Beggar's Feast (36 page)

“No! I ask for no dowry, I only ask, about your daughter—”

“GO! I don't need another driver. Making like you are no orphan, no servant's son. No Englishman's bastard born to drive other men. I don't need another driver.”

“Aiyo,” breathed Thusitha, looking over at Hyacinth shaking in her chair.

“Stop this, Aiya,” tried Arthur.

“A bastard born to drive other men, I say.”

“I said stop this!”

Now Sam had to keep going and he leaned down on Bastian, muttering it again and again. Yes Sam's blood was running fine and hard and true and who said a sixty-year-old man couldn't shatter the constellations? “
GO!
” Sam commanded.

“
YOU GO!
”

“
Mokatha?
” Sam whipped around, but Hyacinth was already looking down again, sylvan lost, would say no more. No one said anything else while Bastian went to the back room and gathered his things, Dudley pleading in vain to know why as Bastian then walked again through the front room frieze. He looked a last time at Hyacinth, who for the first time held his gaze. She nodded once and looked down again. Before dawn the next morning, she met him at the bus stand, climbed onto the back of his bike, and they went. Smoking a cigarette and leaning on the stone ledge of the verandah, Sam Kandy watched his daughter go. Then he called into the house for tea and went down to watch the servant boy wash his motorcars.

“Yes! Yes you must! Please, Father Marcelline, please bless it before he comes. You know Daddy is coming home.
HE IS COMING JUST NOW!
”

Rose had to yell at the priest. Laughing screaming children were twirling noisemakers while running back and forth between the glass-box statues of St. Anthony and Our Lady that marked the far ends of the church square. Meanwhile, passing cars and trucks were honking at the crowd gathered in front of a fresh-painted cement mixer, either because the crowd was taking up too much of the main road or because the drivers knew the crowd was gathered because Xavier Joseph De Moraes was finally coming home.

While the rest of the family had spent the morning packing the vans and picking their outfits for the journey to the airport, Rose had made sure that lagoon crabs had been brought and the pork set to roast and lights strung between the houses in the compound, that the floors of their own house were washed and the bronze polished and the dogs washed and the vehicles washed and polished and the flowerbeds fixed up. She had even ordered her mother's squirrel cages cleaned. Born to be giants and fed like their dogs, the squirrels never tried to escape. Instead they lay about making nasty screeching noises, arguing like a parliament of fat women. Rose hated them. She loved the peacocks her father used to keep, before he went against Mrs. Bandaranaike and then went from the island, leaving one of her brothers in charge of his birds, not her. The peacocks were dead within a year.

But now there would be birdsongs in the compound again. At lunch she had ordered the kitchen girl to keep rice for the pedestal in the side-garden, where her father liked to take his morning tea watching the birds take their breakfast: green parakeets and yellow bulbuls, sometimes a pair of spotted thrush. There should have been new peacocks also, but the brother who should have arranged for their return instead had spent the last few days driving around Negombo with his friends, trying to assemble the world's loudest sound system. In the meantime, Rose had done everything else, for years had been doing everything else. Not only because she was the eldest and remaining unmarried daughter but because her mother, Vivimarie De Moraes, for reasons no one knew and none dared to ask, stopped running the house during her husband's absence years. She had left everything to Rose, save feeding the giant squirrels. Now, upon word of his return, Vivimarie had called for her dressmaker and made plans to publish the results of three years' novenas not just in the
Catholic Messenger
but also in the
Sunday Observer
. The rest remained for her eldest girl to do, a girl the rest of the family had long since assumed would grow old minding other people's children, the lone De Moraes daughter who, according to theories related to her shortness, her most Portuguese of noses, and the telltale length of her second toe, had never been asked after by families with suitable boys.

She allowed herself a cup of tea only after the rest of them left for the airport—her mother, her mother's brothers and sisters and her father's brothers and sisters; her own brothers and sisters and their children; her cousins and her cousins' children; school friends from three generations; and also, cramming and hanging on and sharing corners of seats, boys armed with epic lists of the many things they'd done for Mr. De Moraes's family while he was away. Together they went in garlanded vans down the Negombo Road. They wanted to be in Ratmalana at least four hours early and then wait in the grassless park outside the airport. The De Moraeses packed for the journey like they were going north to Madhu Church for the Assumption Feast: they brought coiled effusions of extra garland, guitars and lap drums, two radios, rosaries, rosewater and Tiger Balm, breviaries, Enid Blytons, Mills & Boons, Sando from New Generations, Sando's father Andrew who owned Portrait Studio 3A Mangala Road, bottles of Pathma's Asian Rose talcum and English Lavender too, flasks of Brooke Bond tea, jugs of water, bars of Zellers fruit, Zellers fruit-and-milk, Zellers plain milk and introducing new Zellers milkcracker chocolate, cricket bats and a badminton set, Maliban cream crackers, Cow & Gate baby formula, tennis balls, a simple pavilion tent, and a full meal for at least twice their number. Everyone dressed up to go to the airport, but waited with newspapers and canteen tea. This family would go like pageant, as usual, and wait, as always, like carnival.

Meanwhile, her own tea finished, Rose had wanted to arrange a blessing, and so she'd gone to the church square which, two days after Christmas 1965, with the village's most prominent man about to return, was its own carnival. And so of course Rose had to yell at the priest: The band she'd hired, New Horizons featuring Sando from New Generations, was nowhere to be found but younger boys, denied noisemakers at the church door when everyone was exiting vespers, were playing hell behind the bass drum, trading turns hammering down on the footpedal with their hands.
Tho tho tho
But never mind the noisemakers and the bass drum booming like the world's own pulse; it was little different than most holy days in the De Moraes family universe. In truth Rose liked the noise: it let her yell with best intentions, with a necessity not her own, at the family priest who was refusing to bless her father's welcome-home present.

“No. I will not. This is scandal and madness,” Father Marcelline insisted. “I am not going to bless something that your own father knows should not be blest. Wait and see, child, how he will come and before even taking tea or a wash, paint over it himself. In that way, he is a good son of the Church.”

“Father Marcelline, Daddy is in all ways a good son of the Church, no?”

“And I'll not have holy water mixed up with all this paint!” the priest yelled and so did not hear her last question. Never mind the money Xavier Joseph De Moraes had given the Church over the years, how many feast days he'd footed, how many Walk Rite kits he'd bought for cripples, how much he'd given for the Beggar's Palace alone: he had also promised his support (his name, his money, and, if necessary, trucks from his cement co.) to the 1962 coup plotters in the name of defending the Church, its schools, and its clergy from the rising temple and from the rising sangha that had weepy Mrs. Bandaranaike's ear and were trying to be her eyes and mouth, her arms and fingers, her fists. Her father had made this promise, as Rose and everyone else knew, after speaking with Father Marcelline, who, after the coup failed, turned amnesiac and would not even give him a St. Christopher's blessing the morning he left home. Some thought he had gone to Rome or to Tuticorin, others said he was hiding out in the old Portuguese fort on Mannar Island; a few believed he had gone to Lourdes itself.

He was coming home, at last, because the charges had been dropped against all of the men named in the attempted action against the government. And still, the family priest would not appear at the homecoming rally planned at the top of the church square, would not even shake a few drops of holy water at the Leyland Comet cement truck that had been bought to celebrate Xavier Joseph De Moraes's return and also announce the company's own return to competition with the big Colombo firms. After the acquittals had been announced, Rose's brothers decided that the company would be just as proudly Christian as Farook Concrete was Muslim and National Agglos and Cement Elephant Cement Co. were Buddhist. And so the new lead truck's mixer had been painted with two images, but they had run into each other when some fool had climbed into the cab and turned on the mixer before the portraits had dried, striping the mixer itself and purpling Christ's crown of thorns and Mary's starry veil. The truck's cab at least showed perfect red roses on its doors. Underneath, in fresh stencilling, it read
LOURDES CEMENT CO. (PVT.)
.

“But it's not Daddy's fault they turned the mixer on before the paint dried, Father, is it? He didn't even ask for it to be painted.”

“Wet paint or dry paint how can I be seen to bless such a thing? It is blasphemy!”

“Right then. Thank you, Father. I will send Daddy your best and we will see you at Mass.” Rose turned and went, walking fast through the crowds. She found another priest, a young Chilaw fellow who knew nothing of anything here save the name of the most prominent family in the parish, whose eldest daughter asked him to bless Xavier De Moraes's new truck and what was he to do but find his holy water? Rose led him through the crowd and he decided to be blind about the paint job. (Afterwards, he went to the parish house where already how many old women were queued to tell Father Marcelline what he'd just done!)

A boy on a Bajaj beeped and threaded his way to Rose and the cement truck to tell that a line of vans were coming down the road followed by two first-class cars, banged up, old, but first-class. Were these ministers' vehicles? Rose gave the signal and the blessed mixer started up and every head turned because now there was nothing else in the world save the magnificent double roaring of engine and mixer, Jesus and Mary making solemn revolutions.

Nothing he could say do pay promise forget or threaten now could change that it was his fault. Ceylon roads were governed by one rule: never hit the fellow in front of you. Even if the fellow has stopped suddenly on the airport road; especially if the fellow is your own man driving one of your vehicles and you've hit him just as he's hit the van in front of him. He could not pay for any of it. December 1965, Sam Kandy was out of money. His last source, short of opening a Pettah of his own to sell his own things to his own villagers, had been the salt concern up the coast, but it had failed the year before, after Puttalam burned for seven days in creedal fury. Sam listened to reports on Radio Ceylon and a month later Peter Rodrigo sent word that the operation had been ransacked in three languages and in the name of at least four gods and now Rodrigo Salt Works (Pvt.) was part of the Ceylon Salt Board. He'd released whatever workers hadn't already run off and was now himself migrating to Australia. Meanwhile, the village paddy profits went to Arthur by old precedent ties, temple-sanctioned precedents, which Sam was too old now to try to break, and when Sam finally demanded money, Arthur said that everything Sam sent during his absence years had long ago gone to maintaining the village and the walauwa. Right. Pools of sunlight and monsoon came as they liked through the walauwa's roof, more every season, and the village itself needed a new water tank five years ago. There was no money to fix anything, according to Arthur, only the old true promises of merit for next lives and good meals for the workmen who more and more expected something other than old true promises and noon-hour plates of rice and garden curry for their sweat.