What she saw, thinking he could not see her watching, was a flash of silver and then of fire and then the fire was gone. In its place there was a glowing mark in the dark, passing back and forth on a short fast course around what must have been his body, like a burning star fixed upon a wire, like an abacus bead on fire. Eventually there would be more flashes of silver in the otherwise dark front room, where her father was standing to speak with the stranger who had not been asked to sit upon entering their house, at least not immediately. Who, minutes before, when the vertigoed servant had stopped staring at the brown man emerging from the back of a motorcar and had pattered up the stone stairs and back into the big house to present the visitor with a brass tray of the Ralahami’s own betel leaves, had bowed from the shoulders but demurred. The servant ducked away and returned, once more bent at the waist, this time to arrange with great satisfaction a low stool before this obviously low man. But placing a black-cased foot on the stool with a firm tap, a foot that had been shod in black leather many times buffed of its own scuffed history, Sam leaned forward to light a cigarette, a habit picked up in the brothel life of Singapore and not forsaken upon his return to Ceylon. From his work in Colombo since that return—his rice dealing and passage- and money-making about the harbour—and also, more recently, from his waiting outside the Fort offices of men who would now envy him his Morris, Sam had overheard the English view of betel chewing. Yet in so choosing to keep his own mouth modern and clean, Sam never knew how close he came to failing at all else, how close he came, just then, to being ordered off his land and out of his village forever. But then he found his lighter.

Robert was by all rights outraged that the visitor had declined his offered betel. But also, if not impressed, he was at least curious what kind of brown man would show up like this, behave like that, look as he did, and own or at least, until the constables found him, have a motorcar in his possession. The last stranger who had entered his village with a bold and wanting eye, many years before, was a money-fat fisherman from down south, who was announced from fifty yards by his aftershave—Portuguese, all shot blooms and sweet wine. Back then, fish oil smiles were suddenly appearing everywhere on the high side of the once impregnable Kadugannawa rock that the English had blasted through so their tea trains and motorcars could pass between Colombo and Kandy town. And then everyone else could come too, and they did come and begin smudging away everything that for centuries had made great the good green country on the high side of the rock—courage for kingdom and honour and history and blood-run lands. Strangers were coming with far more money than the mud flats and weedy tanks and dung floors and daub walls were worth, money that was wiping clean fierce memory.

The bulging fisherman had sat in Robert’s front room and accepted his betel happily, openly chewing less than he took and then asking for more, asking loud enough to wake Robert’s wife, who seemed otherwise to have slept through the early months of her pregnancy. No doubt the fisherman sold the rest of the betel to his own mother when he returned to Bentota, after making such a low offer that Robert had called for the metal-benders and had him thrown in the back of his loud painted cart, a cracker lit to scare his fat bullock down the lane and gone. Six months later, and such dead and bawling months they were, the same bugger came back and asked if Ralahami was ready now, and then he made the same low bloody offer. Robert would have taken a cracker himself this time and chased him down the steps and thrown it after him, were he not in mourning and the lonely babies, for once, sleeping.

Twenty years on and a new stranger now before him, Robert decided that dressed as he was, carrying himself as he did, this one would make no low offer, this baggy pinstriped suit with a silver flint in one hand and a painted tin the size and colours of a songbird in the other, blowing modern smoke through the shade-drawn room. Moments later, those watching from nearby breathed it in, and Sam stared right at her as she leaned forward and coughed. He thrilled and smiled to himself as she stared at him before disappearing again behind a pillar, where she coughed a second and third time, her long fingers reaching for a blue-lined butterfly as it unravelled across the passageway to the inner courtyard. It was a moment’s flight in bright light. He did not recognize its mis-stitched monograph. He offered a cigarette to her father, returning to the business at hand.

“Whose …”

“—motorcar—”

“… is it that you have taken and brought to my village?” Robert asked, after declining the cigarette. How would it look to the servant, to the crowd coughing back of him, if he took it after his own best betel had just been placed to the side? He made another decision, he made it three times. He would decline, were he offered a ride. Because otherwise he might kiss his daughter on the forehead and tell her to go to her aunties on the other side of Kandy town; he might leave no note for his son because his son was not supposed to come to the village until he was finished his studies, even on English school holidays; he might lie to the servant that the Ralahami would just quickly go and come and command that in the meantime Lal was to sweep through the house morning noon and night until the day he died or his own son took over, and then Robert would ride straight out of this mud and black hat burden he had to call my village unto death. A death that he was hoping his son Arthur would avoid, which is why Robert had sent him, nine years earlier, to a Buddhist boys’ college in Colombo where the boy had begun his way to a world well beyond his family’s own, a world of medical college, of London, of saying, yes, motorcar.

“The motorcar is mine,” said Sam, in English. He was asked to sit down.

“But not even the Englishmen I know own such things on this island,” countered Robert, who could speak a little English too.

“Some have, in Colombo. The ones I know,” said Sam.

“Ah right, of course, the ones you know. Next you will tell me that you take tea on Thursdays with the Governor. You say you have, just like the English. Right. But you are not just like the English, are you. You are like nothing I have ever seen. Don’t smile that I say this, because you don’t know what I have seen in this place, where my family has been on this land since long before your father’s father had a name to call his own. Don’t smile. Just tell me. How old are you? Where were you born? What is your good name? You have village colour, that is obvious, but you have taken English from somewhere, from someone else, that is also obvious. Who is it? Where? My son speaks English, but that is because he is reading Medicine at University College London. He, is, in, London.” Arthur had been studying abroad for two years. He had, so far, mailed four letters home, though none as yet had acknowledged Robert’s own.

Sam said nothing. Another pile of fine betel offered in vain. “He is,” Robert insisted. “But you, dressed like this, come here as you have! What, did you take some planter’s tongue and then his suit and then his motorcar? How much did you pass to the driver to dump the body in the well?”

“A crowd gathered round us when we stopped at Ambepussa and were shouting questions,” said Sam. “They kept asking without waiting for me to answer. And really, I think they were all asking only one question, every man and boy, even the constable when he came through the crowd.”

“Which was?”

“‘May I have a ride?’”

“Can you give me even one name? Can you give me your own? Can you tell me where you have come from, what people? Can you tell me why you have come here—to my village?”

“I shall answer anything you ask. But try a cigarette first?”

“I’ll have you thrashed and thrown down my steps in a moment!” But as he said it he thought about how long it would take Mahesh and Sando to reach the walauwa, and then he watched his own hand reach for it and take and the rest of him bend forward as it was lit and he pulled in and in a moment his mind was all new and swoon and more was wanted and so he would give this stranger the life of one cigarette to make his case before calling for the metal-benders.

Three cigarettes later, Robert didn’t believe a word.

“All these years, you’ve gone around as Sam Kandy?”

“Every man needs a name, isn’t it?”

“Of course, but—”

“But what can an orphan left at the temple gate do but name himself?”

“Yes, but here, in this place, in a place like this, they’ll never, why would anyone, how could I be seen to accept—”

“Yes?” Sam leaned forward, the muscles in his legs tense and trilling, breathing hard the air running through the room house village temple city/sea/dock city room house/sea/dock city street shop/sea/room rooms city/car/village house room that had been his thousand streets running as one, his twenty years coming and going in the world—Sudugama Kandy Colombo Sydney Singapore Colombo Kandy Sudugama—the headlong unstopping rush of the story he’d just told, which was somewhat more somewhat less than what it should, perhaps ought to have been, were honest accounting and not triumphant symmetry Sam Kandy’s virtue because what mattered was that it worked, if it worked.

The very same thought had been in front of all else, four years earlier, when the ship he jumped in Sydney docked in Singapore. He had learned the destination well into the voyage, from a white man with dog-brown eyes who had come below with a cloaked camera and tried at first in vain “to document for historical purposes only the nature of this your journey.” Sam, the best dressed among the shadows, hadn’t tucked chin and shown shoulder like the rest, who were huddled and murmuring like cold birds behind him. Instead, red-eyed staring and shoulders squared, Sam stood squarely for the flash and pop, and then, afterwards, when the photographer had immediately and forever forgotten his existence, Sam stepped forward, asking “Where?” and showing an open hand ready to close and get to work if necessary. He knew he’d need money, whatever and wherever Singapore was.

“Give. Give me for mine, and then give me for each that you want to take or you will take none.”

The photographer snorted. Sam stepped closer and the man blanched.

“No, but you see, I’m from the University.”

“Give or I will take mine back.”

Days later, Sam Kandy walked into Singapore, his suit torn beneath the arms from having to grab and hold historical portraits in place, his hands healthy with paper. But he arrived still burning with Mary Astrobe. He could do nothing else until this was done with. He had clothes, words, money, and he did not care what she looked like. His face was wide open as he walked upon the wharf.

“Malay Street! Malay Street! Only the best on Malay Street!”

“Flower girls for you! Flower girls just waking up from your dreams and waiting to love you!”

“Just like home! Come and meet her! Just like home!”

Any sort of man could do this any sort of way, and in this place it seemed that any sort of woman could be had. Other men fresh from the boats were walking toward the crowded rickshaw stands, not even bothering to inquire which home she was just like, only climbing out of the fried-egg Singapore sun into the shady backs of the two-wheelers and setting off for coin-fast love—French sailors in pairs, and other whites in top hats, older heavier men who insisted too loudly and for no one’s conscience save their own that they needed nothing but safe passage to the Raffles Hotel; and also, really mostly, angle-bodied Chinese with slow wide village gaits that only quickened when one of the coolies called to them in some mother tongue or boys’ slang, and then they too were taken and gone. But Sam only looked away, kept walking, burning. What was he waiting for?

He stopped. Coolies were on him immediately, hawking and cawing. No more, he thought. Enough, he said. Get on or stop trying at the rest of it, he decided. Get on or go back to the temple. Get on or shrivel and die to all desire. Get on or grow old man fruit. “Perfect English good time” sounded good enough. He nodded to one of them and was taken to a shophouse on Sago Street. Its main room was broken up with endless gauzy curtains, useless against the working noises within. His girl’s had a slatted window and a brick wall that was mossy and damp to touch. There were slick little flowers growing in the cracks, dripping life. She was smoking on a narrow bed with a headboard whose paintwork still showed. A pastoral scene: fat sheep grazing upon a wide green, a blue sky above them full of sheepy white clouds.

She had skin like milky tea and spoke well enough to get a good price for the rest of her cigarettes and made the right noises to keep him talking telling asking long enough to charge him twice and he never so much as sat down. Instead, Sam offered her more money to meet the woman she called her Pocket Ma, who was sitting on a crate at the back of the shophouse, fanning herself with a thatched fan, chatting with another woman with a sweaty heavy chest and ragged dress, only she was standing at a table, cutting up durian. To look at them, they cooked cabbage for sailors and scared off cheap johns. But the girl had told him enough that he wanted to impress this fat old widow. Considering Sam’s story as she fanned herself, the old woman began to speak English, far better than the girl’s. She said she believed nothing that he’d just said about his shadow work for a great man in Sydney harbour but would let him try to prove it. She gave him a figure for every fresh brown boy he brought her way instead of their going to the Hindu operation on Orchard Road, and she gave him a far better figure than head money for every white man with a shipping contract he could bring from Commercial Square.

Three years later, Sam Kandy might have been the richest virgin in Singapore. But one day he told the old woman that he was tired of fighting the Hindus on Orchard Road for every fresh brown boy on the wharf. Besides, he knew of a crowded little island close by, where brown boys could be had with ease, boys with village-strong backs searching for ships to take them anywhere but home. And he told her that by then he also knew the right white men in Commercial Square to secure the necessary passages. The old woman spat and shrugged. She would see what, if anything, he’d send back, and was meanwhile disappointed to lose a good earner but also relieved to be rid of him, this suited monk who always slept alone in a side room, who never took payment in anything but money.

He returned to Colombo and came to know its dockworkers very well during a strike at the harbour. He sold some of them into Singapore, making money as a sub-agent for Pocket Ma, working harder and faster and cheaper and more silver-tongued than the established shipping agents around the harbour in telling dockworkers and middle sons from the villages that for a fee if they shipped out as he suggested and then went to Sago Street they would make money too. And if they paid him a little more, he would tell them where they would find not only work but rare love behind a green curtain, fair-skinned girls who could have almost been daughters in Cinnamon Garden. When the strike ended, those who were not tempted to go to Singapore would still hold back a sack of rice for a cut, or be hungry for it at a cut price, would anyway and always need something more from the near world than blood and birth hour predicted, than jetty sweat and Pettah stalls afforded, and Sam Kandy made that, all of it, his business. Because he knew them, these young men, their every want and wish, the daily plans, the long-ago promises. He made of them what he could. But after a year of working Colombo harbour he had to go to the village. From this much trafficking in it, Sam Kandy knew the great world was not enough. He needed warrant from the village: he needed the village itself. And when he arrived, his back would not shine with biscuit tins and city things like the small world’s mallis and butterfly catchers. As promised: he would arrive as no one had before him.

Sam tried schemes on six Englishmen—owners of a Crossley 19.6, a Crossley 25/30, a Morris Bullnose, a Morris Cowley, an Austin 12/4, and a Wolseley. He was laughed at and chased off and informed on one occasion that the vehicle in question had been used by the Prince of Wales during a tour of India and was most certainly not for native hire. And yet, whenever he wasn’t conducting his rice- and boy-loading business at the harbour, Sam was moving about Fort, listening for that cough and chug no bullock or man could make, his eyes sharp for the world-piercing flash that was sunlight on polished chrome. Going only harder after six no’s, Sam forced his own hand. He went to Galle and then on to Matara, where he searched inland until he found a fit house for his father and then returned to Colombo and from there went to the village with papers to show and a rail ticket to give and so sent his father south, and before leaving to arrive he discreetly inquired and had confirmed that yes, the Ralahami had an unmarried daughter. Only then did he return to Colombo to visit the offices of Paulet and Son, the firm whose rice Sam had been short-loading for months.

“Before you say anything else,” Henry Paulet began, standing at his desk to receive him, “and even though your suit has brought you this far into this office and it seems better than one might expect or really want, the answer, young man, is no. I have no need of a driver.”

“Sir, I have not come here to see you about a position. I have come because—”

“Just where have you been to school?” Henry Paulet asked of his English, sitting forward, the first of the two occasions they met. He was crumpled and tired looking in his beige suit, like an old birthday balloon, an Englishman too long in the tropics.

“In the world, sir.”

“Well said!” Paulet sat back. “That kind of answer means either you must be someone’s son gone to seed or you must be no one’s son and trying to do something about it. Well?”

“I know who’s been short-loading rice onto your company’s ships.”

“So neither, or both, and anyway you’re just another Judas come for his silver.”

“I have not come for any silver,” Sam began. “I have come about your losing money on your rice shipments. I have come to offer my assistance—”

“Excuse me, sir. Mummy said to bring tea.”

Sam turned at the girl’s voice and saw her roundness and he turned again to see Paulet with his head down, molesting his desk blotter as she approached with the tray. When she set it down the Englishman tensed and held his breath. Sam saw and Sam had him. Soo sa

“And so,” Paulet coughed back into conversation, speaking over the servant girl’s leaving, her free hands back of her hips, her feet beating the timber floors, her mouth muttering the breathing song her mother taught her, “take your tea, but I only have so much time in the day, young man—”

“Looks to me you have three months, at most, no?” Sam lit a cigarette, blew smoke and stared.

Paulet hit a switch for the ceiling fan. The topmost papers on the desk lifted and fell a little. Barred light came through the second-floor window. Slow fan and barred light and city noise: carters and dogs calling after people, tram bells and a convent bell calling schoolgirls to little hours, a general static of crying babies; someone was recognized and recognized back; someone else needed another malli to help carry a chest. And through all that noise Sam could hear Paulet stirring his tea; thin silver on the thin rim of a bone china cup; the wearing down of men and days.

“Just what do you propose?” Henry asked.

“That we take a drive in your vehicle, to start,” Sam said.

“I 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.”

“But I told you, I have no father, no mother, and no relations anywhere to be found—”

“Then it has to be clergy.”

Sam leaned back, breathed out, his legs lost their ready life.

“It 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.

“Why not? You must belong to temple in Colombo. You are Buddhist, no? I will not sell my land to a Moor or a Christian.”

“I am no Moor, no Christian.”

“So you are—”

“An Englishman?”

“Mokatha?”

“If I brought an Englishman to vouch for me, then may I meet her?”

“If 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?”

“He holds a high office in Colombo.”

“I said wait. What did you just ask?”

“Paulet and Son, with offices in Fort, Prince’s Building.”

“WAIT. Tell me. I said what did you ask?”

“May I meet her?”

“Meet who?”

“I 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 the women at the washing. Not compare so much as compete to recreate, or contrast, or combine, correct, dispute, deny, edit, overwrite, amend to all exaggeration, make and remake in their own image, all of it depending on the evening mood of each their own marriages. So that by the time this so-called Sam Kandy concluded his business with the Ralahami and departed, he was the engine smoke and fire of one hundred and one stories. More even.

As agreed, Sam returned the vehicle and driver late that night, and Paulet watched from his back window at Prince’s Building to see that Sam had kept his word: that no one else climbed out save himself and the driver. The young man was already hammering up the stairs before Henry could tell him there was no need, just go.

“I trust the trip was every success hoped for,” Henry said when Sam entered his office.

“It was. Thank you.”

“And thank you. Now—”

“Yes, now.”

“The agreement, you recall, was that I would know nothing of their whereabouts.”

“Of course. Only I know where they are now.”

“Very good,” Henry said. The end. But why was the fellow still here? No money was to change hands. The day-long use of the vehicle and driver, following Sam’s arranging the servant women’s departure from Colombo, was the agreed-upon payment.

“Is there anything else then?” Henry finally asked.

“The drive into upcountry was a picture.”

“Ah, I’m sure. I wish I could have gone as well.”

“If you would go now,” Sam stepped forward as he said it, his face suddenly hungry and Henry wanted to say Sorry of course the likes of you cannot understand I meant nothing of the sort because one must be born to English to know its poetries can be hollow or full but Henry said nothing of the sort because suddenly he could tell this razor was not asking that he go but telling.

“Only I know where they are,” Sam said a second time.

And that was when Henry knew that now he faced the threat of two rail tickets, one-way back to Fort Station, from whatever black green heaven hell or limbo it was Sam had sent his servant women, mother and daughter both mothers at his doing. And so, a day later, Henry Paulet went to Sudugama and on the way was told the tale of Sam Kandy he would in turn tell some upcountry headman with an unmarried daughter. And if a recitation prize could have been given for epic fiction, it would have been given that day to Henry Paulet for his performance in the front room of the dank cool walauwa, and that night, before Henry was dropped at Prince’s Building in streetlamp shadows, Sam next raised the question of Henry’s pending trip to London, which Henry had mentioned earlier that day in the village when the Ralahami had invited him to the now agreed-upon wedding. If Henry was going to London, as he’d said, what need would he have of transport in Colombo? And so, naturally, Sam sought terms for the driver and the vehicle itself—whose value, as he calculated it, would be equal, if not to the cost of the house and limbo land where the women had been sent, then certainly to the price of Sam Kandy’s memory.

“You must know only Englishmen can own vehicles on this island!” Henry said in a seething whisper.

“So write it in the driver’s name and give him more than your blue eyes.”

Eighteen years before, his servant-mother had named him Piyal, as close to Paulet as she dared, and she had refused to send him to the Eurasian orphanage. Save his eyes, the boy was otherwise all village and had been raised as one of the household servants. After Paulet bought his first vehicle, the boy had been made driver. Henry bid no farewell to him or to the Morris. He bid fond farewell to Sam Kandy less for manners than as prayer: because otherwise he fully expected to find him in the morning already waiting for him in the office, waiting now to take away his desk and pry up the timber floors and slide the windowpanes into his jacket and whatever else—his father’s library, his mother’s tea service, the inside air itself—was deemed closer to the original price. That night he went to his empty rooms knowing he had been short-loaded and shamed, knowing that Paulet and Son should have been renamed Pyrrhic and Pyrrhic, wondering would it have been less various shame and short-load had he paid what he truly owed and sat for an honest family portrait with his household. He decided against hiring a new girl. As he made his plans to leave Ceylon, Henry thought of the sad-faced father of the pretty village bride who had invited this pinstriped locust into his house. Who, earlier that day, had also invited Henry to return to his village, for the wedding ceremony itself, which was when Henry had been inspired past Sam’s story: would that he could, but he was to be away from the island shortly. He was going, yes, back to London.

He was told, in turn, of the Ralahami’s son reading medicine at the University College on Gower Street and … and … and … How the headman was biting back his words! Was the father of the bride about to beg the bridegroom’s Englishman to take his other child a sack of village pepper? Or a steamed plantain leaf lumped with home rice and curry? No, Robert hadn’t nearly asked him to take any village love to his son. He had nearly asked that he say nothing of this wedding, if ever he met his son in London town. But upon his saying London to the Englishman’s London, the Englishman looked like he’d swallowed his tongue and so Robert said nothing more. He would instead write of this news to Arthur. But the mail was so slow. Arthur would never be able to attend, even if he had known from the start. Besides, he had exams. After making this decision, for Arthur’s sake, not to tell him in advance, Robert would have begged another of his nearly-son-in-law’s cigarettes, but Sam was already moving again, this time leading his crumpled Englishman out of his walauwa into his vehicle out of his village his his his and for all the world he was only coming back for more.