Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda Page B

said.

    â€œI need someone else’s word,” said Robert, pinching the stub end of a cigarette like he was born to it. “I need to hear the story you’ve just told me, exactly, from someone else, someone this village will trust. Then I can believe. Then I could consider.”
    â€œBut I told you, I have no father, no mother, and no relations anywhere to be found—”
    â€œThen it has to be clergy.”
    Sam leaned back, breathed out, his legs lost their ready life.
    â€œIt will not be clergy.” It could not be. He might as well have never left the temple if he needed a monk’s blessing to return to the village.
    â€œWhy not? You must belong to temple in Colombo. You are Buddhist, no? I will not sell my land to a Moor or a Christian.”
    â€œI am no Moor, no Christian.”
    â€œSo you are—”
    â€œAn Englishman?”
    â€œMokatha ? ”
    â€œIf I brought an Englishman to vouch for me, then may I meet her?”
    â€œIf you can make an Englishman tell your tale, the tale you have just told me, I’ll sell you the land for a bowl of rice. I’ll have the chief monk sit on a low stool and keep the bowl on his head for you to eat. Wait. Wait what did you ask?”
    â€œHe holds a high office in Colombo.”
    â€œI said wait. What did you just ask?”
    â€œPaulet and Son, with offices in Fort, Prince’s Building.”
    â€œWAIT. Tell me. I said what did you ask?”
    â€œMay I meet her?”
    â€œMeet who?”
    â€œI understand you have a daughter, or so I have been told.” Sam stood, too impatient for the speech he’d practised during the drive, save its last line. He was tense, trilling, ready; he would turn and go never to return, try somewhere else, find another way if the Ralahami asked how he knew there was a daughter—because of course to answer was to locate himself, return him to earth, to that low patch of dirt that was his father’s name and house, and so undo the rest of it. But Robert didn’t ask Sam for anything else save another cigarette. And then Alice coughed again.
    Her servant, Latha, had also been watching, this whole time, if listening in vain. After the last cough, she had bunched and thrown the handkerchief across the threshold, the handkerchief that, like the other women in her family, she always kept at hand to wipe at her mouth before and after she spoke, the handkerchief she had been given by a now dead cousin out of a mysterious foreign-sent crate that had been sent to her cousin’s no-account husband, six years before, a man who had himself lately, unexpectedly, some might say miraculously, gone from the village. When not watching and straining to hear what was happening in the walauwa’s front room, Latha was looking at her girl, at Alice, whom she had raised along with her twin brother Arthur from birth. Later, Alice would scold Latha, blame her tossed hanky for his looking just as she coughed that first time, and Latha would scold back that he shouldn’t have been looking at her in the first place, this stranger in her father’s house. And when the girl smiled, Latha would know that all her life’s squirrel work would come to this, that it had already begun, that it was, in fact, a fast progress.
    Behind Latha and also watching in the inner garden was the washerwoman. She was peering through the iron grille that covered one of the courtyard windows, her fingernails raking and flaking bits of old white paint from the rods in her hands. She could see absolutely nothing from her vantage, but no woman in the village would know that when, the next day, she would squat to wash and tell of the high events that had transpired in the big house the day before, just as betel-stocked Lal would do in that evening’s toddy circle. And so that night, the hundred husbands and wives of Sudugama would compare the stories they had lately heard, the men over their toddy and