Beggar's Feast (28 page)

She said she liked it, the new roundness of his belly. She would inspect it some nights, pat it and say she felt like a king building a private little temple on his body, her lush grounds. He tried to turn over or say otherwise; he could have taken her wrist and bent it back, snapped it off even and then slapped her smiling blaspheming mouth with her own hand for making of his own body a sacrilege she could never know. But she would keep patting, looking and waiting for him to do whatever it was he wanted to do, saying nothing but the way she looked at him, breathing fast as he began to breathe fast she was daring him to see what he could do, wanted to do, if he could do it. But then she would look down, past her stupa, and smile with victory and rolling on whisper all that remained now was to find the jewel for the spire.

Sam would have made of their room world enough, world enough would have been their bed, or whatever part of it was in use when they were joined, but every month came a bill, and even though she never left the hotel she liked the seamstress to come from Pettah every few weeks with good bolts and needle and thread. Meanwhile, Sam was using the Pettah stall again. Now, October 1945, the world was still needful but in reverse. The war against Japan had suddenly finished. Around the harbour, two months after the August bombs, he heard men, local men, still speaking of what had happened, their opinions, sympathies, pride diverging. Sam liked the British response more than all this betel talk: now was no time to worry over what had happened. Now was time to move on to what was next: offices to shut and so much to rubbish—tropic-ruined desks and paper and books, cabinets, lamps and chairs, potted meats and untouched jars of Christmas-sent jam.

Meanwhile, these same Englishmen became needful and sudden lovers of true Ceylon notions, for their wives and mothers and mantelpieces. And so, through Sam, British wants and discards met Pettah goods and wants. First, he set up an operation in the seamstress's stall for fences and buying agents sent to Pettah by native planters and businessmen mad for northern wood and banker's lamps, heavy desk blotters, music cabinets, Walter Scotts in indigo marbled hardback, country church prints and solemn hunting scenes to hang upon their huna-studded walls. Next, Sam sent word through Pettah and Pettah sent word everywhere: the war British were leaving and did not want to leave empty-handed. An ironworking shop near the quartermaster's warehouse was cleared out. The lower ranks of the departing English went in for handiwork from the village: devil masks and palm-sized charms that carried pithy biographies of warding off and healing powers, brass ashtrays shaped like coiled cobra tails or held up by trumpeting elephants, cuff-link and earring dishes carried by faceless coolie stickmen or contemplative primates, weak gold chains dangling semi-precious stones for girls to win back, pillboxes made of buffalo horn for wives taking unmentionable medicines. Behind an arched doorway was an anteroom for the officer class. Crate-bottom boards displayed heavy, ornate suriyas dangling from bronze chains that had once dangled from noble necks; boar and leopard pelts awaited unchallengeable stories of their provenance; in a far corner, under sheets sat a stone lion head and cracked free moonstones and assorted segments of stone frieze brought to Colombo from the ruins of the old interior kingdoms, all ideal for English gardens.

A note came from the village once every two months, and Sam would take a taste from his operation and send it there. He never went once to Sudugama himself in the first year of his second marriage. He only sent his driver Joseph with bootloads of canned food, foreign cigarettes, and war-orphaned northern wood and shine, and also with instructions to tour around the old coughing Ralahami as he pleased for one full day before returning. All was sent in answer: to formal word of Arthur's engagement, and then of Arthur's marriage, and, seven months later, to word of a new baby. With that third shipment he also sent some leftover tatters from Ivory's dressmaking, as a welcome to the walauwa's new servant girl, Pathy. After thirty-seven years Latha had left the walauwa, laughing wildly, the very same day Arthur's son was born. Sam also sent to the temple for Vesak and, though late, he sent for Hyacinth's crossing and for her birthday and for the anniversary of the accident, and with every shipment to the village he remembered the Ethiopians for as long as it took to buy six new sets of banyan and sarong, which were also sent, addressed to Arthur. When Joseph returned to the city, Sam asked him how things looked. “Good, sir.” The letters sometimes said otherwise, as when Arthur wrote that his son's birth had been blighted when Ralahamis from nearby villages, the same villages visited on George's engagement tour, came to the walauwa demanding justice for their ruined daughters, who were now brides without grooms and mothers to bastard sons. Arthur wrote that Robert was too ill to receive anyone, more ill with the noise of each of these visits, and so Arthur had sent the fathers off with threats and cigarettes and his own metal-benders and could Sam send more cigarettes next time please. Arthur never mentioned the Ethiopians and never asked where was his promised black Morris, and Sam would have worried why the British had not yet come to him for their prisoners, it was war's end, and why his brother-in-law was not so keenly asking for his promised reward. But Sam Kandy's going time was better spent going elsewhere.

On the first anniversary of his second marriage, it changed. Sam blamed Latha. The morning of the anniversary he went to the office in Fort to bring something for their dinner, a fading frayed menu card whose items he had copied onto the back years ago in deep incisions. He planned to instruct the hotel to make it, all of it, for them that night. But he never went into the office that morning. Latha was there, waiting for him. Latha, at his office, standing outside the door, squinting in the smudged windowpane light of daybreak in the city, wearing a village sari and flat-as-leaf village sandals and carrying an old Cargill's shopping bag like she had been cut from the page of one chronicle and child-pasted onto a page from its successor. Not in the walauwa not in the village but in the city in Fort in Prince's Building in front of his door: Latha. This went against nature itself, as if a tank crocodile had just swooped down from a branch.

“
Mokatha?
”

“Mokatha? I should speak here for all to hear?” she scoffed back, squinting worse than the last time he had seen her, the handkerchief dabbing her mouth. She was old now, slow, her skin had darkened around her clouding eyes and wattled about her neck and the arms. He followed her chin, which was motioning toward the tall narrow office door.

“Mokatha?”

“Ah. Fine. Why should I think that your new boutique madam would have made your manners any better. You would have me discuss it here so all of Colombo can hear. Right. Your father-inlaw is to die soon.”

“Why did Arthur send you to tell me?”

“Not even your eyes blink to hear it,” Latha said, smiling thinly, as if something was just confirmed. “And Arthur did not send me. Arthur does not know I have come. Arthur is, I am sure, scared to tell.”

“To tell what?”

“You've grown fat now, isn't it! What has she been feeding you?”

“To tell me what? What.”

“Arthur is scared to tell why Ralahami is to die soon. What has happened.”

“But you are not scared.”

“No.” Stooped, swaying, showing her village teeth, she eyed him back.

“So then tell and go.”

“You would have me tell standing here, like this?” She breathed out loudly and bobbled her head. Something else confirmed. “Right. Your father-in-law went for a walk in the high grass behind the walauwa.” She waited, studying him studying her. “He said he wanted to see the first place in the village, the old cave, one last time, and he asked Lalson to help him climb the hill but of course, you know, you know what Lalson said. He said he would not go to the founder's cave and tried to tell Ralahami not to go either but how can a servant tell such a thing? So Ralahami went, Lalson followed, and when Ralahami reached the cave he saw them. He saw all four of your fellows, fell back, and knocked his head on a rock. Since then he has even stopped coughing and asking for cigarettes. He is on the bed. He is to die soon.”

“Four, you said.”

“Yes, I said the Ralahami your father-in-law is to die soon.”

“But all four, you said.”

“The whole village knows. They have known from the beginning. Other villages even know. Since you came with your new madam and left those fellows in the muspenthu hut.”

“What hut?” Sam asked in a hard voice, but hard the way a bug sounds hard underfoot.

“What hut? Ha. The only hut fit for such devils. Believe it. I know,” said Latha.

They were only two, the rest of the building empty of Royal bells and footfall this early. Latha. After so many years of mocking him by looking only to Alice when he came to the walauwa, she was now standing here and mocking him outright, in his city, in his building, outside his door. Blocking it. Mocking his old misfortunate hut too, if truly so.

“Arthur told me you have left the walauwa,” Sam said. “Why have you come here to tell me about the Ralahami?”

“Because,” but here, suddenly, Latha faltered. Something had been touched by his question and he could tell that if he kept asking the same question she would break and go, but all Sam did was look down while Latha mouthed air at his question, like a fish on sand. She had already said all that she had planned to say to him. She had come to the city after fifty-seven years in the village, thirty-seven serving its highest blood, an omen blood, a dying blood, all of which she had witnessed and so now had dying eyes herself and would serve no more. She had decided to see Sam as her last duty by the walauwa and also because then there would be at least one known face, even his, in the city, but also because she thought she would have at least some triumph after sixteen years of his devilry. To tell him that she knew, that everyone knew, other villages even, about his black-and-gold padlock men. But here, now, more: from the start of their talking Latha had so wanted him to open the door and let her sit a moment somewhere without rogues and beggars and sick men all walking the same lanes, none giving way. She would even make the tea herself, for both of them, if only he would do the very least for someone from the village, no less someone who had hand-fed his wife from birth and then hand-fed his children the same and never once asked directly for any of his city shine but was now standing before him in need like she never had been before, because she had been standing since coming to the city alone and unknown by every passing face. And all Latha wanted was tea and ten minutes to sit and sip it and then she would go back into the crowds and look for the place called Pettah. She would see what kind of new life could be had for the price of two golden earrings she had long ago decided Alice would have given her anyway.

“But Hyacinth must miss you, no?” Sam asked, looking down. Not the hammer question he had wanted to ask. It was now everything to keep this as only talking. Because suddenly, of all things in the universe, Sam wanted to go to her, to his mother's old cousin, the walauwa's eternal governess, the hated old woman. Who in a moment would turn or he would, and then would be gone the last known of the old blood, his blood, however forsaken, however thin, however spat upon, faded, rusted. But he would not. It had to be so, he wanted it that way, he had to: everything done to him and taken from him, everything he had taken and done demanded that it be so. And more: Sam Kandy knew from a year's worth of prior nights that all would be forgotten by day's end anyway, those hips, those eyes like quartz.

“Hyacinth is a young lady now,” Latha finally answered. “You will get her a husband soon. There is nothing more that I can do for her.” But there was no venom in her saying it. She was soft from the first true thing Sam Kandy had said in sixteen years, that the girl would miss her. The first kindness too, in his voice, she thought. But in vain. He'd made no move to open his door and give her only ten minutes. Truth, yes, but no cup of tea.