Beggar's Feast (40 page)

“You are here because others won't come, no?” the chief monk interrupted, keeping the calendar and diary on the ledge of the cabinet beside him, where Rose's brother thought they would remain unto dust. The chief monk handed the book covers over to a younger monk, who handed them on to another, and then another, until eventually they came to the youngest fellows in the temple, the Samaneras, who took them behind the temple buildings and conclusively determined that the book covers could float, flip, and be made to flap like birds if not wheel like bats, and in the end failed to convince as airplanes.

“Sorry? I am here because I was hoping—”

“You don't need to tell me why you are here, or what you are hoping for,” the chief monk declared. “I know. I know
he
is hoping I will forget how many years he has lived across the main road and motored past this temple and never once stepped foot or sent until now. Now he sends some office goods.”

“No. I am not here for Sam Kandy. I am here for Rose Kandy.”

“Mokatha? What is Rose Kandy?”

“She is my sister. And as I was trying to tell, she now lives across the main road, with him. She has married him. Yes, I know”— Rose's brother smiled at the monk's shocked face and the monk did not scowl away the sympathy because even if he hadn't seen her in the seventy years since he'd taken to robes, he had a sister too. “We have only come here to help her settle,” Rose's brother continued, “and I see that there are things that are needed for the walauwa and the village too and my father—”

“Your father's name is?”

“Xavier Joseph De Moraes, of Negombo.”

“Negombo.”

“Yes. Negombo, where he is the owner of the Lourdes Cement Company.”

“Negombo. De Moraes. Lourdes.
Your
family has come here, to the Udarata, to Sudugama, to the temple.”

“Yes, my sister has.”

“And no one has told me and no one has asked me,” the chief monk observed loudly, and his attendant monks shook their heads vigorously, hoping that for sharing his outrage they would not be asked afterwards why none hadn't already informed him of the old devil's latest devilry, instead of his having to hear it from a Negombo cement man, a Christian. “But you also said cement?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And there are things in the walauwa and the village that need repair. The walauwa's steps, the water tank, and also gutters to be poured for the lanes and sluices behind all the huts. My family will do all of this. But there is no telephone in the walauwa and I am told that—”

“Not just in the village and the walauwa is cement needed.”

“Sorry?”

The monk made a disappointed face. Rose's brother right away knew his father would be making the same face were he here and watching him fail to understand that of course cement would be needed here too. Here first.

“Right right. I was about to say the same. And so shall I trunk-dial to Negombo?”

Standing on the verandah a few days later, Sam heard a cement truck coming down the main road toward the village—like some giant working his pestle into a mortar full of road ordnance. Sam went to the stone railing and yes the villagers were coming into the lane, leaving their dawn lives of cooking and tea and puja to see what it was this time: first looking up to see if the noise had split the moon and then looking down the lane toward the main road, wondering what was left in the world that he had not yet brought to the village: what there was that could be louder even than a caravan of De Moraeses. He smiled. Since he had married this third time, Sam Kandy had been smiling, smiling terrifically, idiotically, shamefully; smiling at last like a malli by the roadside. Because what else was there to do, this late, save smile and smile back, talk a little about the day before or the day to come, tell how he was feeling and ask her the same. One thing else there was: to tell. To tell Rose of how many inside lives and outside lives, of how many joins had been tried and broken, tried and broken. And if he did tell, tell all of it, then what would be left, after she left? One thing else: to tell the cement truck, a fleet of Lourdes cement trucks, to still come to the village and drive up past the crossroads and past the walauwa and past the old founder's cave and there queue, position the chutes, open the drum-hatches and only stop when the village, all and all and all of it including the old man in the old pinstripe suit lying in one of its old huts, was covered and gone. And then at last he would be a triumph to beat all others, because even smoke fades away. But if the trucks came and poured cement over all of it, then Sam Kandy would forever be the slab Ralahami of an endless flat world, the eternal stone headman of a hard grey sea.

So why tell anything instead of smiling along, agreeing along like a sweet greyed malli who'd been given this unearned newness of life, this newness that she was giving him, that he had given her even at sixty-six, this newness she wanted to give him and the walauwa and the village, none of him or them deserving. And yet she gave. But she was giving
them
too? From the verandah, Sam watched the cement truck turn off the main road, turn away from him, the walauwa, the village so undeserving. The cement truck turned into the temple grounds, toward the temple less than undeserving. Sam went into the walauwa, calling for Alice to come quickly he said Rose come quickly, Rose come quickly.

“The cement truck has turned into the temple.”

“Yes. It's going there first, and then coming here.”

“No it's not.”

“Yes, it already is.”

“Mokatha?”

“What?”

“Yes, exactly, what?”

“Seven months married and this is when it happens?”

“This is when what happens?”

“This is when your face more than smiles?” When his voice, his staring eyes, she thought, turn so hard. Seven months married and now, Rose could imagine her mother telling her, now, when he's got you in the village and we, your people, are a day's drive away. Now, darling, he stops smiling. Right now, Rose thought, they'd be taking breakfast in Madhu. They'd be gathered under a white pavilion tent set up in front of the old fine church, and her mother would be asking an unknown little boy to tell her the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, a boy who'd only slipped into the tent already mad with children in hopes of slipping out with a fish bun and maybe one of their badminton racquets.

“Why is the cement truck going to the temple?” Sam demanded.

“Because the temple needs cement.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because my brother had to go to the temple to call Daddy to send a truck—”

“And the chief monk—”

“Yes, he has asked for a little work to be done.”

“Ha. A little work. Ha. Right. You are a Christian. You don't know. He probably wants a beggar's bowl poured for himself, one that would fit the whole courtyard.”

“And how, husband, do you know that?”

“Believe it, I know.”

“Daddy has greater reasons than you to send a truck anywhere in this country except to the temple, and yet he allows it. And do you know why he allows it?”

“How can you think your father has greater reasons than your husband?”

“How can I know otherwise? Can you tell me otherwise? Or shall we keep living as we have been, as if you were born on our wedding day? I have never asked, Sam. Most of my relations think I am a fool for never asking. Tell me, am I?”

“You are my wife.”

“And I will be your wife even if you tell me I am a fool for being your wife. That is holy vows. That is love, this.” She patted her swelling belly.

Sam said nothing.

“Will you tell me another day? When the cement truck has come and gone from the temple and the village and the walauwa?”

“By the time the chief monk is finished with the cement truck,” Sam said, his face cloudy, his hand reaching out for her, touching that swelling newness of life that called him to stop his vengeful symmetries, to stop saying what he still had to say, “this child is going to be old enough to do what his father is too old to do now.”

“Which is what?” Rose asked, feeling for once foolish for deciding to pretend all these months that you can marry a sixty-six-year-old man and make like he's historyless, like he's only a smiling sweet adjunct to your own hope for a purpose beyond forever daily answering your father's questions and minding your sisters' children, a purpose that would take you away from the useless last plot of land in the family compound to upcountry grandness—echoing, dripping, dusty old gone grandness awaiting its restoration. Its redemption?

“I was twice married before you.”

“And you are telling me this only now?” She was not surprised. She wished she was. A jungle paper had been slipped through the bars of her bedroom window a few days after she had come to the village, a mad scrawled boast, or was it a warning?
Don't think you're the first lady of this house. You're only the one he's let live the longest
. She had folded the note into an envelope marked Should Anything Happen, which she put in an envelope addressed to her family in Negombo and hid in the back of her almirah for a day, then removed, reread, tore, and burned in that morning's cooking fire. She had married him.
He
was living now because she had married him.

“I was never asked before.”

“Then tell.”

“My first wife's almirah is in the bedroom. My second wife's music cabinet is in the front room.”

“No, tell me more than that.”

“Right. I am twice widowed.”

“Twice. How?”

“They died.”

“Two, you say. How?”

“Car accident.”

“Both?”

“No, the other drowned.”

“How long ago?”

“Lives ago.”

“No. We each are only one life. How long ago?”

“The first, in 1939. The second, in 1948.”

“That's all?”

“No. There are children.”

“Living?”

“Yes. A son and a daughter.”

“How old? Here in the village?”

“No. They are not in the village. They are about your age, I think.”

“You think? Where are they?”

He looked at her. He looked away. She nodded.

Two more Kandys trying to be historyless. Would she be too, one day? Would she have to, want to? “Why are you telling me these things now?”

“You will hear these things and other things before the baby comes. That's the village.”

“What other things?”

“No. No.” Sam rubbed his forehead. He swallowed. He swung his heel back and forth upon the morning-cool floor. He looked everywhere but at her until, after how many birds and squirrels and dogs had informed each other and the rest of the world of their day's ambitions, Sam Kandy confessed. “I don't want to be widowed again.”

Their first child was born in September 1966: a girl baptized Rose-Maria and called Rosemarie. The second, third, and fourth were girls too: Vivienne-Maria, Charmaine-Maria, and Elizabeth-Maria, called Vivimarie, Charmarie, and Lizzy-girl. The fifth girl was named Blossom-Maria and called Blossmarie and was also born without curse or great motherblood lost in a walauwa bedroom, but she was not baptized in Negombo, as were her sisters. She was born in April 1971, a few months after Sam and Rose built the first set of new bedrooms onto the big house, and hours before a group of boys with village skin and university mouths marched into Sudugama chanting against the enemy government and the enemy British before chanting against the old enemy walauwa high above them, which, the fellows lectured the villagers, had been carried for years on their toiling backs, had been floating for years upon their blood and sweat. The university boys caught no village sun on the rusted blades that rose and fell with their chanting and lecturing. They made it no farther than the crossroads, where they were turned away by village men, the oldest among them wondering if Dambulla had come their way this time, the youngest unmoved by the marchers' invitations demands pleas jeers threats jeers pleas demands invitations to cross the lane and join them. Theirs was the kind of thing best joined in a smoky canteen or crowded common room, not steps away from the hut where you were born, not steps away from the men you were born to stand beside and now asked to stand against. And so all of the villagers chased them off, wielding their own rusted blades and mammoty sticks. Retreating, one of the university boys demanded to know why the village was protecting the walauwa that could never protect them the way they deserved. He was answered by a palm-sized shard of cement whirring past his ear and hitting one of his fellows in the back, who turned and showed a gun. The villagers dropped their blades and sticks and many more hand-sized pieces of cement broken off from the many blocks that had been twice-yearly supplied to every villager in Sudugama since Rose-Madam had come. Only now what? The fellow holding the gun had never held a gun in front of others before; it had been given to him by his former chem lab partner, who had joined a group of JVP boys in sacking a police station near campus the day before. The whole world knew what came next fell to this fellow to decide, but he didn't even know how many bullets the gun held, how many it now had. Certainly fewer than there were men standing in front of him. There were other villages on this road. They went.