Beggar's Feast (37 page)

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 grand 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?”