Beggar's Feast Read online

  “Right … and still you don’t.”

  “Every night,” Sam continued, ignoring the taunt, the churn it could still give him, “so many die when you go in there with your mutton.”

  “So?”

  “So? So who’s going to pay to see a butterfly hall without any butterflies?”

  B. shrugged and turned away.

  “So then no money, and how will you get your mutton?”

  B. switched around and walked straight toward him. Sam took a step back, his legs tight and trilling. Monks lay down and crows hopped away. City men came right at you. But B. stopped short and jabbed a finger at his chest.

  “Remember, malli, I was getting money and mutton long before you and your green net and your butterflies, and I’ll be getting money and mutton long after you and them are gone.”

  Sam said nothing.

  “More mutton even. Truth! There, I hear someone tapping. Go and see. I’m piss heavy.” He grabbed himself and turned around. Before he slipped out to the alley, he called back “Even more money.”

  Sam began to leave when the women arrived. He learned that Pettah at night was lonely and feral. Cooking fires burned every few stalls but these were always private affairs—a shared cup for pot arrack and palms passing beedis and betel. People had a way of arranging themselves when a stranger lingered at heard laughter. Or they would stare back dumb, glare past, glare until he passed. Sam also tried to join a few streetlight sessions of rajay with boys who looked more his age, even retrieving the rattan ball once, in vain. And so he became but another wanderer in the nighttime city, his act of head down deliberate paces abandoned once he accepted that no one else was even watching, let alone believing, that he among all of them had somewhere to go. But he refused to stand around like the others, wearing mournful twilit faces, leaning against dirty walls, waiting either for something, anything to happen, or for sleep to lower them to their haunches, bottom, back. These were drowsy despairing people he’d never be like, people made lazy at life by pickling themselves in pity. He’d seen them before—in the village, fathers given no sons by their wives, only dowries; in the temple, monks sore with bad heels, creased and cracked and lined up the morning of the long last walking day of a relic procession. But Sam kept moving, thinking about where he could take his butterflies, or where he could go and leave them and their owner. Sometimes he thought about what he couldn’t be blamed for doing, a man alone in a buzzard’s city like this. Eventually, he decided these nightly walks were in search of a good blade.

  The last night he returned to the stall, Sam heard no B. and no woman. Instead, he found an overturned chair with a butterfly perched on a spindle. In the lamplight its wings were a pattern of copper and yellow bands. Past the chair, gathered on the ground, were two black clumps. Rats? He leaned to look, ready to bring his heel down. One was a palm-sized heap of wavy man locks, the other a coil of longer, more delicate strands. Around the hair, the dry dirt floor was a scored record of sudden movement, jagged finger gashes and swirled scuff marks. Whoever it was, whether an angry husband and his brothers or someone B. owed or someone who owed B., had dragged both of them toward the butterflies. He found two more clumps of hair in the ruined hall. Looking up in vain for more butterflies, and turning around in the little space, he suddenly curled his toes. The ground was mucked. It hadn’t rained that night. The dead smell of old earth mixed with the iron tang of blood. He held his finger to the light. The tip was covered in a smudge of ground turned reddish brown, and he knew it was from raging life not rain. Only then did he think to turn and make sure he was alone. The double-folded green mesh curtain was gone. Whoever it was, Sam thought, had wrapped B. and the woman in the curtain and taken them away, living or dead. He searched for B.’s stash of money, his money. Instead he caught the last butterfly, righted the chair, and sat down. He decided they must have thrown B.’s body into the harbour. He hoped that B. would someday find his snowfall beyond the blue sea. He hoped that B. would sink and hook onto the anchor of an English ship and be dragged around the island forever. Yawning, Sam looked around the stall a final time before he walked into the bruised blue light of morning in the city, and disappeared.

  He curled his tongue and shook out his clothes and asked again.

  “Can I go to the harbour and see? I will come back straight away.”

  “Another boy will ask for your job the moment you leave,” Ismail warned.

  “You’ll keep it for me.”

  “Ha! Why should I?”

  “Who else knows all the village tricks they use on you?” Sam asked. One day, three years after he left B.’s stall, he had passed by the back of a spice shop just as someone was trying to sell the merchant a sack of useless cardamom. The seeds were already out of their pods; the seller must have rubbed a little fresh-ground cardamom into the top layers to hide their failing savour. He had intervened, explained, and the merchant chased the cardamom cheat off. Afterwards, this Ismail told Sam he had centuries of trading in his blood but only decades of selling spice. He took Sam on and let him sleep in the back of the shop instead of the dog he used to keep there. Every night, Sam breathed a pungent smell of burlap and dog’s body, piss and spice. He woke only ready to leave the stall and breathe in the first-of-the-day, the seablown air of the city before it combusted into business.

  “Do you really have to go and see right now? You know they load elephants onto ships every week at the harbour. See how you’re squinting! It’s almost noontime sun. There’s a sack of peppercorns that needs drying.”

  “They’re taking a tusker on board this time.”

  “What, just one?”

  Sam knew Ismail would try to keep him around with something like that, just as he knew to curl his tongue and shake out his clothes every time he left the spice shop. Sam never told anyone what he did in the time between keeping a butterfly hall and minding spices, only that he remained in Pettah, sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, and in Pettah back then you could always find something to eat so long as you had teeth for bones and a taste for marrow. His new boss was first-person proud of his family’s centuries in Ceylon. A few years before he met Sam, Ismail had been beaten to blood and mush by a crowd of Sinhalese men who were running riot against the plague of Coast Moors that had lately come onto the island. Between the blows, Ismail had told the men he hated these new moneychanger Moors as much as they did, that his family had been here as long as any of theirs, longer even, but this last point had made it worse.

  But by 1918, the latest Ismail was ten centuries of first-person story, hearsay, memory, and legend. When Sam said two Chinamen had been hanged by the stolen silks they were peddling in Pettah, Ismail spoke of the very first man of his family, a silk merchant who’d escaped Canton in 878 after a new rebel king ordered his subjects to show their loyalty by slaughtering the city’s foreigners. That first Ismail had played dead along the way to the harbour, lying in piles of Jews and Christians and Persians. By nightfall, he reached a ship that sailed him to Ceylon, his skin, hair, and clothes soaked with the spent lives of the cosmopolitan dead. When Sam told of a drunken gem trader from Ratnapura who was said to have demanded an entire floor of the Grand Oriental Hotel, hammering on the gilded registry book with a dirty ruby the size of a barbet’s belly, Ismail shrugged. “I watched the last king of Kandy weep at his billiards table, shooting ivory balls made from his finest tusker.” Another time, Sam described how all of York Street had stopped after three English daughters pulled the tortoiseshell clips from their hair. Ismail snorted. “I have seen twin sisters hang bats from their braids.” Sam snorted back. He was from the village. He’d seen his share of bats and long braids. Ismail didn’t like that. Sam soon learned to compete only so much with the man who pays you.

  “Just lay out the peppercorns and then you can go see your tuskers loaded onto a ship,” Ismail allowed, finally. “How many was it again?”

  “One.”

  “Ah, right. You know the Portuguese paraded elephants th
rough Jaffna harbour.”

  “Once in Kandy they—”

  “Head down and spread pepper, Sam, and listen. Then tell me if you still want to see them take your one tusker onto a ship.” Sam hauled a burlap sack past the shop’s back awning into the nearly noontime sun. He put newspaper sheets onto their drying table, a flat square of shimmery metal they’d mounted onto the cracked base of a pedestal sink some Mount Lavinia Burgher had rubbished.

  “Their empty ships would come to Jaffna down from Coromandel,” Ismail began, standing in the shade behind Sam as he worked. “We would watch from Point Pedro. The converts among us tried to teach the faith. They said the Portuguese never sank because they sailed the world by the cross. Three masts approaching meant salvation for all, devils and angels alike. What madness. A week later, the ships would leave for Malabar and then on to Portugal, the masts half-fallen from the heavy holds. Christ and his two thieves listing. Now the time I am remembering, I was keeping a shop in Jaffna, near the harbour, and the Portuguese wanted to celebrate a new rebel king, Braganza. From Lisbon the order came for an elephant parade. The ships were to take as many as they could. I closed the shop and went to watch. The last to leave already had tea and spices and king coconut, and it also had to take a mother, a baby, and one, two, three tuskers. Did you hear me, Sam? Three. The Portuguese dismissed the mahouts for warning that this was too many, and also for saying that the baby should be with its mother. And so the mahouts walked off the ship into the crowd, making predictions like aunties at an ill-starred wedding.

  “The three tuskers and the mother were driven into the hold. The baby was kept on the deck. The ship needed a blessing before it raised anchor, so one of their priests came forward. Even from the shore you could hear the elephants below deck muttering and snuffling through the low slow priestspeech. Finished his prayer, the priest began to throw his water. The sailors knelt and crossed themselves, and then he turned and threw water at the shore and some of us knelt and most of us ducked. Then he began to shake smoke in all directions. Some fool decided the heathen baby should get it before going to the new king. The baby pulled back, more sailors joined to push, and the baby cried out. The priest kept shaking the smoke and she cried again and then, Sam, then the mother answered. Believe it. There was yelling below deck and then a man howling and then the first tusker came up, followed by the others. These poor fellows weren’t charging. They were making way. The mother came last, trumpeting and shaking her ears and swinging her trunk along the ship’s planks. Everyone ran from the baby and a gun went off but these were now Braganza’s elephants so the shooting could only be overhead. The priest tried to run down the gangplank but fell into the water, his chain and ball of smoke too.

  “As for the rest of them, those who weren’t thrown or trampled crossed themselves and jumped. The ship began to sink, the elephants playing hell along the busted deck. Afterwards, the landside Portuguese called for all pearl divers to come forward, and everyone else went home to tell what had happened and to burn their own incense and hold their own babies. Bodies washed up for days: sailors, elephants, the priest, all covered in seagreens and tealeaves. At night, poor men and thieves came to hack ivory and search for gold and shoes. Someone found a mahout’s hook and I traded a bridal sari’s worth of silk for it.”

  Sam still remembered the especially fine elephant hook he’d seen the year before he’d run away from the temple: clean silver, forged with a filigreed handle and a lotus flower hilt, intended only for the ear of the caparisoned tusker who carried the Buddha’s tooth in the great relic procession around Kandy town. “You still have it?” he asked, looking up from the pepper.

  “Son to son it was passed down,” Ismail explained, “until the family split after a 1700s Ismail took a second woman and the first wife demanded it be kept for her son. I have never seen it directly. I came down, first born, but from the second line.” Ismail’s words fell to bits. The mean exposures of memory. But there wasn’t much time. These days they didn’t board a tusker so often. This had to be his chance. Sam clapped his hands dry, curled his tongue and shook out his clothes.

  “Pepper’s finished. Can I go and come?” he asked, then smiled and crooked his head, very like a beggar, and Ismail found centuries of pity for this poor Pettah boy’s notion of spectacle. Yes, he could go see his one tusker, but he had to come back in time to turn the pepper. Sam yawned to hide his smile and went. For him tuskers were no greater sight than bats and braids or butterflies. He’d seen enough of them in his life before the city, and by now he’d seen enough of the city itself that he wanted to see only one last part of it: Colombo harbour at midday. Departure time.

  Before boarding, Sam glanced at the brown buzzing wet spot where the original boy still lay. To his city eyes just another Colombo beauty mark, only no butterflies drying in this blood. Besides, nothing mattered but the heart-ramming prospect before him, certainly not the four village boys already on the great ship, who were glaring at his approach. His fingers still pungent with Ismail’s pepper, his ears ringing with his stories, he gave “Sam Kandy” as his full name when the shipping agent asked. He probably could have said George Buckingham without query. It was now past noon and the agent had been up since well before dawn. All he wanted was to watch the yellow-grey mooring ropes fall slack against the ship’s hull so he could walk back to his office, hang a sarong across the harbourside window, and sleep until nightfall. Sam was the first boy to come forward and actually stay there when, red-eyed and yawning, the agent called for a volunteer to replace the boy just trampled. He knew he’d catch hell for sending four attendants with the two elephants instead of the five stipulated on the zoo’s bill of lading. The white rage for official reality. Ten minutes earlier, one of the boys, stupid fellow, poor fellow, had been standing directly behind the bull when it decided against trying the wide ramp onto the ship. The boy’s chest had cracked in the span of a shocked last gasp before a mahout took hold of the elephant by the ear and led it back to the ramp. The bull stepped around the crumpled body like a dainty lady avoiding a mud puddle, its tail swishing at heat and all the greenflies gathering in its wake, their own bodies flashing in the noonlight like a shattered gemstone tossed up in the heavy harbour air that would be Sam’s last breath of Ceylon for ten years.

  He didn’t know how many days had passed when next he saw daylight. They raised and lowered the food and waste buckets before dawn and again at night. And below deck on a ship never meant to sail around Ceylon forever, a ship with so many chimneys and strolling gentlemen it could have been London itself, a ship large enough to carry elephants, time did not slow so much as absent itself. He could tell durance only from his palms, from the sharpness of his fingernails each time he made a fist in vain. Down here, in the hold, it was four against one. The original five boys were from the same village, near the thorn forest where the elephants had been corralled. Tissa had been their leader, their schemer, their storyteller and go-between with grown-ups and white people as they made their way to the city. The great ship was supposed to be next, for all five of them. Instead they had this black-eyed city boy, whose body they made their record of fate’s ill treatment while they waited each day for someone to open the hatch and let them out for some time above deck. Sam would begin to climb in their rising, swaying shadows, his chest expanding at these sudden miracles of fresh air, and he would breathe in deeply, greedily, whatever made it past the bodies ahead of him, grateful for anything other than the sweet retched odours of straw and dung and blackened plantains, of animals in close quarters and buckets of their own waste that never even sloshed about—at least that would have meant some movement upon the water.

  “I thought you were five down there,” he heard a sailor call out just as one of the four, this time Mahinda, jabbed his heel against Sam’s fingers. He slipped back down, the thud of the hatch besting the thud of his body. The cow in her pen snuffled and returned to eating. The bull watched him with black eyes.

  “Want to t
rample someone else for me?” Sam asked, getting to his feet once more in the funky blackness, his fingernails digging into his palms. While the others were above, he had to squat in low light and elephant dung, his eyes watering, his face wincing as he worked. The other boys in the hold gave him all the lowest jobs. The beatings were worse if ever they returned and he hadn’t already cleared the dung. Enough. He’d be beaten for what he was considering, but he’d be beaten anyway when they climbed back down, windwashed and maybe this time with news of green on the horizon, a destination, not that it mattered. Besides curses and threats, none would speak to him. But, he decided, at least he could do something worthy of the next beating. So Sam felt about in the dark for the heavy egg shapes and broke them and smeared elephant dung on the iron rungs of the ladder. He felt around for more fresh patties and scattered the musky crumble in their sleeping corners, and then did likewise in his own corner for when they tried to sleep there instead. So that at his doing they were all homeless, and all their hands would smell the same, and when the four of them realized what he’d done, understood the hard symmetry of such vengeance, they began to give way. By Sydney they were Sam’s boys.

  After they were counted alongside the elephants and watched the animals be led away by local men in helmet-looking hats—as if those could save you when the bull decided to turn back to the ship!—the boys were told they had forty-eight hours in Sydney. They were shown to the warehouse where they would be given food and cots in the meantime, provided they gave the name of their ship. They’d smiled and nodded at these instructions and the white man overseeing their stay smiled and nodded back and, as he always did with such boys, reminded them again of when they were to present themselves for the return journey and, as he always did, wished them well knowing he’d never see any of them again. By 1920 Circular Quay was spotted with a hundred brown shades—deckhands, galley grunts, elephant minders, bodyservants—young men from all the brown bits of the world carried to and from Sydney harbour on the great ships. And whenever the constables would question them, the boys would make a great show of their unfortunate situation, pantomiming that they were only waiting to leave on the very next ship, their faces grimacing to suggest the hardship of living hundreds of miles away from their fathers and mothers, a hardship of laying about the docks smoking and laughing and sighting parasols twirling to and from the stout ferries. The constables, who were round and thick as barrel and sounded like Englishmen with cows’ tongues, would give one or two a crack as warning to the rest to be gone the morrow. When they returned a few days later, everyone knew to look at them with fresh eyes and blank faces, one or two hiding bruises.