Beggar's Feast (13 page)

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.

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.