Beggar's Feast Read online

  Three years later, Sam Kandy might have been the richest virgin in Singapore. But one day he told the old woman that he was tired of fighting the Hindus on Orchard Road for every fresh brown boy on the wharf. Besides, he knew of a crowded little island close by, where brown boys could be had with ease, boys with village-strong backs searching for ships to take them anywhere but home. And he told her that by then he also knew the right white men in Commercial Square to secure the necessary passages. The old woman spat and shrugged. She would see what, if anything, he’d send back, and was meanwhile disappointed to lose a good earner but also relieved to be rid of him, this suited monk who always slept alone in a side room, who never took payment in anything but money.

  He returned to Colombo and came to know its dockworkers very well during a strike at the harbour. He sold some of them into Singapore, making money as a sub-agent for Pocket Ma, working harder and faster and cheaper and more silver-tongued than the established shipping agents around the harbour in telling dockworkers and middle sons from the villages that for a fee if they shipped out as he suggested and then went to Sago Street they would make money too. And if they paid him a little more, he would tell them where they would find not only work but rare love behind a green curtain, fair-skinned girls who could have almost been daughters in Cinnamon Garden. When the strike ended, those who were not tempted to go to Singapore would still hold back a sack of rice for a cut, or be hungry for it at a cut price, would anyway and always need something more from the near world than blood and birth hour predicted, than jetty sweat and Pettah stalls afforded, and Sam Kandy made that, all of it, his business. Because he knew them, these young men, their every want and wish, the daily plans, the long-ago promises. He made of them what he could. But after a year of working Colombo harbour he had to go to the village. From this much trafficking in it, Sam Kandy knew the great world was not enough. He needed warrant from the village: he needed the village itself. And when he arrived, his back would not shine with biscuit tins and city things like the small world’s mallis and butterfly catchers. As promised: he would arrive as no one had before him.

  Sam tried schemes on six Englishmen—owners of a Crossley 19.6, a Crossley 25/30, a Morris Bullnose, a Morris Cowley, an Austin 12/4, and a Wolseley. He was laughed at and chased off and informed on one occasion that the vehicle in question had been used by the Prince of Wales during a tour of India and was most certainly not for native hire. And yet, whenever he wasn’t conducting his rice- and boy-loading business at the harbour, Sam was moving about Fort, listening for that cough and chug no bullock or man could make, his eyes sharp for the world-piercing flash that was sunlight on polished chrome. Going only harder after six no’s, Sam forced his own hand. He went to Galle and then on to Matara, where he searched inland until he found a fit house for his father and then returned to Colombo and from there went to the village with papers to show and a rail ticket to give and so sent his father south, and before leaving to arrive he discreetly inquired and had confirmed that yes, the Ralahami had an unmarried daughter. Only then did he return to Colombo to visit the offices of Paulet and Son, the firm whose rice Sam had been short-loading for months.

  “Before you say anything else,” Henry Paulet began, standing at his desk to receive him, “and even though your suit has brought you this far into this office and it seems better than one might expect or really want, the answer, young man, is no. I have no need of a driver.”

  “Sir, I have not come here to see you about a position. I have come because—”

  “Just where have you been to school?” Henry Paulet asked of his English, sitting forward, the first of the two occasions they met. He was crumpled and tired looking in his beige suit, like an old birthday balloon, an Englishman too long in the tropics.

  “In the world, sir.”

  “Well said!” Paulet sat back. “That kind of answer means either you must be someone’s son gone to seed or you must be no one’s son and trying to do something about it. Well?”

  “I know who’s been short-loading rice onto your company’s ships.”

  “So neither, or both, and anyway you’re just another Judas come for his silver.”

  “I have not come for any silver,” Sam began. “I have come about your losing money on your rice shipments. I have come to offer my assistance—”

  “Excuse me, sir. Mummy said to bring tea.”

  Sam turned at the girl’s voice and saw her roundness and he turned again to see Paulet with his head down, molesting his desk blotter as she approached with the tray. When she set it down the Englishman tensed and held his breath. Sam saw and Sam had him. Soo sa

  “And so,” Paulet coughed back into conversation, speaking over the servant girl’s leaving, her free hands back of her hips, her feet beating the timber floors, her mouth muttering the breathing song her mother taught her, “take your tea, but I only have so much time in the day, young man—”

  “Looks to me you have three months, at most, no?” Sam lit a cigarette, blew smoke and stared.

  Paulet hit a switch for the ceiling fan. The topmost papers on the desk lifted and fell a little. Barred light came through the second-floor window. Slow fan and barred light and city noise: carters and dogs calling after people, tram bells and a convent bell calling schoolgirls to little hours, a general static of crying babies; someone was recognized and recognized back; someone else needed another malli to help carry a chest. And through all that noise Sam could hear Paulet stirring his tea; thin silver on the thin rim of a bone china cup; the wearing down of men and days.

  “Just what do you propose?” Henry asked.

  “That we take a drive in your vehicle, to start,” Sam said.

  “I need someone else’s word,” said Robert, pinching the stub end of a cigarette like he was born to it. “I need to hear the story you’ve just told me, exactly, from someone else, someone this village will trust. Then I can believe. Then I could consider.”

  “But I told you, I have no father, no mother, and no relations anywhere to be found—”

  “Then it has to be clergy.”

  Sam leaned back, breathed out, his legs lost their ready life.

  “It will not be clergy.” It could not be. He might as well have never left the temple if he needed a monk’s blessing to return to the village.

  “Why not? You must belong to temple in Colombo. You are Buddhist, no? I will not sell my land to a Moor or a Christian.”

  “I am no Moor, no Christian.”

  “So you are—”

  “An Englishman?”

  “Mokatha?”

  “If I brought an Englishman to vouch for me, then may I meet her?”

  “If you can make an Englishman tell your tale, the tale you have just told me, I’ll sell you the land for a bowl of rice. I’ll have the chief monk sit on a low stool and keep the bowl on his head for you to eat. Wait. Wait what did you ask?”

  “He holds a high office in Colombo.”

  “I said wait. What did you just ask?”

  “Paulet and Son, with offices in Fort, Prince’s Building.”

  “WAIT. Tell me. I said what did you ask?”

  “May I meet her?”

  “Meet who?”

  “I understand you have a daughter, or so I have been told.” Sam stood, too impatient for the speech he’d practised during the drive, save its last line. He was tense, trilling, ready; he would turn and go never to return, try somewhere else, find another way if the Ralahami asked how he knew there was a daughter—because of course to answer was to locate himself, return him to earth, to that low patch of dirt that was his father’s name and house, and so undo the rest of it. But Robert didn’t ask Sam for anything else save another cigarette. And then Alice coughed again.

  Her servant, Latha, had also been watching, this whole time, if listening in vain. After the last cough, she had bunched and thrown the handkerchief across the threshold, the handkerchief that, like the other women in her family, she always kept at
hand to wipe at her mouth before and after she spoke, the handkerchief she had been given by a now dead cousin out of a mysterious foreign-sent crate that had been sent to her cousin’s no-account husband, six years before, a man who had himself lately, unexpectedly, some might say miraculously, gone from the village. When not watching and straining to hear what was happening in the walauwa’s front room, Latha was looking at her girl, at Alice, whom she had raised along with her twin brother Arthur from birth. Later, Alice would scold Latha, blame her tossed hanky for his looking just as she coughed that first time, and Latha would scold back that he shouldn’t have been looking at her in the first place, this stranger in her father’s house. And when the girl smiled, Latha would know that all her life’s squirrel work would come to this, that it had already begun, that it was, in fact, a fast progress.

  Behind Latha and also watching in the inner garden was the washerwoman. She was peering through the iron grille that covered one of the courtyard windows, her fingernails raking and flaking bits of old white paint from the rods in her hands. She could see absolutely nothing from her vantage, but no woman in the village would know that when, the next day, she would squat to wash and tell of the high events that had transpired in the big house the day before, just as betel-stocked Lal would do in that evening’s toddy circle. And so that night, the hundred husbands and wives of Sudugama would compare the stories they had lately heard, the men over their toddy and the women at the washing. Not compare so much as compete to recreate, or contrast, or combine, correct, dispute, deny, edit, overwrite, amend to all exaggeration, make and remake in their own image, all of it depending on the evening mood of each their own marriages. So that by the time this so-called Sam Kandy concluded his business with the Ralahami and departed, he was the engine smoke and fire of one hundred and one stories. More even.

  As agreed, Sam returned the vehicle and driver late that night, and Paulet watched from his back window at Prince’s Building to see that Sam had kept his word: that no one else climbed out save himself and the driver. The young man was already hammering up the stairs before Henry could tell him there was no need, just go.

  “I trust the trip was every success hoped for,” Henry said when Sam entered his office.

  “It was. Thank you.”

  “And thank you. Now—”

  “Yes, now.”

  “The agreement, you recall, was that I would know nothing of their whereabouts.”

  “Of course. Only I know where they are now.”

  “Very good,” Henry said. The end. But why was the fellow still here? No money was to change hands. The day-long use of the vehicle and driver, following Sam’s arranging the servant women’s departure from Colombo, was the agreed-upon payment.

  “Is there anything else then?” Henry finally asked.

  “The drive into upcountry was a picture.”

  “Ah, I’m sure. I wish I could have gone as well.”

  “If you would go now,” Sam stepped forward as he said it, his face suddenly hungry and Henry wanted to say Sorry of course the likes of you cannot understand I meant nothing of the sort because one must be born to English to know its poetries can be hollow or full but Henry said nothing of the sort because suddenly he could tell this razor was not asking that he go but telling.

  “Only I know where they are,” Sam said a second time.

  And that was when Henry knew that now he faced the threat of two rail tickets, one-way back to Fort Station, from whatever black green heaven hell or limbo it was Sam had sent his servant women, mother and daughter both mothers at his doing. And so, a day later, Henry Paulet went to Sudugama and on the way was told the tale of Sam Kandy he would in turn tell some upcountry headman with an unmarried daughter. And if a recitation prize could have been given for epic fiction, it would have been given that day to Henry Paulet for his performance in the front room of the dank cool walauwa, and that night, before Henry was dropped at Prince’s Building in streetlamp shadows, Sam next raised the question of Henry’s pending trip to London, which Henry had mentioned earlier that day in the village when the Ralahami had invited him to the now agreed-upon wedding. If Henry was going to London, as he’d said, what need would he have of transport in Colombo? And so, naturally, Sam sought terms for the driver and the vehicle itself—whose value, as he calculated it, would be equal, if not to the cost of the house and limbo land where the women had been sent, then certainly to the price of Sam Kandy’s memory.

  “You must know only Englishmen can own vehicles on this island!” Henry said in a seething whisper.

  “So write it in the driver’s name and give him more than your blue eyes.”

  Eighteen years before, his servant-mother had named him Piyal, as close to Paulet as she dared, and she had refused to send him to the Eurasian orphanage. Save his eyes, the boy was otherwise all village and had been raised as one of the household servants. After Paulet bought his first vehicle, the boy had been made driver. Henry bid no farewell to him or to the Morris. He bid fond farewell to Sam Kandy less for manners than as prayer: because otherwise he fully expected to find him in the morning already waiting for him in the office, waiting now to take away his desk and pry up the timber floors and slide the windowpanes into his jacket and whatever else—his father’s library, his mother’s tea service, the inside air itself—was deemed closer to the original price. That night he went to his empty rooms knowing he had been short-loaded and shamed, knowing that Paulet and Son should have been renamed Pyrrhic and Pyrrhic, wondering would it have been less various shame and short-load had he paid what he truly owed and sat for an honest family portrait with his household. He decided against hiring a new girl. As he made his plans to leave Ceylon, Henry thought of the sad-faced father of the pretty village bride who had invited this pinstriped locust into his house. Who, earlier that day, had also invited Henry to return to his village, for the wedding ceremony itself, which was when Henry had been inspired past Sam’s story: would that he could, but he was to be away from the island shortly. He was going, yes, back to London.

  He was told, in turn, of the Ralahami’s son reading medicine at the University College on Gower Street and … and … and … How the headman was biting back his words! Was the father of the bride about to beg the bridegroom’s Englishman to take his other child a sack of village pepper? Or a steamed plantain leaf lumped with home rice and curry? No, Robert hadn’t nearly asked him to take any village love to his son. He had nearly asked that he say nothing of this wedding, if ever he met his son in London town. But upon his saying London to the Englishman’s London, the Englishman looked like he’d swallowed his tongue and so Robert said nothing more. He would instead write of this news to Arthur. But the mail was so slow. Arthur would never be able to attend, even if he had known from the start. Besides, he had exams. After making this decision, for Arthur’s sake, not to tell him in advance, Robert would have begged another of his nearly-son-in-law’s cigarettes, but Sam was already moving again, this time leading his crumpled Englishman out of his walauwa into his vehicle out of his village his his his and for all the world he was only coming back for more.

  Her chin against her knees, Alice was crouched in the almirah, watching her husband through the eye-wide gap between the wardrobe’s doors. He was still brushing the dirt from his jacket, just as he’d done for all those just-married hours in the vehicle, on the curving downward drive to Colombo. Seated in the backseat with enough space between them for the rest of the village to dry its garden pepper, he had brushed his shoulder and smoked and stared out his window. When they reached the rest-stop at Ambepussa, a crowd came upon the vehicle like ants upon a dropped sweet and he climbed out and said something and they gave way like blown leaves. And only then did the blue-eyed driver turn and look at her and run his hand along his own forehead. She had smiled and looked away and wondered if from his vantage, standing guard beside the vehicle far down from the wedding platform hours before, he could have seen the bridal jewellery she had worn
during the ceremony, the heavy gold humility that had made her keep her head down. Head down, she did not see who’d thrown the dirt that hit her new husband on the shoulder either, that had made him turn to her and say, for the first time words meant only for her and not cigarette words for her father, “We won’t stay here now. Change fast and come.”

  The driver was staring forward when Sam came back with cool drinks and then returned to brushing his shoulder. She wanted to tell him that the dirt was gone, that it was never so much as he was making it out to be, that anyway it was village dirt, paddy dirt, nothing more than a dried-out clod. Alice would have said more; she would have asked him if he was trying to brush the very pinstripes away, but to say this or anything else she would have to speak over the sound of the engine. Besides, Alice did not know her husband so well to make such comments. To make any comments, really.

  When they reached the city, it assaulted her every sense of time and place and purpose: Colombo was a mad rushing everything and everywhere of more than two lanes; was braids of schoolgirls and coils of standing-around people and all this yelling and calling and cart dung and rows of square white buildings fronted with stalls of shiny city things, cooking pots and fish and measuring scales themselves for sale. They moved through these shocking city streets slow and fine as a queen beetle in the grass until they reached the wide road to their hotel, the Oriental Grand she thought it was called, and as they went in she tensed at the sound of her husband’s heavy modern shoes on the blinding lobby floor. It sounded like a one-man artillery demonstration. Once, when she was small, Alice and her brother and father had been made to wait in their cart while some Englishmen, planter-soldiers in angry pith helmets, drilled on a scrubby green field near Mahaiyawa, where before the war bioscope films had been shown, come one come all: the Oxford-Cambridge boat race of 1909, George V tours India, Ben Hur. Alice had tensed and taken her father’s wrist at the boom boom echo cadence of yell and shot and reload, command and fire and check targets, a roaring upon roaring that became its own echo and then, briefly, a birdwing silence. After one round, while the wheezing pink soldiers were reloading and cursing the humid air for making greased pigs of their bullets, there was an awful cracking sound from far across the brown land, followed fast by so many little beats, like some Hindu god playing the tabla. A rose apple tree was splitting apart from an earlier volley, and as it broke and dropped its fruit, the Englishmen cheered, readied, aimed, and fired again. With this last volley her hand had slipped from her father’s wrist because he had turned to scold Arthur, either for too much courage or too much fear, for his readiness either to run into the field to gather the fallen apples or to run down the road in holy blue terror. In the meantime, she had to hold her own wrist.