Beggar's Feast (20 page)

In silence they followed the rising pathway that ran along the base of the rock face until they reached the temple's entryway, a long white verandah. The Sudugama people had long since passed inside, hands cupped full of frangipani bought beside the stall where they left their sandals in a pile like many others, each a tumbled pyramid of thin cracked leather. They went into the holy darkness complaining about the injustice of the flowers they were carrying, offerings they had purchased for far too much because their eyes were darting everywhere else in search of the bright catch of her gold bangles in broad daylight. How expensive, how wilted, how limp were the petals, like heat-sick children, and even in the shade of the temple's verandah and the candles and ledge light of the caves you could tell the flowers were already browning. Bad omen bad omen bad omen. How much better—whiter, fuller, cheaper— were the temple flowers to be had back home! How much better if they were there now and had never heard of workers' rights or been promised the future. But at least now when she found them, they would be in prayerful repose. If she found them: the caves were large and many and crowded with others in white, their palms also made into cups of bloomed once-white. If she found them: she had come with the husband and everyone knew he would never stay long enough for them to be found: since his wedding day he always looked ready to leave.

Foul that Alice walked so slowly and that he had to go into a temple now, Sam paid a smiling malli to hold his socks and shoes— the man was in fact older than Sam but had from birth been barefoot and curved sharply along the spine, born to be helped and helpful. Handing them over, Sam made it clear that he was paying for his shoes and socks and for nothing else: Alice would have to leave her sandals in one of the piles of village sandals because she had come here to respect the old ways, the stinking piled-up old ways. Dambulla temple felt nothing like the grand temple at Kandy town where he had been dropped by his father that rain-joy ginger-toed morning years before, nor was it like the small white temple by the village. And still, walking barefoot along the pebbly passageway that led to the sacred caves, his feet cool and pricked by so many little stones, he would have turned and run from this blackness of memory and devotion. Monks, old and young and even one as young as he had been, nodded and smiled like cats as he passed, no doubt waiting for him to drop his wallet and wife's gold in their beggar's bowl.

In the first cave, his heel crushed dropped flowers as he followed her in. His every necessary breath was a sweet full nausea of squished flowers, body sweat, lamp oil, Tiger Balm, oiled hair, and child's mess. His eyes suffered more: everywhere in here were Buddhas awaiting his devotion: stone and gold, seated and reclining; one was a recumbent giant; fifty small ones were arrayed in gold; and hundreds upon hundreds were painted upon the smooth stone walls. In the second cave they were seated row on row in a fading field of saffron and cinnabar lotuses, their composed faces lit up by candles and oil lamps and revealed in their greatest number whenever clouds cleared and fuller sunlight filled an archway. Room to room Sam followed his wife, burning only more to face more and more of them. They had been here, like this, for centuries, fixed upon the walls, carved in stone and gold, unchanging, no trajectory, nothing to run from, nothing to run to, only summit. Master of the world. In the third cave, arcing bands of sunlight showed more than Buddhas. There were also frescoes of brave kings and handsome warriors whose devotions and victories won them places beside the holy men. Sam ignored the images of kings kneeling before monks, their hands full of flowers and gems. What caught him were paintings of great men shooting arrows at unseen enemies, riding white horses upon crimson fields, walking upon strewn white flowers beneath copper parasols, or sitting on jewelled chairs at the centre of a fixed and jewelled world of grateful wives and loyal children and loyal servants bearing lamps on staves and pitchers of water and baskets of grain and flowers, and meanwhile, to the side, mild elephants were waiting to move the world as was commanded. These were fixed constellations of men made immortal at the height of their trajectories. Assured, arrived, served. Storied. As he walked on after his crowded-in wife to still another room, his teeth grit, his hands opening and closing like a virgin assassin, Sam wondered if Alice was really looking for the villagers. Was she in truth leading him in and out of these places to show him what he could never be? To show him so much legend upon the walls, all these fixed, these jewelled, these jurying stars?

He nearly knocked her down going into the last cave, he was walking so close behind. Not Sam, but a would-be guide. Alice had already ignored his mealy offers of a tour and then his mealier launch into explanations of whatever statuary or fresco she'd earlier passed, and she had ignored his questions as to her needs—cool drink, nicest fruit, a shaded escort from the temple to the town square whether by foot or carriage he could arrange anything to suit Madam's needs—half because she was searching the worshippers for any face that, seeing hers, would go pop-eyed and blank and so be caught before it had time to look away, and half because such was the very world she had come here to maintain, a world where a woman like Alice did not speak to a man like this. Pretending not to hear was how to deal with such things when no buffer of servants was present, nor father nor brother nor old-enough son. When, most of all, there was no husband with the presence of mind if not birth to see, step in, and send the beggar off. Yes Sam had followed from cave to cave but he was always off to himself, presumably trying to find the villagers but really looking as he did whenever he went to temple in the village, swallowed and bitten, like every moving thing inside was a scorpion, like the temple itself was a belly. She had watched him staring at frescoes like he was ready to split the painted stones. And so in the meantime Alice could only ignore the guide, which only encouraged him and by now he was convinced that Madam was looking for something that, on this suddenly auspicious day, he was self-appointed to find for her.

“Madam please if you please follow my arm to see most special statue of Lord Buddha or Madam if you please come this way Madam I shall show you most famous place where most famous queen died of thirst chained to window bars mourning the king and refusing to marry his brother.”

She turned to see evidence of a wife, any wife, who so loved her husband. She followed the guide's reed-thin arm as it pointed to the barred window and she followed him to it and took in enough of his hot fast wordmeal to hear tell of a thirsty queen hanging by her wrists against this very wall for love, for love. It was a fine story and the guide was honoured to have shared it with such a fine audience. Alice smiled tightly. And only then did his words slow, like rainwater still dripping from leaves the next morning. “Madam, please, whatever you think is best. In the village I have my wife's mother and a lame brother besides my own four children.”

But look at her. She was wearing clothes meant for women whose lives were so high, so protected, so intact, there was never any need that required anything so common as money. As Alice searched the low cave for Sam, the guide placed his toes upon the already dirt-smudged hem of her sari, pressing down and curling forward, letting her know her place was now fixed.

She looked down. In barred sunlight the bottom of her sari looked like trampled temple flowers. More than trampled: she saw the man's foot firmly upon it, bare and flat, knob-toed, field black. Her skin crawled to see his toes curl into the old fine cloth, to see the toenails overgrown and white as her sari had been when they had set out in darkness from the village the night before. Nails so white as to look almost fine, shaming her sari, now some low-born devil's foot-cloth.

“Sam! SAM! Aiyo Sam please come—”

The guide saw him coming before she did and, stepping forward, grandly gestured toward the archway out of respect for the worshippers who had stopped at Alice's voice and were watching to see what would happen next—save about twenty who were now looking down down down, certain they had been discovered, waiting for him to come and grab them by their hair and tie them to his motorcar and drag them home.

Sam walked right into the guide's outstretched palm, which stiffened to hold him.

“What is it?” Sam asked, pushing the arm down and holding it there, squeezing the guide at the wrist like B. used to in Pettah when a man owed him.

“Madam is—” he started, his voice wavering as he tried to twist free.

“I asked Madam, not you,” Sam said, squeezing harder.

“Aiyo hurting!” the man whined, dropping to a crouch and studying the man's dusty suit. “All I am asking is small donation for telling Madam about temple.”

“She has no money.” His tone was as unclear to himself as it was to the guide and Alice.

“But you must be keeping it for her, no?”

“Mokatha? What do you mean, keeping it for her?”

“You are Madam's driver, no?”

Sam's hand fell and the guide fled through the archway, gone like a bat woken by a boy's rock. Sam stepped up to Alice, who felt pressure again and looked down in the barred light and the skin wasn't as black and the toes not as knobby and the nails cut back but it did not matter. It felt the same. It looked the same. This was his dirty foot-cloth. She looked up but was shocked by what she saw. His face was shattered like a child's, very like her child's, like
their
son's when he was waiting for her to tell him what he already knew: that a promise had already been broken and all that remained was his having to hear it said. She could have cupped her husband's face, but she did not. She held her own wrist instead, the gold bangles cave cool against her palms. Because what sort of man would have any cause to worry that his wife would call him her driver, to lower him so? Only the sort that could be so lowered.

He was waiting for her to say otherwise, to tell him, even if it were a lie, that she had said nothing of the sort to the guide, and then life could resume. All she had to do was tell him, just shake her head no, even look down and nod to admit yes but she did not mean it, to allow that he was her driver. Anything. But Alice said nothing. She stared back, eye for eye, silent and cold and, to him, as fixed as the surrounding stone. Sam took her by the wrist and led her from the cave, squeezing as if he was trying to break her gold. The Sudugama people followed, their heads ringing with such a story to tell, desperate now to be discovered and dragged home, whatever punishment was worth what they had just witnessed, what they could now tell. But they never would. Within the hour, a few of their heels would be bloody too, and when they reached home, two days later, and heard the story of what had happened in Dambulla as it was being told in the village and were asked what they knew, they would say they knew nothing, they had been praying in the caves the whole time.

When they were past the verandah Sam let her go and stalked ahead. He waved off the old malli who had immediately approached, his head cocked as if it had been wrenched ninety degrees, smiling sweetly, bearing Sam's shoes like holy vessels. Sam looked and looked until he saw the guide and then broke into a dead run across the bright barren plain. Alice watched him while walking toward the pile where she had left her sandals, her wrist aching and stinging as if it had been crushed in some stone beehive. She watched him give chase while her mind made mad figure eights, trying to determine if she had enough time to find the flowered talipot in the town square and persuade Blue Piyal to take her, her alone, home to the village and there persuade her father and the rest of them to roll boulders onto the Kurunegala Road before he came back. No: boulders he'd split. They'd have to move the village entirely, or at least get the metal-benders and toddy tappers and temple elephants to suspend it high above the earth, between the tallest strongest trees at the village limits, and then when he walked into its shadow—

Only he wouldn't be walking he'd be still running as he was now, here at Dambulla, and he'd run up the trunk and along the elephant's back and then along a bent tree until he reached the lifted village and he'd not stop until he was standing on the verandah, brushing the dirt from his shoulder, smoking, asking for tea. But she had to try anyway. She found her slippers just as he found the guide. She stayed barefoot, worrying the stitching while standing with the other templegoers who had gathered to watch her husband beat the guide into the ground, knocking him down and then stomping, one witness later suggested, like a bitten snake charmer. Stomping and stomping until the guide's calls for mercy became gasping mouthed words and then spit and gurgles, and then Sam kicked him in the side until the body turned over, one lung collapsed, and then Sam kicked the gasping air from the other side and the body turned over once more and the legs weakly pushed out and pulled in, pushed out and pulled in, like he was a frog on a riverbank, a newborn on a pallet, and that was when the women near Alice began to whimper for someone to do something because it's a sin even to kick a dog. And meanwhile Sam was still stomping and eventually he fell to the ground himself, his blood-slick heel slipping as it came down a last time upon the guide's pulped mouth, now a useless bloodmeal.

The crowd was nearly upon him when he stood and brushed off his trousers. Turning his heels dry in the dirt, Sam winced and nearly dropped again, one foot was so sore. Breathing hard, wiping sweat and tears and dirt from his eyes, he looked for his wife, worrying no wondering no more than wondering if she had seen. No one touched him as he limped through the crowd, but behind he could hear them, their seething plans for him. What they had just witnessed was the day's words made flesh and blood: walking away, unpunished, was one of the world's evil owners, a helpless worker's blood on his hands, his feet, the sort they had heard tell of in the May Day speeches in the town square hours before, the sort they had chanted against while they were promised that if they united in demanding justice in their fields and factories and plantations, then one day such men would fall just as they all rose up. This could be one day.