Beggar's Feast (18 page)

Not that Sam ever told out himself. “What about you?” Charlie would ask. “How'd you get here?” “Where were you before?” Nothing. Head down, reading bills of lading and seaman seniority rolls or another letter from his village wife. Nothing save one October night, in 1938, when they heard crackers and snatches of “God Save the King” outside their window. Word had come from Munich, by way of London, that there would be peace for our time and the monsoon had yet to come and so the city, Sam and Charlie too, revelled this night in the good fortunes of the near world and far, revelled hard because they could tell from the air itself the time for storms was still coming. With a bottle between them they went walking along the Wharf Road to the breakwater, where the eternal sound of the world divided into its first and last chords, into crashing and the quiet that comes afterwards only to give way, always, again.

“Okay Sam, between us, for once, something! By now I've said so much about Saul Kurtz you could pick out the mezuz above my old front door! Just for once, anything. I know how names work here. No different than most places, and I've never met any Gary Indianas. So come on. Who were you before you were Sam Kandy?”

In the quiet between them there came the smatter of many more crackers, distant and muffled, as if set off beneath stacks of telegrams. Nearer were the sounds of roused birds and of sailors roaring a song against a curfew whistle that kept blowing but eventually stopped, defeated. After a cheer the song started again, one voice stronger.

“No one that any one of you could ever know,” Sam said eventually, squaring his shoulders to the black lapping sea, the horizon blocked out by a parliament of moored ships. He breathed in the sour air of the listless harbour, that tang of rusted anchors and hulls, foul blooming bird- and man-rubbished seawater, all the seeping cosmopolitan bilge no one ship's like another and no ship's the same this hour as the hour before. Who was he before? To get there Sam would have to tell of things caught and burnt, driven, drowned, dropped, watched, played, picked, promised, chased, held against, hidden, heard and heard of, opened, sent, bundled and taken, taken care of, stomped, thrown, smoked, spent, remembered, remembered, remembered, earned, bought, bowed before, and crushed with his stone-hard heel. And in the next breath, he would have to tell more.

“One day, I had to be Sam Kandy. The rest I wipe from my feet.”

“Yes, but when did you decide? What made you decide? Who?” Curzon was given another sip, Sam holding the bottle against his mouth. He then finished it himself, wanting the same warrant to speak ten more rare true words and, he hoped, be free of them.

“I remember things starting around the time my wife was born.”

Charlie stumbled, stopped, and doubled over as if a ladder of Hindu temple gods had descended to tickle his gut. When he could breathe he tried to speak but the words themselves brought the blue fists down again. Never mind he was eighteen years older than his own wife, who was born at dawn in a Mount Lavinia bedroom while he was rumbling across Indiana in a boxcar. What kind of man dated his design from the day his wife was born?

“You know, Sam, in all these years, and I can even remember being in the office the day Piyal came to say your children were born, in all these years, have I even met your wife?” Of course he had never introduced Sam to his own wife. In some ways he had turned true English. “These years I've watched you buy her half the stuff in Cargill's and Piyal plays like he's counted the hairs on her head when I ask him anything, but from you, not a word. I bet I couldn't pick her out of a parade of two.”

“Right. But maybe she would say the same.”

“What, that she couldn't pick Lady Curzon's nephew out of a parade?”

“No, that she couldn't pick her husband out of a parade.”

“Ha! And what do you think? Could she?”

“Where she was born, it doesn't matter what she could or could not do. She already is what she is. That's the village.”

“Were you born there too?”

“We all were.”

“I could have been born anywhere.”

“No. That's not right. Where you're born is why you're here.”

“Which is—”

“‘Not payable with a plate of rice and curry,' the man said.”

He'd come at her request, right away upon receiving the letter, and he understood that they were going to leave right away—because even in the pitch black and beyond the buzzing overnight parliament of insects, Sam could tell people were missing from the huts. But first, only a cup of tea; even a common dog is given water when there's water to give. And she said no. She also said there was no time for him to hear words from her father as she had requested in the letter, and also that there was no time to look in on the children and besides Latha was with them, and before old Lal had even reached the verandah with the parcels Piyal had unloaded and passed to him, there was no time to see what he had brought and the way Alice said all of this was flat and fast, practised. Sam said nothing. Again flat and fast like a schoolgirl's recitation Alice said that if Sam had any feeling for either her father or his children they would go now and bring back their villagers before they were all ruined and gave up paddy and garden crop for speeches and never another day in the fields. They had to go to Dambulla, to bring them back so there could be someone, something, someday, to pass on. The walauwa land had been written in Alice's name upon marriage, and before sending Sam the letter requesting that he come to the village, she had taken the deed from her father's almirah, sneaking in and out of it with a small girl's expertise and leaving a letter in its place with details for her father and brother and no mention of her husband, and then she had gone by carriage to see a lawyer in Kandy town, to have the deed written into her son's name in the event of her death. Alice had decided that the Ralahami's daughter would never be the Ralahami's wife but instead the Ralahami's mother when her son turned eighteen.

“Yes,” he said, “I will go now.”

“No.”

“No? No. You send a letter telling me to come straight away—”

“This is straight away? Had you come yesterday or even this morning instead of this—” she pointed past his shoulder at the spray of stars and quarter moon hanging above the massed black treetops.

“Yes, this is straight away when more is asked of you in a day than to wait for the servant to finish massaging your feet so she can rub more coconut oil in your hair. Yes, for a man in the city, this is straight away.”

“What can you know of what it means to be in the village? To be responsible for so many—”

“And then you say no to my having a cup of tea because there is no time, because I must go and retrieve them straight away, and now you say not to go?”

“I say you will not go but that we will go. Both of us.”

“You want to go to Dambulla. Right. Are you trying to make me take your brother?”

“I am going, Sam. I must go. Appachchi is too sick even to get out of bed and Aiya must stay here to watch things. I must go. It is my duty to my father and to my son. This is what it means to be born in this house. Are you coming? This is what it means to be born in this house.” Only when she said it a second time did Alice step forward into the fuller light of the verandah, yellow lanterns blazing at midnight, each a hazy ball of maddened insect love. She wasn't wearing one of the English nightdresses he had brought on prior visits, crème and custard and snow-covered fields of fallen flowers, their collars and sleeves as lacy and involved as table settings for hotel tea. Nor was she wearing one of the many English-hipped day dresses he had given her. Instead, Alice was dressed as of old, in a white upcountry sari of the sort her grandmother would have worn to wait in the shade beside other wives while their Ralahamis chewed and spat their way through a council meeting. Latha had dressed her in candlelight after the men and children had gone to sleep, sighing and sucking her teeth as she had wrapped her lady, sounds that were more than enough to say that Alice had been raised to be dressed this way from day one of her marriage. In vain. The bunching and wrappings around her waist were like so many proud banners and fresh bandages; the sleeves puffed and tight-cuffed in the shape of palm fronds, the skirt itself wider banners and bandages and if Sam had looked closely he would have seen ribbons of storytelling so intricate— embroidered pictures of processing kings and queens and monks and relic-bearing elephants—they made all his bought English lace look like moth-eaten napkins. Her ears, fingers, toes, wrists, and ankles chimed and shined with gold as she walked forward, her head held straight from the thick gold chain running high about her neck. The dress and jewellery, like nothing he had seen her wear since their wedding day; her face, composed in challenge, even command that he take her to Dambulla to find those twenty-odd villagers who, Alice had learned from Latha who had heard from the washerwoman who had heard from the weaver's wife who had begged her husband not to go, had been persuaded to attend the rally by cunning pamphlet devils who had lately come to the village promising those who went a future free of sweating for walauwa people, a future of everyone their own walauwa people. They also promised free rides in bona fide modern buses for those who waited at the village bus halt at the appointed hour. And now they had to be brought back. Alice made to walk past him. He stepped in front of her.

“So you have dressed like a proper Hamine and you think going to Dambulla like this will make them weep to come home when you call them? Weep and beg forgiveness and work harder every next day in the paddy and all because of the way Latha has wrapped your sari?”

“I have dressed the way I am supposed to by birth and station and by respect for the right ways of my village and my family, the old ways. And when they see how I am respecting these, they will respect these too.”

“Right. And now you want to take a motorcar to show them how you respect the old ways? Why don't you just hide in your hotel almirah until they come back?”

She did not turn and go inside and take fire from the kitchen and burn down the almirah he had given her and then make him his tea with its ashes. She would have, but she was a daughter before him and a mother after him. Duty before pleasure. She stepped forward again, her head held even higher.

“Right,” he said, holding her eyes. “You may come. But I warn you, yes, people from this village might see their Hamine dressed like it was a hundred years ago or dressed like it was the day before I drove in, same thing, they might see you and right away bow and run home in the gutters. They might. But you have no idea about the others going to Dambulla, beasts and rogues, what they're willing to do to anyone, even to a high-born lady. Sometimes especially to a high-born lady, just to show what kind of respect they have for old ways. But believe it, I know.”

“Yes. We both know you know.”

Before she could walk ahead of him he was crashing down the steps, the sound like he was dashing every piece of the gold-rimmed china he had brought them last first-of-the-year. Alice nodded at Latha, who had come to the threshold at the sound of his going. She smiled that her resolve and dress were working as they ought to, and Latha tried to smile back. Alice turned and followed, carrying her village-made sandals while relishing the unyielding hardness and cold of the moonlit stone upon her bare feet, the rightful humility of it. A penance for eight years of accepting Sam Kandy's terms for their marriage.

Seated in the backseat, she knew what her aunties would make of her behaving this way. All modern ruin they would say. They would say it started the wedding day she went away from the village in a foreign cloth dress, seated beside unknown dirt. Still, always, unknown. One of the times Sam had sent the loaded vehicle and stayed in the city, she had asked Blue Piyal to take her for a drive along the Kurunegala Road until the children fell asleep in her lap, which was when she asked what her father had never been father enough to ask.

Where did the Mahatteya come from?

He began to tell her what he heard city men mutter and wager about Sam Kandy but she cut him off. Worse scandal than marrying nobody from nowhere might have been learning who and where he came from, which was also who and to where she had been dutiful and obedient these nine years. And like an old-time wife she had been obedient often enough to her own ends, never once asking anything of her modern money husband except sometimes a different colour size cut of whatever he had brought her or the children or her father or brother from the city on his latest visit, requests that, she knew, if never outright admitted, told him she wanted nothing more than what was on offer, only more of it. Her expectation of womanhood had been confined to one oniony night in a hotel and to nine years of the sweet-brained driver's dream-eyed devotions. But Sam's lack of interest in even securing a second son was a deliverance, or so she understood from Latha's opinion that the twins' births were a threefold miracle and that the separate sleeping arrangements when Sam came to the village were blessings for these two children, who knew their mother by loving face and word and touch. Alice could not but agree, knowing more than anyone save her brother what it meant to know your mother's love only through your father's face and word and touch.