Beggar's Feast

by Randy Boyagoda

  “Where are they? Where did they go?” Sam said to a beggar digging a trench in the floor with his finger, who did not stop even when Sam dropped a divinely bright coin near his hand. “Now look at me will you.”

  “Two questions, Mahatteya, but you only give once?” the man observed, still digging.

  “Here. And here is another. And another. Now answer me and I will give you more when I am done asking if you can tell me something.”

  “They went. They went away.”

  “I will kick you flat as those coins. And I will take them back too. Now tell me something as if I am more than a blind man. Have they all gone?”

  “Not all,” another voice answered from the other side of the grand doors. The beggar in front of Sam turned onto his back, covering the money Sam had dropped, waiting for Sam to either leave or stomp him down until the coins could be seen shining again. He did not seem to care. He was staring up at the electric lamps the British had shut off when they left, which were now roosting perches and spider maps. On days when the doors were open and there was sea-blowing, a bird’s egg would sometimes fall, or wild skeins of web would trail down, whole lives’ worth of work in vain.

  “Last night, Mahatteya, they were still loading in the harbour,” the voice called out.

  “They are always loading in the harbour,” said Sam as he crossed to the other side of the doors, to an upright beggar sitting against the warehouse wall. “You expect money to tell me that? Next you will tell me the sun comes in the morning and goes away at night and again hold out your palm.”

  “I don’t ask for money, Mahatteya. I only mean to say they were still loading prisoners last night. Did you bring your fellows?”

  Sam studied the man’s face. He was gaunt and especially black around the eyes and ragged-dressed as the rest but wearing loosefitting sand-coloured boots, the laces gone to some other purpose.

  An Englishman’s parting gift.

  “You worked here.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you, you remember.”

  “Yes, I remember when you came and took those Kaffir fellows.”

  “Ethiopians. Do you know where the warden has gone?”

  “War has been good for you, no?” he observed, tapping his own notion of a belly.

  “I will give you better than those boots. Tell me where the warden has gone.”

  “I told you, Mahatteya, I ask for no money. I am a patient man. And I do not know where the warden has gone, only that yesterday they sent off the Italian prisoners. One of them stopped on the gangplank and cursed the crowd and people started dancing a baila because his cursing sounded like a song, and even the English clapped for him and the Italian fellow of course spat as he turned to go but he was smiling, everyone was, because war is over and everyone is going home.”

  “Except you, it seems, unless you were born in this warehouse.”

  “I told you, Mahatteya, I am a patient man.”

  “Patient for what?” Sam asked, even though he was certain another warship departed with every word passed between them, another known Englishman gone, another hour it would take to reach the village, where once were six and now were four, which meant at least another two hours away from Ivory who was waiting in the room or not waiting in the room but waiting where, and was she waiting with her knees up, and would this be for the whole second year of their marriage?

  “I am patient, Mahatteya, for what comes next. For who comes next.”

  “And who comes next?”

  “I listened all the years I worked here, Mahatteya, sweeping in the canteen and up and down the rows three times a day because the English thought they could govern our dirt too. I swept anyway, and I listened to the English talking about who was coming when they left. Someone will take over this island from the English and take over this warehouse and all these other beggars will be cleared out and I will work for them, whoever they are. It won’t be the Japanese anymore. But otherwise? Who can tell? Most of the English said it will be the Americans, but others said it will be the Red Chinese or the Russians or our own people even. But one thing is certain, Mahatteya.”

  “What?” Sam asked, already peering through the door at the ships in the harbour, his ears desperate for more Italian singing.

  “Can you spare cigarettes, Mahatteya? Foreign brand.”

  “Right. Here. Now tell.”

  He motioned for Sam’s lighter, lit, and inhaled deeply, then blew luxuriant spumes against his own body like some kind of private benediction. He tapped the ash beside him very carefully, as if he was feeding someone. The smoke spread into the murk.

  “Tell, I said!”

  “Whoever takes over, Mahatteya, won’t take your black fellows.”

  Sam turned to go.

  “Aiyo Mahatteya cigarette please!”

  “Aney Mahatteya cigarette please!”

  “Apo Mahatteya cigarette please!”

  He kicked over the fellow lying on the other side of the door, squatted and took back his coins. He left the others fighting for the cigarettes he dropped in his wake as he passed through the grand doors. Looking across the lane, he saw the True Ceylon goods store he had been stocking since war’s end. There was no queue of departing English, only the slumped counterman staring at the dividing line of sun and shade thrown down by the warehouse across from them. He looked south and felt better. He could still see queuing green metal and tan uniforms consulting clipboards. They were still loading. But he had only four men, and there were three hundred and sixty-four days until his next anniversary. And so he went on to the village, counting and counting undefeatable numbers.

  Robert’s funeral bier was set atop a rude-stacked square of dried-out logs and rosewood and sandalwood branches. It went up right away, as if with its passenger’s relief, so fast that Arthur ducked at the air-walloping whoosh as he walked away from lighting it. Even though many in the crowd also ducked at the sound, all were certain that as the first public act and first village memory following his father’s cremation, this was no good omen for the son. When he rejoined the first line of mourners, Arthur spoke to Sam, who was standing beside the senior monks who had taken seats in the front row where they chanted at the bier and chatted behind their palm-leaf fans.

  Sam knew what Arthur was asking but made like he could not hear. He wanted him to have to ask over the sound of his father’s roaring-away body, over the sound of the wailing mourners hired in from another village, to see if Arthur would in fact try to beat those sounds with such a question, standing there with his fatherless shoulders already broadening. Sam now knew why Arthur had never once mentioned the motorcar in the letters he sent from the village. It had nothing to do with Arthur’s fear of losing two of the prisoners—three, as of last night. Arthur’s not asking yet had everything to do with the overwrought patience of an adult son, patience and patience and then absolute insistence for what was promised him, because now it was at last his to do with as he pleased. And Sam, whose hip was aching more than his feet from standing beneath slate-grey skies on the village’s great green clearing for the first time in thirty-six years, finally answered, after Arthur asked a third time. Both men were loud enough to be heard over the burning and so were chatted about behind palm-leaf fans.

  “When will you bring me my motorcar?”

  “What motorcar? You owe me three men.”

  “You would call them men? You, who left them like that, to be fed and washed and kept like that? It’s a sin. And you are not even staying for the almsgiving, are you? And where is your new wife? It’s a sin. All of this.”

  By now the other mourners could hear, were listening and whispering and reporting and inventing from row to row. “And what,” Arthur continued, “do you think the Crown Agent will say when he comes and finds out about your Ethiopians? You cannot think the walauwa will be yours too.”

  “Do you want it? Or do you want a motorcar to ride out of here? Give me the deed—”

  “And then? Then you�
��ll give?” But Arthur’s voice was defeated, his shoulders already sagging with having to return to the walauwa where he could only wash himself with limes for so long before his wife would ask when was the vehicle coming, and how long after the mourning and almsgiving before they could visit her village and show the new baby as he had been promising they would, promising in candlelight when she let him search again and again and again for that famous birthmark.

  Sam pressed his hand against his hip just as it began to rain. The monks disappeared behind black umbrellas. After a brief consultation, they processed to the temple single file. When they left, the rest returned to the village, certain that the rain, its timing, its effect, whether an overdue cleansing or quenching or drowning, was anyway auspicious. The rain was a judgment upon the Ralahami or upon whoever would be his successor, and anyway not on the villagers themselves, who only needed dry clothes and hot tea and the rest of the day to talk about it all. Sam and Arthur were left alone before Robert’s bier, soaked, neither talking, both watching and listening to the sodden cremation and each near certain the village was his now and trying to convince himself that this was what he wanted—all this ash and hissing.

  As expected, Sam went directly to the car where Joseph, staring forward, had been waiting with the engine running. Sam went feeling certain beyond his thudding heart that the funeral smoke and rain and remembering were why a yellow hat just caught his eye, that this wasn’t, at last, the crocodile come for him. He climbed in beside the driver and, turning around for a moment, counted the little black men in the backseat, and then they all went, one two three four five, to the city.

  Instead of going to the harbour, as instructed, Joseph stopped the Morris in front of a short-eats shop in Borella Junction. Standing in its threshold was a metallic woman worrying the pirith thread on her wrist while wordlessly directing a traffic of dogs and beggar children and men in motorcars. None of whom, the old woman included, stopped to watch Joseph climb out of the Morris, remove his coat and cap, and place both on the seat, by which point the questions and commands issuing from the passenger side were commands and then threats, threats made of the blade and gutter words Joseph always knew his boss kept in his fine pockets. The sort of words that made him feel right to resign like this, stopping the vehicle full of cannibals in front of a short-eats shop and not in front of the dress boutique over which he and his mother lived.

  Cursing, Sam climbed into the driver’s seat vowing never to hire another, suddenly realizing how little he knew the city to drive through it himself. After four times passing the same man and son standing in the middle of De Soysa Circus hawking a silver-mounted toilet mirror that caused three blindings and two accidents that day, Sam found the artery that led to Wharf Road and the harbour, where, in his approach, he could still see the great grey ships filling with green metal and steamer trunks. When he arrived, the newly painted gate remained closed, though for how many years had he known the men in the guard booth, all of them, knew each their preferred brands of smoke and drink and aftershave. Sam honked. He switched on and off the bug-lathered headlamps. He honked again. Eventually, one of them came to the vehicle—a handsome fellow, tall as English, who drank Old Monk and smoked Woodbines and wore Musgo Real—and when he waved the car off Sam thought he was motioning him toward another entrance, that perhaps a queue of Wrens or warplanes were on the side of this gate. But then the fellow slammed his hand on the hood and all four inside jumped at the sound.

  “Mokatha?” Sam demanded, stepping out and slamming the door shut loud enough to make the guard jump too. Only he did not.

  “Entry barred. Military business only.”

  “You know what kind of business I am. Now open the gate.”

  “I am not to open the gate except to persons and vehicles on the list.”

  “And?”

  “And you are not on the list.”

  “Right. It was Old Monk and Woodbines, no?”

  “No. You are not on the list anymore.” The guard motioned him back to the Morris. But Sam did not move.

  “What is this?” he asked the universe. Deed gone, driver gone, gate closed, and was she in the room, was she in the hotel in the room in the bed waiting and if so waiting how for what? But he could not know or return to the rest of his going until he was absolved of these men, these three remaining men. He knew from asking Arthur that one of the prisoners had died in the intervening year from unclear sickness; and that one was thought kidnapped for rival spectacle in a neighbouring village. The third Sam knew himself had been outright killed in the village the very night that Sam had arrived to take them back to the British, by village men with arrack-red eyes who had decided to avenge the fallen and sudden beloved Ralahami. Before blue light the next morning, among the sandalwood and rosewood bundles, someone had carried the limp black body and flung it onto Robert’s bier.

  A second guard walked over, a short fat fellow with little dangly arms who liked molasses whisky, the brand didn’t matter. He was stern-faced but began smiling with the boast he would make against his taller partner when they returned to the guardhouse, because upon sighting him, Sam rushed back to the Morris. The squat guard thought he’d chased Sam off, until he turned to see the gate opening for a Flying Ten Saloon. Sam went straight at it. He did not hear the guards’ whistles or the other car’s horn as it swerved and he did not see the curdled white face at its rear window or the guards sprinting after him into the harbour compound where for years he had come and gone and picked up and dropped as freely as a frigate bird and only when he was inside and could see no open ramp did he stop, surrounded moments later by dust clouds and whistling men. He opened the back door and pulled them out and when the guards stopped calling for their mothers and the Englishmen stopped calling the heavens good Sam asked where should their prisoners queue. But one of the Ethiopians was too impatient for the answer. He ran, tripped from the atrophy that had been his Ceylon life and for the first time in years his gums bled around the padlock. He began frog-crawling toward the water but well before reaching it a guard cracked him with a rifle butt—a real sixer! his fellows would toast him afterwards, when the crazy Mahatteya shaking the key ring before impassive white faces had driven away with the other two black fellows. The Mahatteya who could now convince no Englishman at Colombo harbour that he had ever been there before, that he was only returning their own spoils, that he had been trusted with the prisoners by no less than Mountbatten himself, that all was written down and so had to be real, which was finally conceded as a fair point, but none could find any such records on their clipboards and the only counsel given, because pity if not guilt endures past official memory, was that Sam might have more luck depositing his fellows at the Puttalam salt plains.

  Sam drove on, first to Pettah, where he had the seamstress hang cuts of heavy fabric along the back windows. She told him people would think he was driving a funeral car or touring around royals or Muslim wives. Next he went to the hotel, bringing along the seamstress’s sons to watch the vehicle, the men, until he was ready to go to Puttalam. He gave them enough cigarettes to reach dawn and told the front desk to send them tea through the night. Then he went upstairs, to the room where yes she waiting for him. But Sam walked into a completely different marriage. He shut the door and they were again man and wife but both were suddenly, starkly aware of how little they knew of each other beyond their body parts. When, later, they were lying in the bed, Sam told Ivory that he had to leave again the next day. He told her to have things ready because they would be moving from the hotel when he returned. She did not ask where but she did not jump through the window either. She did not move at all. She did not move even when he began to, when wordless he climbed onto her and sprung open her knee-knocked legs and then, to her surprise and his, wretched shocked his, Sam put her hand in his hair, squeezed the fingers full and waited, breathing ragged, hovering over her face, waited until she pushed him down.

  By February 1948 he would have padlocked his own mo
uth. 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.