Beggar's Feast

by Randy Boyagoda

  Ten years later, thirty years later, the same blue eyes. Sam’s mouth opened and closed like a caught fish. But after a few moments he nodded, less at Bastian than at what Bastian’s being here now meant, could mean, if not had to mean. Sam nodded more vigorously, taking a new measure of those old jurying stars, of how time and men, time and means, could constellate and shatter and constellate again, and not always forever more against you as Sam Kandy, great shattered shatterer, had long since been certain. What vanity! It was, for now, a freeing thought. And so, after Bastian righted his bike, the two men climbed the stone steps, one in front of the other, and Sam told Bastian to wait on the verandah and he went into the walauwa first, nodding after ten years at Arthur and Thusitha, at Hyacinth, at the servants waiting to the side. They were staring at the floor near his feet. Embarrassed to receive him dressed in their daily sarong and home skirt and blouse, or respectful? Or considering whether to queue and bow low and give ten years’ respect? But then he looked down as well, just as a boy, bowing low, started running a die-cast toy car across Sam’s black shoes. Running it hard, then looking up and disappearing. This was Dudley, who was called Arthur’s son, when in truth or Latha’s talking this was Sam’s grandson, one of the thirteen George left behind in Ceylon.

  “Welcome, Sam-aiya, after so long,” Arthur said, half standing, his voice all boom and quiver. “And where is …” He could have said lawyer George Madam Ethiopian. He said none of it and Sam’s face showed none of it, and no one in the room minded the withering away of ten years’ fear and curiosity.

  “Sam-aiya,” said Thusitha, amazed her husband had not already yielded and called him Ralahami, “you must have had a long journey. Would you like to take a wash? Would you like tea?”

  Sam said he would take tea now and take a wash later. And when she asked if tea should be sent down for the driver too Sam said there was no driver, that he had driven himself. And when they asked if Lalson should go down to empty the boot Sam said there was nothing to carry other than one suitcase and a shaving kit. Sam lit a cigarette and told them that he had come to stay. He remained standing. The room wondered if he would motion for Arthur to give up his seat, an oak-panelled armchair that Sam had sent from the city. All of them, Arthur included, wondered if Arthur ought to invite him to sit in one of the other chairs he had sent, for which had been rubbished stools and benches turned out long ago from village wood by village men for village headmen. Sam included, all of them wondered if Sam would accept Arthur’s invitation and if so what then, what meaning, whose? Whose victory? He remained standing.

  “For how long?” Arthur asked.

  Sam said nothing. He was studying Hyacinth. She was not so pretty as Alice had been, but not so proud either. Her face was rounder, fuller, sweeter. His daughter was what, thirty years old now. She was not even a young woman. He had been sending her dollies for thirty years. He nodded at her.

  “Appachchi,” she said, coming forward and giving respect. Then she stood, stepped back, and looked at her father. No, she looked just over his shoulder, past him, onto the verandah. Searching to see if he was waiting there with his stupid hope, or had he already gone?

  “Shall I have him called in?” Sam asked her, now knowing why Bastian hadn’t done anything save righting his bike and following Sam like a tail, then waiting outside just as Sam commanded. Was this what it would mean to have a son-in-law?

  “Who?” she answered, her voice high and hollow and everyone listening looked away, pitying the girl, her poor acting, their mouths each whispering Who one hundred more believable ways, a roomful of quietly mad owls.

  “Right. Who. Right.” Sam finished his cigarette. “Lalson!” he yelled, making all of them start, because Lalson was already in the room, standing within arm’s reach. “Bring the betel and then tell the visitor he may come in.” Sam walked to the empty chair beside Arthur’s and dragged it across the tiled floor to the centre of the room and there he sat waiting to receive his daughter’s suitor, arranging himself like some bemused king.

  Thirty minutes later, Bastian stopped telling. He waited for Sam to answer. And he looked over at Hyacinth who, like a proper highborn daughter, would not look back at him but only sidelong at her listening, now considering father, and otherwise at her feet, properly lost in the sylvan inlay of a toe-ring. At thirty, Hyacinth Kandy was long pitied and envied her father’s indifference, which some thought came of her looking like her mother, and which others, Hyacinth included, thought was just indifference because she was not her brother and so never once gave Sam, gave anyone really, cause for anything more than that. She did not think this day would have come. She was still unsure whether her father even understood this day had come for her, that she was even in the room and if so, that he, Bastian, was in the room not only to say thank you to him, her father, for his getting him that first passage out of Colombo harbour but also to ask him about her, to ask for her, for her hand. She was and had been for twenty years too old for dollies and at thirty she should have been at least ten years too old to be married. But then this fellow had come and as of today had passed nearly exactly thirty auspicious days in the village, days spent walking with her and always with her nephew near and never but in highest light, listening without looking at him tell of yellow apples and of snow, its bluish colour in a field at night, how it became its own kind of yellow under streetlamps; its sound underfoot like schoolboys grinding their teeth at night. But unlike her mother and brother, Bastian had stayed here because of her father. And now it was her father who could give his assent and then horoscopes could be read and a time set and a visit to the chief monk made and then onto the poruwa they could go, and then, then he, Bastian, could stay truly, and Hyacinth Kandy would no longer be the sweet unnoticed girl sitting at other people’s meals in her very birth-house.

  Sam’s ears were burning. Not from the story of going and coming—which Bastian enjoyed telling too much, which he told too much of—or even from hearing in that story the size of the dowry this fellow was going to expect, to keep making as if he were the only blue-eyed brown boy ever to have visited Sudugama. No, Sam’s ears were burning from having to hear Bastian’s audience make such sounds—pitying, wondering, shocked, worried, confused just as the Munich Tamils had been confused. How many times had they heard it? This latest telling ended with Bastian saying he had come and waited to give Sam his thanks for giving him his start into the world, which made Sam’s ears ring, strain to hear more. But that was the only moment in the story that the walauwa people made no noise about.

  “So now you have said thank you,” Sam said, finally. “And you have thanked these people, my relations, for letting you wait like this, here, to tell me.”

  “Yes. Of course, Mahatteya.” Bastian turned his head. “And thank you, Ralahami.”

  Arthur nodded gravely. Sam blackened. Called Mahatteya. Called Ralahami. How stupid. How fatal, to let Arthur be the one to be thanked, to be so named as he was thanked. Had they, Arthur and Bastian, planned this before Sam had come? Would Bastian next ask for a dowry and before Sam could answer Arthur would offer it from his own pettagama and steamer trunks filled by Sam’s thirty years’ running? And then Arthur would walk to the temple with Bastian to see the chief monk?

  “And now that you have said thanks, you shall go,” Sam declared.

  “Actually, Mahatteya, there is more,” Bastian answered. He had been practising this speech too, at night, sleeping beside the boy in the back room, across the hall from where, for the rest of his days, he would sleep beside his wife, were it granted that he could stay.

  “Right. You say there is more,” Sam answered. Something had to be done. He had been in the village for one hour and already it was upon him to show that what was here was his to give or his to deny, his to defend.

  “I also want to say, Mahatteya, that of all the places I have been to, this is the best place. This is the most beautiful place. I would also like to say, Mahatteya, about your daughter—”


  “Where is your horoscope?” Sam barked. “Where are your parents?”

  “What do you mean?” Bastian asked. “You know—”

  “What kind of house do you think this is, what kind of people do you think we are, that you can come and stay and tell grand stories and make like you are something other than a vagabond?” Sam stood and walked across the room, toward him. “And while I have been away you have mooned with your bad omen eyes and fooled these village minds into thinking you have come down from Buckingham Palace itself on the devil’s own motorbike to seek my only daughter’s hand and when I grant it the morning after the wedding you will be gone and so will every piece of my gold.”

  “No! I ask for no dowry, I only ask, about your daughter—”

  “GO! I don’t need another driver. Making like you are no orphan, no servant’s son. No Englishman’s bastard born to drive other men. I don’t need another driver.”

  “Aiyo,” breathed Thusitha, looking over at Hyacinth shaking in her chair.

  “Stop this, Aiya,” tried Arthur.

  “A bastard born to drive other men, I say.”

  “I said stop this!”

  Now Sam had to keep going and he leaned down on Bastian, muttering it again and again. Yes Sam’s blood was running fine and hard and true and who said a sixty-year-old man couldn’t shatter the constellations? “GO!” Sam commanded.

  “YOU GO!”

  “Mokatha?” Sam whipped around, but Hyacinth was already looking down again, sylvan lost, would say no more. No one said anything else while Bastian went to the back room and gathered his things, Dudley pleading in vain to know why as Bastian then walked again through the front room frieze. He looked a last time at Hyacinth, who for the first time held his gaze. She nodded once and looked down again. Before dawn the next morning, she met him at the bus stand, climbed onto the back of his bike, and they went. Smoking a cigarette and leaning on the stone ledge of the verandah, Sam Kandy watched his daughter go. Then he called into the house for tea and went down to watch the servant boy wash his motorcars.

  “Yes! Yes you must! Please, Father Marcelline, please bless it before he comes. You know Daddy is coming home. HE IS COMING JUST NOW!”

  Rose had to yell at the priest. Laughing screaming children were twirling noisemakers while running back and forth between the glass-box statues of St. Anthony and Our Lady that marked the far ends of the church square. Meanwhile, passing cars and trucks were honking at the crowd gathered in front of a fresh-painted cement mixer, either because the crowd was taking up too much of the main road or because the drivers knew the crowd was gathered because Xavier Joseph De Moraes was finally coming home.

  While the rest of the family had spent the morning packing the vans and picking their outfits for the journey to the airport, Rose had made sure that lagoon crabs had been brought and the pork set to roast and lights strung between the houses in the compound, that the floors of their own house were washed and the bronze polished and the dogs washed and the vehicles washed and polished and the flowerbeds fixed up. She had even ordered her mother’s squirrel cages cleaned. Born to be giants and fed like their dogs, the squirrels never tried to escape. Instead they lay about making nasty screeching noises, arguing like a parliament of fat women. Rose hated them. She loved the peacocks her father used to keep, before he went against Mrs. Bandaranaike and then went from the island, leaving one of her brothers in charge of his birds, not her. The peacocks were dead within a year.

  But now there would be birdsongs in the compound again. At lunch she had ordered the kitchen girl to keep rice for the pedestal in the side-garden, where her father liked to take his morning tea watching the birds take their breakfast: green parakeets and yellow bulbuls, sometimes a pair of spotted thrush. There should have been new peacocks also, but the brother who should have arranged for their return instead had spent the last few days driving around Negombo with his friends, trying to assemble the world’s loudest sound system. In the meantime, Rose had done everything else, for years had been doing everything else. Not only because she was the eldest and remaining unmarried daughter but because her mother, Vivimarie De Moraes, for reasons no one knew and none dared to ask, stopped running the house during her husband’s absence years. She had left everything to Rose, save feeding the giant squirrels. Now, upon word of his return, Vivimarie had called for her dressmaker and made plans to publish the results of three years’ novenas not just in the Catholic Messenger but also in the Sunday Observer. The rest remained for her eldest girl to do, a girl the rest of the family had long since assumed would grow old minding other people’s children, the lone De Moraes daughter who, according to theories related to her shortness, her most Portuguese of noses, and the telltale length of her second toe, had never been asked after by families with suitable boys.

  She allowed herself a cup of tea only after the rest of them left for the airport—her mother, her mother’s brothers and sisters and her father’s brothers and sisters; her own brothers and sisters and their children; her cousins and her cousins’ children; school friends from three generations; and also, cramming and hanging on and sharing corners of seats, boys armed with epic lists of the many things they’d done for Mr. De Moraes’s family while he was away. Together they went in garlanded vans down the Negombo Road. They wanted to be in Ratmalana at least four hours early and then wait in the grassless park outside the airport. The De Moraeses packed for the journey like they were going north to Madhu Church for the Assumption Feast: they brought coiled effusions of extra garland, guitars and lap drums, two radios, rosaries, rosewater and Tiger Balm, breviaries, Enid Blytons, Mills & Boons, Sando from New Generations, Sando’s father Andrew who owned Portrait Studio 3A Mangala Road, bottles of Pathma’s Asian Rose talcum and English Lavender too, flasks of Brooke Bond tea, jugs of water, bars of Zellers fruit, Zellers fruit-and-milk, Zellers plain milk and introducing new Zellers milkcracker chocolate, cricket bats and a badminton set, Maliban cream crackers, Cow & Gate baby formula, tennis balls, a simple pavilion tent, and a full meal for at least twice their number. Everyone dressed up to go to the airport, but waited with newspapers and canteen tea. This family would go like pageant, as usual, and wait, as always, like carnival.

  Meanwhile, her own tea finished, Rose had wanted to arrange a blessing, and so she’d gone to the church square which, two days after Christmas 1965, with the village’s most prominent man about to return, was its own carnival. And so of course Rose had to yell at the priest: The band she’d hired, New Horizons featuring Sando from New Generations, was nowhere to be found but younger boys, denied noisemakers at the church door when everyone was exiting vespers, were playing hell behind the bass drum, trading turns hammering down on the footpedal with their hands. Tho tho tho But never mind the noisemakers and the bass drum booming like the world’s own pulse; it was little different than most holy days in the De Moraes family universe. In truth Rose liked the noise: it let her yell with best intentions, with a necessity not her own, at the family priest who was refusing to bless her father’s welcome-home present.

  “No. I will not. This is scandal and madness,” Father Marcelline insisted. “I am not going to bless something that your own father knows should not be blest. Wait and see, child, how he will come and before even taking tea or a wash, paint over it himself. In that way, he is a good son of the Church.”

  “Father Marcelline, Daddy is in all ways a good son of the Church, no?”

  “And I’ll not have holy water mixed up with all this paint!” the priest yelled and so did not hear her last question. Never mind the money Xavier Joseph De Moraes had given the Church over the years, how many feast days he’d footed, how many Walk Rite kits he’d bought for cripples, how much he’d given for the Beggar’s Palace alone: he had also promised his support (his name, his money, and, if necessary, trucks from his cement co.) to the 1962 coup plotters in the name of defending the Church, its schools, and its clergy from the rising temple and from the rising sangha that had
weepy Mrs. Bandaranaike’s ear and were trying to be her eyes and mouth, her arms and fingers, her fists. Her father had made this promise, as Rose and everyone else knew, after speaking with Father Marcelline, who, after the coup failed, turned amnesiac and would not even give him a St. Christopher’s blessing the morning he left home. Some thought he had gone to Rome or to Tuticorin, others said he was hiding out in the old Portuguese fort on Mannar Island; a few believed he had gone to Lourdes itself.

  He was coming home, at last, because the charges had been dropped against all of the men named in the attempted action against the government. And still, the family priest would not appear at the homecoming rally planned at the top of the church square, would not even shake a few drops of holy water at the Leyland Comet cement truck that had been bought to celebrate Xavier Joseph De Moraes’s return and also announce the company’s own return to competition with the big Colombo firms. After the acquittals had been announced, Rose’s brothers decided that the company would be just as proudly Christian as Farook Concrete was Muslim and National Agglos and Cement Elephant Cement Co. were Buddhist. And so the new lead truck’s mixer had been painted with two images, but they had run into each other when some fool had climbed into the cab and turned on the mixer before the portraits had dried, striping the mixer itself and purpling Christ’s crown of thorns and Mary’s starry veil. The truck’s cab at least showed perfect red roses on its doors. Underneath, in fresh stencilling, it read LOURDES CEMENT CO. (PVT.).

  “But it’s not Daddy’s fault they turned the mixer on before the paint dried, Father, is it? He didn’t even ask for it to be painted.”

  “Wet paint or dry paint how can I be seen to bless such a thing? It is blasphemy!”

  “Right then. Thank you, Father. I will send Daddy your best and we will see you at Mass.” Rose turned and went, walking fast through the crowds. She found another priest, a young Chilaw fellow who knew nothing of anything here save the name of the most prominent family in the parish, whose eldest daughter asked him to bless Xavier De Moraes’s new truck and what was he to do but find his holy water? Rose led him through the crowd and he decided to be blind about the paint job. (Afterwards, he went to the parish house where already how many old women were queued to tell Father Marcelline what he’d just done!)