Beggar's Feast (2 page)

“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.