Beggar's Feast (39 page)

Two nights later, men came for Sam. They were certain this was extortion. They came most of them drunk, carrying broomsticks and cricket bats, bottles, belts, crackers, and messy torches made of old banyans and kitchen rags soaked in kerosene and wrapped around lengths of suriya wood. They called him out, loud and threatful and tearful, lyrical like Hindi movie heroes. Rose heard from her window and ran past her mother standing in the threshold of her own room to ask her father to stop them. Xavier stayed on the bed, also listening. Rose said if he did not go, the blood would be on her hands, her hands. Her mother came into the room and, as her first words to either husband or daughter in two weeks, she told Xavier to stop them. When he was certain of what his wife was actually saying, what she was assenting to, Xavier dressed and went. Rose asked her mother why. Her mother told Rose that Rose had a stupid heart and a stupid father for listening to her stupid heart but no daughter of hers would have blood on her hands. God did not make daughters to have blood on their hands. Then, in a different tone, Vivimarie said, “God did not make wives to have blood on their hands either.”

While mother and daughter were speaking, Xavier ordered the useless torches doused before the whole compound burned down. Then he went in to see Sam, who was sitting on his cot. Bopea was standing at the far end of the room. Both were smoking. Robert saw Sam's suit laid out on a chair beside his bed, the shoes underneath, ready for another morning.

“Mahatteya, please,” Bopea pleaded with Xavier, “I am only the driver. My son is studying abroad. Aiyo please, I am only here until the vehicle is repaired.”

“You don't deserve my daughter, Kandy.”

“I don't deserve anything that's come to me in this life.”

“No, not anything. I don't know what you deserve and don't deserve because I don't know you. You aren't known. You don't deserve my daughter.”

“No. No, I don't.”

“Then tell me one reason I should stop them from thrashing you.”

“I can't.”

“Truth? You can think of no reason? None? What kind of man are you? Every morning you are asked to stay another morning and you won't even ask me to stop them for her sake?”

“I need to ask you for that, for her sake?”

“NO!” Xavier yelled, a good father trying to be a good father and defeated and trying, trying to make of this defeat a triumph. Never mind the mob was his own flesh and blood and he would be standing at its head save the blood that then would be on her hands, her hands. But what father ever thought any fellow deserved his daughter? And at least this one was old enough to admit the same. God help her. He left the room and told the crowd to go. The next day, Vivimarie told Rose that she would convert the old fellow and that the children would, of course, be raised in the Church. She also told Rose how many of her squirrels had been drowned in Negombo lagoon that morning, in bags tied around collars of Lourdes cement. Rose asked her to repeat the number of squirrels her mother expected her now to match. Vivimarie smiled and wished her daughter good luck and Godspeed, then called for her dressmaker.

No crowd gathered again in the compound until three days before the wedding. For the engagement dance, the great drum was brought out and heated and a dozen women were called from the parish and given cloth and jacket to play it until the crackers were lit. Xavier took Sam round to meet all of them who weeks before had wanted to hammer him but now offered baroque toasts and congratulations, sweet words about Rose, manly questions about the upcountry land he was said to hold off the Kurunegala Road and about his cars, lately repaired. In the end, De Moraes had paid. No one called it a dowry, at least not in his hearing. He said he paid because he wouldn't have his eldest daughter driven to her wedding in a brand-new vehicle—the Leyland cement truck was outfitted with a fine rounded Burgomaster chair for the bride, its mixer garlanded and repainted bridal white—only to be driven home in a wreck. There was no wedding Mass. Not even Rose's mother could persuade him, or was it plead with him feed him pray with him pray over him pray about him catechize him threaten him threaten to pray more feed more plead more catechize more, to convert. But the family had insisted on something more than fifteen minutes in front of the Negombo Registrar of Births and Marriages, and Rose told Sam that even if he would not convert he could at least kneel beside her for the vows. And he did, Sam Kandy knelt, with wan Bopea looking on from the groom's pew, the lone pew reserved for the groom's side because Bopea was the only person who attended the wedding from Sam's people.

The rest of St. Anthony's was full of De Moraeses, save the back pews where sat the parish widows who attended every good family's wedding, only this time not only to see how decked in gold was the bride, or to cry during the presentation of the bouquet to the Virgin, or to cry during the Ave Maria. Of course they did all of this at Rose's wedding too, glad the eldest girl, a very good girl, her father's girl, was at last getting married, if not as she should have married even if she was short and thirty: to a known Bharatha boy from a known good family, a boy with blood and a name that went back across the salt-and-pearl water to Rig Veda times, whence first their people had come to Ceylon. But no, Rose De Moraes married no Bharatha and no boy. And so this time the womenfolk of the parish sat in the back pews for the wedding mostly to see if the story coming out of the De Moraes compound in the days before the wedding was true: that Xavier De Moraes had left his smarts abroad during his exile and Vivimarie De Moraes had drowned her tongue with her giant squirrels, because otherwise how to explain Rose's groom, how old he was, how unpeopled, how un-baptized, how universally unknown save the name he gave, the cars he crashed, his driver, his suit, his rumoured village. But now Sam Kandy was known again in the world, was known beyond his own conceiving, was a smiling grey groom standing on the church steps beside his triple-decker new wife, and she was smiling too.

And so came the age of cement, of Christians, of Christians and their hired vans and Leyland trucks and guitars and miraculous medals that, over the years, would be discovered on the common ground of Sudugama like the parted shells of fine silver nuts. And from the first day Sam Kandy brought the De Moraes family to the village there also came the age of children, children in the walauwa and in the lanes, children challenging the village boys to footraces before the village boys could even tell they had been challenged. In turn, the boys of Sudugama challenged the invaders to a cricket match. The visitors won the toss, calling miraculous Mary over miraculous Joseph, and then ran back to one of their ten thousand vans and returned carrying actual cricket bats and tins of tennis balls whose every wondrous opening was an occasion for awed silence, for every boy to wonder if this was what the world itself had sounded like when it went from nothing to the stars; what it would sound like when to nothing it someday returned. Soon the green-black branches surrounding the rude village oval shook with blasted sixers and bounding fours and the gardens of Sudugama became studded with strange fruit. The batsmen were too gallant or was it impatient for the balls to be retrieved and why should they be retrieved when standing in the shade were younger cousins and little brothers dying, absolutely dying, to throw in a replacement to the scowling bowler. The visitors ran up an impossible figure for plank bats to answer, for anyone, even Don Bradman, to match. But these weren't walauwa children. These weren't old Sam Kandy children. When their inning was up, the visitors let the Sudugama boys use their bats, and so came an age of eternal friendship, all in the first hour of the first day.

He came home with a Negombo bride in July 1966; he came, it seemed, with all of Negombo itself. A few of the village men stopped wondering where Bopea was when they recognized one of the drivers in the caravan as among those who had come some months before, asking about Sam. Those who were questioned then had been surprised at how suddenly numb were their tongues, how heavy their lips. Were they protecting Sam because say what you will, he was at least more village than the men asking after him? Afterwards, in that evening's toddy circle, which was again hosted by Lalson on the walauwa verandah because no one had lived for days in the big house except the servants, it was agreed that Sam Kandy was being held somewhere while his story was checked out. Bopea must have been held too, apparently, poor proud fellow in his yellow hat. By the end of that evening's toddy, the majority held that Sam Kandy must have owed someone significant and owed him significantly and at long last, after so many years of his city life, five years after his city life had ended, his collection time had come. A minority, well, really only one fellow, a tabla player, insisted that Sam was being considered for a minister's post, less because he truly believed it than because he was, like his father before him, a stubborn drunk. But that night no one thought, no one could even conceive, that someone had sent questioners to ask about old Sam Kandy because he, the sender, had a daughter.

Months later, when Sam climbed out of his Hillman and went to the other side and opened the door, smiling the whole time, the women watching already knew what he'd gone and done before the men within their hearing knew there was anything more remarkable here than the dozen Gipsy trucks queued behind Sam's Hillman. The village women wondered with limed innocence if poor Hyacinth had shrunk in her absence years, and only then did the men look away from the Gipsys and their bulging canopied flatbeds to see the young woman on Sam's arm. Only then did they search their memories and fail to find anything of Hyacinth Kandy's face in this young woman's, and so one or two declared with superior and stupid innocence that this was not Hyacinth and were woman-told with honeyed innocence that of course it had to be Hyacinth, because who else would a sixty-six-year-old widower be squiring toward his house, save his very own daughter? When, eventually,
finally
, their men understood what Sam had gone and done, again, the village women then noted how this latest Madam Kandy was walking toward the walauwa. She was moving with more care than her city shoes warranted, with the kind of care a woman only takes once: when it's her first. Her first what? one man asked but he wasn't answered. The question itself, that late in the hour's revelations, was considered beneath any woman's notice.

The caravan left a few days later but not before a visit to the temple. While the rest of them waited in their vans, playing Jim Reeves songs and fencing with fruit sellers, one of Rose's brothers went in to speak with the chief monk. Sipping clammy tea, he was made to wait in a damp-smelling Buddhist hallway lined with Buddhist things: monks, namely, but also darkwood cabinets full of slapdash plenty, books and brass plate, brass statues, brass lamps topped with brass-cast roosters and temple flowers; palm fans that looked older and more dried out than the oldest Palm Sunday crosses hanging behind the holy faces in his mother's house; pied pennants, ola leaf scrolls tipping into each other like sleepy drunks and ruined columns, left as if their consultation was interrupted one hundred years ago and never returned to by the monks who were themselves captured in the formal portraits propped up behind it all. Eventually, the chief monk came and sat in a schoolmaster's chair across from Rose's brother who, reaching up from a child's chair, presented him with an appointment calendar and a desk diary and a sheaf of plastic book covers before beginning to explain why his family had come to Sudugama.