Beggar's Feast Read online

  Even if she wanted to, Alice could not have taken her husband’s wrist in the hotel lobby. She had nearly to run to keep up when they walked in. He nearly knocked over a boy cooling the esteemed guests with a palm-leaf fan in the first arch they passed through. Following, she saw the boy hoist his palm again and smile at the boy across from him, who was not smiling back because he was smiling at Alice who looked down and for whatever reason, maybe an apology to everyone else, held her bangles so they wouldn’t make any noise as she followed after what seemed like the only sound left in the world, her new husband’s hard black heels on the hotel’s hard white tiles. Alice had rarely been in a building as large as this hotel, and at least when you went to temple you went barefoot.

  She stood like a statue while he studied the pages of the gilded registry book as if they were sacred ola leaves before signing, in deepest cut, across more than two lines, MR. SAM KANDY. Reminded, he signed for her as well. AND MADAM. Waiting, Alice caught her breath and better understood the good of the going-away dress he’d brought for her. After the wedding ceremony, in the walauwa bedroom that had been made the bride’s dressing chamber with profuse jasmine and strung coconut flowers and lit lamps and uneaten, ant-attacked sweets, her aunties had sat as quiet as if a divorcée were present. They waited as she went behind a teak partition to step into the going-away dress with Latha’s help, Latha trying to help without actually touching the foreign cloth until it was absolutely necessary, which was when she had to pull the zipper along Alice’s side, the noise like his engine coming from far off, the zipper a shiny-headed snake eating itself whole. After she was ready, but before she went into the front room where the men were waiting with betel and smoking and not discussing the dirt that had hit the bridegroom in the shoulder (Dirt? What is dirt?), Alice faced the aunties for their approval. They were seated in a row, wearing saris their grandmothers’ grandmothers could have worn. They smiled at her with sideways eyes. And after she had gone with him in the vehicle, they had gossiped about it like idle mahouts: how the cloth was crème-coloured and less than six yards and hung like a rice sack from her waist because it was meant for English hips; how shamefully fast moving had been the zipper; how wrong it was for a high-born upcountry girl to wear a dress with a zipper, which, it was agreed, was only meant for a shamefully fast-moving woman. Her wearing it was like this marriage to this so-called Sam Kandy: bad fruit that mother-eyes and wife-warnings would have withered and dropped well before blind glutton bridegrooms and fathers could pluck and eat. But in a widower and orphan house like this one, the aunties and fates both knew, a pretty daughter, an only daughter like Alice, was meant for low hanging. When she was returned to the village, alone, after a one-night honeymoon, Latha would tell her everything.

  They were shown to their room and their bags were arranged and now for the first time it was only he and she behind a heavy wooden door. Sam drew the drapes, which made Alice stiffen and think of squirrels but then without a word he walked into the bathroom. Because of the drawn drapes she could not look out at last and see the sea, and in spite of the zipper dress there was nothing in the world that was going to make her wait for him on the bed, the only bed in the room, canopied in bright white and wide enough for a whole village to sleep on but still she would not touch even a corner of her own volition, and so Alice did the only known thing she could think of. She opened the almirah and climbed in and pulled the heavy doors closed with all the life in her smallest fingers. It was larger than any almirah she had been in before, and it had a funny smell, more than just clean. It smelled like opened medicine. There she waited for him.

  Back home, the almirahs smelled of lime and spice and folded clean clothes. She had hidden like this many times before, when she was only a girl and not, as now, twenty and waiting, nearly a woman. How many times had she taken jaggery from Latha’s latest hiding spot, cracked it into smaller pieces with her back teeth, and then spit all of it into her palm and deliberated like a village council over the order of honey-brown slivers and stones to dissolve, one at a time, against the roof of her mouth. But it was never many pieces before she’d hear Latha sweeping in the hallway and put all of the sugar rock in her mouth at once and chew like road ordnance so that when the doors opened in a rumble against the rickety joins she could smile, open mouthed, innocent. She never once hid in her father’s almirah because Latha told her that it had once been her mother’s. She only had to be told once. With the natural intelligence of a lonely child in a large house full of dark places, Alice knew what was off-limits for play. She considered her free passage otherwise as proof of appeasing the ghosts.

  She had no idea what it would mean to appease this man she had been married to. He was handsome and he was sharp and she did not mind everything about him that meant she should not have wanted to marry him: that he had named himself; that he had no family or village behind him, or even a horoscope leaf to place beside her own; that he seemed to come from nowhere save his own motorcar; that other than telling the Registrar of Deaths and Marriages that he was for certain upcountry-born, his answers about birth date and birth hour had moved around like sea-crabs and wall lizards; that he had stones for bones when they had had to bow to the monks at the almsgiving and blessing the night before the wedding; that he hadn’t thrashed whoever had thrown dirt at him, or demanded he be thrashed, but instead had taken her from the village to the city to this hotel for their honeymoon and in all this, the only thing he had touched so far was his own shoulder.

  The narrow light between the almirah doors went black for a moment and then came a wash of electric city light around his white-shirt frame and Alice looked out at Sam who was looking in not at her but at the shelves beside her and she wondered should she reach out her bangled wrists to be taken or wait? Should she help him become her husband or wait to be made his wife? She did not know because the only thing she had ever been taught about being a high-born lady she had been taught by Latha placing a baby squirrel on her shoulders and waiting to see which of them moved first. All she knew was that standing sitting or otherwise waiting in the presence of a man other than her father or brother, she was to be still still still, still as a god’s eye, still and perfect as the untouched, untouchable gemstone on top of the temple spire.

  He had something in his hands—his suit-jacket. He placed it across the topmost shelf and looked at her and she looked down and her bangles were a little ringing because she was herself a little shaking for what came next. But he only closed the doors. He left her in there with his dirty jacket. She heard him walking about the room and then the front door closed. The door opened again moments later and he and his shoes came crashing back and the almirah doors rumbled apart again and this time he reached in for her no for his darling suit-jacket and all was closed and crashed and she could hear his footfall firing and fading down the arched hall. Eventually, Alice opened the doors herself and climbed down and smoothed her dress and brushed the rest of the village dirt from the bed-sheets and then parted the curtains and waited at the shaded window, waited and watched for what and when and who this was, whose waiting wife until next life now she was.

  Sam crossed York Street and stood behind a scrum of city workers gathered at a tea-stall. The rail-thin office boys and paunchy hotel uncles turned at his approach and turned back, turned in, closer together. The stall-keeper at his shoulder-wide counter stood tippytoe on an unseen fruit crate to follow their resumed talk across sipped tea and spat betel, their going back and forth over fat and lazy bosses with their ugly wives and rumoured pretty daughters; over fat hotel guests with wrongfully pretty wives but of course ugly daughters; over fat and bored English wives with husbands on circuit and ravaged kingdoms of marzipan and fondant creams for meantime company, or dangerous smiling holiday nieces; and sometimes over their own faraway waiting brides, often near-perfect strangers, or over wives sending unanswered, unanswerable letters from the village about how long more before next visit and how long more to live with witchy sisters-
in-law and don’t forget your waiting dowry daughter and your older-than-marriage-time daughter, your pretty daughter, your difficult daughter. Sympathy was freely poured during these late-of-day sessions, it cost less than hot water, and always the question came from somewhere young and free in the scrum.

  “But uncle, and I am only asking because others like to know, is your difficult daughter so difficult because she is also your pretty daughter?”

  Clapping and hooting, roaring and laughing, it all gave way to a dancing-for-drama silence, the rest of them swaying as one with expectation that family honour would now have to be defended. And it was, with an outraged father’s mimed chops to the offender’s neck and half-chases down the road and sometimes thrown tea and carefully worded jokes threats proposals to make the smart-mouthed beggar marry the daughter in question and see for himself just how difficult … actually how very pretty. Before long the laughing would quiet and the replays cease and the tea be finished and then it would just be standing around in daily Colombo noise, calls for hackney carts, constables’ whistles, fruit and pots for sale, the wheeze of the city’s new buses built for better roads and drier air and fewer people, the curse-storms of the conductors fighting over fares, the groan and clang song of the York Street trolleys, and through this all the air itself distending like heavy-coming rain for the men gathered at the tea-stall. Eventually, one of the them would have to mark aloud what was felt by all—not time itself, but boss-kept time, marzipan-feeding time, niece-strolling time, and so the scrum would break. In pairs and alone the men would stalk back to the rest of the day, the dead inside hours of nodding and smiling, the over-starched and sweat-stained honours and devotions of work in the city, work they boasted of or lamented over in their letters home, depending on how that morning’s hours had passed, or what the tea-time martyr beside you had complained of, or what was reported threatened asked for in the latest letter from the village.

  “Hallo, Mahatteya, tea for you please?”

  “Right,” said Sam, stepping forward to the counter like he should have when he had first crossed the street. He felt strong of spirit suddenly. Mahatteya. How the weight of the world could tilt in your favour across the life of a word! He had been called Mahatteya, not malli: he looked like a sir, not a little brother.

  Earlier that day, in the village, he had been standing high upon the wooden wedding platform and looking down upon them all barefoot upon the bare ground and squinting and smiling up, who to the ash of their fathers’ fathers knew the respect they were supposed to give such time and place and people, and so were wearing their best temple white to behold the Ralahami’s daughter in her bridal sari and bridal gold. One of them gave respect to the unknown bridegroom as well. The dirt that hit his shoulder broke to bits but it made the mark it was meant to: we know nothing of you, your family, or where you’re from: you are matter out of place: this is dirt.

  Though he’d live to one hundred, he would never know who threw it. His eyes had been long since elsewhere, locked on a latecomer among the well-wishers watching the girls of the village perform a damsel’s peacock dance for the new couple. This latecomer had moved among them slow and certain, taking his time like a noon-hour crocodile, and he was wearing a yellow hat. The yellow hat from the Christmas crate Sam had sent from Sydney, from whole lives earlier. When he had come to see his father to send him south, weeks before, Sam had looked around the old dirt hut and seen nothing, absolutely nothing, from the great world beyond and decided that the crate never made it out of Colombo. It must have been breached in Pettah by some other B. who would have burned his letter before marvelling trading feasting on the hats and handkerchiefs of Sam’s secret home-sent charity. But no. The crate had come home. Beyond his high-match wedding day, his own hard-won veneration, someone down there knew something of his fellow blood and soil. Or so he thought with man’s supreme vanity—that your own hated fate is the turning world’s axel and gravity. Because, thought the thought, why would whoever he was wear it to watch him high upon the wedding platform, save to yellow Sam’s triumph? But no moment was forced, no payment demanded, no expiation given. The man in the yellow hat did not come forward during the rest of the village’s respects. And so the dirt Sam was grateful for: it was something he could brush off and keep brushing off, it was right cause to step off the wedding platform and go to the big house and forgo seven days’ feasting in the dry dead village for the day-long ride into the salt-loud city, a ride spent wondering would he ever be Ralahami and walauwa were his father, his horoscope, his first hut known and told? Now, finally now, with everything in place as he had wanted it, this older want—that his father have a sense of how far away his taken boy had gone, too far for any village crow to find him—had become a waiting vengeance. And far worse than any fat old crow: this was a crocodile among the mud and lilies, waiting secret and patient in its hunger, its greatest power knowing one thing more than the rest of the universe: when it would attack. And all Sam Kandy knew was that this was absolutely opposite the way life had run since he had run from the temple: this time, someone would come for him. Meanwhile it was his wedding night.

  “Anything else, Mahatteya?”

  “No. Right. Tea. Thank you.”

  “Are you sure, Mahatteya?” Something in his voice.

  “Sorry?”

  “Mahatteya, I have worked in this tea-stall for many years.”

  “Right.”

  “Mahatteya, this means I have been here, across from the GOH, for many years.”

  “Right, and I am staying in this hotel.” And I want to ask you, Sam said to himself, from still another life, anything but the near past and nearing future, did you ever hear of the Ratnapura gem trader who’d tried to take a whole floor of the GOH with a dirty ruby the size of a barbet’s belly? Did you hear from out here the sound of his gem hammer on the registry book? Did you give him tea when they turned him out as a certain drunk and likely thief? Did you ask him what more he needed? Did you ask with something in your voice?

  “But not staying alone, no?”

  “You watched me arrive in my motorcar.”

  “Yes. You arrived as two but only one has come.”

  “Madam is … she is …” Sam was biting his bottom lip. What could he make of his new wife? Her name was Alice. She was city thin and village pretty. In the car she had studied the seatback and his shoulder, back and forth, like she thought she was to be examined on one or the other. She liked to hide in hotel furniture.

  The stall-keeper smiled. “Madam is … resting, because it was such a long journey, and like any good gent you have come outside to give lady her time and space before, isn’t it?”

  Sam nodded and sipped his tea.

  “Mahatteya, this is your wedding day, no?”

  “It is.”

  The stall-keeper leaned out and looked west, asked with his chin that Sam consider as well the later-day-light, the tea-stained redness of the sun-falling sky.

  “Mahatteya, congratulations! Long life to you and your wife and many children and please, I want no money for the tea.” The stall-keeper motioned Sam closer. He dropped his voice. “But now is not your wedding day so much, is it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Now is nearly your wedding night, Mahatteya.”

  “Mokatha?” snapped Sam, suddenly everything in full view.

  “Please, I have kept this stall across from the hotel for many years, and helped my father here since I was a boy. Can you guess how many young men, none dressed so fine as you, have come here at this hour of their wedding days?”

  Sam said nothing. He should have swallowed the rest of his tea and left. He could have poured it hissing upon the ground and left. He would have flung it across the counter and left and called for the motorcar and returned and left the stall a wreck of old wood and dry leaves and bloodred puddles, steaming spilt sunset. But he did none of it. Because if he did any of it, in time there would be nothing to do but the one thing he had to do this day, t
he one and only thing that, at epic-continental thirty, Sam Kandy had not yet done.

  “Mahatteya, come this way, come this way,” the stall-keeper said, motioning to the side of his stall. Sam stepped around a green-stained city of old metal canisters, drooping stalks of shoeflowers, a sack of onions dropped against the wall like a drunk. The stall-keeper blocked out his front window with old crate-bottoms and met him wearing a city saint’s smile, all sweet and sharp angles. “Mahatteya,” the man said again, and by now Sam hated the word, heard it only as a price quote for whatever was coming next. “I would like to help you with this.”

  “With what?”

  “That’s what the bridegrooms always say.”

  “You know this suit means nothing. I’ll give you a thrashing just the same.”

  “Yes, I know what you can give me. But I also know what you can give your bride!”

  The stall-keeper’s eyebrows moved like they were hooked to a fisherman’s pole. He spread his hands across the scored surface of his counter and leaned down smiling, his face so composed that for a moment Sam worried that here was another expecting to be kissed.