Beggar's Feast Read Free

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,