Beggar's Feast

by Randy Boyagoda

  “Sir,” Mary said. “Sir. Please.”

  “What. I don’t want tea. I want to sleep.” Eyes still closed. He would sleep right there. He would dream of nothing, no heels hammering down, no known faces.

  “No, sir. Please, where is Madam?” Mary asked.

  “Madam. Madam?” he said it like a word from a lost age. What is Madam?

  “Yes. Where is she? Where is Mummy?”

  Sam went away seeing nothing, hearing nothing of her crying. He felt nothing nothing nothing, wanted needed asked for nothing but what he had just gone to Puttalam and accomplished, become: an island freed from memory and prospect and other such rule. Long waited for and sudden changed and what was before what was now what would be next did not matter because Sam Kandy was already far from all such reach, unbeholden, unjoined, floating out under a moonless, star-gone sky, like a body that would never be found floating in brine and black water.

  “But he will return. This is Sam Kandy’s village, no?”

  The thin men who’d stepped out from work-stalls and sagging awnings to block his way bobbled their heads. He could have revved and gone but instead he cut the engine. They watched him without approaching. He unzipped his leather jacket and stretched his arms, breathing deeply as he turned, considering Sudugama. This was the village always told of under the crow tree, the village long since imagined, from long ago hoped for. Its air was no rivalling oppositions, no rise and fall of enemies, as in the city, but the timeless accord of all living: it was cooking fires and the clarity of recent rain; it was greenness, so much greenness, the spread of paddy and garden things put to dry; everywhere were spearing and curving and hanging-down leaves smattered through with the white light of clear day; in the air was fruit and incense and balm and oil and yes under it all for certain was good dark dirt, the dirt from which all came and to which all goes. All was thriving. This was what he had come back for, from actual Munich’s grey air and grey light like the world was always at the end of day. And what he heard while he breathed in Sudugama was likewise hope’s reward. Never mind Munich, this was nothing like his boyhood life inland from Matara, his life under the loud Mara tree. Here were troops of sweet birds calling and answering, squirrel and monkey chatter, mothers calling for children answering. The highest sound was no constable’s whistle or train shriek but the bronze peal of the temple bell from across the main road; the lowest was not black whispering about his blue eyes and brown skin when he went with his grandmother to the market but the steady thwack of washed clothes on drying rocks, itself a kind of strong pulse. It was a thriving, all of it.

  None of the villagers knew where Sam was or when he would return. They did not mind not knowing, because of what had been arranged during his absence years: a doctor now visited fortnightly, smelling of Dettol, not bark and root and the last patient’s left-behind betel sheaf. More: Sudugama was soon to have its own government school. There were Poya day deliveries of kerosene for every man with a family, and tins of brick-shaped meat, so pink and modern. Since 1956, an American movie was shown for a day and a night once a month in the Dansala hall. His fine screaming red bike aside, they did not want this fellow, whoever and whatever he was, to ruin all of it. Because if he reached the walauwa and spoke with Arthur, who could tell what Arthur would tell him, or what Arthur, the Ralahami-in-name, would do?

  “Then can you tell me who in the village knows when he is coming? The walauwa people must know, no? Wait. You like my bike? Who likes my bike? Who wants to sit?”

  The man in the faded yellow hat passed through the gathered crowd just as Bastian was lifting the third beaming boy onto the Heinkel’s red leather seat. Hunching forward to take the black handlebars, the boy was smiling and squinting, his glorying mind roaring across endless open road. His father stepped forward to watch within catching range, just as the others had when it was their sons’ turns, watching and squinting and smiling just the same as their boys. For going on ten years now Sam Kandy had sent kerosene and American movies, yes, but he’d let a man-eater ride in his motorcar before any village boy.

  “Where are you from? Who sent you? What business have you with this village? Who sent you?” asked the man in the yellow hat, who was Arthur’s driver and had been named to the position after travelling to Colombo with his son years before, where he had met with Sam Kandy, met him again.

  “I am Henry Bastian Paulet. Bastian,” he answered, lifting another boy onto the bike, a boy who at eleven was already a champion tree climber. The boy landed on the red seat in a perfect squat and had already raced past Jaffna town, speeding north by northwest like some kind of machine-age monkey prince jumping islands on his way to conquer India before the man in the yellow hat, Bopea, answered Bastian.

  “Who has sent you?”

  “No one has sent me. I have come.”

  “To see who?”

  “You know, or else you wouldn’t be talking like this.”

  “Who?”

  “Sam Kandy.”

  “He is not here. He has gone.”

  “I know. But I cannot find him in Colombo. I was told to look here. I was told this was his village.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The barber.”

  “Right. Well you have come and looked in vain. So why are you still here?”

  “Because I am waiting for him. And because I think there are more boys that would like to try the bike, no? Or try a second time?” Small black-thatched heads nodded, were proliferate: every time a boy climbed off he ran to tell brothers and cousins and even long since sworn enemies to come quickly. A group had already gathered in front of the scooter, respectful and proprietary the way boys can be with sudden-found treasure or an injured animal. They wanted to wipe the bug lather from its headlight, to polish the mystic emblem bolted below it, a great-winged bird taking flight across a chevron of silver letters.

  TZIRUOT

  “I have no money to give you,” Bopea said.

  “Aiyo!” Bastian laughed. He looked past Bopea to the village men, as if for sympathy at the absurdity of the suggestion. “You think I have come all this distance for money?”

  “Then what? What? Do you owe him money?”

  “I owe him something, yes. Not money, but something.”

  “Then show. Tell what you owe and leave it with me and he will get it. Otherwise go.”

  “What I owe is to Sam Kandy. I will give when I see him. I would like to wait for him to return. If you say I must go, I will, but I will come back until I meet him.”

  “You cannot know when he will come. No one knows when he will come.”

  “But he will. That is enough. I will wait.”

  “How to wait? Here now, you listen to me. I am not going to—”

  “What distance?” a voice called out, interrupting.

  “What distance?”

  “Yes, tell what distance you have come!”

  “Aiyo, tell what distance!”

  The calls kept coming as Bopea, muttering, stalked back to the walauwa where Arthur and his son were crouched and watching from the verandah. Where, inside, were Arthur’s kidney wife and his niece, sweet Hyacinth Kandy, officially listening to the music cabinet Sam had sent years before, just after independence.

  Meanwhile, below, Bastian was standing in front of the bike, legs planted, one hand on a handlebar. Boys were pushing each other spans apart to stand just as he was.

  “You want to know how far I have had to come, to come here?”

  Decisive nods, no bobbling this time.

  “But you must all have work, no?”

  Decisive laughter. The day’s work had been done for hours. Or it could be done in the hours to come. Or tomorrow. The paddy had been thriving for years, obliterating memory and omen hunger even more than the kerosene and movies did. These days you could carry a crying baby along a paddy bank and by morning the dirt would have shot green.

  And so Bastian cleared his throat, breathed, and told. And that night, after he had
been called up to the walauwa where he was doubtless telling the same story, in the huts of Sudugama he was retold. Fathers and sons, older brothers and younger, all trying to tell the story to trick their women’s hearts just as theirs had been, just as that other mother’s heart had been, in actual Munich. Submersible.

  One morning in 1948, eleven years before Bastian finally came to Sudugama, he had bought a cup of useless station tea and a cone of green gram and gone to see Sam Kandy, who gave him a paper to see a man at Colombo harbour. Bastian soon had his papers to be a deckhand on an oil tanker (Kuwait/Colombo/Rangoon), but the harbourmaster refused to sign his release to the ship. Without so much as looking at Bastian standing inside his office door, he declared to the rest of the boys waiting outside that as of that morning, no citizen of Ceylon could be released for work abroad without first showing a school certificate. None of the boys in the queue had a certificate in their packets. None of the boys moved anywhere save one spot forward when Bastian left a few minutes later. Each of them was certain, as vaulting young men need to be, that he would be the exception, the one whose paper the harbourmaster would be convinced to sign, whether from believing in the boy’s promise to go and come like none before him; or for mercy, to hear tell of father death, mother sick, village drought, village sick, and then day upon night upon day of bullock and bus, barefoot and train top in blistering sun, through monsoon rain and rogue’s alleys before reaching the harbour, and all to go and come like none before him. And if still denied, that didn’t matter: this was Colombo, there had to be someone set up nearby who long since knew to copy the harbourmaster’s signature, in whose veins ran the blood memory of every harbourmaster’s signature, Sinhalese British Dutch Portuguese. Either that, or the true harbourmaster would sign the paper upon the boy’s return with his school certificate, because that same forger would no doubt have known of this new edict before even the harbourmaster did and so already be waiting for the boys with a stack of embossed papers: of course Royal and St. Thomas, and also Ananda, Nalanda, St. Antony’s and Trinity, St. Joseph’s, St. Thomas’, St. Peter’s, and even Maris Stella: all that was needed was the proud graduate’s name. And the fee. Not payable in promise or saddest story.

  But Bastian needed none of that: he left the harbourmaster’s office that morning with his papers signed because the harbourmaster had chanced to look at his face while showing him to the door, only to close it and sign his release asking nothing telling nothing knowing nothing because Englishmen in the tropics tend to make exceptions for brown boys born with blue eyes.

  And so Bastian joined seven other new boys on the tanker, bunking with a Tamil fellow from Jaffna town who said he was shipping out to reach his mother and father—they cleaned houses in actual Munich and had sent him a letter saying that if he could reach Germany, he could attend hotel school. The ship was Greek save the eight of them and two of ten original Burmese boys, the only two who hadn’t jumped ship when the tanker last reached Rangoon. The brown hands’ daily work was scraping the deck free of the chips and slivers of the last paint job so the next could be done by the waiting, watching Greeks. The listing deck. The listing deck that needed scraping on hands and knees. Who would think a ship larger than some of their villages could rise and fall from side to side like a devil dancer’s shoulders? Who would believe the far deep sea itself could be all such chop and churning when from shore it looked like indigo stone? The eight Ceylon boys were all first to sea. The Burmese fellows were by now used to it and never once looked up at the others’ retching. The Greek sailors made sympathetic faces and mimed that they had once been so sick too, and they even washed down the deck afterwards, when the boys were lying on their sides, rusted scrapers in their open palms, mouths burning hot and wretched, eyes closed waiting for any kind of land or for someone else to be the first to call for his mother. The second time they were seasick, there was no mimed sympathy. The Greeks washed down the deck and the boys’ mouths, then their faces, their hair, their whole bodies until they crawled back to work. By the fifth day it was only Bastian still getting sick and the Greeks were tired of spraying him and so sent word to the captain, who came and saw and took pity on blue eyes never meant for deck life. Even a little English blood could ruin a fellow for hard work in open air. He was put to work in the galley, carrying fish and potatoes from the pit and scraping and peeling until they reached Kuwait. And while they were docked in its harbour, and the other boys fished from the deck at dusk, drinking beer while comparing casts and catches with the Greeks and together calling out useless jibes challenges and questions to the passing brown dhows, Bastian never fished once. At night, asked why he was coming to the cabin so late, he would only tell his mad-as-wife bunkmate that the captain had asked him to do something. What betrayal! After even giving Bastian his parents’ address in actual Munich! At breakfast the next morning, the others called him the captain’s compass polisher. But all Bastian carried for him were cases of beer and wine, and also arrack and ouzo, gin and whisky and molasses whisky from India, all kept in a room off the galley that he had never noticed as anything but another rusting green door. Each night, he carried the crates along the starboard side to the bow and down a flight of stairs to another little room. And on the third night the captain told him to bring all of it onto the landing and he pointed to the flat black water, which began to break up at short distance as it began to surface, rising with blinking red lights and a man standing in its water-beaded glass top. The captain had been selling to the princes of Kuwait for many years, trying when he could to get the specific gins and whiskies they asked for, but they always bought all of it, never once—

  Wait.

  “Wait.”

  “Wait!”

  “Wait wait wait wait wait” the villager men finally sang one after the other, all at once, hands up, some smiling, others looking sceptical, shocked, outraged to have listened this long and believed the whole of it until now, until that.

  “Mokatha?” Bastian asked, broad and innocent as blue sky.

  “No, you tell us.”

  “You don’t believe that Arab princes buy Indian whisky?”

  “Aiyo, stop playing the fool! What was it you say came out of the sea? Red lights, glass top, man standing in the glass top. All lies!” They had to demand that he deny it, their picture-making with his story. But there was nothing in their voices save laughter and hope that this stranger was no liar, that here was no loveshine, that for once the wild dreaming of men born to live dream and die far from the marvelling world be true, triumphant, their own triumph.

  “The captain told me that for years the princes would send pearl divers to collect the bottles,” Bastian continued, “but after one of the princes was named head of the Naval Force he bought it from the British without first asking his father, who did not mind the cost, only what six of his sons were discovered using it for when they returned from the tanker that night and there at the dock was the king and the other six sons, who were devout and also had never been given rides. The next morning the captain was brought to shore. He came back and told me he was being sent from the country and that I was too, that he would cash me out less the cost of the ticket he had already bought for me, because we were to fly from Kuwait to Beirut and from there he was going home and he said he would get me onto a ship going back to Ceylon. But I did not want to go home just yet. I wanted to go to—”

  “Apo go to a boutique on the moon! What was it called?” one of them pleaded, the others nodding as he spoke, their faces righteous and wounded with waiting this long without asking.

  “Submersible. They came up from the water in a submersible.”

  Bastian waited while they tried out the word, each to himself, their faces lost to the work of fitting word to picture, then fine and calm and smiling. Submersible was exactly right.

  “No boutique on the moon but I decided to try for actual Munich,” he continued. “When I started in Beirut, I had two hundred dollars. Twenty dollars for YMCA hotel, t
en dollars for food, then another ten dollars for a bus ticket to Ankara, then five dollars to Istanbul, and, for an underground tram to the Europe side, one dollar. And on that side, believe it, is a street where pretty girls stand all day and night in glass boxes. They only close the curtain when a chap goes in.”

  “One hundred dollars gone!” someone called out to a thunderclap of hands.

  Bastian bobbled. They asked for more. He said he knew that to reach actual Munich he would need new clothes and a school certificate. He found a uniform shop where he bought the same kit that he saw a scowling boy wearing while his mother and laughing sister inspected him. Then he bought the largest piece of cheese he could carry and spent almost the rest of his money on a ticket from Istanbul to Munich on the famous London Express. Two dollars left. On the train he traded seats with an old man who wanted to be anywhere but the car full of schoolboys going abroad for the first time. They were a few years younger than Bastian but dressed much the same. When the train was stopped at the Austrian border and the car was emptied beside an endless field of goldenrod, a teacher taught them to say Die Studie and Bastian said it just as the others did and was sent back to the train, where from his seat he watched four Indian fellows dressed like Indian fellows and pleading like Indian fellows being led off by two guards. Before Munich he was more than once scolded and stared at by teachers wondering why he was not sitting with the rest of the students. All he would say was Die Studie Die Studie until actual Munich, where in the station he traded his last two dollars for two marks with the first man willing to do it, who was the first black man Bastian ever saw, who wasn’t AWOL jack he just wanted to go home.

  “Truth?” one asked him.

  “Yes, I tell you he was truly black, blacker than—”

  “Ah ah okay. Only you have gone such distance, so many places, and that was the first black you saw?” another asked. The Sudugama men became bored cosmopolitans.