Beggar's Feast Read online

  His mother’s hair changed to white with black ribbon within a week and in the village they said the widow was turning into some witch or ghost to avenge her husband’s death. One fool thought her hair must have touched his poisoned skin but he was stared quiet. Poison? What is poison? Chameleon water. She barely spoke for two years. And when her daughters were to marry, ten days apart, twin brothers with good perches in Mahaiyawa, on the far side of Kandy town, she rose before dawn to feed milk rice to their dry mouths and divide her bridal jewellery between them. The older girl started another fit when her mother said a final time that she would not, could not, attend the wedding. A fibbing aunty intervened, counselling in a whisper that a widow at a wedding was as bad an omen as seeing a lone magpie the morning of. And so the eldest accepted a glass of first milk from her mother at the threshold and they said goodbye and to stop his sister from spending the rest of her life weeping on the verandah Robert arranged for a cow to pass just before she reached her carriage. He had to rush her down the stone steps and between the boulders to make the omen. And so the bridal party began its departure, everything petal-graced, the blue light of before morning beaten through with tom-toms and lit up with torches, and the first bride’s eyes shut against the possibility of a magpie, while in the carriage behind her, the bride-of-next-week, worried middle child, was head down and counting, wondering if their mother’s jewellery had been divided evenly. Meanwhile Robert’s mother dismissed her servant girl for the day and went for a walk in the high green grass behind the big house, toward the old village founder’s cave, and that was how she stepped out of frame before full morning and it was hours before anyone knew to look for her, by which time she was a ghost in the back garden.

  On his own wedding night, a few years later, Robert and his wife were formal strangers facing each other across a bedroom lit in copper light and faint with jasmine and brazier smoke, a room that felt as empty and echoing as a failed water tank. Eventually, he made her nearly cry but then laugh and come closer by imitating how stiffly she’d stepped on and off the wooden poruwa during the ceremony. She was nineteen years old. But then, without anything more, she moved a step closer. And afterwards, a sheet pulled to her waist in a shared narrow bed, she lay his head upon her stomach, and it was firm and fine like the butter-clay glad kings used for temples in the old epics, and she shaped his face with her fingers again and again, and Robert fell asleep for a perfect moment. She had been warm like wood in the sun. Nine months later the world was rent and bawling. But when those cries from the lay-in room stopped, the universe itself fell silent, and suddenly there were new noises, eck eck aah and a pause, then a second eck eck aah, but Robert, waiting outside the curtained threshold, couldn’t hear any more of it for all the sobbing rolling into sobbing from the women inside. His wife’s servant girl, Latha, streaming proprietary tears, eventually came out. Perhaps she had thought it would balance out his grief to bring the babies with her—twins, a boy and girl. He was staring at them when he was told the news, staring at their raw faces, listening to their eyes-shut-screeching at world and time for finding and taking them out as they had. Immediately he envied them the perfect rightness of their pain, the roomful of cupping hands and soothing songs that were theirs now and would be for years, whereas he, almost thirty, an eight-year orphan and ten-minute widower and ruler of a hundred lazy murdering omen gluttons and now father to two say it, if only to spit it out two more “Bloody murderers!” he sobbing cursed, staggering past her blotted, sheeted body and out to the verandah, where off to a corner, he fell to his knees and then his stomach and the stone was cold and flat and he remembered hers, before them. A warm banner of fair flat skin. Not one high-caste daughter in all the surround was ever found who wanted bridal gold and walauwa honour enough to have a poisoned ghost for a father-in-law and a garden ghost for a mother-in-law and a sweet gone beauty for her husband’s nightly dreaming and mother-taking twins for stepchildren. Robert had been alone for twenty years, crouched low in memory and waiting for what would come next, watching, and also trying to amend words his children had never heard, were never told, words they never but felt in how numb his hand could be upon their waiting brows at night.

  What she saw, thinking he could not see her watching, was a flash of silver and then of fire and then the fire was gone. In its place there was a glowing mark in the dark, passing back and forth on a short fast course around what must have been his body, like a burning star fixed upon a wire, like an abacus bead on fire. Eventually there would be more flashes of silver in the otherwise dark front room, where her father was standing to speak with the stranger who had not been asked to sit upon entering their house, at least not immediately. Who, minutes before, when the vertigoed servant had stopped staring at the brown man emerging from the back of a motorcar and had pattered up the stone stairs and back into the big house to present the visitor with a brass tray of the Ralahami’s own betel leaves, had bowed from the shoulders but demurred. The servant ducked away and returned, once more bent at the waist, this time to arrange with great satisfaction a low stool before this obviously low man. But placing a black-cased foot on the stool with a firm tap, a foot that had been shod in black leather many times buffed of its own scuffed history, Sam leaned forward to light a cigarette, a habit picked up in the brothel life of Singapore and not forsaken upon his return to Ceylon. From his work in Colombo since that return—his rice dealing and passage- and money-making about the harbour—and also, more recently, from his waiting outside the Fort offices of men who would now envy him his Morris, Sam had overheard the English view of betel chewing. Yet in so choosing to keep his own mouth modern and clean, Sam never knew how close he came to failing at all else, how close he came, just then, to being ordered off his land and out of his village forever. But then he found his lighter.

  Robert was by all rights outraged that the visitor had declined his offered betel. But also, if not impressed, he was at least curious what kind of brown man would show up like this, behave like that, look as he did, and own or at least, until the constables found him, have a motorcar in his possession. The last stranger who had entered his village with a bold and wanting eye, many years before, was a money-fat fisherman from down south, who was announced from fifty yards by his aftershave—Portuguese, all shot blooms and sweet wine. Back then, fish oil smiles were suddenly appearing everywhere on the high side of the once impregnable Kadugannawa rock that the English had blasted through so their tea trains and motorcars could pass between Colombo and Kandy town. And then everyone else could come too, and they did come and begin smudging away everything that for centuries had made great the good green country on the high side of the rock—courage for kingdom and honour and history and blood-run lands. Strangers were coming with far more money than the mud flats and weedy tanks and dung floors and daub walls were worth, money that was wiping clean fierce memory.

  The bulging fisherman had sat in Robert’s front room and accepted his betel happily, openly chewing less than he took and then asking for more, asking loud enough to wake Robert’s wife, who seemed otherwise to have slept through the early months of her pregnancy. No doubt the fisherman sold the rest of the betel to his own mother when he returned to Bentota, after making such a low offer that Robert had called for the metal-benders and had him thrown in the back of his loud painted cart, a cracker lit to scare his fat bullock down the lane and gone. Six months later, and such dead and bawling months they were, the same bugger came back and asked if Ralahami was ready now, and then he made the same low bloody offer. Robert would have taken a cracker himself this time and chased him down the steps and thrown it after him, were he not in mourning and the lonely babies, for once, sleeping.

  Twenty years on and a new stranger now before him, Robert decided that dressed as he was, carrying himself as he did, this one would make no low offer, this baggy pinstriped suit with a silver flint in one hand and a painted tin the size and colours of a songbird in the other, blowing modern smoke through th
e shade-drawn room. Moments later, those watching from nearby breathed it in, and Sam stared right at her as she leaned forward and coughed. He thrilled and smiled to himself as she stared at him before disappearing again behind a pillar, where she coughed a second and third time, her long fingers reaching for a blue-lined butterfly as it unravelled across the passageway to the inner courtyard. It was a moment’s flight in bright light. He did not recognize its mis-stitched monograph. He offered a cigarette to her father, returning to the business at hand.

  “Whose …”

  “—motorcar—”

  “… is it that you have taken and brought to my village?” Robert asked, after declining the cigarette. How would it look to the servant, to the crowd coughing back of him, if he took it after his own best betel had just been placed to the side? He made another decision, he made it three times. He would decline, were he offered a ride. Because otherwise he might kiss his daughter on the forehead and tell her to go to her aunties on the other side of Kandy town; he might leave no note for his son because his son was not supposed to come to the village until he was finished his studies, even on English school holidays; he might lie to the servant that the Ralahami would just quickly go and come and command that in the meantime Lal was to sweep through the house morning noon and night until the day he died or his own son took over, and then Robert would ride straight out of this mud and black hat burden he had to call my village unto death. A death that he was hoping his son Arthur would avoid, which is why Robert had sent him, nine years earlier, to a Buddhist boys’ college in Colombo where the boy had begun his way to a world well beyond his family’s own, a world of medical college, of London, of saying, yes, motorcar.

  “The motorcar is mine,” said Sam, in English. He was asked to sit down.

  “But not even the Englishmen I know own such things on this island,” countered Robert, who could speak a little English too.

  “Some have, in Colombo. The ones I know,” said Sam.

  “Ah right, of course, the ones you know. Next you will tell me that you take tea on Thursdays with the Governor. You say you have, just like the English. Right. But you are not just like the English, are you. You are like nothing I have ever seen. Don’t smile that I say this, because you don’t know what I have seen in this place, where my family has been on this land since long before your father’s father had a name to call his own. Don’t smile. Just tell me. How old are you? Where were you born? What is your good name? You have village colour, that is obvious, but you have taken English from somewhere, from someone else, that is also obvious. Who is it? Where? My son speaks English, but that is because he is reading Medicine at University College London. He, is, in, London.” Arthur had been studying abroad for two years. He had, so far, mailed four letters home, though none as yet had acknowledged Robert’s own.

  Sam said nothing. Another pile of fine betel offered in vain. “He is,” Robert insisted. “But you, dressed like this, come here as you have! What, did you take some planter’s tongue and then his suit and then his motorcar? How much did you pass to the driver to dump the body in the well?”

  “A crowd gathered round us when we stopped at Ambepussa and were shouting questions,” said Sam. “They kept asking without waiting for me to answer. And really, I think they were all asking only one question, every man and boy, even the constable when he came through the crowd.”

  “Which was?”

  “‘May I have a ride?’”

  “Can you give me even one name? Can you give me your own? Can you tell me where you have come from, what people? Can you tell me why you have come here—to my village?”

  “I shall answer anything you ask. But try a cigarette first?”

  “I’ll have you thrashed and thrown down my steps in a moment!” But as he said it he thought about how long it would take Mahesh and Sando to reach the walauwa, and then he watched his own hand reach for it and take and the rest of him bend forward as it was lit and he pulled in and in a moment his mind was all new and swoon and more was wanted and so he would give this stranger the life of one cigarette to make his case before calling for the metal-benders.

  Three cigarettes later, Robert didn’t believe a word.

  “All these years, you’ve gone around as Sam Kandy?”

  “Every man needs a name, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “But what can an orphan left at the temple gate do but name himself?”

  “Yes, but here, in this place, in a place like this, they’ll never, why would anyone, how could I be seen to accept—”

  “Yes?” Sam leaned forward, the muscles in his legs tense and trilling, breathing hard the air running through the room house village temple city/sea/dock city room house/sea/dock city street shop/sea/room rooms city/car/village house room that had been his thousand streets running as one, his twenty years coming and going in the world—Sudugama Kandy Colombo Sydney Singapore Colombo Kandy Sudugama—the headlong unstopping rush of the story he’d just told, which was somewhat more somewhat less than what it should, perhaps ought to have been, were honest accounting and not triumphant symmetry Sam Kandy’s virtue because what mattered was that it worked, if it worked.

  The very same thought had been in front of all else, four years earlier, when the ship he jumped in Sydney docked in Singapore. He had learned the destination well into the voyage, from a white man with dog-brown eyes who had come below with a cloaked camera and tried at first in vain “to document for historical purposes only the nature of this your journey.” Sam, the best dressed among the shadows, hadn’t tucked chin and shown shoulder like the rest, who were huddled and murmuring like cold birds behind him. Instead, red-eyed staring and shoulders squared, Sam stood squarely for the flash and pop, and then, afterwards, when the photographer had immediately and forever forgotten his existence, Sam stepped forward, asking “Where?” and showing an open hand ready to close and get to work if necessary. He knew he’d need money, whatever and wherever Singapore was.

  “Give. Give me for mine, and then give me for each that you want to take or you will take none.”

  The photographer snorted. Sam stepped closer and the man blanched.

  “No, but you see, I’m from the University.”

  “Give or I will take mine back.”

  Days later, Sam Kandy walked into Singapore, his suit torn beneath the arms from having to grab and hold historical portraits in place, his hands healthy with paper. But he arrived still burning with Mary Astrobe. He could do nothing else until this was done with. He had clothes, words, money, and he did not care what she looked like. His face was wide open as he walked upon the wharf.

  “Malay Street! Malay Street! Only the best on Malay Street!”

  “Flower girls for you! Flower girls just waking up from your dreams and waiting to love you!”

  “Just like home! Come and meet her! Just like home!”

  Any sort of man could do this any sort of way, and in this place it seemed that any sort of woman could be had. Other men fresh from the boats were walking toward the crowded rickshaw stands, not even bothering to inquire which home she was just like, only climbing out of the fried-egg Singapore sun into the shady backs of the two-wheelers and setting off for coin-fast love—French sailors in pairs, and other whites in top hats, older heavier men who insisted too loudly and for no one’s conscience save their own that they needed nothing but safe passage to the Raffles Hotel; and also, really mostly, angle-bodied Chinese with slow wide village gaits that only quickened when one of the coolies called to them in some mother tongue or boys’ slang, and then they too were taken and gone. But Sam only looked away, kept walking, burning. What was he waiting for?

  He stopped. Coolies were on him immediately, hawking and cawing. No more, he thought. Enough, he said. Get on or stop trying at the rest of it, he decided. Get on or go back to the temple. Get on or shrivel and die to all desire. Get on or grow old man fruit. “Perfect English good time” sounded good enough. He nod
ded to one of them and was taken to a shophouse on Sago Street. Its main room was broken up with endless gauzy curtains, useless against the working noises within. His girl’s had a slatted window and a brick wall that was mossy and damp to touch. There were slick little flowers growing in the cracks, dripping life. She was smoking on a narrow bed with a headboard whose paintwork still showed. A pastoral scene: fat sheep grazing upon a wide green, a blue sky above them full of sheepy white clouds.

  She had skin like milky tea and spoke well enough to get a good price for the rest of her cigarettes and made the right noises to keep him talking telling asking long enough to charge him twice and he never so much as sat down. Instead, Sam offered her more money to meet the woman she called her Pocket Ma, who was sitting on a crate at the back of the shophouse, fanning herself with a thatched fan, chatting with another woman with a sweaty heavy chest and ragged dress, only she was standing at a table, cutting up durian. To look at them, they cooked cabbage for sailors and scared off cheap johns. But the girl had told him enough that he wanted to impress this fat old widow. Considering Sam’s story as she fanned herself, the old woman began to speak English, far better than the girl’s. She said she believed nothing that he’d just said about his shadow work for a great man in Sydney harbour but would let him try to prove it. She gave him a figure for every fresh brown boy he brought her way instead of their going to the Hindu operation on Orchard Road, and she gave him a far better figure than head money for every white man with a shipping contract he could bring from Commercial Square.