Beggar's Feast (4 page)

“And you believed this and gave him the rest of your money and now he's sent you back to the street,” Sam predicted, feeling streetwise and worldly.

“Malli, what to do? I only know to catch butterflies, not to keep them. Of course now I see I was played the fool. Aiyo half the butterflies died during the rains. I'm telling you, right now, I'd trade the rest for a good blade. If I had a good blade,” he said through clenched teeth, “then that potter would know, I promise you that!”

“Truth? You mean you would—”

“Malli, can you blame a man for anything he does in this buzzard's city?”

Sam put his head down and drummed on.

Tho tho tho tho tha

After shifting Mahesh's stock into a clay pot apiece, the two of them came to the stall, where Sam asked B. to let him barter for the butterflies. Wordless, B. disappeared into a corner and returned dragging an oak chair by its lion paws. He grandly arranged himself to watch Sam conduct his business, a yawning bored king bemused by his own generosity.

Meanwhile, Mahesh was happy to forsake his muttering for a knife when he saw B.'s piles of kettles and pans. He marvelled at the picture of himself returning to the village, his back made into a shiny metal shell of shiny city things. Sam could tell. He would have been thinking the same, had he a village and family worth the thought. Instead he observed to Mahesh how good it would be, getting down from the cart in front of his house, Colombo-returned with the finest and latest Pettah goods for every woman in his family. Sam said he'd even help Mahesh wipe off the sludge of other people's cooking. And before he left Colombo swearing never to return, Mahesh helped Sam stretch the green mesh netting tight across the stall's monsoon hole to let in light enough to keep the butterflies confined and lively. The leftover mesh was cut and doubled to make a curtain that closed off enough space for four people. B. told Sam to send in six at a time. And so he began to keep a butterfly hall in the back of B.'s stall, making money from city people who had forgotten the village wonder of pretty little papers fluttering in greened light. B. was happy with the arrangement. Sam cared for the butterflies and organized the queues and took the money. This left B. at liberty to visit in the queue itself, where he set the occasional loan and bought and sold and made so many pretty new friends he no longer had to bark along the Saunders Place Road. He was happier still with the returns. He told Sam that they would divide the profits between them, the money “as evenly parted as my Achchi's hair” he vowed the first time he told Sam to hand over the day's take for safekeeping. A long week later, when Sam asked for his share—he lied that he wanted to take his first shave at the Chetty barber's stall up the lane—B. dropped coins in his hand. So few Sam could close his fist around them.

“As agreed. Exactly half,” B. said.

“Half,” Sam said. He collected this many coins on a Saturday morning. He wiped sudden sweat back into his scalp, pulling his fingers dry through his proud black thatch.

“Yes. This is half,” B. said. “Mokatha?”

“How is this half?” Sam demanded, but his voice was hard like a tapped coconut is hard.

“This is half, Sam, after your expenses.”

He said nothing. Expenses. He left the stall, B.'s stall, B.'s stall full of B.'s things, things that were stolen, broken, bartered, chipped, rusted and crusted in brown bits and yellow oil, and all his.

He kept giving over money and getting back fistfuls of coins but he wouldn't try what everything—what memory, body, prospects, hunger, justice—wanted him to do, which soon became what B. himself wanted as well. To drop the money and settle things as men would, not like the perfect parted middle of a granny's hair, but as men would. Sam could feel B.'s regard lowering each time he took the coins without comment, but B. was older, stronger, longer in Pettah than Sam was, and B. was spoiling for it. Why? The butterflies were a greater moneymaker than anything else B. had going, and they were getting him more mutton than ever. He'd lately started to take his women behind the green curtain at night. “Private viewings.” He would hold a lantern to show them the butterflies fixed on whatever snapped tree life Sam had been able to find that day. And so at night Sam fell asleep to the sounds of women sucking in their breath at discovered beauty or shrieking, then laughing, at what was suddenly touching them. In the mornings, after they glanced past him with their useless kettles, Sam would go into the hall before the first paying people knocked. He'd rearrange the dragged-down branches and sweep the floor with the hard soles of his feet, so many butterflies dead among the dead leaves.

“If you keep doing this, soon we'll have none,” he warned one morning.

“Doing what?” asked B.

“You know.”

“Right … and still you don't.”

“Every night,” Sam continued, ignoring the taunt, the churn it could still give him, “so many die when you go in there with your mutton.”

“So?”

“So? So who's going to pay to see a butterfly hall without any butterflies?”

B. shrugged and turned away.

“So then no money, and how will you get your mutton?”

B. switched around and walked straight toward him. Sam took a step back, his legs tight and trilling. Monks lay down and crows hopped away. City men came right at you. But B. stopped short and jabbed a finger at his chest.

“Remember, malli, I was getting money and mutton long before you and your green net and your butterflies, and I'll be getting money and mutton long after you and them are gone.”

Sam said nothing.

“More mutton even. Truth! There, I hear someone tapping. Go and see. I'm piss heavy.” He grabbed himself and turned around. Before he slipped out to the alley, he called back “Even more money.”

Sam began to leave when the women arrived. He learned that Pettah at night was lonely and feral. Cooking fires burned every few stalls but these were always private affairs—a shared cup for pot arrack and palms passing beedis and betel. People had a way of arranging themselves when a stranger lingered at heard laughter. Or they would stare back dumb, glare past, glare until he passed. Sam also tried to join a few streetlight sessions of rajay with boys who looked more his age, even retrieving the rattan ball once, in vain. And so he became but another wanderer in the nighttime city, his act of head down deliberate paces abandoned once he accepted that no one else was even watching, let alone believing, that he among all of them had somewhere to go. But he refused to stand around like the others, wearing mournful twilit faces, leaning against dirty walls, waiting either for something, anything to happen, or for sleep to lower them to their haunches, bottom, back. These were drowsy despairing people he'd never be like, people made lazy at life by pickling themselves in pity. He'd seen them before—in the village, fathers given no sons by their wives, only dowries; in the temple, monks sore with bad heels, creased and cracked and lined up the morning of the long last walking day of a relic procession. But Sam kept moving, thinking about where he could take his butterflies, or where he could go and leave them and their owner. Sometimes he thought about what he couldn't be blamed for doing, a man alone in a buzzard's city like this. Eventually, he decided these nightly walks were in search of a good blade.

The last night he returned to the stall, Sam heard no B. and no woman. Instead, he found an overturned chair with a butterfly perched on a spindle. In the lamplight its wings were a pattern of copper and yellow bands. Past the chair, gathered on the ground, were two black clumps. Rats? He leaned to look, ready to bring his heel down. One was a palm-sized heap of wavy man locks, the other a coil of longer, more delicate strands. Around the hair, the dry dirt floor was a scored record of sudden movement, jagged finger gashes and swirled scuff marks. Whoever it was, whether an angry husband and his brothers or someone B. owed or someone who owed B., had dragged both of them toward the butterflies. He found two more clumps of hair in the ruined hall. Looking up in vain for more butterflies, and turning around in the little space, he suddenly curled his toes. The ground was mucked. It hadn't rained that night. The dead smell of old earth mixed with the iron tang of blood. He held his finger to the light. The tip was covered in a smudge of ground turned reddish brown, and he knew it was from raging life not rain. Only then did he think to turn and make sure he was alone. The double-folded green mesh curtain was gone. Whoever it was, Sam thought, had wrapped B. and the woman in the curtain and taken them away, living or dead. He searched for B.'s stash of money, his money. Instead he caught the last butterfly, righted the chair, and sat down. He decided they must have thrown B.'s body into the harbour. He hoped that B. would someday find his snowfall beyond the blue sea. He hoped that B. would sink and hook onto the anchor of an English ship and be dragged around the island forever. Yawning, Sam looked around the stall a final time before he walked into the bruised blue light of morning in the city, and disappeared.

He curled his tongue and shook out his clothes and asked again.

“Can I go to the harbour and see? I will come back straight away.”

“Another boy will ask for your job the moment you leave,” Ismail warned.

“You'll keep it for me.”

“Ha! Why should I?”

“Who else knows all the village tricks they use on you?” Sam asked. One day, three years after he left B.'s stall, he had passed by the back of a spice shop just as someone was trying to sell the merchant a sack of useless cardamom. The seeds were already out of their pods; the seller must have rubbed a little fresh-ground cardamom into the top layers to hide their failing savour. He had intervened, explained, and the merchant chased the cardamom cheat off. Afterwards, this Ismail told Sam he had centuries of trading in his blood but only decades of selling spice. He took Sam on and let him sleep in the back of the shop instead of the dog he used to keep there. Every night, Sam breathed a pungent smell of burlap and dog's body, piss and spice. He woke only ready to leave the stall and breathe in the first-of-the-day, the seablown air of the city before it combusted into business.

“Do you really have to go and see right now? You know they load elephants onto ships every week at the harbour. See how you're squinting! It's almost noontime sun. There's a sack of peppercorns that needs drying.”

“They're taking a tusker on board this time.”

“What, just one?”

Sam knew Ismail would try to keep him around with something like that, just as he knew to curl his tongue and shake out his clothes every time he left the spice shop. Sam never told anyone what he did in the time between keeping a butterfly hall and minding spices, only that he remained in Pettah, sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, and in Pettah back then you could always find something to eat so long as you had teeth for bones and a taste for marrow. His new boss was first-person proud of his family's centuries in Ceylon. A few years before he met Sam, Ismail had been beaten to blood and mush by a crowd of Sinhalese men who were running riot against the plague of Coast Moors that had lately come onto the island. Between the blows, Ismail had told the men he hated these new moneychanger Moors as much as they did, that his family had been here as long as any of theirs, longer even, but this last point had made it worse.