Beggar's Feast (31 page)

By February 1948 he would have padlocked his own mouth. He would have padlocked everyone else's too. People were suddenly acting as if they cared little for foreign goods. The harbour itself was loud with village boys returning from the Italian campaign, calling themselves veterans and standing drinks on promise of pound-sterling pensions. There was a four-month madness of young men asking for passages to Australia when terrifically ambiguous notices had been posted in Colombo announcing openings on Queensland sugarcane fields for anyone with plantation experience (four months because that was how long it took the first batch of misery letters to reach Ceylon). Otherwise, more and more mothers were keeping their middle sons back from the great ships. Soon there would be no need to go abroad to get enough to become enough to come home again. Every day, 1947, 1948, was another day until independence, another day until they were their own for the first time in anyone's remembering, in anyone's father's father's remembering.

Meanwhile, the Englishmen who still ran shipping offices in the harbour had no plans to leave. The lizard-splayed walls of their Cinnamon Garden homes displayed prints of Midland country churches and solemn oil portraits of titled and long-dead uncles, but also more recent family triumphs—the mounted heads of Sambar deer, boar with tusks like old mower's scythes. These were Ceylon English cured of homesickness by movie reels of blitzed London and, after the victory, by gloomy letters whose good cheer was rumour of the clothing ration coming to an end and reports of baked snoek and beans, mashed turnip and snoek, snoek piquant. Staying in Ceylon, with impeccably Oxbridge natives taking charge, these Englishmen sensed that more than pride and the propriety of skin and accent would be needed to maintain them under any new, local dispensations. Propriety of association would matter too. And so they turned thin-smiling amnesiacs when Sam Kandy came calling at war's end. For a few months he tried their offices in vain, and then for a year he tried lower down, in the brine-smelling warehouse near the ships themselves, only to find that even the brown men who ticked items on and off cargo manifests had become remarkably straight-eyed and austere—they were practising patience, certain that their English directors would soon leave for home and leave intact, waiting, their library tables and gin and gin trolleys done in local calamander, their bloodstone seals and lineal sextants set up like holy vessels on side tables.

Sam Kandy had no such patience, no such need for another man's bloodstone. But he would not return to his old short-loading days, to mucking his shoes with dock slick while flashing whatever staple or cheap shine turned a dockworker's eye and made him Sam's own carter. That was a younger man's game, a minor man's game. At least people still needed salt. When he'd first gone north to Puttalam, the year before, Sam had thought the Englishmen at the harbour had been making a joke in sending him and the Ethiopians to its salt plains—only in such whiteness could black men be freed in vain. Eventually he found the man in charge, fat as Sam and just as brown skinned but with a yellow-gold cross hanging from his neck. Sam brought him to the Morris and pulled down the curtains and asked him to look in the back and the man, Peter Rodrigo, looked in and crossed himself and stepped away and crossed himself and accepted one of Sam's cigarettes and asked how he obtained them, the foreign cigarettes. Never once did he ask anything about the Ethiopians after Sam said they had been left behind by the war British. And so they had started dealing. Rodrigo said they could stay if the padlocks could be removed and they did not run or try to eat anyone but were willing and able to carry and stack like the old-time Kaffirs already in his employ— who had been carrying and stacking and telling rosaries close by the salt plains of Puttalam long since the orange-headed Dutchmen chased Coutinho and Menezes and their soldiers home to Lisbon, leaving behind clerks and priests and fishermen and half- and quarter-blood sons and also their servants, who had been baptized before leaving Fort Jesus against the native devilry in which they were found and first taken from Mombasa, some watching their departure from the granular white water where three hundred years later what attenuate remainder of their many times crossed blood and skin and singing was working that same white water for a man who was himself, if only in name, an attenuate remainder of the blood that had come and gone on the same such ships. In return, Sam was only asked to listen to Rodrigo tell of how strong and true was Puttalam salt.

He had Sam taste it to agree that it was stronger than Hambantota salt and truer than Kolkata's. More: Rodrigo said it was still prized in Portugal, that stories from centuries before were still told of its preserving qualities in the bellies of the great ships, that exhumed missionary saints found in perfect state were known to smell of Puttalam salt. Besides which, any man could see how plentiful were Rodrigo's beds and how needful was salt island-wide, war or no war, British or no British. But Rodrigo Salt Works (Pvt.) was only a small operation sending north to Jaffna and inland. The southern hook of the island, down the coast from Colombo, was dominated by the Hambantota outfits. If there were someone who could break him into Colombo, Rodrigo would be willing to share the profits. Sam gave him another cigarette; a whole pack. The Ethiopians woke, many hours and cigarettes later, without incident, having passed out when the padlocks were first removed. They began stretching their mouths silently, like the very, very old. They were dressed in the banyans and sarongs Sam had brought and given tea they dribbled to drink freely and then Sam appeared before them, for the last time, his mind already back in Colombo with salt and Ivory but also, for a moment, spinning, raging, to know how little, save four deaths and the loss of his own harbour privileges, had come of his virtue-making with the Ethiopians' years of confinement. His own. They were led away by a gang leader in need of new men, to a low wide shophouse that stood behind the salt-filled godowns. They departed him weak legged and flabber mouthed, squinting at the sun and sea and salt that here was all one terrible brightness.

Now, a year later, no longer the Ralahami of the harbour's backrooms, and the Ethiopians made into another man's carry, Sam had nothing to do save tasting grains and counting manifest sheets at his desk in Prince's Building, before going upstairs to the dusty rooms where he had moved Ivory the year before. Not dusty so much as un-dusted because the girl Ivory had hired, mud brown but thin and pretty of feature, seemed hired to do nothing. And because she was hired to do nothing save sit with Madam and listen as Madam reread a year's worth of Mills & Boon books, Sam paid her to tell him what Madam did when he had to go to Puttalam, or to the village. The servant girl's reports were, of course, singular: Madam went nowhere today. Loyal reports, worded by Ivory herself no doubt. And Sam knew. Yet he kept paying and listening, believing that Madam went nowhere today because if he did not believe then what kind of nights would there be between them, what next would he have to do, what next would he have to do.

He was too much by himself these days belonging to others, he had too much time to make figure eights and zeroes of memory and prospect, of why he kept giving her tufts of his hair before even she could reach. Of how it could end. It had to. No Curzon at the desk beside his, no driver, no father-in-law coughing in the front room. Not that he ever had to say anything to any of them, but they had been blood-and-bone stays against what he was now doing with the long, long hours of going back and forth from the city to the bright flat plates of Puttalam, the shock-white nothing of accumulate salt in the shallow seawater that washed onto an island about to be free, an island never and never to be his.

When he returned from still another such trip on February 4, 1948, Colombo was in revel. Crowds were hooting and cheering for cooking fire oratory and toddy rebuttals over whether independence won without blood would be independence taken away with blood; over whether this would now become again the nation it had been for so long and was ordained always to be by blood and Lord Buddha, or whether it would have to be shared with the Tamils and Muslims and Christians; over whether new anthems or old anthems would be sung and in what tongue, tongues; over who would try to bite off the other fellow's tongue first.

“What has happened?” Ivory asked excitedly as he walked into the kitchen for water.

“British are going,” he muttered, wiping his mouth. He'd grown a beard in the last year, to return the abrasion. Staring in the mirror, it looked like he'd caught it from her body, as if her body was consuming him at the join. But how fine she was still, standing before him dark eyed like rain in deep forest, mouth still like a flower.

“I want to see!” Ivory knew bankers and their wives, officeseekers and their sons, would also be in the streets this night. They could see her passing in the triumph of a motorcar. She also knew she could leave the rooms now because she could tell how strong still was his need for her, for her body that way, that she make him do it that way. She was no longer afraid that if she left he would shut the door and open it only to close it again, as happened last time, with the last one. The first one she'd left was a Chetty banker with wife and children who had set her up, at nineteen, when she was still called Hilda Stevens, in the top floor of a house on Magazine Road, within walking distance of his own. The terms: she could stay and have whatever she wanted if whatever hour he came she would be there waiting, drapes closed, with cigars and something for him to eat on hand, and otherwise growing only paler and more perfect. He had called her his ivory. One night he came in, full and drunk after a director's meeting, and passed out on top of her, his body collapsing and collapsing even after he was sleeping until, collapsing more, she smelled it, as burning hot it trailed down through his legs onto hers and she had reached for the side of the bed and pulled herself free and smeared, washed herself, washed herself raw, then filled his valise with the dresses and vials he had bought for her, and left.

The second, who caught her perfume as she waited to be danced with one night in the Grand Oriental ballroom, was as wild for it as Sam was, as needful in some of the same ways. But he had had not let her back into the room when she had gone away to the Holy Family convent as they had agreed she would when, a few months into their time together, she began to show and had refused his offer of shoeflower tea for cleansing. “Reducing,” he called it. It was a baby girl. He was a Colombo Tamil, the son of a speechmaker whose only son could never marry a Burgher girl if he wanted to be someday an office-holder—let alone marry a Burgher girl who professed to have no parents and said her name was Ivory. She knocked on his door after her months at the convent and eventually he opened it an eye-space, sudden-cured of his need for her body and making strange like he did not know her or the mud-brown child riding her hip. She knocked until the child began crying and then another fellow came to the door and made it known that if she did not go and never return he would make it so she and the child went and never returned, anywhere. And so she went back to Holy Family, agreed to call the baby Mary, and meanwhile was taught elocution and shorthand and to type. She left the child there because she was fair enough to find work in the English offices when the war came and then in the office at Peradeniya, where the laughing Americans proposed marriage to her morning noon and night only honeymoon first baby. But then Sam Kandy came and she was told to report to him in Colombo and she went and first saw her daughter and then him, who married and kept her and after leaving the hotel had unknowing kept her daughter as well, whom Ivory had retrieved from the convent and called a hired girl, whom it was she used to visit when she left the hotel room for the afternoon during her first year with Sam, who it was that now gave her mother the money Sam paid her to tell him that today Madam went nowhere.

She knew he thought she was going with other men. But with Sam there was more: she could also tell he could not stop treating her as his nightly plate and making like it was her wanting it, even if she only wanted to try it once to punish him and also because of a Mills & Boon passage that had long confused her. But no matter. He kept coming for it and making like she was taking him by the hair and pushing him down. And however long that needfulness persisted did not matter. The girl, her girl, was already on the home side of the door. Ivory had decided they would stay here for good only if he never returned from wherever it was he went, whether stabbed or shot or eaten for whatever he daily went for and whatever he did and kept to get money. Otherwise they would go once he had given the girl watch-and-tell money sufficient that they could depart, mother and daughter, and live elsewhere in the city, without need ever again of men or convent care. Such were their whispering plans at night, each consoling the other for how long more until their days and nights were truly their own.