Beggar's Feast

by Randy Boyagoda

  “Yes,” Bastian said. “Why?”

  Sudden wry smiles and sideways eyes and they each had a story that could rival submersible but they were of one mind about village secrets—they could be told and retold for years but only for known ears and shared dirt.

  “I went to the bus terminal and took out the paper with the address of the Jaffna boy’s parents and showed it until someone put me on a bus, now no money, and I showed the paper to the driver who pointed to a seat and we drove and drove from square to square and it’s getting darker and darker and this isn’t like back home, no? These are Germans.” He stepped closer to them. They stepped closer to him. He lowered his voice. They leaned in.

  “These are Germans. I can’t turn to the fellow beside me to ask where I should get down. But soon everyone else has got down from the bus and the driver keeps driving and we come to another square and it looks like all the others but then he stops and opens the door and points. His finger is showing me these buildings, all the same brown squares, like giant chocolates, but he tells me to get down and goes and now I’m left alone in actual Munich and I don’t see any Jaffna Tamils. What to do? An old woman came to the bus halt eventually and I showed her the paper and she takes my wrist and we go to one of the buildings and we stand just like this in front of the door, beside a board that was green and rusted like ship doors, only with little black buttons running up and down and she keeps pointing at it and at me and finally she takes my finger and pushes one of the buttons and it starts ringing and I thought they had tricked me and taken me to a police station and I told her Die Studie Die Studie and she took my finger saying Gleich Gleich Gleich and then the door opened—”

  “Police!”

  “No!”

  “Then?”

  “A Tamil fellow comes and screams and pulls me to him and kisses my head and takes me down the hallway calling for his wife and she comes running and crying but then she goes back into the room and comes back still crying too but now spilling a cup of milk. She gives me the milk and she’s about to put a vadai in my mouth too and now I’m crying but then she drops the vadai and calls the husband to come away from me and he takes the milk before I can finish it and asks whose son are you and I say nothing and they go and now I am standing in the hallway and the only other person is a German boy who’s opened his door. He’s looking at the vadai on the floor and watching me to see who’ll get it first.”

  “Aiyo why? After you had come so far to see them!”

  “Who?”

  “Your daddy and mummy!”

  “Not mine.”

  “What do you mean, not yours? How when you went so far to find them?”

  Before Bastian could answer, Lalson broke through the village men and told him that the Ralahami was waiting. He nodded and climbed onto his bike, kicked it to life, and rode forward slowly, the servant bounding ahead. He saw an old red Morris parked beside the twin boulders, and then the stone steps leading to the great house itself. Looking up, he saw a man and a boy recede from the verandah. Following them toward the dark threshold he saw something else glinting, then gone. A bangle. Whose?

  Meanwhile, behind him, like lit candles, each man remembered one after the other how far gone they’d been moments before, listening to the stranger. They broke away, planning how to tell their wives the story that night and see if they would think the same, that in Munich it had been this fellow’s parents. Bloody Tamils rioting in Colombo and taking all the jobs abroad and can’t even give a poor Sinhalese boy a glass of milk in a distant country.

  “Right, they weren’t his parents. But how did he come back to Ceylon?”

  “What men, are you blind? He came back on his motorbike.”

  Everything was as he’d left it ten years before, black or green or dirt. The piled shells and drying laundry, the cooking fires and busted thatch were all as these had always been, would always be. The dogs were still barking blue murder and daring him, tempting him to brake or reverse, but he drove his Hillman Minx on through the crossroads without stopping. Sam Kandy was sixty years old. He squinted more than stared now, but he needed no spectacles to see the red motorbike waiting there beside his old Morris, the two parked like older and younger brother under the walauwa, under his walauwa high above his village, even if he had no lawyer papers saying so. Now, as never before, he needed it to be his, not for the taking or keeping but for the staying, living. Him. Here. Where, these last ten years, never once was a fuel can or film canister sent back unopened; never once was a stethoscope or music cabinet or toy soldier or stuffed dolly or stuffed envelope refused.

  In April 1956, when the harbour and the city suddenly turned all patriotic saffron and Sinhala only, Sam went to Trincomalee and worked as a native proxy for quiet Americans who’d taken over an English airfield to fly planes back and forth from Indochina. They had their own warehouse kingdoms come. But then one day in 1959, the Americans left. And even if no one was, Trinco Tamils were not Sam’s people. He returned to the city only to discover that Colombo harbour was now fully closed for business to all save blood relations and devout Buddhists. And Sam Kandy was not born to the first and would not bow low enough to be the second. Meanwhile, the greater city was useless with strikes and rallies and even his barber was charging double the old rates. There was nowhere left to go. He bought a new car and went that night, the moon hanging before him like the heel smudge of some passing god. On his way to the village he wondered about the balance of the stars, about why it was set always against him. And now, greeting him upon his return, a bright red motorbike, another man’s machine. He was too old to knock it down.

  The first time he tried, he only kicked it into the old red Morris. The second time, he slipped and fell down. He stood and brushed off, then took the bike with both hands, pulled it away from the old Morris, righted it, and considered it. Yes, it was very fine. Then he pushed it down to the ground and looked around, his face desperate shameful and daring proud; desperate to see if anyone had been watching, daring them to come forward with a claim against his. A sixty-year-old seven-year-old. Sam’s lungs hurt, he was heaving so much from the effort, from breathing more than just outrage about this bike, which had not been brought nor sent here by him but bought with all his sweat and running while here, high upon the world, they never had to move save when the servant swept under their feet.

  Sam wondered where Bopea and his yellow hat were, why he was not waiting for Sam when he arrived, why he had not sent word that this motorbike had been bought. He wondered how much of his money had gone into it. Arthur must have ordered it from Colombo, from the warehouse of some new minister’s nephew’s cousin who in the latest election had helped put down a riot, or start one, or put up a poster or tear one down for its English or its Tamil blasphemies, and thus was now the High Commissioner of Imports, whose first order of business of course was to celebrate the nation’s prosperity by ordering German motorbikes for the whole family and no problem he could get one more for an upcountry chap with a good upcountry name who made his inquiry on the back of a fat envelope that had been filled by Sam’s sweat, a chap who agreed that upon delivery he would pry off or paint over any foreign words before using it on Ceylon roads and anyway not to worry he would only ever use it to bring the village temple’s chief monk to and from schoolboy recitations of the Mahavamsa. It was very fine. It would be Sam’s now too. He almost pulled it up but he stopped himself, straightened his back, and stood to the side. It had to be righted, yes, but not by him. It was his place to want it so, to have it done. If he were going to stay in the village he would have to follow village ways. Waiting to be received, Sam began to imagine it: at last, day-after-day in the village. Cough awake and call for tea, then take a wash and a shave, dress and come to the front room and take more tea, listen to the Radio Ceylon news report and to the cocks crow and to the temple bell sound and to the sound of the boy washing the vehicle below. News report and tea finished, next would come vehicle inspection, smoking a cigarette
while checking for mud and smudges as the boy stood to the side, rags in hand, smiling and hating, waiting to be released by the pinstriped Ralahami’s nod and grunt. But there would always be missed spots and only when they were gone could the boy fetch fresh water and new rags and wash the other vehicle, because both were Sam’s. And when it was all done, he would return to the walauwa and take his breakfast while listening to the next news report and now there were only twelve hours more to pass until he could sleep and twenty-two hours until his next morning tea, until another day of taking a wash and a shave and dressing to descend and tell the boy to wash it again.

  What triumph.

  “You should have told me you were coming,” Bopea called out as he approached, putting on his yellow hat like an amulet while eyeing the fallen bike.

  “I should have told you. I should have told you? I should go from here and fly to Russia and bring your son back and still it will cost less than this thing that I have paid for and never been told that I have paid for.” He kicked more dust at the shining bike. After the servant boy washed both vehicles and the bike, next would be Sam’s shoes to shine.

  “Aiyo, what am I to tell when I don’t even understand myself? And leave the boy alone because he must be having more exams.” Bopea’s son had been in Moscow studying for ten years now. No word yet of return. Over the years, he’d sent his father occasional mimeographs of graded work and degrees earned, all of which hung in Bopea’s hut. The first degree was framed over a woodcut print of Sydney harbour. The second degree papered over a young Queen Victoria.

  “You are to do what I tell you to do. And I have told you: tell everything that happens. That was our agreement.”

  “Right.” Bopea smiled like an old noon-hour crocodile. He cocked his hat. “But our first agreement was about what I remember.”

  Sam had almost asked for mercy, mercy from memory rather than from Bopea’s grip, when Bopea had come to the harbour office that morning in 1948, a few months after the island’s independence, knocking and entering before Sam could say come or come later and then Sam said nothing because there, standing before him, finally, was the man in the yellow hat. He was a village man about Sam’s age, dressed to come to the city the way village men do, in his good sarong that he only now let down to his feet.

  “I don’t know you,” Sam said, too quickly.

  “You do. Only you won’t remember.”

  “Go. What do you want? Go. I’ll give you a thrashing. What do you want? Go.”

  “You know this hat, no? You sent it. Many years ago, you sent it to the village.”

  “This is the last time I will tell you—”

  “You’re fatter than you used to be but I know you. And I knew your Appachchi and it’s like this:”

  Before Sam could catch and thrash and throw him, Bopea met him in the middle of the office and took him at the forearm with one hand and with the other began turning the skin on his forearm.

  “Now you know me? Now you remember?” Bopea laughed. Sam should have laughed with him, with the universe laughing at him, here, about to drop to his pinstriped knees on a wooden floor in the middle of his own office in his city, biting his lip like a seven-year-old. Found and returned, returning, returned past even salt stains and accidents with a bullock cart. Returned to the great green clearing itself, to an age before the rest of it, before even only a little bird, putha. Soo sa

  “Let go of me.”

  “And?”

  “And tell.”

  “What?”

  “LET. GO. OF. ME.”

  When they were both seated, Bopea talked twenty years of waiting to talk. He asked and answered his own questions because Sam would say nothing to any of it, to Bopea’s recounting his wonder, that day in 1929, when Sam stood on the wedding platform, ignoring the dirt thrown at his shoulder to stare at Bopea in his yellow hat walking through the wedding crowd, and then ran back to the city. Bopea had in truth only worn it that day because it was the first auspicious occasion fitting the hat’s own grandness that followed upon the departure of the man who had given it to his father years before. All the things from that mysterious crate had been given in discharge of various debts in the village. The particular terms between Sam’s father and Bopea’s father had been long since forgotten, but not their source. Bopea told Sam it had taken him time to piece things together, that he was not so smart as his son: first, why the old man had disappeared, who Bopea had always thought would never have gone farther from his own hut than whichever was the next hut he was begging or borrowing from; and second, how then this new fellow had come as he came, to try for the Ralahami’s daughter and the whole village could tell what the pinstripes and loud car and absurd name tried to tell against, that he was village too, only which one he would never tell or why he chose to come to this place, or why he came when he came, or why he had stared at Bopea in his yellow hat—and then Bopea began remembering, deeper into the past, wondering if this was that black crow boy who had disappeared one day, long before. And, Bopea continued, even if he was not so smart as his own son, still he had studied Sam’s coming and going for years. He had studied a face that was, save his first wedding day, always so void of pity for the rest of them that he passed in his motorcars full of gifts for the walauwa, a face void of pity even for his children after his wife their mother had died, void as that boy’s had been who had dropped Bopea back in that useless turtle pond years before, void of pity even for himself though he had had to bite his lip the first time Bopea had burned his arm and beat him down on the great green clearing behind the village.

  “So now you must only have one question left, no?” Bopea asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “So answer it.”

  Bopea then said what Sam could already tell, could probably have known from that first day they’d fought: that he, Bopea, was a patient man, a very patient man. He asked Sam to think of how many times since Sam’s first wedding day he could have told against Sam or told Sam himself, told that he was known and known to have been not just a low-caste paddy worker like the rest of them but low-born right there like the rest of them and not just low-born right there like the rest of them but low-born to such a fellow as his father had been, long since known in the village for only sweating and moving when someone came to his hut to collect.

  “Just tell me what you want,” Sam seethed through clenched teeth, clenched fists. Tell how much of what and then stop telling, stop making me want to stand and defend my father’s name never worth defending.

  “First, do you admit?”

  “Tell me who else knows.”

  “So you admit?”

  “Tell me who else knows.”

  “No one else, I swear on my son’s life. If everyone knew, then my knowing would be useless, would be just another jungle paper nailed to the jak tree tomorrow morning, no?”

  “Then tell. How much.”

  “So you admit.”

  “HOW MUCH.”

  “Right. I want nothing like that.”

  “Then go to hell.”

  “I’ll go and come straight away.”

  Bopea returned, minutes later, with his son, a thin boy in his early twenties smelling of bay rum and holding a book, always holding a book. While his father was upstairs, he had taken his first proper shave at the barber-stall below. Bopea told Sam that the scholarship examinations were to be held the next day, at the Public Library, Edinburgh Crescent, Colombo 7, that the monk who had long tutored his son at the village temple had told Bopea’s son and then Bopea that the Russians were coming to Colombo to give full university scholarships to top-flight boys. The monk said he was certain none of the Royal-Thomian types would sit for anything but Queen’s Scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge, let alone go to the Public Library if it wasn’t a British Council event. The only thing was to get an admission ticket to the exam, and the monk did not know how an upcountry village boy with only a temple teacher could.

  “But I
knew straight off who would get him one,” Bopea said, beaming, staring at Sam, his arm around his son. “I knew the most generous man of the village, Sam Kandy, would want to help the smartest boy in the village, no?” Immediately Sam understood the game and he played it well, had to keep playing it after the boy sat for the exam and won the scholarship and needed another ticket, this time a ship berth to Madras and from Madras by train to Calcutta and from Calcutta to Moscow by plane (Dum Dum/ Aspern/Vnukovo) and of course a Parker pen and proper, heavy clothes because no one wears sarong to lectures in the Russian snow. Before the boy left, he wanted to return to the village and tell the monk his results, give the monk alms in his late mother’s name, then drink a cup of good heavy milk and break a branch and go. Sam said if Bopea knew to drive or was willing to learn, he could take the boy to the village in Sam’s old red Morris, the car that still smelled of Puttalam, of blackwater saltwater, the car that could be Arthur’s, and let him paint it black with his money if he wanted. After a driving lesson along Wharf Road, there came their second agreement, which carried across Sam Kandy’s absence years: after his son was sent off to his studies, Bopea would become Arthur’s driver and Sam’s man in the village. He would report only to Sam, meeting him where and when Sam said to and bringing to the walauwa and village what Sam decided to send and telling Sam who if anyone came looking for him and what if ever anything had happened since their last meeting and telling also whenever Sam’s name was heard in the walauwa, telling what was said, what was whispered, bought, brought, broken, taken, thrown, coughed at, and cursed. Whenever and whatever, and this bloody motorbike lying in front of them was not grown in any paddy field.

  Sam glared at Bopea glaring until they heard the hammering of modern shoes upon the stone steps.

  “There. You hear? Your latest blue-eyed fellow is coming. It’s his bike.”