Beggar's Feast (42 page)

A week later, a meeting was called to discuss what parts of the old-time village might hold attraction for visitors. The meeting was held in vain. The people of Sudugama thrashed each other's memories of what was old true village. And so, no choice. A professor was called. He was a very short man. He flared his nostrils as preface and conclusion to his statements. And when he was not telling them about the strange damp of a rainy day in Aberdeen, where he'd given a paper last year, or the familiar heat of stepping off the plane in Gainesville, where he'd given a paper the year before last, he smiled at their efforts to dispute him on certain aspects of
Temple Paddy and Paddy Politics: Ceylon's Upcountry Village Life, Pre-1948
.

In time workers came and cut a fine wide roadway from the village crossroads to the great green clearing. Here the village was rebuilt in small. Sudugama became a charm bracelet of itself, of old-time huts with side-garden plots winding down from a water tank beside which was a pile of washing rocks. The huts were broken up by godowns fitted with cadjan roofs; to one side was the notion of a paddy field at whose edge grew rubber and areca nut and kitul; on the other side were a car park and a trenchline of bathroom stalls. Buddhas were liberally installed. The new village crossroads was dominated by a little walauwa that was erected across from a canopied stage where a bride and groom would stand and where damsels would dance their numbers to traditional music played on hidden cassette tapes because the professor thought the local tabla men did not rate. The night before the village opened for business, the paddy workers revolted, refusing to appear in loin-cloth before strangers. At remarkable cost, white swimming trunks were rushed in from the nearest hotel gift shop, which the paddy men tried to save for more auspicious occasions than pretending to their mud work, until they were threatened with replacement. Those villagers not selected to be villagers became ticket-takers and staffed the refreshment stand and the craft tables. The professor arranged for a rotation of his graduate students to work as guides. Three of Rose and Sam's sons-in-law agreed to move their families from Negombo. One would be the chief managing director; another would be the operations manager; the third would handle the money. The outraged Marias still living in the walauwa, those of a dangerous age for public life, were strictly confined during operating hours, where they had to mind their nieces and younger sisters. And when she was not running the house, Rose helped her husband prepare for his own duties. Twice daily, Sam Kandy played the Ralahami.

What was left of Robert's own clothes turned out to be an old moth's feast found at the bottom of an almirah drawer. To the professor's specifications, items were purchased from a traditional upcountry costume shop in Kandy town, which sat between a bookstore and currency exchange office on the first floor of the Queen's Hotel. It rented out headman's costumes for weddings, family portraits, twenty-first birthdays. It was also pleased to ship worldwide upon request, whether to London or Dubai, Scarborough or Brampton. Before each performance, Sam was wrapped above the waist in a heavy white cloth that reached his bare feet and was topped with a broad crimson band, over which was placed more red—a crimson-and-gold belt whose buckle was no smaller, no heavier than a child's head and filigreed in golden leaves that made a courtyard around a crimson field of golden temple flowers. A pillow had to be fitted around his sunken old man's waist to give the necessary effect of a village in prosperity.

While the professor's graduate students over-explained to their tour groups in their loudest BBC English, villagers would come for audiences with the Ralahami in the little walauwa. They would pantomime shows of respect and be shown to graded stools by the servant, played by old wan Bopea standing behind him with a sun-shaped palm fan slumped against his shoulder. Raising his hand, the Ralahami would then direct the servant to give the petitioner a sheaf of betel or accept his offering of rice or coconut, fruit or spice. After the betel was sagely prepared and solemnly chewed to loud live tabla (at last, work for the spurned drummers), Sam would render pantomimed decisions to their pantomimed disputes, pantomimed commendations to their pantomimed reports, grant his pantomimed permission to their pantomimed requests to burn a field or marry.

With the audience trailing behind him, cameras snapping like grasshoppers, Sam would then make his rounds, first nodding at the bowing smiling women dressed in their best home-cloth, who then returned to their sweeping and winnowing; next witnessing a solemn family make puja before their home Buddha and give their solemn first son a glass of first milk on his eternal first day of school; then inspecting the smiling potter and weaver squatting in their chequered sarongs and squinting at their work, the shirtless carpenter leaning into his plane, the grinning metal-benders clowning with trick-bent rods. Lastly, Sam checked the health and promised wealth of the rice paddy farmed by shy-looking little men in bright white swimming trunks. He then led the audiences back to the village crossroads before walking back to the walauwa proper where he was changed, took a wash, and lay on the bed until his next call. The audience was meanwhile invited to enjoy a traditionally rigid wedding ceremony followed by a traditional village damsel's dance while drinking thambili water through bright plastic straws. King coconut refreshments were offered at the beginning and end of all tours and were complimentary. A few years into the venture, when Rose's cousin Jerry Fernando replaced the professor, they were sold separately. Everything was.

The first time he came, Jerry immediately saw how much better the operation would run with proper facilities, as supplied by his father's firm, Resplendent Clean Co. (Pvt.). He could also see how much money Rose and family were losing, which he explained when he was allowed to address a directors' meeting in the front room of the walauwa proper. By only charging admission, he pitched, they were missing how much more money the visitors would be willing to give over, to buy their own traditional drinks, their own leaf brooms and engraved pots and pirith strings and grinding stones and winnowing fans and washing bowls and betel-chewing sets, not to mention spice packets, vials of pure village toddy, devil masks, home-cloth curtains, and jute sacks of pure village rice small enough to fit in carry-on luggage, never mind what they'd pay for elephant rides, snake charmers, garden remedies, and Ayurvedic massage. Making a face like he'd just stepped in something, the professor noted a series of geo-historical inaccuracies in Jerry's list of proposed souvenirs. In turn, Jerry informed the meeting that he'd just received a first-class certificate from the Ceylon Hotel School. As to the question of inaccuracies, he agreed and said the villagers could make a few display items, but the best way to ensure quality and satisfaction was for all items to be brought in from Colombo warehouses. The professor smirked that he thought Jerry's expertise was in toilets. But the air in the room had already turned. No one laughed. And so his voice going higher and louder, the professor said he would not cite his own numerous degrees but he did wonder why the far more salutary possibility of offering a selection of historically sound pamphlets was not mentioned and then he concluded, his voice now whistling, now exploding like a bombed teakettle, that he had grave reservations about turning a project so true to his years of scholarly care into some Pettah stall Disney World!

“Exactly!” said Jerry and the professor left immediately, returning for his graduate students the next day. In time, they found more rewarding work with a proper folk-culture museum in Koggala.

“If you want to make money,” said Sam in his wake, “build a butterfly hall. See how many come then.”

And they came. Colombo people went mad for the place. In this village there were no cousins urging that you stay the night and sleep in the room with the new fan, begging that their middle sons be put up in your phantom spare room in your phantom big house in the city so they could get phantom computer jobs and how can you refuse any of it, how can you, because who can forget when—and so would begin the great chronicle of good deeds and black deeds done for and against—and that was why you never went to the village unless someone died or was married, because in the village no one forgets, there is nothing to forget, because in the village everything always forever is. Whereas at Sudugama, history and memory and butterflies were conveniently located and reasonably priced, and also reachable by safe roads lined with newer rest-stations and only a few army checkpoints.

And they came. People from villages up and down the main road, who had grown up on Sudugama's Sam Kandy stories. Some paid the S/L national rate and took the tour and always had a question for the guide that they mumbled only to each other, about when the tour would show the traditional village's traditional motorcars and traditional cannibals; others simply hung around in the shady parts of the car park, cadging cigarettes and asking drivers trying to nap under newspaper sunshades about the size and strength of their engines, waiting for their friends to come from the tour and tell how much they were charging for the bronze pot that kept the old murdered Ralahami's ashes, and which bright Barefoot curtain hid all the dead Hamines, and which pedestal Buddha held back those ten thousand Negombo Catholics.

And they came. British and Germans, and also Australians and Japanese and Gulf people and Malays, and even a few Americans and, though rarer and rarer by the 1990s, the odd pathologically anglophile Indian. All of whom loved Sam Kandy's Sudugama for being what, from afar, it could be, the lovely spot it must be, yes the garden of the world, the trees full of big lazy leaves to float on, the Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun in
dolce far niente
. Paid to be photographed doing village deeds on the hour and otherwise not doing a hand's turn all day. Just waiting there, staring, smiling while they were considered by pale visitors carrying canvas bags and sipping bottled water and at last able to see exactly where a boy would sit in defiance of municipal orders.

And they came. Emigrants returning with their television children on summer holidays. They came and found at Sudugama the Ceylon they always dreamed of remembering from their grey northern lives: sunny and beautiful, bird mad, green and clean, clean bathrooms, actual queues, an A/C gift shop filled with brass bowls and sequined prints. Better still were the villagers themselves, their shy smiles and un-benefited teeth, their mumbled requests for foreign stamps and addresses, their smallness, even the men so slight as to make any last-picked brown boy in Cambridge or Sydney feel like a true champion to be photographed beside them. And when the emigrants went to leave, calling the driver to come and take the bags and get the water jugs for hand-washing, a final blessing: no beggars in the car park, only more little men in cheap slacks and T-shirts and Bata slippers smoking in the shade, men who never studied like they should have when all of them had been village boys, and so now could only watch as those who did study left the village again, while they remained here, weeds in this the garden of the world.

Sam let Bopea do the afternoon show after the first year and stopped doing it altogether three years later, when he turned ninety. Bopea did both shows until he died at ninety-two without ever seeing Moscow, at which point Jerry Fernando hired a tragedian from Colombo to play the Ralahami, a fellow who, a year later, persuaded Jerry to hold auditions for a Hamine. Sam never saw the woman they brought in, another Lionel Wendt player from Colombo, because by ninety-four it was enough for his hip and heels to go and come from the verandah. When he wasn't lying on the bed or called to walk around the kitchen table clearing his throat to make the children eat, he went to the verandah. From there, because of how many abandoned huts had been flattened and trees cleared to make car lanes, Sam could see what had once been the great green clearing, how much had since been wrought upon it. Now and then he was joined in his watching by one of the Marias, other times by Rose, with whom he had been fighting as old married people fight since 1983, when they had come back from Madhu and she had told him about baptizing the baby in the van and then asked if he would be baptized, if he would come to the Church for the sake of his own soul and the ease of her nightly prayers. To which he said, year after year, that coming to her was enough, which sometimes made her smile, and sometimes made her curse, and always she prayed for him.