The timing seemed right—they would have gone to Madhu and had an Assumption Day baptism—but the Kandys stayed in Sudugama until almost the mid-August feast day itself, listening for the latest news of the trouble in Colombo, hearing from village talk that the trouble had come to the upcountry too. There were none in Sudugama, and while of course you talked for years against upcountry Tamils when you were in toddy circles and standing around the carpenter’s shed and walking back from the fields, against their field blackness which was also Indian blackness, and against their old treacherous, poisoning queens who, as the schoolmaster and the temple had been teaching since 1956, had so weakened the last four kings of the Udarata that the British came and took the island with ease from already-defeated men. There was likewise talk against their blue devil temples, their Shiva love, above all of late against their demanding ballots, schools, first-class positions for their people, and not demanding in Sinhala or even English medium but in their shipbottom Tamil. These were not our people. Still, there were also days you talked against your wife’s relations, but that didn’t mean if someone gave you a can of petrol and a knife and asked you to join in you would. If twenty asked you to join, and none of you knew any of you, it might be different. But this wasn’t the city.
When the trouble finally seemed over, Rose said they should still go to Madhu, even if her family in Negombo refused. And so the Kandys set out for the shrine in two hired vans. They moved fast, far too fast along the Vavuniya-Mannar Road, no need this time for roadside stops beside other vehicles likewise defeated by the pilgrim traffic ahead of them. According to their ages, the girls complained they hadn’t had any road sweets or road toys, lagoon baths or smiles from any roadside Romeos. Their caravan was stopped only when they were very near Madhu, by two army jeeps parked in a chevron across the main road. A soldier came to the window and told the lead driver who turned and told Sam that there was trouble ahead, on the far side of Cheddikulam. Word was sent to Rose, riding in the second van, and word was sent back: Our Lady was waiting. Sam told the driver who told the soldiers who shook their heads until these mad fools actually gave them money and then, still shaking their heads but now counting the bills, the soldiers let them pass.
After driving through a ghosted Cheddikulam, the lead van came across two Tamil boys on push-bikes lolling back and forth across the main road as if it were long since theirs. As the lead van neared, honking, more boys began walking out of the bushes, un-slinging dead men’s guns and raising mother’s knives and jogging at them, waving them down, now running. The vans turned sharply and while they sped back toward the other checkpoint Rose baptized Zamarie from the vial of holy water she kept in her purse and then gave the screaming wet child more Cow & Gate formula to stop her crying and told the rest to stop their own screaming and crying and pray rosaries instead. Meanwhile, in the other van, Sam watched the boys coming at them, boys like none that he had ever known in his own hard-running days. They weren’t queued in a shipping agent’s office waiting to go out into the world and take what they could of it. They were already taking from the world, and all the world they wanted was here and now, was this line of road, this common patch of wind-tossed green. And if they could not keep it, then no one else would. Sam knew more: he knew he was too old to run anymore, but going home from Madhu in the safe, crowded van, he did not mind. At eighty-four, Sam Kandy had run enough, had taken and spent and broken and been given far more than enough to know what kind of races were run and won in vain. It was late, he was weary, yet he knew.
The decision was made not to sell tickets to Sam Kandy’s funeral. Sudugama itself was closed to the public for the day. Tour operators and upcountry hotels were informed and the evening before the cremation, two village boys went along the Kurunegala Road in a pickup truck to collect the nameboards that had been lining the way to and from the village these last fourteen years. Across the top of each it read ALL WELCOME / WILLKOMEN / AUYBOWAN and beneath was promised AUTHENTIC TRAD SRI LANKAN VILLAGE ATTRACTION 5 MI. AHEAD / 4 MI. / 3 MI. / 2 MI. / 1 MI. / 500 FT. / TURN! / PLS. COME AGAIN! Over the years more words were added, in curlicued and filigreed and bold black strokes. HANDICRAFTS, SPICE GARDEN, BUTTERFLY HALL, TRAD DAMSEL DANCE, TRAD MASSAGE, TRAD FIREWALKING DEMO, TELEPHONE, ELEPHANT RIDES, ELEPHANT HOUSE, ICE CREAM, SNAKE CHARMER, TRAD HOROSCOPES, GIFT-SHOP, TRAD LUNCH THEN WESTERN LUNCH then finally TRAD + WEST LUNCH, RESPLENDENT CLEAN TOILETS and eventually, when terms with the chief monk were reached, GUIDED TEMPLE TOURS. By 1999, there were still more letters: A/C, USD, GBP, & DEM, then EURO, then VISA AND M/C, and also postcard-sized renderings of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and the Deutschlandfahne and the Lonely Planet logo and the Sri Lanka Tourist Board’s seal of approval.
The village first opened as an attraction in 1985, as a compromise between Rose and Sam and the villagers, who had sent a delegation to the walauwa the year before, a day after the first and last Sudugama Annunciation Festival. On their way to the big house, the delegation had to pass the glass-boxed blue Virgin that had reigned over the village crossroads for two weeks. Bouquets of dried roses were tied with wires around her feet, and she was attended by papier mâché angels hanging down from the bulb-lit top while still more bulbs lined the edges and back wall of the box. The effect was like an electric waterfall, or the entrance to a Foreigners Only nightclub in Colombo. Yet there had been no opposition to the scandal of this Mother Christ buzzing and beseeching in a true old upcountry Buddhist village. There had been no opposition because there was no saying otherwise: the village had done very well in the eighteen years since Sam had brought Rose to Sudugama. They, the temple included, were living lives finer lit and firmer walled than their wattle-and-daub and lamplit fathers and grandfathers ever had. To all who stayed in the village had finally come better lives than the rutted bloodcourse of their meritless history, but there was something in that blood and history that had been offended by the festival, something other than pride of temple.
Rose had invited her family, etc., to the village to pass the Feast of the Annunciation because there would be no going to Madhu that year, given the country’s situation. Afterwards, the village delegation informed Rose that her family’s coming was not the problem. It was the etc., it was all the other pilgrims who’d come from Negombo and from Mount and from Chilaw, who stayed in tents and pavilions on the great green clearing where stall-men sold wood apple chutney and kites and shelf upon shelf of bright plastic guns, cars, weeping Virgins, and washing bowls.
Now no one minded the caravans lining the lanes whenever Rose had a baby, or when they visited for school holidays or before going on to Madhu in July in the years before the trouble, just as no one said anything, not even in the cement-smooth temple was anything said, when every second Sunday a Catholic priest came from Kandy town and said dawn Mass for Rose and the Marias in the walauwa’s inner courtyard and then stayed to breakfast and said grace before a true old upcountry meal. Speaking softly, out of respect for Sam, who seemed to be sleeping, the delegation asked Rose please to agree that no one had ever said anything about any of it, that her family had never but been welcomed in the village.
“But now?” Rose asked.
“Aiyo, please agree, Madam.”
“Agreed,” Rose said. “But now?”
“Madam, they looked in our houses.”
“Sorry?”
“They did not stay in the clearing. Your pilgrims came into the village and they looked in our houses. They asked how we made things, what we made, where we slept. They looked in our houses. They looked at our wash. They watched us make puja, make tea. Madam, they watched us eating. Your family has never done that, just as we have never looked in their vans, isn’t it? But these other people, they watched us eating.”
“What men, they meant no offence,” said Rose, imagining what these fellows would make of Negombo compound life if a face in a window was cause for a delegation to be sent. Back home, pregnancies could be announced before even conception. �
��They must have liked to see some of the old ways still going. I know my family likes that when they come. Our daughters tell of it in Negombo.”
“Yes but Madam your people have never treated us as if the way we sweep the house is something to watch.”
“But what if it is?” Sam asked, awake.
A week later, a meeting was called to discuss what parts of the old-time village might hold attraction for visitors. The meeting was held in vain. The people of Sudugama thrashed each other’s memories of what was old true village. And so, no choice. A professor was called. He was a very short man. He flared his nostrils as preface and conclusion to his statements. And when he was not telling them about the strange damp of a rainy day in Aberdeen, where he’d given a paper last year, or the familiar heat of stepping off the plane in Gainesville, where he’d given a paper the year before last, he smiled at their efforts to dispute him on certain aspects of Temple Paddy and Paddy Politics: Ceylon’s Upcountry Village Life, Pre-1948.
In time workers came and cut a fine wide roadway from the village crossroads to the great green clearing. Here the village was rebuilt in small. Sudugama became a charm bracelet of itself, of old-time huts with side-garden plots winding down from a water tank beside which was a pile of washing rocks. The huts were broken up by godowns fitted with cadjan roofs; to one side was the notion of a paddy field at whose edge grew rubber and areca nut and kitul; on the other side were a car park and a trenchline of bathroom stalls. Buddhas were liberally installed. The new village crossroads was dominated by a little walauwa that was erected across from a canopied stage where a bride and groom would stand and where damsels would dance their numbers to traditional music played on hidden cassette tapes because the professor thought the local tabla men did not rate. The night before the village opened for business, the paddy workers revolted, refusing to appear in loin-cloth before strangers. At remarkable cost, white swimming trunks were rushed in from the nearest hotel gift shop, which the paddy men tried to save for more auspicious occasions than pretending to their mud work, until they were threatened with replacement. Those villagers not selected to be villagers became ticket-takers and staffed the refreshment stand and the craft tables. The professor arranged for a rotation of his graduate students to work as guides. Three of Rose and Sam’s sons-in-law agreed to move their families from Negombo. One would be the chief managing director; another would be the operations manager; the third would handle the money. The outraged Marias still living in the walauwa, those of a dangerous age for public life, were strictly confined during operating hours, where they had to mind their nieces and younger sisters. And when she was not running the house, Rose helped her husband prepare for his own duties. Twice daily, Sam Kandy played the Ralahami.
What was left of Robert’s own clothes turned out to be an old moth’s feast found at the bottom of an almirah drawer. To the professor’s specifications, items were purchased from a traditional upcountry costume shop in Kandy town, which sat between a bookstore and currency exchange office on the first floor of the Queen’s Hotel. It rented out headman’s costumes for weddings, family portraits, twenty-first birthdays. It was also pleased to ship worldwide upon request, whether to London or Dubai, Scarborough or Brampton. Before each performance, Sam was wrapped above the waist in a heavy white cloth that reached his bare feet and was topped with a broad crimson band, over which was placed more red—a crimson-and-gold belt whose buckle was no smaller, no heavier than a child’s head and filigreed in golden leaves that made a courtyard around a crimson field of golden temple flowers. A pillow had to be fitted around his sunken old man’s waist to give the necessary effect of a village in prosperity.
While the professor’s graduate students over-explained to their tour groups in their loudest BBC English, villagers would come for audiences with the Ralahami in the little walauwa. They would pantomime shows of respect and be shown to graded stools by the servant, played by old wan Bopea standing behind him with a sun-shaped palm fan slumped against his shoulder. Raising his hand, the Ralahami would then direct the servant to give the petitioner a sheaf of betel or accept his offering of rice or coconut, fruit or spice. After the betel was sagely prepared and solemnly chewed to loud live tabla (at last, work for the spurned drummers), Sam would render pantomimed decisions to their pantomimed disputes, pantomimed commendations to their pantomimed reports, grant his pantomimed permission to their pantomimed requests to burn a field or marry.
With the audience trailing behind him, cameras snapping like grasshoppers, Sam would then make his rounds, first nodding at the bowing smiling women dressed in their best home-cloth, who then returned to their sweeping and winnowing; next witnessing a solemn family make puja before their home Buddha and give their solemn first son a glass of first milk on his eternal first day of school; then inspecting the smiling potter and weaver squatting in their chequered sarongs and squinting at their work, the shirtless carpenter leaning into his plane, the grinning metal-benders clowning with trick-bent rods. Lastly, Sam checked the health and promised wealth of the rice paddy farmed by shy-looking little men in bright white swimming trunks. He then led the audiences back to the village crossroads before walking back to the walauwa proper where he was changed, took a wash, and lay on the bed until his next call. The audience was meanwhile invited to enjoy a traditionally rigid wedding ceremony followed by a traditional village damsel’s dance while drinking thambili water through bright plastic straws. King coconut refreshments were offered at the beginning and end of all tours and were complimentary. A few years into the venture, when Rose’s cousin Jerry Fernando replaced the professor, they were sold separately. Everything was.
The first time he came, Jerry immediately saw how much better the operation would run with proper facilities, as supplied by his father’s firm, Resplendent Clean Co. (Pvt.). He could also see how much money Rose and family were losing, which he explained when he was allowed to address a directors’ meeting in the front room of the walauwa proper. By only charging admission, he pitched, they were missing how much more money the visitors would be willing to give over, to buy their own traditional drinks, their own leaf brooms and engraved pots and pirith strings and grinding stones and winnowing fans and washing bowls and betel-chewing sets, not to mention spice packets, vials of pure village toddy, devil masks, home-cloth curtains, and jute sacks of pure village rice small enough to fit in carry-on luggage, never mind what they’d pay for elephant rides, snake charmers, garden remedies, and Ayurvedic massage. Making a face like he’d just stepped in something, the professor noted a series of geo-historical inaccuracies in Jerry’s list of proposed souvenirs. In turn, Jerry informed the meeting that he’d just received a first-class certificate from the Ceylon Hotel School. As to the question of inaccuracies, he agreed and said the villagers could make a few display items, but the best way to ensure quality and satisfaction was for all items to be brought in from Colombo warehouses. The professor smirked that he thought Jerry’s expertise was in toilets. But the air in the room had already turned. No one laughed. And so his voice going higher and louder, the professor said he would not cite his own numerous degrees but he did wonder why the far more salutary possibility of offering a selection of historically sound pamphlets was not mentioned and then he concluded, his voice now whistling, now exploding like a bombed teakettle, that he had grave reservations about turning a project so true to his years of scholarly care into some Pettah stall Disney World!
“Exactly!” said Jerry and the professor left immediately, returning for his graduate students the next day. In time, they found more rewarding work with a proper folk-culture museum in Koggala.
“If you want to make money,” said Sam in his wake, “build a butterfly hall. See how many come then.”
And they came. Colombo people went mad for the place. In this village there were no cousins urging that you stay the night and sleep in the room with the new fan, begging that their middle sons be put up in your phantom spare room in your phantom big
house in the city so they could get phantom computer jobs and how can you refuse any of it, how can you, because who can forget when—and so would begin the great chronicle of good deeds and black deeds done for and against—and that was why you never went to the village unless someone died or was married, because in the village no one forgets, there is nothing to forget, because in the village everything always forever is. Whereas at Sudugama, history and memory and butterflies were conveniently located and reasonably priced, and also reachable by safe roads lined with newer rest-stations and only a few army checkpoints.
And they came. People from villages up and down the main road, who had grown up on Sudugama’s Sam Kandy stories. Some paid the S/L national rate and took the tour and always had a question for the guide that they mumbled only to each other, about when the tour would show the traditional village’s traditional motorcars and traditional cannibals; others simply hung around in the shady parts of the car park, cadging cigarettes and asking drivers trying to nap under newspaper sunshades about the size and strength of their engines, waiting for their friends to come from the tour and tell how much they were charging for the bronze pot that kept the old murdered Ralahami’s ashes, and which bright Barefoot curtain hid all the dead Hamines, and which pedestal Buddha held back those ten thousand Negombo Catholics.
Beggar's Feast Page 28
