Beggar's Feast (14 page)

Sam crossed York Street and stood behind a scrum of city workers gathered at a tea-stall. The rail-thin office boys and paunchy hotel uncles turned at his approach and turned back, turned in, closer together. The stall-keeper at his shoulder-wide counter stood tippytoe on an unseen fruit crate to follow their resumed talk across sipped tea and spat betel, their going back and forth over fat and lazy bosses with their ugly wives and rumoured pretty daughters; over fat hotel guests with wrongfully pretty wives but of course ugly daughters; over fat and bored English wives with husbands on circuit and ravaged kingdoms of marzipan and fondant creams for meantime company, or dangerous smiling holiday nieces; and sometimes over their own faraway waiting brides, often near-perfect strangers, or over wives sending unanswered, unanswerable letters from the village about how long more before next visit and how long more to live with witchy sisters-in-law and don't forget your waiting dowry daughter and your older-than-marriage-time daughter, your pretty daughter, your difficult daughter. Sympathy was freely poured during these late-of-day sessions, it cost less than hot water, and always the question came from somewhere young and free in the scrum.

“But uncle, and I am only asking because others like to know, is your difficult daughter so difficult because she is also your pretty daughter?”

Clapping and hooting, roaring and laughing, it all gave way to a dancing-for-drama silence, the rest of them swaying as one with expectation that family honour would now have to be defended. And it was, with an outraged father's mimed chops to the offender's neck and half-chases down the road and sometimes thrown tea and carefully worded jokes threats proposals to make the smart-mouthed beggar marry the daughter in question and see for himself just how difficult … actually how very pretty. Before long the laughing would quiet and the replays cease and the tea be finished and then it would just be standing around in daily Colombo noise, calls for hackney carts, constables' whistles, fruit and pots for sale, the wheeze of the city's new buses built for better roads and drier air and fewer people, the curse-storms of the conductors fighting over fares, the groan and clang song of the York Street trolleys, and through this all the air itself distending like heavy-coming rain for the men gathered at the tea-stall. Eventually, one of the them would have to mark aloud what was felt by all—not time itself, but boss-kept time, marzipan-feeding time, niece-strolling time, and so the scrum would break. In pairs and alone the men would stalk back to the rest of the day, the dead inside hours of nodding and smiling, the over-starched and sweat-stained honours and devotions of work in the city, work they boasted of or lamented over in their letters home, depending on how that morning's hours had passed, or what the tea-time martyr beside you had complained of, or what was reported threatened asked for in the latest letter from the village.

“Hallo, Mahatteya, tea for you please?”

“Right,” said Sam, stepping forward to the counter like he should have when he had first crossed the street. He felt strong of spirit suddenly.
Mahatteya
. How the weight of the world could tilt in your favour across the life of a word! He had been called Mahatteya, not malli: he looked like a sir, not a little brother.

Earlier that day, in the village, he had been standing high upon the wooden wedding platform and looking down upon them all barefoot upon the bare ground and squinting and smiling up, who to the ash of their fathers' fathers knew the respect they were supposed to give such time and place and people, and so were wearing their best temple white to behold the Ralahami's daughter in her bridal sari and bridal gold. One of them gave respect to the unknown bridegroom as well. The dirt that hit his shoulder broke to bits but it made the mark it was meant to: we know nothing of you, your family, or where you're from: you are matter out of place: this is dirt.

Though he'd live to one hundred, he would never know who threw it. His eyes had been long since elsewhere, locked on a latecomer among the well-wishers watching the girls of the village perform a damsel's peacock dance for the new couple. This latecomer had moved among them slow and certain, taking his time like a noon-hour crocodile, and he was wearing a yellow hat. The yellow hat from the Christmas crate Sam had sent from Sydney, from whole lives earlier. When he had come to see his father to send him south, weeks before, Sam had looked around the old dirt hut and seen nothing, absolutely nothing, from the great world beyond and decided that the crate never made it out of Colombo. It must have been breached in Pettah by some other B. who would have burned his letter before marvelling trading feasting on the hats and handkerchiefs of Sam's secret home-sent charity. But no. The crate had come home. Beyond his high-match wedding day, his own hard-won veneration, someone down there knew something of his fellow blood and soil. Or so he thought with man's supreme vanity—that your own hated fate is the turning world's axel and gravity. Because, thought the thought, why would whoever he was wear it to watch him high upon the wedding platform, save to yellow Sam's triumph? But no moment was forced, no payment demanded, no expiation given. The man in the yellow hat did not come forward during the rest of the village's respects. And so the dirt Sam was grateful for: it was something he could brush off and keep brushing off, it was right cause to step off the wedding platform and go to the big house and forgo seven days' feasting in the dry dead village for the day-long ride into the salt-loud city, a ride spent wondering would he ever be Ralahami and walauwa were his father, his horoscope, his first hut known and told? Now, finally now, with everything in place as he had wanted it, this older want—that his father have a sense of how far away his taken boy had gone, too far for any village crow to find him—had become a waiting vengeance. And far worse than any fat old crow: this was a crocodile among the mud and lilies, waiting secret and patient in its hunger, its greatest power knowing one thing more than the rest of the universe: when it would attack. And all Sam Kandy knew was that this was absolutely opposite the way life had run since he had run from the temple: this time, someone would come for him. Meanwhile it was his wedding night.

“Anything else, Mahatteya?”

“No. Right. Tea. Thank you.”

“Are you sure, Mahatteya?” Something in his voice.

“Sorry?”

“Mahatteya, I have worked in this tea-stall for many years.”

“Right.”

“Mahatteya, this means I have been here, across from the GOH, for many years.”

“Right, and I am staying in this hotel.” And I want to ask you, Sam said to himself, from still another life, anything but the near past and nearing future, did you ever hear of the Ratnapura gem trader who'd tried to take a whole floor of the GOH with a dirty ruby the size of a barbet's belly? Did you hear from out here the sound of his gem hammer on the registry book? Did you give him tea when they turned him out as a certain drunk and likely thief? Did you ask him what more he needed? Did you ask with something in your voice?

“But not staying alone, no?”

“You watched me arrive in my motorcar.”

“Yes. You arrived as two but only one has come.”

“Madam is … she is …” Sam was biting his bottom lip. What could he make of his new wife? Her name was Alice. She was city thin and village pretty. In the car she had studied the seatback and his shoulder, back and forth, like she thought she was to be examined on one or the other. She liked to hide in hotel furniture.

The stall-keeper smiled. “Madam is … resting, because it was such a long journey, and like any good gent you have come outside to give lady her time and space before, isn't it?”

Sam nodded and sipped his tea.

“Mahatteya, this is your wedding day, no?”

“It is.”

The stall-keeper leaned out and looked west, asked with his chin that Sam consider as well the later-day-light, the tea-stained redness of the sun-falling sky.

“Mahatteya, congratulations! Long life to you and your wife and many children and please, I want no money for the tea.” The stall-keeper motioned Sam closer. He dropped his voice. “But now is not your wedding day so much, is it.”

“How's that?”

“Now is nearly your wedding night, Mahatteya.”

“Mokatha?” snapped Sam, suddenly everything in full view.

“Please, I have kept this stall across from the hotel for many years, and helped my father here since I was a boy. Can you guess how many young men, none dressed so fine as you, have come here at this hour of their wedding days?”

Sam said nothing. He should have swallowed the rest of his tea and left. He could have poured it hissing upon the ground and left. He would have flung it across the counter and left and called for the motorcar and returned and left the stall a wreck of old wood and dry leaves and bloodred puddles, steaming spilt sunset. But he did none of it. Because if he did any of it, in time there would be nothing to do but the one thing he
had
to do this day, the one and only thing that, at epic-continental thirty, Sam Kandy had not yet done.

“Mahatteya, come this way, come this way,” the stall-keeper said, motioning to the side of his stall. Sam stepped around a green-stained city of old metal canisters, drooping stalks of shoeflowers, a sack of onions dropped against the wall like a drunk. The stall-keeper blocked out his front window with old crate-bottoms and met him wearing a city saint's smile, all sweet and sharp angles. “Mahatteya,” the man said again, and by now Sam hated the word, heard it only as a price quote for whatever was coming next. “I would like to help you with this.”

“With what?”

“That's what the bridegrooms always say.”

“You know this suit means nothing. I'll give you a thrashing just the same.”

“Yes, I know what you can give me. But I also know what you can give your bride!”

The stall-keeper's eyebrows moved like they were hooked to a fisherman's pole. He spread his hands across the scored surface of his counter and leaned down smiling, his face so composed that for a moment Sam worried that here was another expecting to be kissed.

“I must return to Madam.”

But his feet were suddenly so heavy. And York Street itself, from here to the hotel, suddenly seemed too much for a man who'd been walking city streets like they were his own paddy banks since he was fourteen. Besides, from this side of the stall he could not see his hotel window at all: he could not be seen. He lit a cigarette.

“Aiyo put that out will you! It'll shrivel you before you can even get started. Would you like to try a little watercress in hot water instead?”

“How's that?” Sam asked.

“If not watercress” —the rest of the words came fast—“I also have tea made from the bark of a kumbuk tree. Bitter but it rarely fails …”

He went on, trying every sure-fire remedy and success story he knew. But Sam showed nothing to watercress or kumbuk, or to the tale of an Englishman who had taken five cups of a particular concoction and had five handsome sons to show for it, five crowns of gold. While the stall-keeper spun, Sam dropped cigarette after cigarette, crushed each like this was some victory and eventually he plucked a flower from the tree beside him but memory had him here too. It was wet to touch like a Malay Street shophouse flower hanging between humid bedroom bricks, and Sam started shredding its petals between his thumbnail and first finger, petals that were either a shocked or a tired out pink-red, now splotchy Sydney cheeks.

“Ah, yes, I can also make shoeflower tea from those plants but that's for the woman, for when you don't want to marry her. It's called, you see, a cleansing tea, Mahatteya. Worried lover-boys and mad fathers come for it at dawn. Just yesterday the son of one of our finest Tamil speechmakers came and took. But not something you need today.” The stall-keeper's voice dropped. “Mahatteya, also, not here, but also, I have access to yellow oleander and to an even more potent one. What another of my English customers told me is called”—here he swallowed—“
Gloriosa superba
. The Glory Lily. Not an auspicious name, at least for the madam who takes any of it. Mahatteya, do you know about these flowers?”