Beggar's Feast

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2011

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10  (RRD)

Copyright © Randy Boyagoda, 2011

The traditional horoscope markings that appear on part opener pages are courtesy of Ivor Boyagoda.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Boyagoda, Randy, 1976–

Beggar's feast / Randy Boyagoda.

ISBN 978-0-670-06563-9

1. Kandy, Sam, 1899-1999—Fiction. I. Title.

PS8603.O9768B43 2011     C813'.6     C2010-905826-7

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

For Anna,

and for Mira, Olive, and Ever,

the four corners of my earth

O fool, to try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders!

O beggar, to come to beg at thy own door!

RABINDRANATH TAGORE, “O FOOL”

Chase away a little bird, putha, only a little bird
. It looked more like a winged dog, waiting for him at the far side of the great green clearing. His father was standing beside the man who'd come to the hut and eaten all their lunch the day before. His mother and brothers and sisters and the new baby were also there, and one of his grandmothers, who was given a stool. She carried a little rag and always wiped her mouth before and after she spoke. The baby was crying. His father motioned him over and opened and closed his palm long enough to show him a piece of jaggery. Then he pointed at the bird and the boy ran right at it. On his eighth birthday, the crow was waiting at the same place behind the village. His father showed him two pieces and the boy ran again. As he neared, the bird lifted and jumped forward, directly at him, once more sending him glancing to the side. But this time, when he turned to face his father, he had to watch him feed his promised sweets to two of his brothers, who were jumping up and down at their sudden good fortune. He decided that would not happen again. At nine, they went to the field with a bowl of curd and treacle, and a newer baby crying, and no grandmother, and with everyone cheering he sprinted at the crow through a stretch of limp yellow grass no longer knee high. His heart lifted as the bird went off at his approach but it resettled not ten steps away. He looked to his father, who was looking to the keeper for a ruling. The boy would not wait. He ran at the bird again, who lifted over another few feet, then again, and again, and soon he was running useless figure eights across the great green clearing, his eyes burning with sweat and tears and dirt, and they were all laughing and eventually he fell and the bird, the bird actually hopped closer to him. It seemed to be considering him with its bead-black eyes, as if to say
Hard luck. See you next year
, but it was only watching his father, who knelt beside the boy, lifted his chin, and pointed at the crow. He wanted to say to him
Sorry Appachchi
but instead watched his father dump the bowl of white curd onto the dry brown ground. The bird's beak gleamed.

He'd been six-plus when the dry time had first descended on the village. Every family needed someone to blame. They took him to the astrologer's hut, which always occupied the most auspicious of the four corners of the dry dirt square where the village's two lanes met. Villagers had lately been queuing in greater numbers to see her. She asked less than the nearby temple monks and their bottomless stomachs, and besides horoscopes, she could also read palms. After first uncoiling his birth-hour scroll and showing his parents a future tattooed with empty houses and empty marriages, she took the boy by the wrist and traced the lines already creasing his small hands—hunger, poverty, rage. The boy was then sent from the hut, where he met other families' blights: a granny who peed herself while he waited, and a girl with milk-white eyes, another with a creviced lip, and also an uncle who giggled while smelling his wrists. But he had ten fingers and ten toes. He hunted snakes and could climb almost any tree his brothers could. Why was he here? Meanwhile, the astrologer told his parents that this was a son never meant to be born in the middle of a family. She said he would never give when he could take, never serve when he could be served. He should have been born first or last.

“What will he do to us?” his mother asked.

“Ruin you,” she answered.

“What can be done?” his father asked.

“I'll send my husband to see you.”

As was his known habit in the village, the astrologer's husband came calling just as his mother was getting the lunch—rice, a thumbprint of dried fish for his father's plate, dhal, and limp long slices of salt-and-peppered papaya and combs of finger-long plantains. Plantains were the only food the children were allowed to eat as they pleased. His father gave his plate to the visitor.

“He looks too young, I am telling you. I can't take a man's money when he has so many to care for, and at such a terrible time for everyone, no?” The crow-keeper swept his dhal-dripping hand across the reedy children, all of them watching him with mud-brown eyes.

“Doesn't matter,” his father answered. “Tomorrow he is seven. We have heard of others who have chased the crow at this age. Who's to say, maybe he will too, no? At least to try, what harm?”

“Only harm is the cost.”

“Which is?”

“Not payable with a plate of rice and curry.”

“No, it's an honour to have you share our table. About paying, it's like this.” His father bagged up his sarong between his legs. “I'd like to pay you, of course. But also, if you're interested—”

“I'm not.”

“Right.”

His father took him walking that evening. He couldn't think of what for, this private time together. As they passed through the village, dusk and a long day's work draining it of all colour, his father ruffled his hair, then found a piece of sweet jaggery in one of his ears and popped it into the boy's mouth. Joyfully sucking on this hard miracle, he didn't think they were eating such delights even in the great walauwa itself.

“Tomorrow, putha, do you know what day that is?”

“Appachchi,” he slobbered, before shifting the sugar rock to the other side of his mouth, “another piece?”

“Soon, baba, soon. Tell me, putha, what day is tomorrow?”

“Birth day.”

“And how old are you turning?”