Beggar's Feast (10 page)

Robert had been standing on the verandah sipping tea that had steeped too long when he heard it coming. He forgot about condensed milk; whatever this thing was, it had to be coming for him. If a little surprised, he was, still, not unhappy about this. He might have been, even, relieved. He looked behind his shoulder, into the quiet walauwa. When he was sure there was no one about, he stepped forward to the stone ledge that ran the length of the verandah and ducked down. The hem of his sarong curled and floated in his tea cup. He never noticed. In the gaps between the chipped, veined white pillars, he could only see of his village what he had always seen from this crouch: browns and greens and jumbled thumbprints of black hair; smoke from cooking fires and the burning of spent fields rising to fade into whatever time of day and weather it happened to be. Today what smoke there was was also engine smoke fading into the haze of mid-morning, vellum-covered sunlight.

Holding the pillars between his hands, he remembered how he used to watch this way when his father descended to make his rounds about the village. Sometimes his father walked beneath a white parasol ringed in thick wavy black lines, two cobras swallowing each other at the tail, which he had bought during a pilgrimage to the great temple in Kandy town. Later, his father began going down with a fox-headed walking stick and a stove-black bowler. Both had been presented to him by a Crown Agent who had grandly appointed him to the village headman's position that he and his father and his father before him had all been born to—the white rage for official reality. In the time between his father's death and when Robert felt old enough to try these things himself, the parasol fell to moths, and the walking stick vanished, likely spirited out the kitchen doorway by some servant girl to the boy who had caught her eye or to the husband whose eye she was trying to keep. Robert still had the hat. It sat on a high shelf in a back room, untouched for decades, a dusty palace for whole races of insects.

Robert had been twenty-plus when his father died. That day, instead of watching from the verandah, he was told to go with him, to a meeting held at the crossroads. It had to be called, his father explained to the dark faces gathered, because he, the third Ralahami to rule Sudugama, was being shamed by the men of his village, who had failed to report for Road Ordnance duty as they had been invited, asked, and then ordered to by the Crown Agent. He then declared, once again, that Sudugama was abandoning the old way in the fields. There was to be no more clearing of the King's trees and firing the scrubby flats. No more hope in ruinous fresh soil and friendly moonlight. But his father had chosen the wrong time for the meeting, midday, before the meal, and the crowd, mostly field-hands who loved their hena farming as much as they loathed the prospect of tar-pots, was hungry, heat tired, sullen, and staring stone silent. Besides which, in the paddy fields that morning they had been told that the chief monk of the village temple had ruled that labouring for the British might be a wicked conversion scheme: a good Buddhist carrying timber looked too much like a cross-dragging Christ. But this wasn't Negombo! With devout pride the men in the fields were decided: faith, history, and the high cause of the failing first family itself were in fact on their side in not going to work the roads, the very same roads upon which the British had lately hanged the famous Saradiel, a highwayman who had shown greater courage than any Ralahami in exacting right tribute from the English passing in their coaches—gold and pocket-watches, whole trunks and billiard balls and lady brooches. Their own Ralahami should have been ashamed for asking them to abandon the old ways, the good ways of growing, let alone begging them to report to the Crown.

Sensing their sourness and also beaten by the heat, Robert's father began to sweat. There came a stir at the back of the crowd and a draught of coconut water was passed forward. Conciliation. Instead of hacking open a good heavy coconut and passing it forward, they had drained it into a fine-rimmed glass that some returned son had stolen from a Colombo hotel, a glass passed forward in honour of the Ralahami's smart bowler hat and walking stick and faith in English farming pamphlets. He finished it but for a couple of seeds and, smiling, showed its empty sunlight to the crowd. He handed out betel, tipped his hat, and the men went home for lunch looking pleased as fox.

The bowler fell off when his father staggered upon the stone steps to the big house. Robert, standing behind him, picked it up and stood to the side as the servants looked down and yelled and his mother, screaming, her sari streaming, flew along the stairway to cover the twitching body with her own. She was joined, moments later, by her own mother and by Robert's two sisters, and with all of them crowded around her, she cradled her husband's face in her lap, wiping and wiping the forehead and cheeks with her hands and hair and pleading with him like he was a baby about to break fever. Eventually, and wearing the bowler for the first and last time because he did not know what else to do with it, Robert took his mother at the elbow and half carried, half guided her up the stairs and into the house, her heaving little body swinging against him like a birdcage wrapped in a bed-sheet. He sent a servant for the village doctor, a legendarily fat man, who, when woken from a snatched nap because no one had come to see him for two hours that day, took twenty minutes to dress worthy of a visit to the walauwa. He came, breathing loud as a bullock, his sons at his forearms helping him climb the stone steps. When the doctor finally reached the back room where the Ralahami lay dead, Robert stepped around the body and the crying women and sent him off. On the next auspicious day, mourners from another village were hired in and his father was cremated. The family washed itself with limes and fed the monks. The Crown Agent arrived the next morning and appointed Robert the fourth Ralahami of Sudugama. He then ordered Robert to stand close by and say nothing while he questioned the men of the village. It made for a quiet time. No one knew anything about anything. They would only swallow their lips and stare elsewhere until the white man and his translator let them be. It was as if his father hadn't given the empty glass to another human hand but somehow passed it through some momentary rent in the world itself that had closed as soon as it had opened. Like a lizard had blinked, a chameleon.

His mother's hair changed to white with black ribbon within a week and in the village they said the widow was turning into some witch or ghost to avenge her husband's death. One fool thought her hair must have touched his poisoned skin but he was stared quiet.
Poison? What is poison?
Chameleon water. She barely spoke for two years. And when her daughters were to marry, ten days apart, twin brothers with good perches in Mahaiyawa, on the far side of Kandy town, she rose before dawn to feed milk rice to their dry mouths and divide her bridal jewellery between them. The older girl started another fit when her mother said a final time that she would not, could not, attend the wedding. A fibbing aunty intervened, counselling in a whisper that a widow at a wedding was as bad an omen as seeing a lone magpie the morning of. And so the eldest accepted a glass of first milk from her mother at the threshold and they said goodbye and to stop his sister from spending the rest of her life weeping on the verandah Robert arranged for a cow to pass just before she reached her carriage. He had to rush her down the stone steps and between the boulders to make the omen. And so the bridal party began its departure, everything petal-graced, the blue light of before morning beaten through with tom-toms and lit up with torches, and the first bride's eyes shut against the possibility of a magpie, while in the carriage behind her, the bride-of-next-week, worried middle child, was head down and counting, wondering if their mother's jewellery had been divided evenly. Meanwhile Robert's mother dismissed her servant girl for the day and went for a walk in the high green grass behind the big house, toward the old village founder's cave, and that was how she stepped out of frame before full morning and it was hours before anyone knew to look for her, by which time she was a ghost in the back garden.

On his own wedding night, a few years later, Robert and his wife were formal strangers facing each other across a bedroom lit in copper light and faint with jasmine and brazier smoke, a room that felt as empty and echoing as a failed water tank. Eventually, he made her nearly cry but then laugh and come closer by imitating how stiffly she'd stepped on and off the wooden poruwa during the ceremony. She was nineteen years old. But then, without anything more, she moved a step closer. And afterwards, a sheet pulled to her waist in a shared narrow bed, she lay his head upon her stomach, and it was firm and fine like the butter-clay glad kings used for temples in the old epics, and she shaped his face with her fingers again and again, and Robert fell asleep for a perfect moment. She had been warm like wood in the sun. Nine months later the world was rent and bawling. But when those cries from the lay-in room stopped, the universe itself fell silent, and suddenly there were new noises,
eck eck aah
and a pause, then a second
eck eck aah
, but Robert, waiting outside the curtained threshold, couldn't hear any more of it for all the sobbing rolling into sobbing from the women inside. His wife's servant girl, Latha, streaming proprietary tears, eventually came out. Perhaps she had thought it would balance out his grief to bring the babies with her—twins, a boy and girl. He was staring at them when he was told the news, staring at their raw faces, listening to their eyes-shut-screeching at world and time for finding and taking them out as they had. Immediately he envied them the perfect rightness of their pain, the roomful of cupping hands and soothing songs that were theirs now and would be for years, whereas he, almost thirty, an eight-year orphan and ten-minute widower and ruler of a hundred lazy murdering omen gluttons and now father to two
say it, if only to spit it out
two more “Bloody murderers!” he sobbing cursed, staggering past her blotted, sheeted body and out to the verandah, where off to a corner, he fell to his knees and then his stomach and the stone was cold and flat and he remembered hers, before them. A warm banner of fair flat skin. Not one high-caste daughter in all the surround was ever found who wanted bridal gold and walauwa honour enough to have a poisoned ghost for a father-in-law and a garden ghost for a mother-in-law and a sweet gone beauty for her husband's nightly dreaming and mother-taking twins for stepchildren. Robert had been alone for twenty years, crouched low in memory and waiting for what would come next, watching, and also trying to amend words his children had never heard, were never told, words they never but felt in how numb his hand could be upon their waiting brows at night.

What she saw, thinking he could not see her watching, was a flash of silver and then of fire and then the fire was gone. In its place there was a glowing mark in the dark, passing back and forth on a short fast course around what must have been his body, like a burning star fixed upon a wire, like an abacus bead on fire. Eventually there would be more flashes of silver in the otherwise dark front room, where her father was standing to speak with the stranger who had not been asked to sit upon entering their house, at least not immediately. Who, minutes before, when the vertigoed servant had stopped staring at the brown man emerging from the back of a motorcar and had pattered up the stone stairs and back into the big house to present the visitor with a brass tray of the Ralahami's own betel leaves, had bowed from the shoulders but demurred. The servant ducked away and returned, once more bent at the waist, this time to arrange with great satisfaction a low stool before this obviously low man. But placing a black-cased foot on the stool with a firm tap, a foot that had been shod in black leather many times buffed of its own scuffed history, Sam leaned forward to light a cigarette, a habit picked up in the brothel life of Singapore and not forsaken upon his return to Ceylon. From his work in Colombo since that return—his rice dealing and passage- and money-making about the harbour—and also, more recently, from his waiting outside the Fort offices of men who would now envy him his Morris, Sam had overheard the English view of betel chewing. Yet in so choosing to keep his own mouth modern and clean, Sam never knew how close he came to failing at all else, how close he came, just then, to being ordered off his land and out of his village forever. But then he found his lighter.