Beggar's Feast

Chase away a little bird, putha, only a little bird. It looked more like a winged dog, waiting for him at the far side of the great green clearing. His father was standing beside the man who’d come to the hut and eaten all their lunch the day before. His mother and brothers and sisters and the new baby were also there, and one of his grandmothers, who was given a stool. She carried a little rag and always wiped her mouth before and after she spoke. The baby was crying. His father motioned him over and opened and closed his palm long enough to show him a piece of jaggery. Then he pointed at the bird and the boy ran right at it. On his eighth birthday, the crow was waiting at the same place behind the village. His father showed him two pieces and the boy ran again. As he neared, the bird lifted and jumped forward, directly at him, once more sending him glancing to the side. But this time, when he turned to face his father, he had to watch him feed his promised sweets to two of his brothers, who were jumping up and down at their sudden good fortune. He decided that would not happen again. At nine, they went to the field with a bowl of curd and treacle, and a newer baby crying, and no grandmother, and with everyone cheering he sprinted at the crow through a stretch of limp yellow grass no longer knee high. His heart lifted as the bird went off at his approach but it resettled not ten steps away. He looked to his father, who was looking to the keeper for a ruling. The boy would not wait. He ran at the bird again, who lifted over another few feet, then again, and again, and soon he was running useless figure eights across the great green clearing, his eyes burning with sweat and tears and dirt, and they were all laughing and eventually he fell and the bird, the bird actually hopped closer to him. It seemed to be considering him with its bead-black eyes, as if to say Hard luck. See you next year, but it was only watching his father, who knelt beside the boy, lifted his chin, and pointed at the crow. He wanted to say to him Sorry Appachchi but instead watched his father dump the bowl of white curd onto the dry brown ground. The bird’s beak gleamed.

He’d been six-plus when the dry time had first descended on the village. Every family needed someone to blame. They took him to the astrologer’s hut, which always occupied the most auspicious of the four corners of the dry dirt square where the village’s two lanes met. Villagers had lately been queuing in greater numbers to see her. She asked less than the nearby temple monks and their bottomless stomachs, and besides horoscopes, she could also read palms. After first uncoiling his birth-hour scroll and showing his parents a future tattooed with empty houses and empty marriages, she took the boy by the wrist and traced the lines already creasing his small hands—hunger, poverty, rage. The boy was then sent from the hut, where he met other families’ blights: a granny who peed herself while he waited, and a girl with milk-white eyes, another with a creviced lip, and also an uncle who giggled while smelling his wrists. But he had ten fingers and ten toes. He hunted snakes and could climb almost any tree his brothers could. Why was he here? Meanwhile, the astrologer told his parents that this was a son never meant to be born in the middle of a family. She said he would never give when he could take, never serve when he could be served. He should have been born first or last.

What will he do to us? his mother asked.

Ruin you, she answered.

What can be done? his father asked.

I’ll send my husband to see you.

As was his known habit in the village, the astrologer’s husband came calling just as his mother was getting the lunch—rice, a thumbprint of dried fish for his father’s plate, dhal, and limp long slices of salt-and-peppered papaya and combs of finger-long plantains. Plantains were the only food the children were allowed to eat as they pleased. His father gave his plate to the visitor.

He looks too young, I am telling you. I can’t take a man’s money when he has so many to care for, and at such a terrible time for everyone, no? The crow-keeper swept his dhal-dripping hand across the reedy children, all of them watching him with mud-brown eyes.

Doesn’t matter, his father answered. Tomorrow he is seven. We have heard of others who have chased the crow at this age. Who’s to say, maybe he will too, no? At least to try, what harm?

Only harm is the cost.

Which is?

Not payable with a plate of rice and curry.

No, it’s an honour to have you share our table. About paying, it’s like this. His father bagged up his sarong between his legs. I’d like to pay you, of course. But also, if you’re interested—

I’m not.

Right.

His father took him walking that evening. He couldn’t think of what for, this private time together. As they passed through the village, dusk and a long day’s work draining it of all colour, his father ruffled his hair, then found a piece of sweet jaggery in one of his ears and popped it into the boy’s mouth. Joyfully sucking on this hard miracle, he didn’t think they were eating such delights even in the great walauwa itself.

Tomorrow, putha, do you know what day that is?

Appachchi, he slobbered, before shifting the sugar rock to the other side of his mouth, another piece?

Soon, baba, soon. Tell me, putha, what day is tomorrow?

Birth day.

And how old are you turning?

Se-ven. A gob of sweet spit dripped from his mouth.

And do you know what that means? It means you must show all of us what a big boy you’ve become! Tomorrow in the clearing you will see a little bird, putha, only a little bird, and you must run at it like the big boy you are and chase it off. We will all be watching and cheering you. Will you do this for your Appachchi?

What will you give me if I chase the bird, Appachchi?

His father nodded. A son who would never give when he could take.

When he was ten, the village was still in a very bad way. A fourth year of poor paddy: cracked mud lands, the village water tank a puddle of itself, the men broadcasting useless seed, the silo empty of all rice and grain and echoing like bellies. People were accusing each other of evil eyes and bad mouths. Jungle papers covered the tree trunks, so many that when the anonymous accusations were read, the sound was like an army walking through leaves. The astrologer was chased off and brought back, chased off and brought back. Pirith ceremonies became so commonplace that monks were yawning in the middle of their chanting against these dark days. The walauwa people, who had misfortune enough in their own history, as the old ones in the village sometimes lamented, sometimes cackled about, were made to suffer again. A rich fisherman from down south came to buy the family lands, and the servants said the Ralahami had him chased off only because the figure was too low. Then, a few months later, his wife, the pretty Hamine, died in her first childbirth: twins, a boy and girl, Arthur and Alice. The Ralahami cursed both babies.

On his tenth birthday, his father walked him over to the great green clearing wordless and empty handed. Twenty words hadn’t passed between them that year. The crow-keeper approached like an old friendly devil. He took the boy close and tried to give him an avocado nut to throw at it. The keeper had grown a grand belly in recent times, which inclined him to be merciful to those he’d seen more than twice. But the boy walked straight past him. This old ugly bird, also slick and fat from years of good work, didn’t even watch him coming. Only the boy didn’t run this time. After hundreds of nights of plotting under the broadcast stars, the jurying heavens, he had decided that he wouldn’t chase this bird into the air. He would stomp it into the ground. He would do it slowly and absolutely. The crow cleared the treetops before cawing its offence. Turning back triumphant, the boy passed the keeper calling after the bird in vain. That night the keeper left the village and was never called back. Alone, the astrologer held out for another week.

His father met him and cupped his chin. He told him that he was such a good boy. His ears burned. His father said more. He said the boy had done an auspicious thing for his family name and that it would be remembered. As they returned to tell his mother, his father said that the next morning he would get his reward. He promised that it wouldn’t be more jaggery and curd, and at this they laughed together like men, and the boy almost forgot how he had wanted to grind his heel into that bird until its blue-black wings snapped. The next day, at dawn, in fresh rods of joyful rain, the half-sleeping child was bundled into a bullock cart, his head pressed against his proud father, who murmured of prizes as they went forth. Who broke no branch when they passed from the village into the world. Who, at the gates to the great temple at Kandy town, pressed down on his shoulders until he knelt and then pointed at the dry red ground in front of a smiling saffron man. And when the boy stood and looked back and called for him, it was raining and his father was gone. And so he was taken to robes and shaved to skin to begin a new life of desire and suffering, defeat and triumph, from which would come another, and another, and another, and then, at last, after one hundred years of steel and pride, fever and speed, another.

For the three years of his temple life, he was questioned by the other boys after evening prayer. Was it a lady’s finger, drumstick, chicken bone, green bean, crab leg, crow’s beak, cow’s tit, dog’s tail, bandicoot? Are they green gram or peppercorns, peppercorns or rambutans, rambutans or thambili, thambili or durians? He would say nothing. They decided his silence meant he actually enjoyed it. When one day he saw his teacher laughing to talk to another apprentice monk, his hand upon that boy’s head and that boy smiling, he had wanted to run and fight him down to the ground. Lying upon his mat that night, black and quiet and thirteen years old, he had stomped and triumphed in his head until it was only he and his teacher again and when he woke it was with a wretched longing, such a wretched longing, and he knew then that there was nothing to do now but wait for another lesson time or once more run and fight and triumph from this life unto the next.

It rained the morning he went forth, the way it did every year in the weeks before the grand relic procession. The sky was blue like an Englishman’s eyes. The sun was holy white. Water came down from unknown clouds but it cleaned nothing. It only turned the temple’s red grounds darker, a bloody brown, and when the storm finished, the immediate heat warmed it. His feet smudged into that darker redness as he made his way along the stone walkway to the shady timber hall where he knew he would find his teacher alone at the hottest time of day, seated behind a pale yellow pillar scored from centuries of sudden rain. He turned his heels and wiped his soles as he climbed the old chipped steps. The boy wanted his feet stone smooth for what they had to do.

No lessons just now, Squirrel. Sadhu is cooling, the monk said, as the boy held his breath and knelt on the rough rock floor to give respect. The monk smiled, twittering his toes. A few days after he’d been left at the temple gate, the boy heard another whispering that monks’ feet smelled like tins of cheese. It was 1909 and he didn’t know what a tin of cheese was, he would not ask, and in his three years of temple life, he never found out.

Not asking for lessons, Sadhu, he said, rising. I have come to make you a present.

But who comes empty handed promising gifts, Squirrel? the monk asked, resting on his elbows, knees lolling at a wide angle. Considering him. Smiling. Opening things up.

This is my gift, Sadhu. He dropped his robe and went forward too fast for the monk to slam his knees together. After three years, he knew where to kick. He made sure Sadhu’s crusty peppercorns got some of his heel too.

Ooh sha squirrel … Ackguh … Magee Amma!

Mother was the last word he heard as he ran down the stone steps bare-bodied save for the white cloth that hung about his waist. He cut across the grounds toward the front gate. Temple flowers lay about from the last Poya day, limp and browned. Rain was falling again, piping through white light and blue sky. Running past the royal lake, his body made a streak upon the still water. Blackbirds were perched upon the highest clutch of a sunken Mara tree. Throats pulsing, eyes black and shining, they watched him pass. When finally he had to stop for breath, he was taken for a most holy young beggar by passersby who noticed that he didn’t even have a bowl to beg with. Clasping his hands and dipping his head in taught humility, he was well fed within the hour, cinched a new sarong at his knees, and barefoot went walking down the Kandy Road.

On the way to Colombo, he became a blank slate for bullock cart drivers. The nervous ones decided that he had an honest face and asked that he keep watch for thieves and monkeys. The guilty ones divined his bullet head and beggar’s bowl to mean they were gaining merit for their next lives by helping a wayward young monk home to temple. The lonely ones saw their own sons in him. He didn’t care, so long as they let him ride. His feet throbbed. His head ached from squinting through long hours of sunlight. Climbing into the carts, he would crawl into straw-smelling narrows where it was darkest and coolest and then stretch his legs in search of lighter air for his feet. More than once, he just moulded his body onto heaped bags of rice. There he’d sleep suddenly, deeply, until someone slapped his ankle and waking in a fragrant rage he was roughly helped down to the ground, rubbing his eyes to life, already walking again.

He took his last ride on a cart loaded with English furniture that once belonged to a planter’s favoured servant, a childless hoarder now dead, whose mad passion for northern wood made his nearest relations true believers in its worth. Hoping to marry off their daughters with good dowries, the driver told him as he climbed in, they were now sending all of it to a nephew in Colombo who knew about such things. He found an armchair balanced between the upturned legs of other chairs. He pulled it free and cleared a space at the far side of the cart. From the Kandy side of Ambepussa to the nephew’s address in Colombo, he watched as a new green expanded in the cart’s creaking wake, a countryside milder in its rise and fall, thinner of trees, brighter in sky and more peopled than the world of home had been. He felt no urgency of what he might do when he reached the city. There were so many people there already. Colombo could take one more.

In the village, everyone always gathered whenever boys actually came home from the city. They always returned in dark trousers and collared white shirts, their arms carrying city things, their mouths too full at last of mother food to answer father questions. They brought a folded set of shirt and pants for their fathers, who either wore the gift to tatters or died before finding a worthy enough occasion. They gave bolts of fabric to their mothers and older sisters, who argued over how many saris were there. They brought bouncy balls for little brothers and yarn-headed dolls for little sisters. They never had anything for their older brothers, only sometimes a handkerchief for their wives, scented with lavender and the hope of envy. They would leave their grandmothers with foreign-stamped envelopes mailed from England itself; their mothers, with chipped china slipped out of Colombo hotel kitchens for their First-of-the-Year milk rice and with shortbread tins smelling of metal and butter—treasure boxes for old proposal letters, coiled horoscopes, morsels of wedding gold. Once, a boy brought home a framed picture of the young Queen Victoria, the cloudy glass cracked above the peak of her beak-like nose. Bugs entered through the break and took up residence along her milk-white collarbone. He remembered his brothers laughing about it. The boys who lived with the Queen heard and challenged. They had fought on the great green clearing behind the village, in a humid birdcall silence. While the others clawed and kicked, he had knelt in damp dirt, pressing his head against his enemy’s knee, the bigger boy twisting his arm, burning the skin until he said Mercy. He’d bitten his lip until it bled instead. And if all these returning boys could come home each with so much, he knew he would be able to get enough for himself, more even. And were he ever to return to the village, he promised himself, the world, he’d return like it had never been done before.

But what would he call himself in the city? Malli had been enough to get from the temple gate to the city outskirts, but he did not want a new life as just another sweet little brother, just another weary smiling street-side boy born to be helpful, waiting to be helped. He had been called Ranjith at home, but no one had called him that since he had been sent to the temple, where he was formally Samanera and less formally, in the empty audience hall those dead afternoons, Squirrel. Shortly before his departure, the other boys had learned of Sadhu’s pet name for him. They had used it without mercy. His teacher had told him that he would get a new name upon becoming a full monk. He would be a Sadhu then too, and his priestly surname would be the name of his birth-village. But he would never be a full monk, and he could think of no cause to honour Sudugama, and so when he was asked his name by the Colombo nephew who received the dowry furniture, he just said Sam.

And what’s your father’s good name?

My father doesn’t have one.

Why is that?

He’s not good enough.

You would disrespect your father to a complete stranger! Who is this tamarind mouth you have working in the back here? The nephew called over the driver, who had been happy to drink a lime-juice and let Sam unload the furniture.

He’s not mine. Malli only wanted a ride to Colombo.

What village are you from? the nephew asked him.

I’m here now.

So why have you come?

Sam jumped off the cart, head down, carrying the furniture into the stall.

Stop this or I’ll give you a thrashing. I have no money for you.

I only want a little space.

This is Colombo. There is no space.

I’ll help you in your work.

And what’s my work?

The driver says you’re to sell this furniture for your family.

And you think that’s my work? The back half of the nephew’s stall was dark. He sounded amused by his own question.

I don’t care what you do for your work.

Good. This is Colombo.

Those daughters waiting on dowry money must have died spinsters. Nothing was ever sent back to the village. The nephew, who was named Badula and went by B., sold off whatever he didn’t keep for himself. B. was a street hustler businessman whose every decision was made to get more money and more mutton, as he called it. He was five or six years older, his every way and feature curved and narrow like the husk of a coconut flower, and they were more than once mistaken for brothers after Sam began trailing him around the glorious cutthroat bedlam that was Pettah. Sam Kandy’s education into the world began in those bright and steamy knife-edge streets, where everyone with something to sell was the last honest man in Colombo, where the rest of the city went by tram and rickshaw to look and take what they would and escape home hoping they had not been taken for too much. Pettah stank and gleamed with spices and gold, with fruit money flesh. B. had a finger in anything he could pry open or plug. He borrowed, he lent, he fenced. He immediately liked the look and feel of Sam standing behind him as he conducted his business and so took him everywhere. More, he liked the audience the boy gave him those nights it was only the two of them in the stall, alone with its few moulding and stained pieces of once fine furniture and the mad piles of rusting kettles and crudescent frying pans that were B.’s outward concern. On such nights, B. rose and fell with remembering while they fell asleep on the dank floor. He recounted his sad life in the village as the loyal, wronged son who had had no choice but to leave. It was the same morality play every time, and it was too familiar from the first. When I was a boy, I thought my father

B.’s second story, his heroic flight, was Sam’s reward for suffering the first. He left his village, near Dambulla, and made his way northeast to Trincomalee, where he eventually found work carrying crates of tea onto British ships. The older boys already on the job tried to scare him away. They told him about a Frenchman’s ghost that had haunted the docks since before even the Dutch had come. Sometimes, they said, this bloodied sailor would sway to the sad music of two drowning sisters calling for help in vain, Tamil girls who had kept him back from his departing ship for a dance lesson, none of them knowing that their brothers were watching. But B. kept carrying the crates. One day, a few months into it, he walked up a gangplank and unloaded but this time kept walking forward, an endless banner of sea blue and blue sky stretching before him. He turned at the first quiet corner and tripped over two fellow stowaways. He suggested they move deeper into the ship. One boy whispered back that he was trying to trick them and the other motioned for him to go. Ten minutes later he heard them begging for mercy as they were thrown off. He was himself sent off at Galle, his arms bent back so far he swore his elbows actually touched for a moment.

B. spent a year in that southern city. At the rail station, he fought others as hungry and ready as he was to carry trunks for white people; on starched Sunday mornings he waited outside their fortress churches with a dirty snappy monkey that their children begged money from their fathers to play with; for two days he worked for a buffalo farmer with two pretty daughters; eventually, he ran messages for a blind Moor and his seven miserable sons. They lived and worked along Havelock Street and they always made him shake loose his clothing and curl his tongue before leaving their stalls, even the blind one did.

The next time he tried for that infinite banner of sea blue and blue sky, he was pushed down the gangplank at Colombo harbour. An old uncle helped him to his feet and said that if he tried again, he’d meet the gangplank in Negombo, or Jaffna town, then it would be Trincomalee, then Batticaloa, next Matara, then Galle, and back to Colombo. For years, the uncle whispered, the British had been sailing ships around Ceylon just so boys like them would never see the far white rim of the deep blue water. B. asked the old man how long he’d been trying and he grinned to show the number of teeth he’d had knocked out. And so B. went into the city. Two years later, once he’d taken over a kitchen-goods stall in Pettah under circumstances he never clarified, B. sent word and a biscuit tin to the village: He was presently in Colombo, where he had made a name for himself and could take care of anything.

Including furniture, said Sam.

That’s right. Of course, you know how furniture lets me take care of my other business!

Other business? I thought you called it mutton.

What Sam, didn’t you see the one that came last night? Sha! She was soft as lamb.

Most days they moved around Pettah, hopping piles of bullock dung along the Saunders Place Road and making mad mirror faces at the beaming children riding inside the trams buzzing down Main Street. B. invited any woman who held his glance to come to his stall. He’d tell them to forget Don Carolis and his timber shed: if they visited B. they would see furniture that had once belonged to the Queen of England herself. The kind of women who came on such terms were also the kind of women who didn’t mind that a fourteen-year-old boy was lying a few feet away. Early the next morning, after they made B. his tea, the women slipped past Sam looking sunken and sad and also ridiculous—they took dented kettles and rusted hopper pans with them to avoid scandalizing the indifferent street. When Sam officially woke up, B. would sometimes show him how he’d used the furniture the night before, how he’d propped the girl onto the peeling top of a child’s dresser or had her hold a washstand’s towel rack and lift her blossomy bottom. B. detailed his nightly victories out of boastful charity; he said he knew Sam could only hear, never see. But what Sam could hear was enough. He learned that chairs creaked and sometimes cracked while dresser drawers scraped and eventually shook; he learned that a woman gives a different cry at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, and, sometimes, a while afterwards, when the only other noise is a sleeping man’s innocent sawing. One night B. came over to him with a slip of a Malay girl who had hair that fell past her buttocks in a raven sheaf. B. yawned that he was too tired for a second go but Sam could have a try. The girl jiggered her eyebrows in the carried light of a bottle lamp and he felt something stir but then he felt tight and scalloped around his abdomen and the rest of him felt squeezed and knocked about and so wordless he turned over to their laughing. He fell asleep, eventually, to the girl crying, trying to annihilate memory itself.

Sam decided mutton could wait, but not money. After a year of apprenticeship, he only wanted his mentor to loan him a little so he could lend out himself. And if not a loan to start making and collecting his own, then why not give over one of the yellow-brown stone chains B. was always rubbing in his pockets? Each, as Sam discovered while listening to him conduct his business, had been given to B. by one of his many dead mothers, who had begged him on their assorted deathbeds to sell it to a good man so that any number of poor daughters could be cured buried or married. But the more successful B. became, the more Sam heard promises that he’d get his chance, and in the meantime the more devoted, grateful, and servile he was expected to be: happy to fetch packets for B.’s lunch, proud to be B.’s bucket man.

B.’s stall lost the back quarter of its roof to the southwest monsoon season