Beggar's Feast (26 page)

And so the boy rushed from the walauwa to his father's hut, passing the crowd gathered around the green army truck that had followed Sam into the village and was now parked at the village crossroads. A crowd so focused on the truck that none had noticed Sam's latest ascent, ten minutes before, his hand at a bare fair elbow. A crowd which, whether from whole cloth or half truth, recalled memory or borrowed, had been made gloriously one in a sudden bout of divination, an asking and answering that was unto itself generative and affirming, sceptic and disputing, all of it only to make more of the same, to keep it going, the telling.

What was in the truck?

There was much in this question for men old since used to the rattle and vroom of Sam Kandy's coming and going, men by now bored of believing that the rest of the world would inevitably emerge from the boot of Sam's car. This was a sudden new roaring, a war-green monster with a black mouth in the back, which had stopped at an immediately auspicious hour on an immediately auspicious day in October 1944, beneath the water-print fade of an auspicious moon, and was now parked only a walk away from where they had all been born and married, would die and be burned to next life. It would be a sin for the back gate to swing down and what emerge?

What?

Inside were British soldiers, come to take the village boys to fight the Hitler war. No, inside were row on row of Japanese, them come to take Ceylon; the white driver was a dupe, a decoy. Yes! The Japanese had come to defeat the British at Peradeniya and knew that this was the place to start; they must have heard of the village's famed Road Ordnance victory against the British, years before, from the new monk at the village temple, who had studied abroad, in Siam or was it Burma, which might as well have been Berlin or Japan. Who was no monk but yes a Japanese agent, a pilot!, his beggar's bowl a flying cap, his scholar's specs goggles, and inside the truck was a Japanese aeroplane, its wings folded up like a Vesak lantern. Aiyo no! Madness! It was so much simpler. Inside were a thousand field Tamils got down from Madras to take over the Ralahami's paddy fields. In that much dark for that long, by now there could be two thousand field Tamils waiting to take over in the fields and take our huts and garden pepper and declare themselves upcountry since before the days of Sri Vikrama. No. All lies. There was only one reason Lalson had just run to his father's hut. The walauwa must need Old Lal's carrying help. Because inside the truck was George Kandy, returned from his latest engagement tour, now so fat his father needed an army truck to bring him home.

“No. You're all wrong.”

The speaker this time was the village weaver, not the village weaver's wife, who could go on like she was seven sisters, but the weaver himself. He could have heard something when he went to hang new cane tats across the walauwa windows the week before, after Hyacinth had crossed. And so for the first time in their glorious mongering, the crowd became a windstorm of threats and pleas each to all to be quiet so they could hear the latest certainty. Inside that truck, the weaver declared, were all the cooking pots and chocolates of Ceylon, all the paper dolls and aftershave the father could buy or steal, a collection that explained the latest absence; it took even Sam Kandy a month to get it all. And all of it was needed—not in Sudugama, but in Mahakeliya and Rambawewa, in Galagedera, Mawatagama, Barandara; in walauwas full of ruined daughters and sobbing mothers and outraged fathers from here halfway to Habarana. George's engagement tour route. The invocation of known places, not more conjuring words like
Berlin
and
aeroplane
, was the modest champion, collapsing the wild fine rest of it.

And so they neared the back of the truck, expecting to find cooking pots shining in the darkness. Two young men came forward, two of the three boys who, one vellum-sun morning in 1929, had chased a Morris Minor fireball down the lane. One of them dropped on all fours at the muddy bumper so the other could climb onto his back and look in, their having agreed in advance that the positions would reverse at the count of ten. But the first fellow didn't get to peer past the count of five, which was when Old Lal and Lalson marched past. Without breaking stride Old Lal called into the crowd for the metal-benders to follow. Everyone did. And only when he saw the village stream toward the big house did the truck's driver hop down and knock twice on its side for the prisoners' handlers, two sons of a Pettah seamstress, to open the gate and, as instructed, let it drop without banging. While they got the Ethiopians down, the army driver smoked, shaking the key ring in his other hand, trying to remember which way down the crossroad Sam had said he would find the empty hut where they were to be deposited.

Inside the otherwise silent walauwa, the sound of foot on stone was now much louder, was now like a lane of bored fruit sellers. Lalson was returning along the steps, following his father. Heavier and slower and behind them were the metal-benders. The rest of the village was gathered below, at the twin boulders, where they were frenzied with fresh fecund telling about why Old Lal had walked so straight and serious, why the metal-benders had been called along, what or better still who were they going to take from the walauwa and throw into the back of the army truck. Hearing their approach and beyond them a murmuring crowd, Sam knew it was time for the day's next business. Taking Ivory at the waist, he turned her away from his stony father-in-law and idiot-smiling brother-in-law and walked out onto the verandah wondering, hoping, needing the whole village to be waiting there with clumps to throw. His suit would show all, would encourage more, he thought. And he did not worry about any man in a yellow hat. In fact, over the years, when no crocodile ever came for him, Sam decided it must have been a heat shimmer, a hot mad dream on his first wedding day. On this, his second, the only question was how to get the village yelling loud enough for when the army truck drove off. But he knew how.

In the city, she had asked for the whitest cloth Sam could find for her wedding-day dress, and he had said nothing. The shoes and hat she picked out at Cargill's, her dress copied from a creased catalogue print she had shown him ten minutes after Sam proposed marriage one evening in the office, two weeks after Charlie Curzon had left for the day never to return, and a long, respectful hour after Ivory had interrupted a dictation to say her parents were both dead and she had no other family on the island. And she had accepted, right away and without much excitement, more impatience, just the same way he had proposed. They exchanged toothy, congratulating smiles. Then pressing his hand into hers Ivory had shown Sam the design as if she'd had it in her palm all the two weeks and one hour they'd known each other. Sam had it made for her by a Pettah seamstress whose eyebrows showed she thought it was more than absurd: the jacket with its row of fish-eye buttons and plunging neck like some scoundrel man had split it open before it could be worn; a sharp-gathered waist; and then the skirt, too short by at least two hands from above the ankles. She wore it that dawn, to appear before the Registrar of Deaths and Marriages, who, unshaven, had married Sam and Ivory on the front step of his office without once looking up from his vow book.

Lal and Lalson and the metal-benders met Sam and wife just before the three final steps to the verandah. Looking up, they watched them emerge from the noon-hour maw of the verandah. Everything about her was so white. The sun was white too, at least what was throbbing through the spear-leafed green and pouring down the lines of the walauwa's staggered orange-red roof tiles in a blinding wash. It was as if, as it would be told in the toddy circle that night, she had been poured down beside him. Only much later, when descriptions of both the new wife and the army truck's coming and going were exhausted, were the metal-benders asked what Sam had also looked like from so close. And they answered, being the first men of that long day, from meeting the truck at Pettah to outside the Registrar's door to the rest-stop at Ambepussa to the walauwa, to notice that Sam Kandy had been wearing a full white suit. In fact he had chosen off-white because he did not think it would look so bad after they started throwing their dirt.

But no one threw anything. The villagers staring up at them, at her, were shocked silent for a moment. But then they knew who and what kind of affront, how many affronts, this was. Meet Madam Kandy. Their answer to Sam presenting his new wife was total, was outraged, and it was loud and long enough to bring the Ralahami and his son from the shadows of the walauwa to stand on the high step behind Sam and Ivory, without coming forward any farther. It was also enough to annihilate the sound of the now-emptied transport truck leaving the village and turning onto the Kurunegala Road, where it was seen off by seven saffron-clad monks who had been watching it all from the other side of the road, three old ones frowning to appear solemn and four boys waving with mad longing to leave too.

Fifteen hours later, Arthur felt Sam's hand against his mouth. Thrashing his face back and forth to break free, he was pushed more firmly into his mattress and held there, trying now to bite enough fingers away to call for help.

“Arthur!” Sam seethed, pulling away his sudden throbbing hand. Wanting to wheel around and knock him in the jaw with the key ring. But he was needed.

“
MOKATHA?
”

“Damn quiet will you!”

“
Mokatha?
” Arthur squinted in the silver moonlight that came through the edges of the window tat above his bed. “Sam-aiya?” His brother-in-law had come to his bedroom in the middle of the night, the middle of
his
wedding night. More than that: his brother-in-law had come barefoot, in sarong.

Bunching it between his legs, Sam took Arthur at the wrist and pulled him up and put an iron ring in his hand, its little keys falling between his fingers. Arthur quickened.

“What are these for?” he whispered.

“Come and see,” Sam said. He had already kept the Ethiopians longer than he had wanted, fifteen plotting days in back of B.'s old stall in Pettah, for which he had paid well the widow seamstress who occupied it now, and also paid her two sons to keep the prisoners dry and fed and no morning noon and night attraction for the city. He'd also paid the English transport driver to return to Pettah at dawn for the upcountry run and, before they left the city, to witness Sam's second marriage, and finally to leave the key ring in a pile of dead timber beside his family's old hut, where the prisoners were taken and left while the rest of the village was, earlier that day, distracted.

“What is it?” Arthur asked.

“Just come and see will you.” And then they could return to the city, he could return to the Oriental Grand. And if that tea-seller so much as looked across York Street as he walked his wife into the hotel, Sam would burn his stall down. Only he would do it the next morning. Because he had been aching certain for three weeks and a day now that no onions would be needed this time; that there would be nothing and no one to un-remember. All that remained was the return drive to Colombo, before which was this black of one night's work.