Beggar's Feast Read online

  The four of them, Mahinda, Mohan, Fat Mohan, and Viresh, assumed Sam was from Colombo—only a city boy could be so strange and bold, proud and profane, as to be called Sam Kandy. He never told them otherwise, and it was he who decided how they would move about Sydney, this skyward puzzle of endless brick and squinting white faces brimmed in black hats. So far, they had left the dock area exactly twice. Both times, the others close behind him in single file, their throats exposed in wonder, Sam had moved with wary Pettah swagger into the busy city, trying not to flinch every few minutes when the world would change from darkness to light and back again at the intersections along Pitt Street. The first time he turned them around, he did it for fear the road they were walking was a world-without-end of looming shadow. Searching ahead, Sam could only see more of the same: broad-faced buildings peaked in a cold recurrence of turrets and clock-faces and steeples, the occasional sceptre-wielding stone queen or sea-goddess borne aloft by petrified knights and mermen. He looked back at the others and shrugged, stretched, yawned, observing they had already seen as much of Sydney as there was, the rest was repetition. The others yawned and stretched and agreed as one and returned to Circular Quay along the same route, only lighter in their steps, their heads more level, feeling like conquerors.

  The second time they went into the city, moving again along Pitt Street because they already knew they knew it, they brought with them a coffee-coloured boy with almond-shaped eyes who was younger than even his caterpillar moustache suggested, who would not tell them his name or the name of his island just in case any of these people were in contact with his parents. Mahinda and the other three enjoyed the new boy’s company—seeing his exposed throat as he looked up and around immediately made them more experienced, disenchanted. Meanwhile Sam had decided that this time they would turn onto another street, only why this one and that way instead of the next and the other? He never had to decide. You couldn’t tell coming clouds from building shadows in this place, and suddenly it was raining fat brown splats. Right away the sixth boy turned back to the harbour and ran, bouncing through the crowd. He looked like a dancing candle disappearing in some nighttime game in the forest. They never saw him again. They were all wearing white cotton, which, soaked through against their bodies, felt like failing bandages. Fat Mohan called ahead to him and pointed to the overhang in front of a hotel where others, where Sydney people, had already gathered. Sam walked toward them, the others following. Toward black shoes and black suits and black vests and black hats all made slick with rain. Toward standing shoulders, broad and square, arranged like statuary and waiting with staring right back at you, too many ever to be scared off or stomped through and suddenly he stopped short, turned and said they’d walked through worse during monsoons back home, so the five stalked back through the rain-sheeted street, droopy tallow too proud and waterlogged to run.

  Of various necessities, Circular Quay became their known world. When the ferries on the far-side docks stopped for the day and they could no longer look for parasols and it was too dark for another game of ball, they spoke of their longing for home things, for things that were true green and red, for the shade of trees not buildings, for piles of blush mangoes, for getting the seed to yourself, for the street theatre of rickshaw drivers and cart-men arguing over who was taking up too much road, their necks wrenched at sharper and sharper angles, their curses trailing off in opposite directions. Of course this was longing without end: no one actually wanted to go home to Ceylon. They had discovered that they could live here, in a harbourside Sydney warehouse, until they died toothless old men. They just had to keep their heads down and ears pricked for the ship name the fellow in front of them used in the queues for food and cots. Poor math and bad eyes helped. The men who worked the massive steaming pots were often the same men who pointed the ship-hands to open cots, and they never raised a fuss that the Sinjin Sailor seemed to be carrying seventeen little brown men at the lunch hour and seventy-five by dinner. Not a bad life, but Sam and the others were getting notions. You don’t come this far in a dark stink beside two elephants, for daily servings of carroty broth and bony bread, for cots that were never but already body-warm and scalp-smelling. The five of them talked up taking a ferry across to the other side of Sydney; they talked up trying Pitt Street again and this time entering one of the stores whose windows were grand new worlds unto themselves, going in perhaps for a pocket-watch or a razor; they talked up the brass foot-rails they’d catch flashes of when the door to a pub would open, which gleamed like holy charms cut from the necks of devout giants. And they began to talk up money, because they had come to understand, not just Sam but all of them, that in a place like this you couldn’t ride a notion across the water, you couldn’t marvel at its intricacy or weigh it in your palm, you couldn’t sip it to waste away an afternoon in a dark murmuring room. Of course they knew how they could make money: ships departed daily from Circular Quay, always looking for boys like them to carry and load, to cook, to clean captain’s quarters and messes and heads. It was also known that there were paying men, Sydney men, once every now and then even a barrel, who came around the warehouse at the weird hours of night, hats tipped low in low light, pockets full of coin and longing. Sam and the others had witnessed brown boys taken off by both situations—often one was fast followed by the other—and they had agreed that they wouldn’t leave this place as servants on a ship, or see more of it by serving any white-bellied nighttime needs. They were in agreement but one time Viresh only wanted to point out that—“That nothing!” Sam cut him off, suddenly vehement and seething. “We’re not going to see the world by filling our hands with other people’s filth.”

  Money came, eventually, unexpectedly, after they began to win crowds to their afternoon sessions with the rattan ball. All of them had played the game in the village, and during his nighttime strolls in Colombo, while B. had been busy butchering in his butterfly hall, Sam had also seen boys playing it in the mothy streetlight around Slave Island, everyone too focused to notice a new boy standing at the perimeter hoping for a try, just a touch, looking even for a chance to retrieve an errant throw or dropped ball and be nodded at, if not with invitation or gratitude, then at least with acknowledgement that the ball hadn’t floated back to the circle of its own volition but been returned by someone. Someone. But that had been Colombo. Here, in Circular Quay, on the pebbly ground beside their warehouse, Sam not only played, he was in charge. He sent the ball skyward for each in the circle, who then vied to keep it aloft in a competing, scaling show of body music and muscle.

  They played with a boy from Java whose ball it was until he left it behind, and occasionally with others who knew the game from their own islands under eccentrically different names. They sent the ball back and forth to him with taps, kicks, elbows, with bounces from the head, hailing and fanning forearms. As each round intensified and more watching white faces ringed their circle, each boy had to top the other until a ball went wide or fell to the ground or, the best times, one of them worked up too fine a combination to be beat and the others knew it and clapped and gave way: as when Sam once threw the ball for Viresh, who took it on one knee and shifted it to the other, then let it drop and drop, nearly to the ground, until a shin kick sent it high enough for a devil-dancer-fast body twirl before the other shin sent it this time waist high for a smiling half-turn finale, a dismissive jolt from the elbow finished with a casual stroll away from the circle, Viresh smiling victory at the crowd, the ball arcing fast and perfectly back to Sam and the others giving a cheer before crouching ready, desperate to beat him on the next throw.

  But Viresh always won the most cheers from the other players, and also from their audience and, the time everything changed, he won a florin from someone in the crowd. Studying the sudden silver in his hot palm, he grinned as he flashed it at the others and they all knew it. They had their game. Their sessions now ended not from fatigue or failing light, but always with a dramatic flourish from Viresh followed fast by Sam circu
lating through the crowd in taught and recalled humility, carrying a battered bowler hat as his beggar’s bowl. But the ferry ride to North Sydney was a constant sea-spray and barricade of parasols and fathers, husbands, brothers, suitors, and sons. Their time sipping a pint in the pub was no better. They’d crowded around one open spot at the bar, each trying to get a foot on the rail, their legs raised and shaking forward in a slow, insistent rhythm, shy and smiling like damsel dancers at a village pageant. But around them the other drinkers only squinted and snickered and planned their own prizes. The boys drank bitter and fast and left.

  When lining the beggar’s hat with spare change was no longer enough for them, Fat Mohan, unanimously the worst player, was chosen for the main role in their new con. He would take a throw from Sam and begin bouncing the ball backward until he fell into the crowd itself, which, with the static intelligence of crowds, didn’t make way as he neared but held fast, trusting the notion that he wouldn’t actually break the invisible barrier between watched and watcher. But he always did, on one occasion tumbling into a round man with thick red sideburns that had grown to half-moons upon his fat cheeks. Who called out “God and his angels!” as he fell back, Fat Mohan landing on top of him crying “Magee Amma!” and rolling like a pestle on a mortar until Sam came and shoved Mohan and helped the gentleman to his feet, dusting off his coat and making sure he hadn’t dropped anything and meanwhile the other boys and spectators crowded in with apologies and concerned noises and offers to call doctors wives and constables, all of it making the mark the more embarrassed of having been so felled and so just to show there were no hard feelings before he walked away never to sight brown boys at their game again, he gave Mohan a florin. Having already given up his pocket-watch.

  Within a few weeks they each had one, and then they wanted more, they needed something else to try for, some other shiny gimcrack to let them believe that they had become conquerors in their new world, not its cowards, that their long days about the docks were days of daring, were days desired more than anything or anyone you could find on open water or down Sydney’s canyoned streets. But what? Anxious, agitated, demanding, they looked to Sam, who looked away, not because he didn’t know what they should do next, but because why was everything now they? Sydney was his latest shadow life, and it had to yield more than shadow because he didn’t know what that might mean yet. Not with four others to think of, to worry him with their wanting. But what? He ignored the latest question and Mahinda snapped shut the bright copper halves of a shipping agent’s watch and declared it was time to go for their billfolds.

  “But a billfold is not simply clipped to a vest,” warned Sam.

  “You’re scared to try? Tissa would have done it,” challenged Mahinda, who wasn’t looking at him but at the other boys’ answering faces, their agreeing nods. Dung smear squirrel courage

  “Right,” said Sam. “You throw.” A day later, when Fat Mohan missed the ball and fell and began to pestle and cry out, Mahinda ran over and reached in to help a man in a yellow hat to his feet. Sam waited until just after he saw Mahinda’s fingers pulling away a triumphant thickness from the man’s vest before he turned Mahinda around and hit him hard in the stomach. Sam picked up the billfold and the man in the yellow hat tapped around inside his coat, then with a black boot gave Mahinda a second to the stomach. Stepping over the curled, cursing boy, the man nodded at Sam. He handed over the money, already wondering if the other boys would catch him before he could jump the next ship out of Circular Quay. But the man in the yellow hat was still staring at him. He pointed at a windowed building beyond the warehouse and walked off. Sam followed.

  A year later, he slipped climbing the staircase to his new room. His feet had been made modern: they were bound and fine-looking and useless, shod in black leather shoes that were unyielding hard. James Astrobe, the man in the yellow hat, was ahead of him, smoking, his hands free. Sam tried to brace himself against the wall but his nervous hands slid and smeared and he slipped again, pitching forward. Immediately he crouched to make it seem like he was looking between the steps. Astrobe took no notice. Meanwhile, balling his toes in vain, Sam stared down at a world of dark hard wood and yellow lamplight, a world of long windows that rippled their streetscape pictures and rattled in the wind, of muffled voices waiting behind heavy-looking doors that Astrobe hadn’t opened and showed him as they’d gone through the grand house of gleaming silver things—knobs and switches on walls, thin knives and little spoons and little mugs arranged on mirrored trays, bells, a clasped book cover, a heavy-looking brush: all of it looking as if washed in silver itself. His hands had touched nothing as he followed Astrobe, but the very idea of it had made them warm and wet like a clam cracked open by a gull and left on a shore rock. They were still damp when to stand up and keep climbing he pressed off the wall, which was itself firm and cold to touch, not home cold, not the earth-smelling soft dampness of the dung-walled house where once he’d been a boy, and not temple cold, not like the shaded stone floor of the audience hall where Sadhu liked to cool his parts, but a cold that was no respite from the world without: late June in Sydney, wintertime. It had already turned black night and hard air when it was time to shut the office for the day and, for the first time, walk home with Astrobe in winds spun up from the great curving bays that ringed the city.

  The room at the top of the stairs was an octagon of shuddering windowpanes. It would be weeks before these became sleeping noises for him, by which point he wasn’t sleeping anyway. This was to be his graduation from the pallet in Astrobe’s Circular Quay office, where he’d been sleeping since that afternoon, a year before, when he’d broken with Mahinda and the others. He may or may not have seen them since: there were always so many brown boys hanging around the harbour, huddled, bruised, staring. Too timid to try anything else. Astrobe motioned for him to come nearer the glass and then he showed Sam the nighttime city. Below them stretching in every direction was a great electrified blackness. Following Astrobe’s hand as it pointed past the fine houses of Potts Point, Sam saw broken successions of small blazing squares, where still some office men were working, and also bright clusters and isolated drops, the streetlamps and evening lamps that marked the walkways and warehouses and moored ships of Circular Quay. Sam tapped a finger against the glass. Astrobe tapped just above the faint smudge he’d made and Sam nodded. The office. The tour continued in a gesturing silence. Both of them generally preferred it that way. After a year of acting as James Astrobe’s valet shadow and protector against others like himself, Sam had gained a rudimentary sort of English that was daily improving from his errand- and message-running through the city he now knew better than Colombo, but they rarely used English between them. They had been, from the start, so swift and natural with gesture they were loath to give it up, especially when the other way involved the indignities of learning to share a language: the slow long mouths, the patient restatements, the endless reductions from sentence to phrase, from the name for something to the separate sounds that made the name—an ugly primate mimicry.

  Astrobe turned on a desk lamp and the starry city disappeared. He stood next to a portrait hanging behind his desk, his back flat against the wall. It was broadsheet-sized and set in a thick frame that was itself a carved busyness of laurel leaves and fruit-studded vines and each sharp corner a crowded garden of blooming flowers and all of it gilded. Looking at Sam with a smile, Astrobe made a face that monkeyed the stern one beside him. He could be this way when it was only the two of them in the office—brothers making faces under father’s nose. Sam smiled. He had already decided he would not wonder why Astrobe wanted to be like this with him, this acting like twin mallis though age money and skin said otherwise. He would not wonder because this past year nothing, nothing of his old squirrel life, had happened to make him kick out and run. But he also decided that when he was the one with a young man smiling to serve at his side—and, after a year of watching James Astrobe run a shipping business out of Sydney harbour, Sam knew th
at somehow, somewhere, he would make this his work as well—he wouldn’t ever be so free and friendly and monkeying, wouldn’t ever let such a person as he was now feel the pride of place and secret power that he had come to have with Astrobe. Sam liked him, but it was in the way, in the village, you liked an older boy willing to race you along the banks of the paddy fields and at the same time knew to your bones that he was beneath you for doing it.

  He stepped closer to study the portrait, his heavy shoes making a rackety footfall against the wooden floors. The face looked about the same age as Astrobe’s and was, like his, white as coconut pulp. And the man was also wearing a yellow hat. The resemblance seemed to end there. The hair in the painting was lighter, a reddish orange like the colour of shaved cinnamon trees, regenerate lives. And everything in the face itself looked stouter, rounder, the eyes, nose, the full lips, which were pursed, as if their owner were trying not to laugh at something the painter just said.

  “This,” Astrobe said, stepping forward, his hand reaching back in a gesture of a formal introduction, “is the late Martin Astrobe, my great-grandfather, as he was painted a hundred-odd years ago, by his wife, when he was a rising gentleman in Rose Hill. Looks like a proper Englishman, don’t he?”