forgotten the village wonder of pretty little papers fluttering in greened light. B. was happy with the arrangement. Sam cared for the butterflies and organized the queues and took the money. This left B. at liberty to visit in the queue itself, where he set the occasional loan and bought and sold and made so many pretty new friends he no longer had to bark along the Saunders Place Road. He was happier still with the returns. He told Sam that they would divide the profits between them, the money “as evenly parted as my Achchi’s hair” he vowed the first time he told Sam to hand over the day’s take for safekeeping. A long week later, when Sam asked for his share—he lied that he wanted to take his first shave at the Chetty barber’s stall up the lane—B. dropped coins in his hand. So few Sam could close his fist around them.

  “As agreed. Exactly half,” B. said.

  “Half,” Sam said. He collected this many coins on a Saturday morning. He wiped sudden sweat back into his scalp, pulling his fingers dry through his proud black thatch.

  “Yes. This is half,” B. said. “Mokatha?”

  “How is this half?” Sam demanded, but his voice was hard like a tapped coconut is hard.

  “This is half, Sam, after your expenses.”

  He said nothing. Expenses. He left the stall, B.’s stall, B.’s stall full of B.’s things, things that were stolen, broken, bartered, chipped, rusted and crusted in brown bits and yellow oil, and all his.

  He kept giving over money and getting back fistfuls of coins but he wouldn’t try what everything—what memory, body, prospects, hunger, justice—wanted him to do, which soon became what B. himself wanted as well. To drop the money and settle things as men would, not like the perfect parted middle of a granny’s hair, but as men wo
uld. Sam could feel B.’s regard lowering each time he took the coins without comment, but B. was older, stronger, longer in Pettah than Sam was, and B. was spoiling for it. Why? The butterflies were a greater moneymaker than anything else B. had going, and they were getting him more mutton than ever. He’d lately started to take his women behind the green curtain at night. “Private viewings.” He would hold a lantern to show them the butterflies fixed on whatever snapped tree life Sam had been able to find that day. And so at night Sam fell asleep to the sounds of women sucking in their breath at discovered beauty or shrieking, then laughing, at what was suddenly touching them. In the mornings, after they glanced past him with their useless kettles, Sam would go into the hall before the first paying people knocked. He’d rearrange the dragged-down branches and sweep the floor with the hard soles of his feet, so many butterflies dead among the dead leaves.

  “If you keep doing this, soon we’ll have none,” he warned one morning.

  “Doing what?” asked B.

  “You know.”