A boy on a Bajaj beeped and threaded his way to Rose and the cement truck to tell that a line of vans were coming down the road followed by two first-class cars, banged up, old, but first-class. Were these ministers’ vehicles? Rose gave the signal and the blessed mixer started up and every head turned because now there was nothing else in the world save the magnificent double roaring of engine and mixer, Jesus and Mary making solemn revolutions.
Nothing he could say do pay promise forget or threaten now could change that it was his fault. Ceylon roads were governed by one rule: never hit the fellow in front of you. Even if the fellow has stopped suddenly on the airport road; especially if the fellow is your own man driving one of your vehicles and you’ve hit him just as he’s hit the van in front of him. He could not pay for any of it. December 1965, Sam Kandy was out of money. His last source, short of opening a Pettah of his own to sell his own things to his own villagers, had been the salt concern up the coast, but it had failed the year before, after Puttalam burned for seven days in creedal fury. Sam listened to reports on Radio Ceylon and a month later Peter Rodrigo sent word that the operation had been ransacked in three languages and in the name of at least four gods and now Rodrigo Salt Works (Pvt.) was part of the Ceylon Salt Board. He’d released whatever workers hadn’t already run off and was now himself migrating to Australia. Meanwhile, the village paddy profits went to Arthur by old precedent ties, temple-sanctioned precedents, which Sam was too old now to try to break, and when Sam finally demanded money, Arthur said that everything Sam sent during his absence years had long ago gone to maintaining the village and the walauwa. Right. Pools of sunlight and monsoon came as they liked through the walauwa’s roof, more every season, and the village itself needed a new water tank five years ago. There was no money to fix anything, according to Arthur, only the old true promises of merit for next lives and good meals for the workmen who more and more expected something other than old true promises and noon-hour plates of rice and garden curry for their sweat.
And then, one day, came remarkable news—Arthur’s son had won a scholarship to England, no school anyone had heard of in Colombo, the boy hadn’t even applied, but no matter. Within days, Arthur had Bopea drive him to the city, where he arranged their papers and bought Air Ceylon tickets for himself and Thusitha and Dudley, and because he had expedited the passports with yet more of his secret hoarding and kept the rest to set them up in England when they arrived and he had to tell his son the truth about the scholarship, truly now there was no money left in the walauwa. Sam drove down to Colombo separately, to make sure at least this much was true, that Arthur and Thusitha board the plane with the boy. The last he saw of them was at the departure barrier, where they were writing their names and addresses in ALL CAPS on sheets of paper and affixing them to their suitcases. Arthur said he and his wife would return in ten days, after settling the boy, but he had stayed his son’s hand against breaking a branch before they’d left the village for the airport. (At last, he would reach true London.)
And so the empty walauwa was at last Sam’s, and returning he would knock down all remaining walls so they could not taunt his final days with their blankness, unwritten and lizard-splayed save where hung the pictured dead. And when the time came, he would make his funeral bier right there, in the finally bloodless walauwa made a fitting size full of fitting memories, rotting with all those fine fitting things that were fit, in the end, everything was, in the end, only to burn to ash and blow away, at last freed. There was nothing more to the world save that final triumph, or so Sam thought as he drove away from the airport, before he hit and was stopped. When he stepped out, a whole village surrounded him. He could just see Bopea ahead, likewise surrounded, and still more people emptying out of the vans beyond, the women making the sign of the cross with beads in their hands that they kept kissing as if they were long-lost wedding earrings. These were like no people Sam knew. They were fatter yet faster moving than upcountry people, their hair just as oiled but done up in American waves and fins. They gave no ground to pinstripes. They did not seem even to notice. If only he could kick out and go, but would these people think he was kicking or dancing? Would they give way or join him? Or would he be joining them? Looking ahead, hearing it before he believed it, Sam wondered, What kind of people bring guitars to a car accident?
After following the convoy from the airport, so many fenders and bumpers scratched, so many headlights and taillights shattered, Sam and Bopea were brought to a Negombo church square already teeming with more of the same people. The driver of the van that Bopea had hit came to them with bottles of Lion beer. Sam declined. Bopea took both and, suddenly full of festal courage, followed his new friend into the crowd. Standing alone, Sam listened to welcome-home speeches from members of the business community and from the president of the Negombo Bharatha Association, and to a series of solemn, absolutely shouted recitations of Shakespeare by uniformed schoolboys. All for a man who looked about Sam’s age, but with broader shoulders and softer eyes and a straighter back, dressed in a much newer suit, white, and he wore it with a white shirt and brown-and-white shoes. He told the crowd he was glad to be home and thanked God and our blessed Saviour and all his dear friends for watching over his family while he was away. To great applause he said that patience always pays, and then he climbed into the cab of the Jesus-painted cement truck and turned on the mixer and every boy tried to join him and soon all you could see was the gold of his watch, his heavy wristlet, his rings, as he waved to the crowd that waved back until the night’s first crackers were lit and then everyone clapped and covered their ears, shaking their heads at how loud and how many were set off, how many! Three years away, the company all but dead while he was gone, a fleet of hired vans to have repaired, and see how much money De Moraes still could burn!
To Sam it was sterile smoke, empty noise. He pitied the fine suit crushed inside the truck cab. But later, in the family compound, the man seemed not to care as it crumpled still more from all the hugging and waving and clapping and singing along. Sam watched and listened and tried to understand what kind of world this was, what kind of Saturn-upon-Mercury could so command its mad joy. Eventually De Moraes removed his coat and tie and collar, and then, to applause and like-minded gestures, his shirt and shoes. Sam thought at first he was behaving low, like a hired driver at the end of day, or like a man would when alone in his bedroom just before sleep. But then Sam watched De Moraes move through the compound in his banyan and bare feet, so many always gathered around him as he called out to others and drank and was fed by endless old women’s hands, joined one dance and led another, the steps coming to him as if he’d just walked in from the Brown’s Beach Hotel. There was no space between him and them, none given and none demanded. Here was a man elaborated into a crowd elaborated into a man. Sam watched all of it from a side-garden, standing beside a barren bird pedestal, smoking and turning down how many invitations to join meals, Jim Reeves songs, rosaries, thanksgiving novenas, carom, crackers, darts, epic retellings of the extraordinary pile-up on the airport road, new meals, the same songs.
Sam’s children didn’t even send him triumphant crates from wherever, from whoever, they now were. And when he went walking through his village these past five years, he was given wide but glowering margins by men and women who hadn’t seen a movie or a fortnightly doctor in five years, whose children were still without a government schoolmaster and whose paddy sweat wasn’t paying for a new village water tank but apparently for airplane tickets to London, and all of which was Sam’s doing even if they could tell he too had been lately lowered. No more did he go and come from the city with bootfuls of loveshine, no more new wives or vehicles; he didn’t even know anyone to get a phone number for the walauwa while across the main road at the temple the chief monk could trunk-dial all the way to Colombo. The most Sam could imagine now was his own bier, that it burn higher, longer, grander than any before it. All his sixty-five years of steel and pride, fever and speed, would make a gr
and plumage of rich black smoke that would be seen across the island before all of it fell upon the village green, conferring upon that blackbird field its right recompense. What triumph that was to dream of, and Sam finally did dream when night became the blue before morning and he was too tired to keep watching Xavier De Moraes keep going and so he left the dark-lit side-garden, not knowing he had been watched the whole time. Sam lay until morning on a cot in a spare bedroom somewhere deep in the compound, where, eventually, drunken Bopea was brought and dropped and stretched out against a wall like a warehouse beggar, snoring but still holding a bread-ring in his hand. There Sam waited through the rest of the night in a broken sleep broken by the roaring life outside his window, by still more firecrackers, and yes by envy for all of it made into the vain consoling firedream of his own someday great burning. And when Sam went outside the next day there he was, already awake, in fresh and pressed clothes, clean shaved and sipping tea in the side-garden. There he was, watching birds light upon a stand that, barren the night before, was now full and brilliant with gathering green and yellow and a fine blue-feathered fellow as well. De Moraes was standing beside a girl who must have been about Hyacinth’s age, only she was holding her father’s arm, and she was looking at her father, and she was smiling.
Xavier saw him approaching from the lane between the two houses in front of his own, a stranger in scuffed shoes and a fine suit not black anymore so much as black sheen, under which was a white shirt whose collar was wilted and splayed. He pitied the fellow his wearing it, the needful pride you could tell he took in still wearing it, in the years and years of proven expectation that others would give way to the cut of the cloth itself. But his eyes weren’t so challenging anymore, his step not so hard. He was favouring one hip, more from the habit of pain it seemed than from pain itself. His hair was smoothed back by hand, his face salted with old man’s stubble. A tired old bird. During the party, one of De Moraes’s drivers had befriended his driver and asked him a question about his boss for every drink and ring of breudher cake he wanted (the fellow ate like he’d never had butter on bread before). By the time the driver was carried to a room, it was clear his man wasn’t a minister or a minister’s man or a rival cement company’s agent or a debt collector; he wasn’t the phantom father of a phantom daughter demanding money for a phantom baby phantom-fathered by one of De Moraes’s sons. Other than shaking his head to all such queries, all the drunken driver would say of his Mahatteya was that he was called Sam Kandy. He said the name like that should have been story enough. De Moraes had never heard of him, but even to watch his approach, he could tell whatever threat this threadbare man could have posed had long since passed.
“Good morning!” he called out.
“Good morning,” Sam said.
“I hope you enjoyed our party last night. I am told your driver certainly did, no?”
“Yes, he is my driver. Right. Thank you. About my vehicles—”
“Fine vehicles they are. I saw both this morning in the car park when I was coming from Mass. But not so fine just now, no? Rose darling, do you know what this gentleman managed to do yesterday? I am told he managed to bust one of our hired vans and two of his own vehicles on the airport road. One man, three vehicles, all busted. Remarkable, no?”
She nodded at her father. She did not look at Sam. What kind of unmarried daughter looks at a stranger before her father? Having already looked at Sam the night before, having watched him smoke in her father’s garden.
“What’s more remarkable, Rose darling, is that I think he’s come to ask me to pay for it.”
Sam said nothing.
“But you see he is a gentleman! He won’t speak until proper introductions have been made, isn’t it? Right. I am Xavier Joseph De Moraes.”
“I am Sam Kandy.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“How do you know?” There was formal suspicion in his voice, but more curiosity and also, barely, pride.
“Your driver. Where are you from, Mr. Kandy?”
“That’s right. He is my driver. And I am Sam Kandy.”
“Yes. Are you from Colombo?”
“He is my driver. And I am Sam Kandy. And both my vehicles, my old red Morris and my new Hillman, are damaged because your vehicles stopped on the airport road.”
“What you mean to say is that you hit your own vehicle and your driver hit one of our vans. Do you expect me to pay for all of it?”
“What would a headman and a gentleman do?”
“Yes, a headman and a gentleman would offer to pay for what he has done. Do you agree, Mr. Kandy?”
Sam looked away, thinking now of home. Home! Because at least upcountry sun was merciful at first, burning away the morning mist upon the fields and then throbbing through the trees before it came for you at the break of day. Here there were trees too, but they were palms, bushy-topped nepotists with their shade. Squinting in bright morning, Sam could find no great ramparts of skyward green surrounding this town, this compound, this wide house, this blooming side-garden, these people standing in full sun asking him questions to catch him yes, but catch him how and could he catch them first could he even, still, catch? Sam said nothing.
“Do you agree, Mr. Kandy?” the man asked again. “Because you see, I was in the front van and when we stopped, my van hit nothing.”
“But they are all your vans. All of this is yours, no?”
“No, Mr. Kandy.” De Moraes smiled. “All of this is hers, is theirs.” His hand extended toward the many-roomed house behind him before sweeping to show the other houses surrounding them, all many-roomed. “And I am hers too. I am theirs too.” Sam could tell the man had said such things before. Yes, but there was more in his voice than the obvious ploy this was. There was also pride and relief, certainty, certainty of place. “And that is why,” De Moraes continued, “I shall ask my daughter to decide. Rose darling, who should pay?”
Her father had asked her that question at eight and nine, at ten, twenty, twenty-five, and now, at thirty. He had never kept an office anywhere but in the family compound and sometimes, when men would come to see him, strangers dressed either much better or much worse than he was, Xavier would call one of the children to stand beside him and meet this nice gentleman. Then he would tell the man that all was theirs, that he was theirs too, before asking the child, Darling, who should pay? The first few times, Rose and her brothers and sisters and cousins would race to his side when he called. But as the prize became more widely known and won—it was either a single sweet or the latest found peacock feather, and only after the purgatory of standing around while adults spoke and then answering a question from Daddy while the stranger never once looked at you—the older boys would not come from their cricket when their father called, nor would the younger boys abandon their chance to retrieve boundary balls and then heave their whole lives into the ball’s flight back to the bowler. And when they realized there were no boys to race, the girls would not leave their games of netball and French cricket, either. And so eventually it was only Rose. She always went, not only because leaving netball and French cricket were no great trials for her, not only because going spared her sisters bottom slaps and her brothers thunderclaps and later because they were auditioning wedding bands and picking bouquets and fabric for going-away dresses and later holding crying babies and busy threatening their own children to eat or sleep: Yes to all of that, but Rose went most because she could not stand her Daddy calling and no one coming, his waiting in vain, and she loved to hear him tell that all belonged to her, that he did. And so, by twenty and well past twenty, her father had long since called for her and her alone. And while her sisters were called about boys, Rose was called and asked the question she’d been answering her whole remembered life. He should pay, Daddy.
Only this time Rose was not so certain, so ready. Joyful yes that her father had come home, but she was thirty. This morning, with her father at last come home and taking his tea in the birdsinging side-garden with th
e world again right and full, only now did Rose know that she needed more than a father. Her sisters’ houses, her cousins’, even her mother’s squirrel cages: they teemed with life. And she had been sleeping on the same cot since she was ten. She had slept there also the night before, after watching this sudden new stranger smoking in the side-garden, shaking his old handsome head according to whatever principle also governed his wearing a worn-down suit her father would have long ago given to the cook’s husband. Standing there like that. The poor fool.
“I shall give my answer tomorrow,” Rose said.
“Tomorrow?” her father gasped.
“I cannot go and come from my village in one day,” Sam warned.
“Then you shall stay,” said Rose.
On the fourteenth morning, Sam was already waiting for them in the side-garden. Xavier could tell what his oldest girl was doing, what she wanted. At least, by that morning, he was willing to admit to himself, if not to anyone else, what had been evident to the whole watching world on the prior mornings Sam had come, walking faster each time and by now in scuffed shoes that were daily spit-shined, an old suit daily stone-pressed, his hair combed into a crest and his creased face shaved clean of its salt. And each time Rose told him to stay until tomorrow and the next morning he would walk even faster, faster, faster, until the fourteenth dawn when Sam was already there among the birds lighting upon their pedestal, smiling at Rose who was smiling at him as she had never before smiled at anyone, not even, no, not even at her father when he called and she always came. But how many girls this fellow had smiled at, Xavier could not tell. How many rich men’s daughters? And yet, Xavier could tell he was not smiling with extortionate plotting but with nervousness and bliss and idiocy, with the joy of a girl smiling at him, and in this alone was the fellow like a young suitor, a proper suitor, a hopeful groom for Xavier De Moraes’s eldest daughter.
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