Beggar's Feast Read online

  “We should make our way down to the ship,” said Astrobe, resigned.

  “Do you want me to see if you left it upstairs?” asked Sam.

  “You think you could run home and back before we left?”

  Sam shrugged and both smiled, remembering their old wordless competitions.

  “But what about this?” He spread his hands along his chest and down the length of her dead brother’s suit, which hung loose on him the way a rice sack hangs loose on a pole in a garden plot.

  “This time of day, no one should be about the house. And anyway be quick about it. Leave your kit here. I’ll see that it gets on board.

  He nodded and went with such great purpose and imagined rewards that he did not stop running until he reached the last step before the observatory. He was breathing so hard he did not hear their breathing within. They were lying together on his own cot, his own sheet bunched high around Malcolm’s fat middle, whose body was going like a hammering pink temple. She was lying beneath him.

  Mary gasped. Was this her brother Jim, burnt and shrunk by gunpowder death or hell, and anyway returned in his best suit, returned because what she had finally consented to do with their cousin was fit to raise the dead? Malcolm was making noise too, uncontrollably, sighs-into-groaning, his body moving past his mind’s stilled sadness, hatred, at discovery. He looked away. She was slapping his shoulders to stop now, where moments before she’d been kneading, breathing deeply in and out with him. This misfortunate little brown fellow would now know why Malcolm had been so good and answering these past months to all his useless Mary-talk, why he had so nodded at Sam’s telling him, falsely it seemed, that he and his uncle were going to Wellington this first-of-the-month.

  Taking him by a tuft of hair warmed by her skin, oh by her own hair, Sam turned Malcolm’s head and yanked him off her body, brought him to his feet and chopped down at his cowardly hands struggling with hers for the sheet. Sam pushed him hard and Malcolm’s splotchy pinkness collapsed into itself as he staggered backward against his uncle’s desk, his arms and hands scissoring into a V at his privates. Sam rammed an open palm into his nose and when he raised his hands to his blooming bloody face Sam kicked him down. Malcolm fell to the floor, sucking and gurgling. Sam walked over to the desk. He found the scrolled menu card half tucked beneath the blotter and turned to leave. But he had to look again at his cot, at her face, also splotchy. She seemed to be wriggling away, or trying to get herself onto her elbows without the sheet falling. She was cursing as she moved—her cousin, her brother, her father. She leaned and spat in the wastebasket beside his cot. His bed! Suddenly she was staring at him, her eyes diamond bright with confusion and rage and shame, could it be, and thanksgiving? But the creased bed-sheet looked like ten thousand crows’ feet. He felt like a paddy field on fire. He felt charred, used up, scoured of past life and all possibility save one. Sam ran.

  As promised: from high upon the verandah of the silent walauwa, and from within the dark doorways of Sudugama’s silent village huts, a strange new noise was heard coming down the Kurunegala Road. It sounded like distant bees, or ten thousand dragonflies, forty thousand wings, a vibrant hum that became a growl and then a rumble and whine as it neared the village whose people, always ready for omens, checked the time and reminded themselves of the date and squinted over the treetops to consider, in its early-morning fade, how much and malevolent was the moon left in the sky. Malaria, drought, and now this, in 1929, some boxy monster bringing with it dogs barking; birds cawing; boys clapping and calling on friends to come see; older men slack-jawed with shock, women peering from behind husband and brother shoulders, failing to hold on to their own children, who ran to join the mad parade that had gathered around him town after town since Colombo. Sam Kandy was seated in the back of the first motorcar ever to come to the village of Sudugama, a 1928 Morris Minor, black as deep water; his driver, a boy with blue eyes.

  The car turned off the main road into a dry dirt laneway cut between the paddy fields. On the left was the reedy pond, now more a brown puddle. Sam remembered how once, before the temple, when he was just another boy in the village, he had been told that this pond was filled with baby turtles, told by a boy who was soaked through and smiling as he described the crawling surface of the water. His wet finder’s feet were filmed in dust from running up the laneway. Sam never thought to ask him where his turtle was. He ran down straight away, crouched and squinted across the reed-bent water, waiting for the shimmering surface to tremor with life born to be caught. He was pitched forward by the very boy who had called him down. The leafy surrounds shook with laughter as the other boys, ranging from long dry to still damp, stood to see the latest conned. The boy who had pushed him in pulled him out with rough ceremony and said that now it was his turn to find his own boy to tell about the baby turtles. Sam understood and played the game and played it well. He had been so happy not to be the last boy found, happier still that the boy he ran and called down was Bopea, whom he had once fought and lost to on the great green clearing.

  The Morris was moving very slowly now, the surface of lane that led through the village undulant like the bony backs of the men and beasts born to walk it. At Sam’s word the car paused at the barren junction that marked the centre of the village. He glanced to the right, toward the now gaping astrologer’s hut. He glanced to the left, down the lane past the carpenter’s stall, at what, until so very lately, had been his family’s own place. And now, twenty years later, always, he looked forward, upward, to the great twin boulders that marked the entranceway to the walauwa itself. Boulders that, in years past, had always barred the way forward, upward, for men like his father and his father and his father too, the men of his family back unto the very first of his line who emerged from untold, unknown history, who appeared on the scene from unnamed and long forgotten geography one morning to spend the rest of his days and his son’s and his son’s forever more working the mud lands of men born to better horoscopes. Until now and himself, Sam thought, wondered, promised; no, vowed. He had stopped the car so he could ask himself one last time if what was next was in fact what was wanted. And it was, it had to be, it was what everything before this day compelled him now to seek, impelled him, at last un-fathered, to make his own.

  “What are you? A politics? A temperance bugger?” the old man had asked him, days before, when he had stepped into the hut. He’d come by train and then cart, dressed in a simple clerk’s outfit, unannounced, unknown, to see what was left of a forgotten family he was certain and outraged and grateful had forgotten him.

  “You don’t know me?” Sam asked. Yes, he did, he wanted it that way, wanted no ceremony as he returned to the low little room lit only by bottle lamp and any early moonlight and starshine washing in through the side window beneath which he had lain as a little boy. Those jurying stars. While his father studied him, Sam looked around and found nothing of the Christmas crate he had sent from Sydney, four years earlier. He breathed deeply the odour of ages, finding again nothing of himself in it save the earthly sweet smell of ripe plantains, combs as profuse as they and they alone always were, piled on the table. The rest was old dirt and oil, burnt rice, rinds, pot arrack; old man smells.

  “I don’t owe you any money, I know that! Ask anyone if I owe anyone.”

  “Are you alone here?” Sam asked. His mother must have died. Soo sa he had tried to protect her from muddy snakes when he was a boy and she was pregnant too long and they had gone walking on the great green clearing. Soo sa she had taken him to the astrologer and let his father take him to chase the crow and then to the temple. Soo sa

  “Mokatha?” his father shot back, less with puzzlement than worry.

  “You really don’t know who I am?” Appachchi he hadn’t said; the word had curled and disappeared upon his tongue like a singed leaf.

  “Justgowillyou” the old man muttered, bagging up his sarong between his legs as he always did. Only now the legs looked thin as cigarettes. Only now the sarong was from an
old bed-sheet, bought years earlier by Mrs. James Astrobe at David Jones in Sydney and long since faded and betel- and tea-stained beyond all recognition. “I owe nothing in this village. Just ask any fellow if I owe him still! I have nothing for you.”

  “Uncle,” Sam said, swallowing the rest of it. He would use the first of his two plans, the greener one, to get his father out of Sudugama before he arrived a few days later in the motorcar. “I am here on behalf of someone else, to see your wife about an inheritance matter.”

  The bunched-up fabric dropped and the old man hooked forward, his eyebrows crumpling. “Aiyo malli-sir, it’s like this. I am a poor widower, my beloved wife has passed only recently, and just see all my ungrateful children have left me.”

  “And where are all your children?”

  “They are all ungrateful, all gone and left me.”

  He was alone. Sam felt nothing.

  “There are none remaining in this village? None from your relations? No blood?” Sam asked carefully, his words heavy as links. But he felt nothing. He could not.

  “They are all gone and left me!” He would be alone, undiscovered. He could do it.

  “And your wife’s family?”

  The old man waited a beat and bagged himself about the legs again. “No one I can think of, malli-sir.”

  “Only you?” Sam confirmed, pretending to write something in a ledger, knowing the old man was lying but not worried. He could not remember any of his mother’s family save the old one, his grandmother. She was long since gone. None of the rest would remember him. He could do it.

  “I have come on behalf of one of your wife’s distant relations, from down south, near Matara. Did you know she had family there?”

  The old man bobbled his head, knowing it was not true, that no one in his wife’s family or his own had ever been, save Kandy town, farther than a dog’s trot from Sudugama.

  “Right,” Sam said. He had lately gone down to Galle to secure a shipping agreement with a family of Muslim traders. Afterwards, he went farther south, as far as he could, and then inland a ways from Matara. He told anyone he met what he wanted and with funny looks was sent to Ankuressa and there he looked until he found what it needed to be, a certain kind of house for sale. No one had lived in it for a long time, no one could chase them away, and it was a bad omen to cut down a Mara tree. Sam had waited past dusk to make sure that what he had been told was true. And yes, oh vengeful symmetry, this great flamboyance of leaves and branches was in fact a roosting tree, where every night the crows beat its branches black.

  “What have you come to say from them?” his father asked.

  “Not come to say, Uncle, but to give. This relation has died and I have come to show you the deed for the property, a good property, down south with a good strong Mara tree and here is your rail ticket from Kandy—”

  “I AM GOING IN THE MORNING!”

  When the Morris jumped back to life, something fired out the back. Three boys took off down the lane, racing to see who would first find whatever bullet cannon or fireball this thing just shot out. An older man tripped backward over a dog, one of the many milling about sniffing and barking and considering what part of this thing looked softest to bite. There were yells and screams, laughter terror outrage from the rest of the crowd, which, like some palpitating organ, had surrounded the car when, moments before, it had stopped at the village crossroads. The crowd gave way as the car resumed its course, straight ahead and slower still, moving into a steady incline, deliverance from and deliverance forward, the angle-bodied mutts still nipping at its back wheels in vain and so nipping at each other instead. The crowd reformed as one in Sam’s wake, not following but instead watching the black beast drive on to the big house near empty and silent with its own waiting.

  Robert had been standing on the verandah sipping tea that had steeped too long when he heard it coming. He forgot about condensed milk; whatever this thing was, it had to be coming for him. If a little surprised, he was, still, not unhappy about this. He might have been, even, relieved. He looked behind his shoulder, into the quiet walauwa. When he was sure there was no one about, he stepped forward to the stone ledge that ran the length of the verandah and ducked down. The hem of his sarong curled and floated in his tea cup. He never noticed. In the gaps between the chipped, veined white pillars, he could only see of his village what he had always seen from this crouch: browns and greens and jumbled thumbprints of black hair; smoke from cooking fires and the burning of spent fields rising to fade into whatever time of day and weather it happened to be. Today what smoke there was was also engine smoke fading into the haze of mid-morning, vellum-covered sunlight.

  Holding the pillars between his hands, he remembered how he used to watch this way when his father descended to make his rounds about the village. Sometimes his father walked beneath a white parasol ringed in thick wavy black lines, two cobras swallowing each other at the tail, which he had bought during a pilgrimage to the great temple in Kandy town. Later, his father began going down with a fox-headed walking stick and a stove-black bowler. Both had been presented to him by a Crown Agent who had grandly appointed him to the village headman’s position that he and his father and his father before him had all been born to—the white rage for official reality. In the time between his father’s death and when Robert felt old enough to try these things himself, the parasol fell to moths, and the walking stick vanished, likely spirited out the kitchen doorway by some servant girl to the boy who had caught her eye or to the husband whose eye she was trying to keep. Robert still had the hat. It sat on a high shelf in a back room, untouched for decades, a dusty palace for whole races of insects.

  Robert had been twenty-plus when his father died. That day, instead of watching from the verandah, he was told to go with him, to a meeting held at the crossroads. It had to be called, his father explained to the dark faces gathered, because he, the third Ralahami to rule Sudugama, was being shamed by the men of his village, who had failed to report for Road Ordnance duty as they had been invited, asked, and then ordered to by the Crown Agent. He then declared, once again, that Sudugama was abandoning the old way in the fields. There was to be no more clearing of the King’s trees and firing the scrubby flats. No more hope in ruinous fresh soil and friendly moonlight. But his father had chosen the wrong time for the meeting, midday, before the meal, and the crowd, mostly field-hands who loved their hena farming as much as they loathed the prospect of tar-pots, was hungry, heat tired, sullen, and staring stone silent. Besides which, in the paddy fields that morning they had been told that the chief monk of the village temple had ruled that labouring for the British might be a wicked conversion scheme: a good Buddhist carrying timber looked too much like a cross-dragging Christ. But this wasn’t Negombo! With devout pride the men in the fields were decided: faith, history, and the high cause of the failing first family itself were in fact on their side in not going to work the roads, the very same roads upon which the British had lately hanged the famous Saradiel, a highwayman who had shown greater courage than any Ralahami in exacting right tribute from the English passing in their coaches—gold and pocket-watches, whole trunks and billiard balls and lady brooches. Their own Ralahami should have been ashamed for asking them to abandon the old ways, the good ways of growing, let alone begging them to report to the Crown.

  Sensing their sourness and also beaten by the heat, Robert’s father began to sweat. There came a stir at the back of the crowd and a draught of coconut water was passed forward. Conciliation. Instead of hacking open a good heavy coconut and passing it forward, they had drained it into a fine-rimmed glass that some returned son had stolen from a Colombo hotel, a glass passed forward in honour of the Ralahami’s smart bowler hat and walking stick and faith in English farming pamphlets. He finished it but for a couple of seeds and, smiling, showed its empty sunlight to the crowd. He handed out betel, tipped his hat, and the men went home for lunch looking pleased as fox.

  The bowler fell off when his father st
aggered upon the stone steps to the big house. Robert, standing behind him, picked it up and stood to the side as the servants looked down and yelled and his mother, screaming, her sari streaming, flew along the stairway to cover the twitching body with her own. She was joined, moments later, by her own mother and by Robert’s two sisters, and with all of them crowded around her, she cradled her husband’s face in her lap, wiping and wiping the forehead and cheeks with her hands and hair and pleading with him like he was a baby about to break fever. Eventually, and wearing the bowler for the first and last time because he did not know what else to do with it, Robert took his mother at the elbow and half carried, half guided her up the stairs and into the house, her heaving little body swinging against him like a birdcage wrapped in a bed-sheet. He sent a servant for the village doctor, a legendarily fat man, who, when woken from a snatched nap because no one had come to see him for two hours that day, took twenty minutes to dress worthy of a visit to the walauwa. He came, breathing loud as a bullock, his sons at his forearms helping him climb the stone steps. When the doctor finally reached the back room where the Ralahami lay dead, Robert stepped around the body and the crying women and sent him off. On the next auspicious day, mourners from another village were hired in and his father was cremated. The family washed itself with limes and fed the monks. The Crown Agent arrived the next morning and appointed Robert the fourth Ralahami of Sudugama. He then ordered Robert to stand close by and say nothing while he questioned the men of the village. It made for a quiet time. No one knew anything about anything. They would only swallow their lips and stare elsewhere until the white man and his translator let them be. It was as if his father hadn’t given the empty glass to another human hand but somehow passed it through some momentary rent in the world itself that had closed as soon as it had opened. Like a lizard had blinked, a chameleon.