Beggar's Feast Read Free Page A

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.
    But what would he call himself in the city? Malli had been enough to get from the temple gate to the city outskirts, but he did not want a new life as just another sweet little brother, just another weary smiling street-side boy born to be helpful, waiting to be helped. He had been called Ranjith at home, but no one had called him that since he had been sent to the temple, where he was formally Samanera and less formally, in the empty audience hall those dead afternoons, Squirrel. Shortly before his departure, the other boys had learned of Sadhu’s pet name for him. They had used it without mercy. His teacher had told him that he would get a new name upon becoming a full monk. He would be a Sadhu then too, and his priestly surname would be the name of his birth-village. But he would never be a full monk, and he could think of no cause to honour Sudugama, and so when he was asked his name by the Colombo nephew who received the dowry furniture, he just said “Sam.”
    â€œAnd what’s your father’s good name?”
    â€œMy father doesn’t have one.”
    â€œWhy is that?”
    â€œHe’s not good enough.”
    â€œYou would disrespect your father to a complete stranger! Who is this tamarind mouth you have working in the back here?” The nephew called over the driver, who had been happy to drink a lime-juice and let Sam unload the furniture.
    â€œHe’s not mine. Malli only wanted a ride to Colombo.”
    â€œWhat village are you from?” the nephew asked him.
    â€œI’m here now.”
    â€œSo why have you come?”
    Sam jumped off the cart, head down, carrying the furniture into the stall.
    â€œStop this or I’ll give you a thrashing. I have no money for you.”
    â€œI only want a little space.”
    â€œThis is Colombo. There is no space.”
    â€œI’ll help you in your work.”
    â€œAnd what’s my work?”
    â€œThe driver says you’re to sell this furniture for your family.”
    â€œAnd you think that’s my work?” The back half of the nephew’s stall was dark. He sounded amused by his own question.
    â€œI don’t care what you do for your work.”
    â€œGood. This is Colombo.”

    Those daughters waiting on dowry money must have died spinsters. Nothing was ever sent back to the village. The nephew, who was named Badula and went by B., sold off whatever he didn’t keep for himself. B. was a street hustler businessman whose every decision was made to get more money and more mutton, as he called it. He was five or six years older, his every way and feature curved and narrow like the husk of a coconut flower, and they were more than once mistaken for brothers after Sam began trailing him around the glorious cutthroat bedlam that was Pettah. Sam Kandy’s education into the world began in those bright and steamy knife-edge streets, where everyone with something to sell was the last honest man in Colombo, where the rest of the city went by tram and rickshaw to look and take what they would and escape home hoping they had not been taken for too much. Pettah stank and gleamed with spices and gold, with fruit money flesh. B. had a finger in anything he could pry open or plug. He borrowed, he lent, he fenced. He immediately liked the look and feel of Sam standing behind him as he conducted his business and so took him everywhere. More, he liked the audience the boy gave him those nights it was only the two of them in the stall, alone with its few moulding and stained pieces of once fine furniture and the mad piles of rusting kettles and crudescent frying pans that were B.’s outward concern. On such nights, B. rose and fell with remembering while they fell asleep on the dank floor. He recounted his sad life in the village as the loyal, wronged son who had