Beggar's Feast (21 page)

Sam walked on, seeing Alice rushing down the pathway. He could feel the crowd coming behind him. He would be trampled if he didn't run. He wondered if the last feet upon him would belong to a slick fat crow, if it would hop onto his chest when there was nothing left to do but savour his burning eyes. Burning for what he had been forced to do. He ran.

Standing in the shade beside the Morris, studying chevrons of afternoon light coming through the flower-headed talipot, suddenly Piyal saw a barefoot Sam running in a hobble past Alice running in her sari and behind them every angry man in Dambulla was chasing them, others in the town square joining the mob like metal shavings drawn to a dropped magnet. Sam reached the motorcar first, climbed in and closed his door and coughed, then exhaled, then called Piyal to get in and go now, as if he was done shopping and now they were leaving Cargill's. She was still twenty steps away. She ran straight into his arms, Piyal's arms, and after all these years she was so thin to actual touch, which made him even readier to— but that was when the crowd reached them. Piyal lost his cap as he bent to push her crying into the empty backseat because Sam had already climbed into the front and was grabbing at the gear-box. The car jerked away just as Piyal was knocked down, and looking up the last he saw was so many downstriking, hammering feet. Before a regiment arrived to disperse the demonstrators with truncheons and boots far harder than any heels, an hour later, one of the first to have kicked in the fallen rich man's face admitted, to himself, that he didn't remember seeing blue eyes on the fellow who had beaten a poor guide at the temple nearly to death, but by then enough sand had been kicked onto the bloodied, suited body lying beneath the talipot tree to make it any evil rich man's, and the rest were already chanting that they could never be stopped now.

Alice dragged at Sam's arms to make him go back for Piyal and the wheel turned sharply as he wrenched free and only just swerved the car away from a tree and back onto the road, picking up speed. She was sobbing and beating her chest and cursing—him, them, her father, her village, him, this car, this marriage, Dambulla, a queen who had loved her king to death, him, them, her father, her village. Herself. Minutes later, she lunged forward again and Sam pushed her back with an elbow and stopped just before another tree and there they sat in silence. The inevitable beggars came to the windows, as did a few strutting young men desperate to be helpful with engine trouble, their own girls watching and laughing like champions. Eventually they all left. The brush was dense and now it was later in the day and so the world seemed to have seeped into a black-and-green wash and was silent but for birdcalls and their own hard breathing.

“What would you have me do?”

“Turn this vehicle around and go back to Dambulla and—”

“And what? The boy is dead … the poor boy's dead,” Sam said into his chest, his voice suddenly, finally hoarse, and Alice sobbed to hear it and suddenly she felt wild joy—at least there was this much heart in him—and she was angry and mournful and cursed that this, this little had to be her joy.

“If he is dead,” Alice said, her voice shaking, her words measured like kitchen water in a dry season, “it is on you.”

“Mokatha?” Sam said, whipping around, his heart all pit again.

“It is on you.”

“How, when it was you who had to come to Dambulla and not just come but come dressed in your upcountry cobwebs? What happened started from there.”

“No. What happened started the day you came to my village.” He made to say something. He made like he was about to get out of the car. But then nothing. “Why?” she pleaded. “Aiyo just tell me why did you come to my village? Why did you have to marry me?”

“
IT IS MY VILLAGE TOO!
” he shouted, finally, feeling somehow ruined and burned free of future ruin for saying it, finally, to someone, to her, to walauwa people, but now he was staring down at the floorboards. Suddenly it was impossible to look her in the eye.

“It will never be your village,” she said, now calm as a cup of milk. She'd heard no confession, no revelation, only a plea in vain. “And that is on you too.”

“Get out.”

Alice said nothing.

“Get out,” he said, terrified that he was still staring down like this, as was old ways right before a high-born lady. Terrified and now raging that the fate-roped world was holding his head in place.

She turned and looked through the dusty claw-cracked window at the road darkening with the late-day gloom of tall close trees. How long could she wait there? Could she hire a bullock cart to take her to Sudugama? Would the driver accept a bangle until they arrived and her father could pay? Would Sam have to give him the money to pay? Could she have the driver's cart loaded with the almirah and the dresses and the bright broken toys and the rest of his bloody loveshine and then have a toddy tapper climb and drop a flare on the cart as it passed so that all her husband's poison goods would vanish from the village in flames? And what if he saw and took her by the wrist and flung her on top of the bier? So be it. So be it. Her children had known their mother longer than she had, and there were still her father and her brother and Latha and a saved village for them and they didn't need to know their black-heeled father any more than they already did. And so when he took her by one wrist, Alice decided, hoped, she would take him at the other and hold him until the flames ran across her body to his and so by the village crossroads all that would be left of Sam and Alice would be blackened bangles and burnt cuff-links. So be it. Only do it as you were born to do it.

“You want me to get out of this vehicle?” Alice asked.

“Yes. Get out.”

“I will.”

“Right.”

“Now,” she said, arranging herself in the backseat with shaking hands, swallowing, “get out and open the door for me like my old driver did.”

He pulled her, head first, into the front seat and then he wheeled the motorcar back onto the road. Picking up speed, it moved like a water snake because he was trying to reach over and open her door and she was kicking and slapping and asking and screaming that his mother used to wash him at the village tap too didn't she and then finally the door flung open and Sam leaned against his own to brace himself as he kicked and kicked until there was only air and if he had turned to look he would have seen a tumbling whiteness flattening out upon the black ground like a wave at night, he would have seen her crashing to mist and nothing. If he had turned to look. But he did not. There was no time. The Morris slammed into a bullock cart, missing the bullock itself and catching the cart full on. The cart driver was pitched into the brush just as Sam cracked the windshield with his forehead. The car was steaming and hissing and buried in a pile of shattered clay pots and when he pushed the door open more pots fell and shattered and wiping blood he looked for butterflies but all Sam Kandy saw before he fell was a freed white beast by the roadside eating and shitting in a perfect universe.

Beyond the red brick orchid house where Sam was to meet Lord Mountbatten, British fighter planes were on evening manoeuvres. He watched them make their bored and boastful contrails, a cloud scrawl of caterpillars and tightropes hanging across the blue fade of upcountry sky. Now and then he could hear their engine drone but otherwise, in the middle of the throbbing green gardens, the noise this late of day was birdsong and bug fury, laggard's drilling and the Beethoven horns of staff cars en route to the new PX. Sam blew smoke at smoke as the last of the fighters descended, skimming along the treetops so thickly leaved they were more black than green, like an ink-bottle spilt on stationery. Like a nosebleed on a bed-sheet.

His hip was throbbing. Soon he wouldn't be just waiting but waiting in rain, the August rain of the grand procession days. Since coming from Colombo to the British command set up at Peradeniya, near Kandy town, Sam had daily made himself apparent at a firstfloor office loud with clacking, dinging, screeching typewriters and with laughing barrels of American military men making jokes and love to the girls. Each time he received only apologies from a staff man who explained, with baroque patience, that the Supreme Commander had not yet returned from his meetings in London. With further apologies, he was told yet again that nothing more could be said as to why he'd been summoned, only that a cable from the British command at Tripoli had described a task requiring certain skills and Mr. Kandy's name had been raised and that only the Supreme Commander could reveal the rest, which he would, directly, it was promised, upon his return. Finally, Sam was reminded, over the lung-collapsing sound of American laughing, that by 1944 much of bottom-right Asia would be won or lost from exactly here, and so this was a very busy office indeed and a man could do his part by waiting to be told how he could do his part. By please waiting elsewhere. And so Sam paced through the Swiss Hotel's dim and echoing corridors as if hour and minute and second hands would rise out of the floor itself and take him by the ankles if he didn't stamp every one of them in place and so have at least that one victory while waiting for Lord Mountbatten.

He kept visiting the office anyway, because he wasn't about to go walking into Kandy town for a visit to the temple, and because the last time he'd been away from Colombo for more than a day and a night, leaving Curzon to run things by himself, he had lost so much. He came because he still had to visit the village before returning to the city, to learn how his son's engagement tour had fared. And he came because of a Burgher girl with sea-green eyes, second desk from the door, a hacked-in-half almirah on blocks. Not since Mary Astrobe and five years a widower.

After Dambulla, a three-cart procession had carried home the wrecked Morris and a sleeping Sam and Alice's birdcage body. It was followed by a mad potter who emptied a sack of shards at the village crossroads when Robert refused to hear his claim. On the next auspicious day, Alice's body was grand-burned upon the great green clearing. Among the mourners were those who had lately gone and come
NOT FROM THE WORKER'S RALLY
but as pilgrims from the cave temple. Heaving and collapsing, they grieved like palm trees in a monsoon, pulling their hair and tearing their shirts and going louder than the mourners hired in from the next village, louder even than Latha herself. Meanwhile Sam lay like a stone in a back room of the walauwa. Ten days later, he stirred. With the household called into the room and watching, he began to spit out words like bits of glass. Robert stopped him with his free hand and while he was coughing into the other, Sam waited, wondering how far he'd get on his tingling legs before the metal-benders caught him and bent his heels into hammers to break apart his face. He'd been fever-dreaming since they'd laid him here. But when Robert stopped coughing he only motioned fierce Latha to bring George and Hyacinth forward to show respect to their father. The boy dropped milk toffee on Sam's bed-sheet. The girl asked when Blue Piyal was coming back to the village. There were more bits of glass but Robert cut off his fellow widower to send the children out and ordered wretched Latha to bring in a good breakfast. Then Arthur nodded and Robert nodded and Sam was asleep before Latha returned with a plate of yesterday's rice mashed with banana and gall.