Beggar's Feast (41 page)

When the villagers returned to the crossroads, old Sam Kandy was waiting there, his arms full of daughters. They told him it was nothing, it didn't matter, it was nothing.
What is a gun?
They asked him if the new baby had come yet. He smiled. They smiled and shook their heads again, at old Sam Kandy's year-after-year feat of elaboration, of such giving and getting, which impressed them more than any chrome or other such long-since-rust-taken-loveshine he'd brought to the village in the years before. Sam knew they were flattering him into forgetting his question. He swelled with the knowledge of it, what they never before had done for him or any other man who had walked down from the walauwa and asked the matter among them, what years of assured water and good growing and a great deal of smoothing, levelling cement and laughter, child's laughter heard in the walauwa itself, had done; what Rose had done, kept doing, for
all of them
. Giving without counting, without demanding, without considering first what was leaf- and star-cast by each their birth-hour heavens.

By 1971 he had been married to her for five years and they had five children and he'd held each in their swaddling clothes and so felt the warmth of life's bawling newness in his trenched hands, fresh blood in Sam Kandy's hands. He would hold each and look over at Rose who was already looking at him, at them, tired but smiling at her handsome old un-lonely husband. Sam and Rose smiling at what they had given and been given, wondering if they were yet too old to hold more such abiding, to give and so gain another true warrant. In time again they would try. And so, down at the crossroads, Sam smiled at the villagers' question, which they asked to protect him from knowing more than a seventy-two-year father of five needed to worry about. He adjusted the squirming girls in his arms and told them that yes Rose-Madam had had another girl, and she was named Blossom-Maria. “Blossmarie!” said one of her older sisters.

Later, Rose was told more than Sam and so refused to leave the village until that July, when her family made its annual one-week stop in Sudugama on its way to Madhu Church for the Assumption Feast. She decided to have the baby baptized at Madhu and this time Sam came as well, and he also came when they baptized the twin sixth and seventh girls at Madhu, which was when they were living no longer in Ceylon but in Sri Lanka, because one morning in 1972 Ceylon was decreed banished from the island, only to be found alive and thriving in London and Dubai, Scarborough and Brampton, where it became the watchword of conjuring emigrants ignored by their television children; and then came Rose and Sam's eighth and nine and tenth girls, and then the eleventh—which was when the first Maria was given in marriage to a good Bharatha boy and settled in Negombo, near the De Moraes family compound; and with Arthur in London long forgotten and Alice's long-ago letter granting deed to long-gone George long gone in the belly of insects that themselves had long returned to dust in the long-closed office of a long-dead lawyer in Kandy town, the first-married daughter and her husband were also given a parcel of walauwa land for a holiday house; the same was done for the second and the third and the fourth—after which these first and second married Marias had their first and second children and meanwhile came Rose and Sam's twelfth and they were written up in the
Sunday Times
and
Sunday Observer
and Rose was photographed pregnant and holding a grandchild and then came their thirteenth, all of whom were also baptized at Madhu, but not their fourteenth and last, Xavier Joseph Maria, who was called Zamarie and named in memory of her grandfather, who died a month before she was born, “peacefully, in his sleep, a holy death,” as went the notices that ran in all the English dailies while the
Catholic Messenger
reported that the meal given in his name was the grandest in living memory, which Rose read about and saw pictures of because Bopea finally came home, after Xavier died, and brought Rose the clippings. She had been too pregnant to sob beside his casket and so Sam went and came with some of the older girls and then their fourteenth was born, in July 1983.

The timing seemed right—they would have gone to Madhu and had an Assumption Day baptism—but the Kandys stayed in Sudugama until almost the mid-August feast day itself, listening for the latest news of the trouble in Colombo, hearing from village talk that the trouble had come to the upcountry too. There were none in Sudugama, and while of course you talked for years against upcountry Tamils when you were in toddy circles and standing around the carpenter's shed and walking back from the fields, against their field blackness which was also Indian blackness, and against their old treacherous, poisoning queens who, as the schoolmaster and the temple had been teaching since 1956, had so weakened the last four kings of the Udarata that the British came and took the island with ease from already-defeated men. There was likewise talk against their blue devil temples, their Shiva love, above all of late against their demanding ballots, schools, first-class positions for their people, and not demanding in Sinhala or even English medium but in their shipbottom Tamil. These were not our people. Still, there were also days you talked against your wife's relations, but that didn't mean if someone gave you a can of petrol and a knife and asked you to join in you would. If twenty asked you to join, and none of you knew any of you, it might be different. But this wasn't the city.

When the trouble finally seemed over, Rose said they should still go to Madhu, even if her family in Negombo refused. And so the Kandys set out for the shrine in two hired vans. They moved fast, far too fast along the Vavuniya-Mannar Road, no need this time for roadside stops beside other vehicles likewise defeated by the pilgrim traffic ahead of them. According to their ages, the girls complained they hadn't had any road sweets or road toys, lagoon baths or smiles from any roadside Romeos. Their caravan was stopped only when they were very near Madhu, by two army jeeps parked in a chevron across the main road. A soldier came to the window and told the lead driver who turned and told Sam that there was trouble ahead, on the far side of Cheddikulam. Word was sent to Rose, riding in the second van, and word was sent back: Our Lady was waiting. Sam told the driver who told the soldiers who shook their heads until these mad fools actually gave them money and then, still shaking their heads but now counting the bills, the soldiers let them pass.

After driving through a ghosted Cheddikulam, the lead van came across two Tamil boys on push-bikes lolling back and forth across the main road as if it were long since theirs. As the lead van neared, honking, more boys began walking out of the bushes, un-slinging dead men's guns and raising mother's knives and jogging at them, waving them down, now running. The vans turned sharply and while they sped back toward the other checkpoint Rose baptized Zamarie from the vial of holy water she kept in her purse and then gave the screaming wet child more Cow & Gate formula to stop her crying and told the rest to stop their own screaming and crying and pray rosaries instead. Meanwhile, in the other van, Sam watched the boys coming at them, boys like none that he had ever known in his own hard-running days. They weren't queued in a shipping agent's office waiting to go out into the world and take what they could of it. They were already taking from the world, and all the world they wanted was here and now, was this line of road, this common patch of wind-tossed green. And if they could not keep it, then no one else would. Sam knew more: he knew he was too old to run anymore, but going home from Madhu in the safe, crowded van, he did not mind. At eighty-four, Sam Kandy had run enough, had taken and spent and broken and been given far more than enough to know what kind of races were run and won in vain. It was late, he was weary, yet he knew.

The decision was made not to sell tickets to Sam Kandy's funeral. Sudugama itself was closed to the public for the day. Tour operators and upcountry hotels were informed and the evening before the cremation, two village boys went along the Kurunegala Road in a pickup truck to collect the nameboards that had been lining the way to and from the village these last fourteen years. Across the top of each it read
ALL WELCOME / WILLKOMEN / AUYBOWAN
and beneath was promised
AUTHENTIC TRAD SRI LANKAN VILLAGE ATTRACTION 5 MI. AHEAD / 4 MI. / 3 MI. / 2 MI. / 1 MI. / 500 FT. / TURN! / PLS. COME AGAIN!
Over the years more words were added, in curlicued and filigreed and bold black strokes.
HANDICRAFTS, SPICE GARDEN, BUTTERFLY HALL, TRAD DAMSEL DANCE, TRAD MASSAGE, TRAD FIREWALKING DEMO, TELEPHONE, ELEPHANT RIDES, ELEPHANT HOUSE, ICE CREAM, SNAKE CHARMER, TRAD HOROSCOPES, GIFT-SHOP, TRAD LUNCH THEN WESTERN LUNCH
then finally
TRAD + WEST LUNCH, RESPLENDENT CLEAN TOILETS
and eventually, when terms with the chief monk were reached,
GUIDED TEMPLE TOURS
. By 1999, there were still more letters:
A/C, USD, GBP, & DEM
, then
EURO
, then
VISA AND M/C
, and also postcard-sized renderings of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and the Deutschlandfahne and the Lonely Planet logo and the Sri Lanka Tourist Board's seal of approval.

The village first opened as an attraction in 1985, as a compromise between Rose and Sam and the villagers, who had sent a delegation to the walauwa the year before, a day after the first and last Sudugama Annunciation Festival. On their way to the big house, the delegation had to pass the glass-boxed blue Virgin that had reigned over the village crossroads for two weeks. Bouquets of dried roses were tied with wires around her feet, and she was attended by papier mâché angels hanging down from the bulb-lit top while still more bulbs lined the edges and back wall of the box. The effect was like an electric waterfall, or the entrance to a Foreigners Only nightclub in Colombo. Yet there had been no opposition to the scandal of this Mother Christ buzzing and beseeching in a true old upcountry Buddhist village. There had been no opposition because there was no saying otherwise: the village had done very well in the eighteen years since Sam had brought Rose to Sudugama. They, the temple included, were living lives finer lit and firmer walled than their wattle-and-daub and lamplit fathers and grandfathers ever had. To all who stayed in the village had finally come better lives than the rutted bloodcourse of their meritless history, but there was something in that blood and history that had been offended by the festival, something other than pride of temple.

Rose had invited her family, etc., to the village to pass the Feast of the Annunciation because there would be no going to Madhu that year, given the country's situation. Afterwards, the village delegation informed Rose that her family's coming was not the problem. It was the etc., it was all the other pilgrims who'd come from Negombo and from Mount and from Chilaw, who stayed in tents and pavilions on the great green clearing where stall-men sold wood apple chutney and kites and shelf upon shelf of bright plastic guns, cars, weeping Virgins, and washing bowls.

Now no one minded the caravans lining the lanes whenever Rose had a baby, or when they visited for school holidays or before going on to Madhu in July in the years before the trouble, just as no one said anything, not even in the cement-smooth temple was anything said, when every second Sunday a Catholic priest came from Kandy town and said dawn Mass for Rose and the Marias in the walauwa's inner courtyard and then stayed to breakfast and said grace before a true old upcountry meal. Speaking softly, out of respect for Sam, who seemed to be sleeping, the delegation asked Rose please to agree that no one had ever said anything about any of it, that her family had never but been welcomed in the village.

“But now?” Rose asked.

“Aiyo, please agree, Madam.”

“Agreed,” Rose said. “But now?”

“Madam, they looked in our houses.”

“Sorry?”

“They did not stay in the clearing. Your pilgrims came into the village and they looked in our houses. They asked how we made things, what we made, where we slept. They looked in our houses. They looked at our wash. They watched us make puja, make tea. Madam, they watched us eating. Your family has never done that, just as we have never looked in their vans, isn't it? But these other people, they watched us eating.”

“What men, they meant no offence,” said Rose, imagining what these fellows would make of Negombo compound life if a face in a window was cause for a delegation to be sent. Back home, pregnancies could be announced before even conception. “They must have liked to see some of the old ways still going. I know my family likes that when they come. Our daughters tell of it in Negombo.”

“Yes but Madam your people have never treated us as if the way we sweep the house is something to watch.”

“But what if it is?” Sam asked, awake.