Beggar's Feast (19 page)

As for her own longing that Sam know the children as something more than twin toy boxes, that they know him as something more than the sound of a coming and going engine, it had long since passed into the opposite resolve: that they be raised in the village and by the village and for the village, fatherlovecitysweets aside. She never asked what he paid for any of it, the heaps of tissue-packed clothing and the cityscapes of biscuit and beef and condensed milk tins, the soaps and perfumes and colognes in shapes and bottles more ornate than most temple stones, the stacks of cigarettes and rag-headed dolls and white wooden soldiers and paintings of wintry animals. Her brother, bitter that the land was in her name and that it was now common knowledge in the village that he was as much of a foreign-schooled doctor as she was a happily married woman, once tried to ask her questions about Sam's work, only to have their father clear his cancer-shredded throat. And so Arthur never asked again, only mumbled along his requests for his own latest set of colours and sizes and cuts for when next Sam sent, all of it tied with enough parcel string to hang herself, her children, the whole village.

The first tea-stall they passed, Sam had Piyal stop the vehicle and walk to the rear of the house and bang on the plank-barred door until the owner came cursing and threatening and then smoothing his hair and almost skipping in the dark to reach the vehicle and take the money for his late-hour troubles. Sam stepped out of the car and faced his silent wife, sipping his tea.

Hours later, nearing Dambulla, Piyal stopped again but Sam leaned forward and said, “It's rain. It will pass. Drive on. Madam says to drive on. And when we get there, the first person you see from the village, tell. Point. Madam says to tell.” Alice said nothing. The world outside the Morris was bare bright sky, blowing dust, burning dry. Many people were walking past in twos and threes, their hands covering their mouths against the dust the vehicle kicked up as it stopped, or covering their mouths to keep talking with a rich man present. They were caught between two cartloads of protesters the second time Piyal stopped. This time Sam said it was monkeys throwing nuts. Alice said nothing. The twist-limbed Keena trees lining the roadway were empty of any life; what little there might have been had already been scared off by the crowds coming down the road all day and the day and night before. The people in the cart behind them were yelling for them to keep moving and the people in the cart ahead of them were dancing and clapping like the car's stopping was some kind of victory: theirs. The third time Piyal stopped, a stone hit the rear window on Alice's side and cracked the filmy pane five ways, making a claw-print out of the glass. Like some blade-footed animal had just climbed over them. Alice jumped and in the same motion turned in to Sam who by the same animal reflex put his arm around her shaking frame, crushing her sari against his suit.

With the engine cut, they could no longer pretend the chanting ahead of them was just strong wind in the trees. Hundreds of the others going to Dambulla for the May Day workers' rally milled past. The greatest number were the village poor walking in the white they otherwise kept for temple days; there were also handfuls of teapluckers dressed their best from head to hennaed feet; and, fewer still, city labourers smoking beedis, dressed in nothing other than the scandal cloth of their daily toil, pied and grimed by blood and spit and sweaty dirty fingers, everything tattered and torn by too many things to recall and where was the money to patch or buy a new anything let alone to eat or feed? All of which was why they, why all of them, had come by train-top and airless bus to rally at Dambulla. Some stared in at Piyal and Sam and Alice as they passed, others made a show of not doing so, whether from fear it was their plantation boss or factory owner, or from pride that they were part of something this day that was more powerful than any man with a motorcar. There were, no doubt, also a few who were half staring to see if any of the stones they'd been throwing at the Morris since it had first passed them had done any damage.

Alice sat up and smoothed her sari as she moved away from Sam to stare back, through the clawed glass, looking through its refracted violence for any of her villagers in the approaching crowd and wondering about what her husband had warned of before they had left the walauwa the night before. Just how many of those men would like to put their hands around her throat and shake free its gold? Sam leaned forward to tell Piyal to drive on. Sam leaned forward again and this time said Madam is fine and Madam said to drive on, and so they went.

When they reached Dambulla, Sam told Piyal to park under the tallest tree they could find in the town square, a bushy-headed talipot in full flower. The first men to rush the car were three Englishmen, cricketers who had come to town that morning for a friendly by the lake. Their faces in the windows looked far past irritated that they'd lost a fine day for their innings—they looked like terrified, exhilarated children happy to be found alive in a sudden evil snow. But then they saw Sam and Alice in the backseat, and a blue-eyed driver in front. Whatever this revolt against reason and order and white man was, it had already begun. They fell away from the Morris and decided without debate that the only rightness remaining was to return to the grounds and wait out their fate in the well-stocked clubhouse. Provided it had yet to fall to native rot, they would wait there, fortified with gin and sandwiches and practice bats, for whatever came next.

“You saw their faces,” said Sam. “Englishmen. And even they are afraid to be caught in this crowd. And still you want to get out of the vehicle and look for your villagers?”

Alice said nothing and for the second time in his adult life Piyal spoke first.

“Madam, please, Mahatteya is right. Please stay in the vehicle and let Mahatteya go.”

“And Piyal will stay with you, won't you Piyal,” Sam said to Alice. But he could tell nothing in her face at mention of the boy's staying with her. Meanwhile, Piyal tried to catch Madam's eye, to tell her with his staring that yes he would protect her from
all
of them if she stayed in the motorcar. More even. For years he had gone to bed sending the Mahatteya on a southbound train, just as Sam Kandy had once done to Henry Paulet's other servants. And now, in Dambulla, after the Mahatteya got out Piyal would drive the Morris anywhere she wanted, whether back to the village or down to the city and the harbour and straight onto the jetty and hammering up one of the rusted wide ramps they banged into place when they were unloading buses from London or sending elephants to the American circus and the two of them would wait there until they heard new harbour birds and then drive down another ramp into another weather, into a whole other life where, he was certain, his blue eyes would get him a brown-eyed driver and a position in a bank and her her her.

But Alice said nothing. Her face was all and only readiness to show Sam what she was willing to do herself, readiness born of her blood-rushing conviction that when she walked through this crowd it would give way as it ought to, and that soon they would be returning to the village with the shamefaced runaways trailing home behind the car. She only had to find them. She made for the door and Piyal jumped out to open it for her and Sam followed but Alice did not wait for him to go first. She walked right into the crowd, which was hot and hungry and bored, a terrible three things for a crowd to be.

Sam made his way through the masses, trying to match Alice step for step, and failing. The others would give way no more than the span of her fine white shoulders and immediately close when she passed, before he could step into her forward wake. So much for revolution, he thought. Still, even following behind her, he was impressed, envious that she did not have to push through as he had had to everywhere he had come and gone. He was also certain they would find no one from Sudugama because they, the hundreds upon hundreds of gathered villagers, looked each and every one the same: the same round brown faces made darker by day upon day in the sun-beat fields, too dark to look or feel worthy of any greater life than another day in the same field unto death and the same for their children's children; faces that seemed near-black as good dirt against the white clothes they had worn to come here, let alone against the whites of their eyes or their bent chipped teeth those rare times they looked back at you or spoke in your presence, because otherwise these were faces that had been made constant in their downward glances by year upon year of working those sun-beat fields, and by generations of respect for the rock-face logic of blood and stars and caste, a marrow respect for those who were born of the merit of past lives into lives set above their own, whose fields they had come into this latest life to work. And so they had been persuaded to come here to Dambulla, on May Day, leaving fallow their known world, to be told why such toil and such respect were history and headmen's ongoing outrages against them, outrages to be rallied and chanted and marched against until stopped. And as one grand body they had been all day ready, even roaring in agreement. The courage that comes of hearing your voice as a thousand voices. And yet, when a fair-skinned walauwa lady wearing an old-time sari walks straight toward you and suddenly you're only one person and she's trying to catch your eye and know your face, you do what you were born to do: you break stride and drop your head and wait to the side until she passes and meanwhile you hope she has no cause to linger. And, when she's walked on, you wonder who it was in the suit that shoved by after her, his black eyes staring like a crow following a squirrel he wants the world to know is already his.

The Sudugama villagers saw her before she saw them. They were waiting their turn at a water tap where a local woman, supremely indifferent to the thirsty dusty marchers around her, was crouched on the smooth rock ledge that circled the stone-pillared spout, washing each of three naked little boys who were puffing their cheeks and chests to think that all of these people had come here to watch them take their day's wash. When one of the people from Sudugama, a weaver, saw Alice coming, dressed as she was, he remembered the walking-to-temple stories his grandmother used to tell. He was certain this had to be the ghost in the high grass behind the walauwa, the ribbon-haired Hamine of many years before, who had disappeared on her eldest daughter's wedding day some time after no one particular villager had poisoned her husband the old Ralahami because he had tried to send the village's men to Road Ordnance duty. Of course, thought the weaver, the ghost was returned to life all these years later because now, finally, in coming here for this, the villagers were again killing the walauwa people. But then the weaver saw Sam's dark shape walking behind her and knew it was Alice, and his ghosted, guilty imagination collapsed as he muttered “Amata siri.” Hearing him, the others looked up and saw her coming with the husband and cried “Apo!” and with the next breath every single one of them began to accuse and blame everyone else for tricking them into travelling here. They talked over each other, their road-dusty arms chopping the air to lend the right rhythm and threat to their louder and louder claims, all of which ruined the three little water-clowns' washing-day performance, who whined to their mother who had before been amused by the crowd's fighting but now broke squat to curse the whole lot for coming to her town and carrying on like this. How disrespectful! she scolded, especially so near the sacred cave temples and of course. Of course! Every one of them had the same story one breath later: they had only come from Sudugama to Dambulla on pilgrimage.
May Day? What is May Day
? Someone had offered them seats in a bus and they had accepted only because it meant they could go and come home faster than otherwise. Before Alice could reach the water tap they were already walking away, solemn to temple, rushing to the caves.

The tap's water was running clear and what she was wearing was so heavy, was meant for sitting and fanning, not for searching through blowing dust and thronged crowds and the high heat of midday. But she could not drink because there was no time Sam said, after ordering off the cursing local and her three boys and then taking a long splashing sip himself, slurping the water from his flat palm like any villager might, as if he was himself born to such low drinking. There was no time for her to drink as well, Sam repeated, now with a fine cold throat, his hand resting on the tap's round stone cap like it was his prized pupil. And besides, how would it look for the Hamine to sip like a washerwoman?